An artificial, and generally unhelpful, divide between lecturers and students frequently occurs in higher education, especially among recent school-leavers. Bridging that divide allows lecturers and students to develop collaboratively to the benefit of both parties. Residential field courses provide an important forum to develop more mature relationships between lecturers and students and the informal opportunities presented allow both pastoral and educational issues to be discussed and often resolved. Here, we discuss the crucial role that field courses can have in student development and we introduce some techniques that can be used to engender pastoral and academic engagement. This provides long-term benefits to learners and develops student-lecturer collaborations that exist well beyond the field course experience.