Purpose-Driven Travel

Expanding Students' Access to the World

By Tutt Stapp-McKiernan

Published in: Warrenton Lifestyle Magazine - March 2024, p. 14 & Haymarket Gainesville Lifestyle Magazine - March 2024, p. 10

“The idea [is] not just traveling to be a tourist, but traveling to say, ‘What can we learn about this? and What can we learn about our world around us?’”

—Casey Carter

According to Casey Carter, faculty member and international studies leader at Wakefield School in The Plains, one of the many changes to which schools have had to adjust in a post-COVID world is the drop in international students seeking to attend secondary school abroad. And that, he says, has an effect on students here: How to ensure that our students continue to “have the opportunity to interact with other cultures, other parts of the world, other perspectives?”

As is often the case, his search for solutions is yielding ideas for Wakefield that go well beyond the previous status quo.

Wakefield has a long tradition of providing opportunities for international travel over spring breaks. But when Mr. Carter assumed a leadership role with global education programs two years ago, he and Wakefield Head of School, Ashley Harper, agreed that “global education” could refer to “something else—something that is more than just a trip.”

With extensive prior experience in student international travel, Mr. Carter began where good educators always begin: with listening to students, both Wakefield’s handful of international students and its local students itching to travel and learn. Through these discussions, he envisioned going beyond the parameters imposed by each year’s one-week spring break and offering students more opportunities—ones that included both longer stays, and access to more far-flung destinations. 

He also envisioned travel that had more direct connection to students' academic pursuits, allowing travel and first-hand experience of the world to make classroom lessons come alive and awaken genuine curiosity. 

Initial steps towards these goals have included last year's trip with Wakefield Science Department Chair Dr. Vickie Miller to the Galapagos Islands, where students did hands-on turtle conservation work and supported local efforts to preserve and protect the Galapagos ecosystem. This spring, a whopping 32 students will be traveling to Greece over break, a trip structured to take full advantage of its dovetailing with Upper School students’ study of World Civilizations, as well as Latin.

Looking forward, though, Mr. Carter has created a three-prong structure to complement spring break travels, to contain the broader and deeper opportunities and connections he heard students yearning for.

This past fall saw the fulfillment of a long-planned immersion program for students from Guatemala, facilitated through the Guatemala-based organization “Faces in Culture.” For seven weeks in October and November, three Guatemalan Upper School students stayed with Wakefield host families and were full-time Wakefield students. In addition to taking classes, they painted a mural for the school and visited with various Lower School Spanish classes. “These were great kids who fit in beautifully with our school culture,” Mr. Carter says. “We will be looking to repeat this program next year” and in the years after.

Wakefield will soon launch a second initiative called “The Summer Scholars Program,” consisting of two-week sojourns abroad that will include an educational component and which can be taken as a half-credit Social Studies course. The inaugural Summer Scholars excursion is planned for South Korea and Japan; future journeys are in planning for Bavaria, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Guatemala and Belize—thus providing an opportunity to reconnect with years’ worth of Guatemalan students who will have been hosted at Wakefield by then.

Finally, Wakefield continues to look for opportunities both to host students from different countries and, specifically, to develop exchange programs that provide our students with reciprocal experiences abroad. 

As Mr. Carter observes, “We participate in Model UN, we will offer AP Human Geography next year, Dr. Ponozzo teaches dual enrollment International Relations—we have components here to learn about the world outside of the U.S. and our role within the global community.” Yet, he maintains, purpose-driven travel remains essential.  

“If we’re not going to be able to have [international] students here with us as much as we once did,” he says, “then the idea [is] us going the other way, of being able to go see things and learn…To me, ‘global education’ as travel is [our ensuring that we] provide our students with as many opportunities as we can.”