the 11th grade trip

While these were both questions of the moment, they were born out of LREI’s longstanding relationship with the field trip as an important tool for creating experience and opportunities for learning. As articulated by Agnes De Lima in The Little Red School House:

They need challenging tasks . . . . They are cramped by the four walls of the classroom and eager to explore the world beyond . . . . They enjoy the unexpected; it offers a test of their ability to deal with a situation. From our earliest days, trips have been an essential part of our school program; the curriculum is built around the children’s explorations of the world. We have referred also to the necessity on the teacher’s part of careful planning for these trips and the development of a technique which will insure safety, avoid strain and fatigue, and make certain that the children get all there is to be got from the excursion. No trip must be taken without long preparation. (pps. 95-96 & 153)

And as LREI Teacher Norman Studer also in The Little Red School House observes:

The usual trips for [high school] pupils have been to libraries and museums, worthy enough places but nevertheless repositories of embalmed culture. They do not afford the intellectual and emotional stimulation that comes from contact with the living book of man’s everyday life. . . . The Little Red School House has attempted to tear down the walls of the classroom and bring the adolescent child into direct contact with the community. . . . The most important outcome of all comes in terms of personality growth directly traceable to these trips. Children notoriously lacking in serious interests suddenly become interested in social problems. A feeling of kinship with people totally different began to develop. Their trips not only caused them to have an understanding of people but gave them the stimulus to do something about it. (pps. 158-160)

In response to Phil’s call to action, a planning team of interested high school faculty members was formed. The group enthusiastically jumped into the work of exploring Detroit as a destination, but also began to explore other possible cities. During this process, team members noted that the inquiry being carried out by the teachers should actually be the work with which students might be productively engaged. That is, the adults should not debate the potential for learning of various cities, reach consensus on a destination, prepare an itinerary and learning goals and then present this to the students as a fait accompli. This must be the work of the students carried out with the support of their teachers. The group agreed, but also understood that going down this path invited a much higher degree of risk. Would the students be up for the task? Would they be able to meet the very real deadlines to ensure that there would in fact be a trip. High School Dean of Academics Allison Isbell was not fazed by these challenges. “This junior class is unbelievably strong, with many outstanding students and leaders,” Allison shared. “We knew they would have compelling ideas.”

Pivoting towards this new idea of a student designed trip experience, the team devised a series of Trip Labs for the fall. These labs created time and space for the eleventh graders to give voice to the important social issues that they saw as impacting their world and our nation’s cities. Then through a process involving brainstorming, research, debate, presentation and consensus building, the students were called on to arrive at a set of organizing issues around which trips to one or more cities would be designed. Underlying this process was a project mission statement developed by trip coordinators Allison Isbell and Chris Keimig that stated:

Understanding one’s relationship to–and capacity to have an impact on–the most pressing challenges facing our society is a necessarily dynamic process. Thus, the best places to engage in this work are in places that are themselves dynamic–places that are in transition, that are working to change, adapt, and transform themselves for survival in a changing world. It is our purpose and mission at LREI to graduate citizens who are ready to engage in shaping their own communities, who believe in their capacity to affect change for the future, and who know that they can and should be a part of that process. We believe the time spent observing, learning about, and working alongside communities in transition is essential to cultivating these qualities in our students.

Later in the fall, the 11th grade class gathered in the high school auditorium where eighteen pairs of students presented topics to their classmates. As the presentations unfolded, some students preferred their peers’ ideas and, in real time, dismissed their own. Then, employing flexible thinking, students partnered with other students, and used strategy to create coalition-building opportunities around common goals. Eighteen teams were narrowed to ten, and then, through a survey process, to a final six, each to become the core focus of a trip comprised of 10-12 students. The six framing issues were:

• Refugee resettlement
• Sustainability and climate change
• Farm workers’ rights
• Educational equity
• Mass incarceration and criminal justice
• Urban revitalization

The issues identified, each team was then tasked with the challenge of developing an essential question to guide their trip and researching three cities where their issue and its associated opportunities and challenges might be productively explored. Of their three cities, one had to be driveable and inquiry in all of their proposed destinations had to connect to both the school’s mission and the trip’s mission. Each team then presented their ideas to a panel of administrators who after weighing a variety of factors determined the destination city for each group. The final destinations were:

• Chicago, Illinois: Issues in Criminal Justice
  Essential Question: In what ways has our criminal justice system served as a conduit for mass incarceration in Chicago and beyond? How are governmental and community organizations successfully disrupting this pipeline?
• Detroit, Michigan: Equity in Education
  Essential Question: How can we reimagine schools and teaching in order to ensure that the needs of all learners are being met, and all learners have the tools they need to succeed?
• Detroit, Michigan: Urban Revitalization
  Essential Question: What role are cultural institutions, urban agriculture, and new businesses playing in renewing and developing the urban fiber of Detroit?
• Hurricane Island, Maine: Sustainability
  Essential Question: How is scallop and lobster sustainability in the Bay of Maine affected by climate change?
• Immokalee, Florida: Justice for Farm Workers
  Essential Question: How can we reimagine modern agriculture in order to protect the rights, dignity, and access to opportunity for the workers growing our food?
• Louisville, Kentucky: Refugee Resettlement
  Essential Question: What role can the U.S. play in relieving and aiding humanitarian crises across the globe? How can U.S. cities most effectively absorb and support refugee communities?

Students and teachers then began the complex task of reaching out to potential partners in their destination cities and developing an itinerary for the trip. In addition, each student took a history elective seminar that addressed in some way the larger themes connected to the trip.

Finally, in the early hours of April 25, students and their teacher-mentors left via planes and vans for their various destinations and a week filled with learning. While each group explored different issues connected to different experiences, upon their return, students discovered a number of shared themes that emerged from these diverse experiences:

Stephanie (Justice for Farm Workers):

On the Monday when we got back from the trips, everyone was talking about the trips and even the people who weren’t really excited about the trips before we left were super excited. They were sharing a bunch of different stories and anecdotes about things that they learned, things that they saw and things that were unjust. I think that it really brought out hidden things for people. It made our classroom experiences so much richer because we weren’t just talking about English; we were making things connections to the trips. We were connecting the material we were learning with the experiences that we had. It was really able to integrate itself into our curriculum.

Tyrell (Equity in Education):

I’ve been going to LREI for 13 years and the trip definitely fulfilled the mission of the school — what we talk about and what we try to do. After the trip, I started an X-Block class called “Let’s Do Something for Social Justice.” The trip really motivated me to want to do something — to help make a change in the educational system. It was the best trip that I’ve been on and the most educational. Going into the trip I was like, “I’m going to change somebody’s life.” And then they told me that it was place-based learning and I said, “I don’t really know what that means.” But I realized after the first day that I had learned so much. I didn’t use Google once. I learned so much from just being there — experiencing it first hand. It was so great.

This LREI experiment in place-based studies could turn into a progressive education model for other secondary schools as well as colleges and universities. Allison remarks, “This process confirms that progressive pedagogy is alive and thriving in the hands of our students.” Chris continues, “This is the most progressive thing I’ve ever done as a teacher, and that our students have ever done. We took a real risk, and the payoff is going to be life-changing.”