Atlantic City becomes the classroom for Stockton students
“You guys are so lucky you’ve got this campus here,” Stockton University Professor Adam Aguiar told his ecology and saltwater fishing students as they took the ramp down to the Albany Avenue beach Tuesday morning.
This wasn’t the first time Aguiar was taking his students outside the classroom for a casting lesson this year. Since Stockton’s Atlantic City campus opened last month, Aguiar said he has done multiple activities with the students.
“I cannot overstate what a benefit it is to have them actually apply the knowledge about the art that I’m teaching them,” said Aguiar, an assistant professor of biology.
In the weeks and months leading up to the opening of the new campus, officials from Stockton touted the opportunities that would become available to the students and faculty once classes began in Atlantic City. About a month into the first semester, Michelle McDonald, chief officer for academic programming in Atlantic City, said those opportunities are coming to fruition.
“Stockton’s faculty take seriously our mandate to engage with their community, not just socially and economically, but also pedagogically,” McDonald said. “It is more than taking our classes into the city, in other words, it’s about using the city as our classroom.”