School News: Reimagining a Global Education Program Amid the Pandemic

Summer 2021

Many global education programs take students to foreign countries to absorb the culture—students go to Toledo, Spain, to see Moorish architecture or a traditional flamenco dance performance, for instance. But often students don’t get the opportunity to engage with their surroundings and the people they meet in an authentic way. At The Pingry School (NJ), the global education program takes students beyond sightseeing in a different country by adding academic content, including historical lessons, to inform the trips students take. But this year, program leaders had to reimagine how to deliver that online for one of the school's recent programs, a travel course to the Balkans.
 
Julia Dunbar, director of global education and engagement, and Megan Jones, history department chair, partnered with Atlas Workshops, an educational organization they had worked with on earlier travel courses, to plan and facilitate a virtual visit to Bosnia and Serbia. For three days in December, nine high school students signed up to be transported to the former Yugoslavia. They met via Zoom for three hours each morning to learn about Yugoslavia and its dissolution in the 1990s, hear the experiences and opinions of Bosnians and Serbians, and explore the concept of nationalism. Over the course of the experience, students heard from four natives of the Balkan region, two of whom are historians, which provided students with a more nuanced look at the roots of the Yugoslav Wars. At least one to two hours per day were devoted to speaking with one of the four guests, followed by a debriefing time at the end of each session.
 
Jones and Dunbar consider this first virtual travel course a success. “We were impressed by how much the students were able to learn and process in such a short amount of time and struck by how they related what they learned from the speakers back to what they know about the U.S.,” Dunbar says.

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Megan Jones (second from right) and Julia Dunbar (right) discuss the siege of Sarajevo with a tour guide and students during a June 2018 trip to the Balkans.
 

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