International student travel offers cultural awareness and new perspectives
Traveling abroad can offer a hands-on understanding of people, history, and daily life
Over the course of six weeks this past summer, I had the opportunity to work with the Sidwell Friends School China Fieldwork Summer Program. And, while I have taken students abroad a number of times in my seven years at Germantown Friends School, my involvement in this program has taught me some important lessons about how and why to facilitate an international trip for students. The directors of the program, John Flower and Pam Leonard, combine academics with real world applications of what the students see every day throughout the program.
The program can be roughly divided into three main focuses; Chinese history and literature, landscape ecology, and Chinese language. But, of course, these areas constantly overlapped during the students’ six weeks in China, because in the real world there is no way to separate these things. An example of the daily schedule demonstrates the careful way in which the program is structured. Each morning students awaken to the sound of the gong notifying them that their morning exercise (tai chi and gongfu) will begin shortly. Following a half hour of movement they head to morning reading (zao du), a recitation of Chinese poems, then have breakfast and prepare for the day. Mornings typically include in-depth studies of dwellings (houses), temples or learning a skill from a local master. The afternoon is a mix of free time to wander around the town of Xizhou and to complete work for the evening seminar and Chinese class. After dinner, during seminar, is where the deliberate planning for the following day begins.
For each evenings seminar, the students complete a reading focused on an area of study that will prepare them for the experiences they will encounter the following day. For example, during our final week at our primary site in Xizhou, as students were finishing up their apprenticeships (2 weeks spent observing and learning from masters in tie-dyeing, silversmithing, wood carving, paper cutting and music), they read about the paper making industry in rural China and its historical development. The following day, I watched as two students arrived at their tie-dye apprenticeship ready to ask questions about how jobs related to the industry were aged and gendered. These questions, which doubtless emerged from the reading the previous day, allowed the students to understand more deeply the experience they were having at the tie-dye workshop. Each apprenticeship told a different but related story about the history of China, and Xizhou in particular. Students do not just see these apprenticeships as neat new skills they learned (though doubtless they are) but started to understand their importance in the larger picture of Chinese history and culture.
They also discover new ways of learning. While they are used to learning from books and teachers clearly imparting knowledge upon them, they are hardly accustomed to sitting and watching. Then trying a stitch (or a note or a cut) only to have their master undo their work because it was not quite right, then watching again in the hopes of getting it right the next time. Finally, after perhaps several failed attempts, they will see that they have mastered the first stitch. Several days later they might at last get the next one right. Students understand that these skills, which perhaps they anticipated might be easy to learn upon first glance, are far more difficult than they could have ever imagined. Many of their masters have been practicing their craft for 30, 40, 60 years or more and their deliberate work is realized once students have tried (and failed) several times themselves.
Another lesson the students learn in China is about the variety of ways in which people acquire knowledge. Many of the students were surprised to read a well-researched article about the governmental attempts to revive a local lake one evening, only to interview a fisherman the following day and hear him describe the exact same causes, issues and possible solutions, with only an 8th grade education.
They realize that knowledge does not only come from books and classrooms, but from generations of expertise and years of experience.
The fisherman never needed to learn about biological, chemical and ecological transformations of the lake from a book, he learned each of these things, and more, from living his life and earning his livelihood on the lake.
The China Fieldwork program is successful because it allows students to see the world through a new lens by combining traditional academics, which they are accustomed to, and new ways of acquiring knowledge with an entirely different way of thinking about how people reside in the world. It is a natural combination of history, culture, economics, politics and language that produces a higher level of cultural awareness and new perspectives.
There is no doubt that the students I have spent this summer with learned lessons they could have never acquired inside of a classroom (and I do not just mean how to do laundry or use a squatty potty, although these equally important lessons also emerged during our time abroad).
Yes, they might have seen a diagram of a traditional Bai ethnic house on a projector in class, but the impact history has had on each corner and wall of the house surely would not been as lasting in their minds had they not touched the walls and spoken with the people who reside within them. And, it has reminded me of the need to show GFS students how to understand the work they do inside the walls of 31 West Coulter Street and to think critically about how that knowledge applies outside of these same walls.
by Rachel Bradburd
Rachel is a Spanish teacher and coach at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. This past summer, she spent six weeks in China with juniors and seniors as part of the Sidwell Friends School China Fieldwork Summer Program.
