Journey Away offered ‘food for thought’ | Education

TOWNSHEND — Journey Away students toured the American South before traveling to Vietnam and France, experiencing very different cultures over seven weeks during the school year.

Jessa Harger, director of Journey Away at Leland & Gray Middle and High School, said she finds traveling and completing difficult tasks to bring “great satisfaction and joy.”

“I believed it was worth doing hard things,” she said. “It helps when you’re in great places and the stimulation of new food and new smells and everything is new to your sight. Your senses are just fully engaged.”

Students told Harger they learned more than ever before. She added that the feedback was “incredibly rewarding”.

“I think it’s an amazing opportunity for the kids,” said Ely White, who will be a senior next fall. “Being able to travel the world as a teenager and being able to travel the world at any age is a true gift and a true privilege. »

Experiential learning and world travel differ from classroom education and may be a better fit for some students, White said.

Students explored agriculture, food and culture as part of the program. They studied how food is grown, produced, distributed, prepared and consumed.

In Greenville, Mississippi, they experienced a “food desert.” They had to eat at a casino because no other establishments were open.

“Everything was closed,” said Grace Wright, who is starting her freshman year. “It was a little scary. But as I walked around and explored with my friends and tried to understand why this town was nothing, I could see that this town was once thriving.”

Wright attributed the downtown economic situation to flooding, not caused by Hurricane Katrina, but earlier.

Fried foods were eaten “24/7” in the South, Wright said.

“I felt so bad,” she said. “All I wanted was salad.” »

In Vietnam, Harger said, each meal included about five courses with fresh vegetables and lots of flavors. The students visited a rice factory and learned how it was processed.

After a week in Vietnam, Wright craved bread and pasta, all the carbs he missed at home. His wish was granted upon his arrival in France.

“The comparative part of our itinerary was pretty special,” Harger said, “certainly so much food for thought that we’ll be dealing with it for a long time.”

The trip’s cuisine was “just perfect,” Wright said. She called the trip “incredible.”

“I still haven’t processed it,” she said. “I still think about it a lot. I still feel like I’m here forever.”

Wright created a book of cultural quotes, which she began by documenting answers to questions she asked students in Birmingham, Alabama.

“We lived completely different lives,” she said. “I thought I wanted to keep asking this question: What is your culture?”

Every time Wright met someone, she would ask them what defines their culture. Some people write a sentence and others write down paragraphs or draw something, she said.

“I got all kinds of responses,” she said. “I put them in a book that I bound myself.”

Wright said the Vietnamese children didn’t speak English but connected with L&G students by playing with them at a festival. In France, students were able to find menus in English.

Soob Soobitsky, who just graduated and will study journalism at New England College, said the trip went well.

“It was a lot to do at once, but we did it,” Soobitsky said.

For their project, Soobitsky created a newspaper called Soob’s News. Highlights of the trip were documented, including a gondola ride in Vietnam where students climbed mountains and into caves.

Soobitsky said he enjoyed visiting the South, where students learned about the struggles of the civil rights movement in Alabama and heard diverse music in Louisiana. A group went to a gay pride parade in New Orleans.

Soobitsky said the trip introduced them to cultures they knew nothing about before.

White knew he wanted to make a film before the trip began, so he bought a phone to record footage.

“When we got home, I put it all together into an interactive, documentary-style film that showcases our experience,” he said. “I captured our experiences and the fun times we had here and there.”

Three chaperones and 10 students from grades 10 to 12 made the trip. Coming from a very small school with students sharing long histories together is “navigable,” Harger said, but she hopes to benefit from professional development to help her deal with any drama that arises in the future .

For seven weeks, the students traveled and ate three meals a day together.

“The connection runs deep,” Harger said. “The love and care are real, but so is the boredom. Adolescents learn to manage interpersonal relationships. This is all completely normal developmentally and it’s time to start understanding what’s going on. »

Harger said she thinks students will remember this experience forever.

“The drama is tough but it’s okay,” she said. “It’s part of the family. You can’t avoid that. And in a way, it was like a little family for this semester.”

Wright recounted that Harger “explained how traveling in the moment isn’t always fun in the moment – sometimes it feels like torture.”

“But looking back on it, it was like the most fun thing in my life,” Wright said.

Although Wright missed the privacy and comfort of having her own room at the time, she was happy to explore. She said she appreciated the opportunity.

With changes coming to L&G’s project-based learning program, it’s unclear what Journey Away will look like in its second iteration. Harger is sure it will include trips away from home.

Lithuanian students will be welcomed locally this summer. In the past, a component of the program’s predecessor, Journey East, was to host Mongolian students every two years.

When Harger was hired, the West River School District board wanted to see this play continue in some capacity with Journey Away.

“But the main priority was to let the kids experience the world, to give them a semester-long program, which we did,” Harger said.

The plan was to wait until 2025 to get local hosting off the ground. However, an L&G teacher made connections in Lithuania and made this possible this summer.

Students from L&G and Lithuania will camp at Rafters Lodge in South Londonderry. Harger said the old Girl Scout camp was owned by the Hazelton family.

Part of the program is learning about “small town and mountain town culture,” Harger said.

“I’ve become wiser,” she said. “I think the kids taught me that.”

Fundraising helps sustain the program. In the future, Harger plans to change how this happens.

This time, the students did it together. Harger suggested that asking students to raise money on their own would give them a competitiveness that would excite them.