I became an English teacher because I wanted to show students the world beyond their classroom walls. I wasn’t just a teacher in the urban public school system, but also a product of it. I remember traveling through the literary wormhole into different times and places and finally understanding that not only was there an escape route, but other people around the world acknowledged what it felt like to both fear and revere what was outside these walls. No matter how foreign, their stories told my story, and this became my window seat, as I left the world of despair. Books were the first visas in my passport.
Seven years into my teaching tenure, I wanted to knock down those walls for my students. After all, they had windows to worlds in their pockets. What if I could take them there? Show them that those places were real.
I ached to show students a world that cherished them. I had tried so many other things. I went into urban public school policy, but it seemed impossible to meet the needs of our students in an environment that closed itself off from the community. I also recognized that my students needed to know what it felt like to be carefree. So many things had robbed them of their childhoods. Here in DC, students were often the easy targets of police raids, something they called “jump-outs.” Soon they found themselves having to round their shoulders and shrink themselves as to extinguish any latent fears passersby might be harboring.
Some schools began to implement policies such as “in-school suspension,” where students were counted for attendance yet did not receive instruction. Students quickly realized that they were being treated unfairly, especially whenever they crossed paths with students on the other side.
That’s when I started looking into student travel. I didn’t know it then, but in just four years, I would end up traveling to nine countries and in that time, taking than fifty students to four continents. Our groups traveled to Costa Rica, Japan, Zambia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil at little to no out-of-pocket cost.
Saevonia is one of the students who took that first trip to Costa Rica her freshman year. Then, she was an amiable, diligent girl whose voice hovered just above a whisper. Filled with potential, she’d come in late almost every day. Her grades suffered from the two-hour train and bus ride to school everyday. Back then, her promise was a vine resting amongst the bramble bushes. Her teachers had not yet fully seen her, and she hadn’t known how to show them that the fruit she would later bear was worth the thorns. Until she began traveling.
After Costa Rica, Saeviona became a promoter of student travel. She recruited her peers to travel to London, Panama, and Jamaica the next year. She turned her attention to the needs of her community and joined a social entrepreneurship organization called LearnServe International. There, she began to work on her own social venture, empowering young women through photography.
How had travel empowered her? “It was eye-opening experience, and it made me more interested in what I was learning–made me appreciate my education more. It opened my mind to being more open to people. Better at expressing myself around people who aren’t used to me, and who I’m not used to.”
I witnessed these transformations in many of the students I traveled with. Students who were on academic probation, now excelled academically. The shy became boisterous; the disenchanted, inspired. In learning to navigate these foreign environments, they started to understand how to better navigate their own. Students who were known for being agitators in the system, now knew how to advocate for themselves more effectively. They became student leaders.
Traveling with my students also forced me to reexamine my own teaching practice. Travel had allowed me to unburden myself from the daily strife of being a Black woman living in America, and this release opened my eyes to a far greater tragedy: having to face my own privilege abroad as an American traveler. Forced to confront my own blindness, this helped me gain a better understanding of the fog that so many of my colleagues seemed to dwell in. How often had I not checked my own bias when entering my classroom? How often had I incorporated the narratives of people all over the globe to teach my lessons? The curriculum often already denies students a worldview, but now I had to acknowledge my culpability in helping to build the walls around my students.
Two years after her first trip, Saeviona–now the founder of her own organization, Eccentric Beauty, which hosts weekly empowerment seminars for girls–decided to travel to Zambia with LearnServe. This was a big step for her. She said of her friends, “When I went to Zambia, people were concerned about different issues in Africa. They would say, ‘be safe.’” This was shortly after the Ebola epidemic and the kidnapping of young women in Nigeria by the Boko Haram. It took a lot more convincing–of not just my students, but their parents as well–to allow them to travel all the way to Sub-Saharan Africa. Saeviona took a leap of faith. Her friends who supported her decision told her, “‘This is the chance of a lifetime.’”
It was something Saeviona already knew. “You definitely have to make this decision a personal one because you can’t let your friends sway your goals,” she said.
Going to Africa with my students proved to be the most transformative experience for all of us. Students who had never ridden on a plane before braved a 22-hour flight to Zambia. Upon return, it seemed they’d traveled light years. In the cocoon of our nightly reflections, I witnessed their rapid metamorphosis. Lack of light in our school communities stunted this type of growth, but my had they blossomed abroad. These city kids camped in tents thousands of miles away from home, helped plant 200 trees, and taught lessons in the slums. I’d like to think that seeing the swaths of children crowded around the doors and windows eagerly awaiting their lessons is what ignited the change. But I also found that my students recognized a more tragic failure–one that was too familiar to them. They’d heard that many conditions in Africa were deplorable, but what they witnessed first-hand was the role Western nations played in creating those conditions. They realized the narratives they’d been given about African nations were missing the voices of the disenfranchised, a humility they knew all too intimately.
Saeviona came back to tackle the misconceptions her classmates had been fed about Africa. “Even though it’s not the place where my family was from, it was like being close to home.” Saeviona said. My students saw local NGOs and small businesses reshape their own communities. Similarly, we met a woman named Gladys who started a school for girls out of her house in Zambia. The students were starting to understand their capabilities in changing the landscape of their communities.
I proudly watched the young people I had taught all year grow in extraordinary ways during this trip. It all took some processing, but I saw the wheels turning as they witnessed the awesome wonder of Victoria Falls juxtaposed with the tourists who turned a blind eye to the dire circumstances only steps away. What they learned abroad are things that could not be taught as effectively using books. Students who would never have the luxury of taking a gap year, got a glimpse of the type of growth endowed to those who could afford it. They were in the beginnings of making connections to their own communities and understanding change agency started with them.
Why should any student be denied this opportunity? Schools like Paul Public Charter School realize the importance and profound impact international travel can have on their students and work hard to enable as many students as possible to travel. Many schools, however, will say they simply don’t have the funding to sustain such experiences. Yet there are hundreds of travel grants and student scholarships. In addition to spending countless hours writing grants to furnish funds for my students, we also fundraised using crowdfunding websites and good old-fashioned baked good sales as a group. The time spent searching for funding proved to be well worth it. Once you go once, you’ll understand just how important this type of experience is for all students.
Clarence Cross, another teacher traveler working with LearnServe International, agrees, “[Travel] is for everyone,” he says. “I truly believe all students deserve the opportunity and access to travel abroad. It allows them to see themselves in their truest light because they tap into a part of themselves they don’t have to access when they’re ‘home’.”
The urgency for action is far too delayed. Teachers can choose to be the change. We can choose to be the “travel” agents who take our students to higher heights. As Malcolm X once said, “Education is the passport to our future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
Victoria Merriweather