Fall break at the College falls right in the midst of midterm season. It would be an understatement to say that it is a stressful time for students. While many opt to relax and unwind or spend their days catching up on piles of readings and papers, a group of students opted instead to immerse themselves in the high school experience in Barre, Vermont.
This fall break, the Middlebury Alternative Trips (MAlt) and Language in Motion (LiM) programs collaborated to organize the second annual LiM Mini-MAlt trip. On this trip, a group of five students traveled to Barre to engage in three days of inter-cultural exchange through in-class presentations and community service work with high school students at Spaulding High School and the Central Vermont Career Center (CVCC), the affiliated technical school.
“Language in Motion works primarily with the local secondary schools, and we try to bring inter-cultural perspective and lens to different classrooms there,” LiM Coordinator Kristen Mullins said. “During the school year, we can’t really go farther out than the local high schools, but we thought, looking at the MAlt model, how wonderful if we could use breaks as an opportunity for students who are interested in doing this but also interested in learning about schools in Vermont that are further away.”
According to Mullins, the cultural exchange flowed both from the college students and from the high school students with whom they worked. While the five students who participated in the trip all had significant international experiences that they hoped to share with the high school students, they did not have much lived experiences of Vermont outside the immediate Middlebury area.
“To go to a part that’s not Middlebury and see what a different part of the state is like was very eye-opening for me,” Co-Leader Michiko Yoshino ’17 said. “Learning about Barre through the eyes of high school students especially helped me realize how much they have to offer and how valuable of a perspective they have.”
The cultural exchange took place both inside and outside the classroom setting. Outside the classroom, the Middlebury group worked with the Congregational Church in the town of Barre and groups of high school students in community service work. In the classrooms, the Middlebury group developed presentations around themes that they found significant to their own international experiences.
Each presenter delivered their themes to a variety of classrooms, from US Government to Human Services to Spanish. In order to engage each classroom, the Middlebury group focused on directly engaging the high school students and letting their interests drive their discussions.
“We were all very free to create our own presentations, and we improved upon them each time we presented them,” Yoshino said. “It was interesting to see the different ways people presented and the different ways they engaged the high school students. We also had a lot of candy,” she added with a laugh.
Shan Zeng ’19 and Kathy He ’19 paired up to develop a presentation around the theme of community involvement and citizenship. To engage the students actively in the presentation, they strayed away from a traditional presentation model. Instead, the pair invited everyone to share their visions through drawings of their own memories and ideal communities.
“The students were actually eager to share their visions once given the opportunity,” Zeng said. “Even though our class had a very dynamic makeup, we shared very similar concepts when asked what our ideal community looked like.”
As the Middlebury group shared the lens they had acquired from abroad, the high school students also shared their own perspectives as high school students and of their town.
“The high school students explained that their town had a perception of being called ‘scary Barre’,” Yoshino said. “They talked about the fights, teenage pregnancy and socioeconomic divides within the town, and it was eye-opening to see how much the [high school] students care and to see them back up the arguments they make.”
It was also interesting to have such open discussions about issues that are seemingly invisible on campus because they are experiences that just aren’t prevalent here, Yoshino said.
This two-directional inter-cultural learning is what Mullins holds to be at the core of the LiM program.
“People are really interested in not only sharing what they’ve been thinking about and who they are but also learning from other people about what they’ve experienced and who they are,” Mullins said. “In my experience, that is one of the most exciting things that there is in the world. There’s this beautiful coming together of experience, excitement and hard work.”
LiM will collaborate with MAlt to organize another LiM Mini-MAlt trip over spring break. Anyone who is interested is encouraged to contact Kristen Mullins at kmullins@middlebury.edu
