One of the core values of the Hackley Schools is Go Forth and Spread Beauty and Light. Every teacher and student whothat comes through the school isare impacted by this quote, and many people involved with the school have been working to give students an opportunity to ‘spread beauty and light’ even before they are out of school by traveling the world with them. Students and teachers get to learn more about the world and themselves through these trips, and they have been a rewarding experience for everyone involved since the trips first started.
Various teachers have gone on multiple trips, two of them being Ms. Maddox and Dr. Liu. Both of them helped to clarify the difference between the types of trips Hackley goes on, how students and teachers are chosen to go on these trips, and the impact these trips have had on the community and themselves.
Ms. Maddox is a drama teacher in middle school. Her travel experiences, both in and out of school, have been extensive.
“I think that I have been on maybe 11 international trips so far,” she said, “And I’m definitely missing some more, but yeah, I’ve been on quite a few; it’s been a lot of travel for me.” Of all the trips she has been on, she only mentioned a few locations, including Spain, Brazil, Canada, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, and the UK.
Her extensive travels have been one of the most important and amazing things for her during her time at Hackley. She has been on multiple different trips, making tons of new memories, and has done community service, sat through lectures, and gone dog sledding.
Hackley has sent students on multiple different trips to experience a variety of different opportunities, including exchanges to Japan, conferences in Dubai, as well as trips to South Africa and Mt. Kilimanjaro, both planned for this summer. This year, the RSIC (Round Square International Conference) was held in South Asia and the Gulf, in Dubai, a major business and cultural hub of the UAE (United Arab Emirates).
“Round Square is on six continents, and the idea is that they’re in different geographical areas. So there is Europe and the Mediterranean, America, South Asia and the Gulf, Australasia, and East Asia. That’s how the schools are divided,” Ms. Maddox said.
The classifications turned out to be less about the exchanges that students go on and more about the Round Square International Conference that is held annually, each conference hosted by a different school.
Last year’s conference was the Dubai Conference, and it followed the same structure as previous years, with each day being based on one of the Round Square ideals.
“The ideals are internationalism, democracy, environmental stewardship, adventure, leadership, and service. So when you go to a conference, each of the days tries to touch on one of those themes,” Maddox said.
These trips are an exploration for students, but they are also an exploration and opportunity for the teachers who accompany them. Alongside their students, the teachers get to take in a different culture and test their limits, making these trips one of the most rewarding experiences for teachers and students alike.
Trips are also meant to let students and teachers understand other students and cultures better, and conferences function similarly to a summer camp or a group project. The goal is to foster cross-cultural understanding and to teach students about making friends in a peer group with whom they appear to have nothing in common.
The Round Square trips are very different from the other trips that Hackley goes on, notably the Casten and Language Immersion trips.
“Language Immersion runs on a rotation of three years. So this year it’s French’s turn to go to Belgium for a French Immersion program. Then it will be the turn of the Chinese language program, and then it will return to Spanish,” Ms. Maddox said. “And on those trips, we try, whenever possible, to match students with host families so that they are speaking their language at home. And we’re also looking at taking guided tours and things like that, so that students are speaking in the language to really work on those language skills.”
While language immersion trips can be a lot of studying, they can also be a trip full of fun, cultural immersion, and meeting new people.
“When I was in Spain, we did a cooking class that was taught entirely in Spanish, and we made traditional Spanish dishes,” Ms. Maddox remembered. “We made paella and gazpacho, which was awesome. So that was really, really fun. It led to a deeper, cultural understanding and connection to the language.”
The final category of trips that she talked about was Casten trips. Hackley has been sending kids out on these trips for close to thirty years, all thanks to the funds from the Casten family that helped get these trips off the ground. These trips are more for students who want a well-rounded experience, instead of focusing on a language or connection and leadership.
“The format for these trips is that they have to be interdisciplinary,” Ms. Maddox said. “They have to cross at least two subjects, if not three. And they need to be international, and they need to have some kind of component of where the students are learning locally and hopefully doing some sort of service work.”
This year, Hackley is running two Casten trips, one to Slovenia and one to Ireland. Mr. Aldrich, the Director of Operations, is the lead chaperone for the trip and is working with Ms. Swan, the Upper School librarian, to create an itinerary that accepted students will love.
“They are running a really cool trip to Ireland that has to do with Ireland as represented in media culture, so in books, movies, film, and things like that,” said Ms. Maddox. “And students are going to see sites where filming or writing was inspired. So it’s going to be a really cool trip.”
Dr. Liu is another teacher who has been on trips abroad. He has been to Uzbekistan and is planning a language immersion trip to Belgium.
He spoke a bit about his experience planning and going on the Uzbekistan trip. “After I did Uzbekistan last year, which was a bit of a dream of mine,” he confessed, “I was like, wow. That was actually my first time really leading an international trip. It was a really great experience, and I thought, ‘I want to do this again.’”
Dr. Liu got the privilege of setting up a new trip to take students this year, this time a language immersion trip. From him, I learned that teachers have a lot of influence and responsibility concerning the trip. They are the ones who have to set up everything, decide where they are going, and who gets to come.
For Dr. Liu, this wasn’t much of a problem.
“I do enjoy planning and organizing trips, to be honest, sometimes maybe even more so than the actual trip itself,” he laughed. “I really love sitting down, looking through possible itineraries, and working stuff out.”
He said that his main criterion for where he wanted to travel was whether or not he could practice a language there. During the time of his Uzbekistan trip, Dr. Liu was learning to speak Russian, Uzbek, and Tajik, and the trip gave him the opportunity to practice with native speakers. One of the things that drew him to Uzbekistan was the possibility of simultaneously practicing three different languages.
On these trips, students are encouraged to take advantage of their environment and the new people around them.
“They might be interviewing locals, asking them questions about, you know, something important like cultural, you know, elements of that location, right? Or asking them for their opinion on something related to their city or whatever,” said Dr. Liu.
Dr. Liu emphasized that he needed students who were mature enough to handle this kind of work, to throw ‘stranger danger’ out the door, but still be able to keep themselves safe.
These trips offer repeated access to the world outside of Hackley, in a structured environment that differs from the traditional school day, but that is organized enough to keep students and teachers constantly learning more and more.
The main thing he emphasized was keeping an open mind.
“Like, I think I tried to go in with as few assumptions as possible so that it’s harder to be surprised,” Dr. Liu shared. “Because you are just sort of accepting and soaking in everything as it’s thrown at you. That’s kind of how I think of it.”
Ms. Maddox had a similar view.
“One of the things that I want us to do is to learn from other cultures and not take a look at another culture and say, ‘Well, what they are doing is wrong, and we are better because X, Y, and Z,’” she said. “For true cross-cultural understanding and communication to take place, you’ve got to take in as much of the culture as possible, so that you come out as a respectful traveler.”
