A group of Metro students is passing around a couple of sketchbooks filled with pencil drawings of people, pasted-in maps, lists, thoughts and watercolor images of the city of Rome one day after school. Created by architecture students from Ohio State University, the journals present an alternative way for the high school students to think about how they might soon experience the Italian city.

OSU professor Kay Bea Jones pages through multiple Powerpoint slides from the many trips to Italy with students that she has taken over the past 23 years.

“The idea of a sketchbook is one way to take loose notes. You’re absorbing all of this information in a way that a camera can’t do it,” she tells the group. “The camera almost starts to become like blinders for the front of your face.”

It’s not that they shouldn’t take pictures, she tells them. It’s that they can use the camera like a “sketching tool” – instead of trying to emulate the work of thousands of travel photographers who have printed hundreds of pristine images of the sculptures, ruins and buildings of Rome for postcard stands and coffee table books, they can, for example, stand in one place and shoot several images over 180 degrees, then reassemble them in mosaic form once they’ve been printed.

“You end up making an image that pushes outside the scale of an ordinary photograph,” she tells the group.

Beyond her ideas about how to process and preserve the many sights of Rome that they will soon take in over spring break, she explains the organization of the city through maps of its roads and obelisks, as well as the cultural significance of the image of the she-wolf in the city’s artwork (the wild mother who raised Remus and Romulus, the first king of Rome in the city’s creation myth). She tells them not to hesitate to enter any cathedral doors that they see open as they walk through the city and note the presence of water in the gravity fountains throughout the city, fed by its ancient system of aqueducts.

It’s just one step in the students’ preparation for their trip, which asks them to engage with the city on multiple levels – to see Rome not simply as romantic postcard images, but for its scientific, cultural and historical qualities, as well as to get a sense of what it is like to live there now. The students have been studying the physics involved in the construction of several monuments, or their cultural significance.

As the date for their departure draws closer, teams of students present to their teacher, Thomas Trang, and a research associate from the PAST Foundation, who will accompany them on their trip.  Teams have plans for projects about the various sites they will visit, and every traveler will have some responsibilities for each project – at each site there will be project managers, interviewers, students who document using video or still cameras.

The research projects range in scope from the sustainability of the aqueduct system to the global draw of the Colosseum to the architectural advantages of the dome and oculus of the Pantheon.

When they come back, their work will be presented to the student body, but, Trang tells them, hopefully somewhere else where the wider community can see it.

“We want to go big on this,” he tells the group.