After 13 years of teaching in dark, cavernous lecture halls, art history professor Judy Collischan wanted to give her students a more visceral experience of the contemporary art world. So she decided to take them directly to the source – a working artist’s studio.

“Sitting in a classroom, students don’t get a sense of the context, color, or texture of the work or the people that make it,” said Ms. Collischan, who teaches an art appreciation course, “Artist’s Private Worlds,” at Hunter College’s School of Continuing Education.

A former curator for the Neuberger Museum of Art, Ms. Collischan has worked in the field for more than 25 years. “Part of understanding art is seeing where and how the artist works and hearing what they have to say about it. And that can’t be accomplished by showing slides in a dark room,” she said.

For adults seeking to indulge their intellectual curiosity, a return to school does not necessarily mean returning to cramped desks and screeching chalkboards. A number of continuing education programs now include courses that take learning beyond the classroom, providing walking tours, weeklong excursions, and even a chance to gaze at the stars above Queens.

Ms. Collischan’s weekly tours of studio spaces offer a voyeuristic plunge into the lives of printmakers, metal sculptors, impressionist painters, and multimedia artists, in places varying from crammed, one-room studios on the Lower East Side to vast loft spaces in SoHo. A recent class visited Art in General, a studio in TriBeCa, where students talked with two New Zealand artists who invited them to crochet small flowers for their wall installation.

“I always found contemporary art kind of inaccessible,” said Anne Griffina, a student who lives in Boston but travels to New York City to attend Ms. Collischan’s course. “But she brings you right into the artists’ home life, and you see their struggles and what they go through to manage it. It makes the art more personal.”

While universities have offered continuing education courses since 1960, enrollment has surged in the last decade, according to the president of National Continuing Education and Training, Carol Brown. “As the baby boomer get older, they have more leisure time and are interested in becoming educated on more diverse topics, particularly in areas of culture,” Ms. Brown said.

New York University Continuing and Professional Studies offers more than 1,500 courses each semester, but those that include educational excursions outside the classroom remain among the most popular.

“Walking and Talking New York,” for instance, has acquired a steady following of students. Taught by New York historian Joyce Gold, the course uses the urban landscape as its textbook, drawing upon the city’s architectural landmarks and ethic diversity to educate her students about particular places and time periods. It wades through more than 300 years of history, covering neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village, Wall Street, and the Lower East Side through a series of six walking tours.

“People often think tours are for tourists,” Ms. Gold said. “But some people just want to know more about the buildings and neighborhoods they pass every-day.”

Ms. Gold, who has culled her knowledge from more than 900 books on New York, has taught at New York University since 1983, in addition to teaching courses at the New School and offering private walking tours through her own company, Joyce Gold Tours. She views her course as a way to help people understand the importance of architectural preservation. “I see architecture as a social document. A way to understand our city’s past and the people who built it,” she said.

Many of her students are lifelong New Yorkers, looking to enrich their knowledge of a certain place or era. “I think they are the ones that get the most out of it because they are always surprised when I teach something new about an area they thought they knew well,” she said.

While some continuing education classes may appeal to the mind, others aim for the stomach. “New York is a wonderful food city, but it is a lot more fun to explore with a guide,” said the executive director of the New School Culinary Arts Program, Gary Goldberg, who helps design guided culinary tours throughout the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

The program offers more than 15 culinary walking tours, each one focusing on a particular ethnic cuisine or neighborhood market. The city’s many markets, gourmet shops, and ethnic grocery stores provide invaluable resources, as many of the lectures are held in store aisles. The shopping tour and cooking classes, for instance, take students on a tour of neighborhood markets favored by local ethnic groups, such as Japanese groceries on St. Mark’s Place or the specialty shops in Little Italy. Expert chefs accompany them as their guides in search of exotic ingredients, flavors, and spices for them to purchase, before returning to the school’s kitchen for an hour-long cooking lesson. In a recent class, students led by chef and writer Eileen Yin-Fei Lo rummaged through the aisles of markets in Chinatown, learning the distinctions between water chestnuts and lotus roots.

“For some people, shopping in Chinatown can be rather intimidating,” Mr. Goldberg said. “There are all these foreign ingredients. People just don’t know what to do with them. Going with a chef, who knows the stores and in some cases the owners, can help a lot.”

The New School also offers dining tours of Chelsea, Greenwich Village, and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where students can learn the history and development of an ethnic cuisine through a tour of neighborhood’s culinary environs. The tour concludes with a meal in a local restaurant.

“I have always regarded New York City as a smorgasbord of taste. It seems silly to have classes here and not get out and explore it,” Mr. Goldberg said.

Shopping in little Italy may be one thing, but visiting Italy is another. A handful of continuing education programs in New York City now offer one week excursions abroad to destinations in Europe. New York University’s World-Class program, for instance, offers study-abroad trips to Oxford, Paris, Prague, and Vienna.

Last October, the program launched its first trip to the university’s Villa La Pietra, a 57-arce estate teeming with lush gardens and winding pathways, located in Florence, Italy. The course, “The Lures of Florence,” provides a week-long immersion in the Renaissance arts with private tours of the Uffizi gallery, landscape and portrait painting classes in the villa’s gardens, and even a chance to sample the local cuisine in Florentine encotecas, or wine bars.

The average age of the students is 55, said the director of WorldClass, Dean Williamson. “Many of them have traveled the world, have even visited Florence several times. But they come to the program for a more one-on-one experience. Sure they can take a tour, but we offer a more hands-on educational experience with experts in the field.” Each trip takes no more than 12 participants and Mr. Williamson suggests that students register six to seven months in advance.

For the more politically minded, NYU offers a one-week foray into the world of international diplomacy and world affairs by taking students to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. The tours attract students ranging from the early 20s to late the 70s and can be used to fulfill elective credits for those pursuing international-affairs certificates. But most students come out of curiosity. Participants attend daily briefings with senior UN officials, policymakers, and diplomats and discuss the latest topics in human rights, peace and security, and world trade, among many others.

As continuing education courses move beyond the classroom – and even across international borders – the sky seems like the limit for where they might go next. Or maybe not. “I not only take my students out of the classroom. I take them into outerspace,” a professor of astronomy at Queens College, Mark Freilich, said.

He teaches a course designed specifically for parents and children seeking to learn more about the cosmos. The one-night session starts with a short media presentation and concludes with a glimpse of constellations from the campus lawn. “There are some subjects that just can’t be taught in lecture halls,” Mr. Freilich said.

COURSE GUIDE

* Artist’s Private Worlds Taught by Judy Collischan through Continuing Education at Hunter College. Tuition: $150 for five sessions. Next session starts on February 5, Saturday, 11 am to 1 pm. For more information, call 212-650-3850, or visit www.hunter.cuny.edu.

* Walking and Talking New York Taught by Joyce Gold through New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Tuition: $390 for eight sessions. Next session starts on February 5, Tuesday, 6:45 pm to 8:25 pm. For more information, call 212-998-7200 or visit www.scps.nyu.edu.

* Culinary Events and Walking Tours. Through the New School’s Culinary Arts Program. Spring 2005 course listings are available at www.nsu.newschool.edu/culinary/. Tuition: $50 to $100. For more information, call 212-255-4141.

* The Lures of Florence: Masterpieces and Monuments Through New York University’s WorldClass program. Cost: $5,200. The next session is May 14-22. For more information, call 212-992-3201 or visit www.scps.nyu.edu/worldclass.

* U.N. in Geneva Study Tour. Through New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies under Global Affairs. Tuition: $1925. The next session is June 16-June 26. For more information, call 212-998-7200 or visit www.scps.nyu.edu.

* The Amazing Skies: A Basic Course in Astronomy Taught by Mark Ferilich through Queens College Continuing Education. Tuition: $135 for five sessions. The next session starts March 7. For more information, call 718-997-5700 or visit www.qc.cuny.edu/cep.