Our School

Last week, our entire 8th grade class departed on their long-awaited Global Studies trip! A capstone of the Evergreen program for over 30 years, this is an especially exciting departure—it marks the first time since 2019 that students have been able to take an extended, four-week trip. While they are not traveling abroad due to pandemic limitations, trip leaders and Global Studies Program coordinators Kristen Gianaris and Eli Keltz have designed a rich itinerary exploring the American Southwest, in partnership with Where There Be Dragons, an experiential travel organization. The group starts in Santa Fe, and will then move close to the border at El Paso, Texas, before heading to the Tucson area and surrounding mountains for the final stage of the trip.
 

Goals of the Trip and Core Learning Outcomes

Thanks to months of planning and thought in selecting the itinerary, this year's trip retains nearly all of the major goals and core learning outcomes as previous trips, even though students won't be leaving the country. Grouped into three categories, these core learning outcomes inform the entire experience:

1. Self-awareness: From growth mindset, grit, and resiliency to curiosity, compassion, and awareness of power and privilege, students learn a lot about themselves and their experiences. Dedicated time for reflection and mindfulness practice helps encourage comfort with discomfort, and the trip also cultivates appreciation of "unplugged" time. 
2. Global Engagement: Encountering diverse cultures and different world-views, students have many opportunities to discuss and practice cultural sensitivity, responsible travel, cross-cultural competences, ethical photography and videography, environmental awareness and advocacy, and service learning and social justice.
3. Leadership: The trip includes frequent engagement with different perspectives and encourages critical thinking and decision making, conflict resolution and communication skills, self-reliance and humility, adapting to the unexpected and unfamiliar, and giving and receiving feedback.

"At each and every destination, every single day, we put these at the forefront of the lessons of their community engagement opportunities," says Eli. "These are how we ultimately evaluate our success with the students."

ABOVE: The night before departure, families attended a farewell ceremony to send students off on their journey with new independence. Students wrote down a responsibility they will commit to accomplishing on their own from now on, while parents/guardians in turn wrote something that will now rest with their child. Then the slips of paper were ceremoniously tossed into the fire pit! 

Why the Southwest?

With all of this in mind, the Southwest is a great place to explore the core learning outcomes of the Global Studies Program. This year's trip will focus on three key themes:

1. Peoples of the Southwest: Indigenous people and sovereignty
2. Environmental: Relationships to land and water, access to food and clean water
3. The Border: Immigration and border studies

Students have already explored many of these issues throughout the school year in their global studies class. As an integration with technology classes, students’ final projects after the trip will look at themes, identify issues, and try to find solutions and ways to be advocates and allies.

Once on the trip, daily activities will be similar in many ways to those of previous trips to destinations like Vietnam and Peru. They'll include "SLIP" days—student-led itinerary programs—during which students work within a set budget, use maps, and plan out day trips in small groups. As on past trips, there is also a significant service learning component where students will spend time working with local organizations to support communities in need.

Global Studies at Evergreen

While the 8th grade trip is an incredible, long-anticipated opportunity for our students, the school-wide Global Studies Program encompasses so much more. It is a way of looking at the world, a web that is woven throughout our curriculum at every grade-level. When we talk about global studies, we are talking about our preschoolers learning about melanin and why people have different skin tones. We are talking about introducing 1st graders to differently abled people, and about 6th graders focusing on issues of diversity, identity, and inclusion. And also, of course, we are talking about our 8th graders studying the history, culture, and language of another country (or this year, region) throughout the entire school year, culminating in their much-awaited, month-long trip.

Returning Home—Lasting Lessons

Together with facilitating students' learning about other places and peoples, our trip leaders also repeatedly bring students back to questions of bridging travel with life back at home. Towards the end of the trip, students are asked to reflect explicitly on how some of these experiences might transfer to their daily lives—in interacting with their families, their school, and the broader community—as they assume more responsibilities and independence. These four weeks away from home are a transformative experience.

After their return at the end of May, the 8th graders will put together a presentation for the entire school, sharing what they have learned in concrete ways, but also from personal growth perspectives. They will share reflections and thoughts from the trip and their early reactions to being home again. And the rest of the school, particularly the soon-to-move-up 7th graders, will watch and listen, and look ahead to the time when their turn will come.