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Lorna Joachim

BY AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published April 9, 2009

Last year alumna Lorna Joachim ’85 started a primate field school in Costa Rica alongside Grainne McCabe in hopes of changing systemic problems in the field of behavioral studies such as the lack of interest in local populations. The field school, TREE (Tropical Research in Ecology and Ethology) Field Studies, offers students a month-long course during the summer where they are immersed in the environment they are studying.

“The idea behind our field school, in terms of the primate courses, is to give students who’ve never been in the field before a safe experience, as safe as you can make it,” Joachim said. “We focus primarily on the tools that they might need to start in graduate school. “The program mainly focuses upon primate behavior and ecology. It gives students the opportunity to pursue an independent research project on one of three species of monkeys while simultaneously learning basic observational skills.

“Part of the difficulty is learning how to figure out that that’s a monkey up there and not a bunch of birds or a bunch of leaves,” Joachim said. “We introduce them to the forest, and some of them don’t even know how to navigate, let alone use a compass or a GPS.”

Joachim created the school after completing a traditional academic course of study. She graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in biology, a passion for macrobiology and no career plans. Back at home, Joachim took classes at UCLA in primate behavior and collected data at a zoo. She went to graduate school at the University of New Mexico and got a doctorate in evolutionary psychology.
McCabe, a behavioral ecologist, noted that most field school instructors are in her field. She finds Joachim’s field of study to be a great extenuation of the school’s focus.

“As a psychologist, Lorna approaches the study of primate behavior from a slightly different angle, bringing in neuropsychology, theories of child development, personality and cooperation among individuals to our discussions of why the monkeys behave as they do, which is a fantastic compliment to the main socio-ecological theories of physical anthropology that focus on food availability, seasonality, predator protection and competition as drivers of wild primate behavior,” McCabe said.

Joachim teaches part-time at the University of New Mexico and does behavioral research on primate intelligence.

Originally, the problems that Joachim and McCabe saw in other field schools prompted them to form their own. “We wanted our own business so that we could control the way we were run,” she said. The school gives students space to make mistakes and discover whether fieldwork is for them before they are thrust into a pressurized graduate school atmosphere.

She also referred to the way that some field schools can be proprietary, exclusive and uninterested in local populations. “We wanted to not treat residents of the country poorly. Part of every student tuition goes to pay for a year of high school for a needy Costa Rican student.” In addition, field school students must participate in Spanish lessons. According to the school’s website, this measure is “to encourage cooperation and collaboration with local Costa Rican scholars and students.”

Joachim attributes part of this social consciousness to her time at Swarthmore. “There’s a certain kind of person that wants to make sure they’re not leaving a big huge negative imprint on everything … I can’t even separate that from my academic interest. I can’t go into a place and decide I’m going to use something and just leave it. I think that I got a lot of that from socializing with like-minded people [at Swarthmore].”

Swarthmore’s educational values also gave Joachim a sense of how to teach, both in the undergraduate classroom and out in the field. “I run into students getting upset because they have professors and can’t find them,” Joachim said. “During office hours, they lock themselves in. That’s not Swarthmore. Their doors are open, and that’s a really important aspect of this process.”

The sheer academic rigor of Swarthmore also gave her a great push in graduate school and beyond. Joachim described her experience in graduate school as comparatively easy: “The rigors of Swarthmore made everything afterwards just simple. I think that the big thing about Swat is that it’s so darn hard and rigorous. It’s just easier when you get out.”

The field school gives Joachim a chance to get to know students one-on-one. “The thing that makes the field school for me fun and interesting is that I feel like we spend a ton of time with students and that there’s a real connection there in terms of mentoring and friendship,” she said.

The close living quarters and constant contact force Joachim to also act as a mediator. “It’s sort of like the first week of school, but for a month,” she said. “There are some clashes, so part of our job is to be den mothers.”

This “den mother” role is partially the product of Joachim’s background in psychology and behavioral observation. “It’s hard to separate out humans from the rest of primate order in my mind … being an expert in behavioral observation, I can’t just not sit there and not see what’s going on behaviorally. It almost invariably happens that someone comes up and says, ‘hey, you may not know that this is going on, but I see the tension.’”

McCabe also commented on the exciting yet difficult aspects of running a field school.

“We’ve been chased by herds of cattle, trapped between a fer-de-lance (an incredibly poisonous and aggressive snake) and a deep rushing river, stuck in mud up to our knees, had close calls with machetes while cutting trails and had to handle both the social drama and inevitable physical injuries of the students, such as infected insect bites and mystery rashes,” McCabe said. “But through it all we have helped each other remain positive and keep the goal in mind, to educate these students about the importance of primate conservation and understanding animal behavior in the wild.”

In addition to improving the social relations among students, Joachim would also like professors and students to get more use out of the resources she’s set up in Costa Rica. “We have all the contexts. What we really want to do is get people utilizing this resource,” she said. She envisions professors teaching courses and students pursuing independent research projects during breaks.

She also hopes to offer more courses over the summer. Hosting additional professors and courses allows her to expand the student experience and to continue developing her own skills.

“One person, Alain Houle from the Harvard Natural History Museum, wants to teach for us,” she said. “He does tree climbing. If he’s down there, I’m going to do it.”

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