I’m excited to introduce the first of several upcoming posts by Julia Lang. Julia has previously contributed to this conversation by sharing entries relating to her thesis research: Culture. Shock. Service. Study Abroad. Global Citizenship? and Transformative Experience: Service-Learning Student to Scholar. She has a very exciting upcoming year of global service-learning leadership, and she will be sharing reflections here about her work with National Geographic Student Experiences in Costa Rica, The Civic Leadership Institute, and Carpe Diem Global Education. Julia begins with this update and set of reflections for practitioners from Costa Rica:

By Julia Lang

This summer, I had the remarkable opportunity to lead U.S. high school students on a two-week community service trip in Costa Rica for National Geographic Student Expeditions. Hired to scope out the community service site before the group arrived, I found myself drifting into conversation with locals on public buses, and later perched on a wooden stool at a dirt floored little food “soda” shop three hours off of the Pan American highway, planning a menu with local Ticos who had never set foot outside their tiny town, let alone Costa Rica. Yet, every person I encountered had heard of National Geographic and was excited to meet me, an ambassador of the magazine.

National Geographic perhaps has the most influence over young children, their tiny hands leafing through the pages, eyes glossing over words but bulging at images of creatures from every corner of the world, deepest depths of the sea and far reaches of outer space.  As a child, I would make collages from these photos; as I matured, National Geographic’s images inspired me to learn more about a world of which I was completely unaware, living a somewhat isolated and insulated life in upstate New York. Clearly, I was not alone, as National Geographic reaches some 450 million people a month, and has done so for decades.

I have participated in and led multiple service-learning and international programs in high school, college, and graduate school, where I was the graduate assistant in the Center for Civic Engagement. In this role, I created, planned and executed our alternative break program, in which students went on educational service trips during school breaks. While I have been steeped in service-learning for years now, I was eager to see how service and travel was framed under National Geographic and how this job would expand the view that I had of service and enhance my ability to facilitate transformative learning experiences for students.

The four-day National Geographic training in rural Vermont united 60 leaders and experts who would guide photography, biodiversity and wildlife conservation, community service, and creative writing trips to countries ranging from Tanzania, Greece, and Iceland to New Zealand, Brazil, and China. Together, we learned about a new approach, the “Nat Geo spirit,” as it is lovingly called by veteran staff and cultivated by leaders in young travelers.

Throughout training, we learned how to apply the “Nat Geo spirit” in our trips to make it different from trips we might have led in the past. This spirit, captured in National Geographic, makes it different from other travel magazines. Its glossy pages do not tell you where to find the most pristine infinity pool while enjoying a Thai massage. Rather, the magazine captures wild animals in their natural habitat, reveals untold stories of people or exotic creatures as yet unexplored, and presents meticulous research that promotes conservation and education.

We learned how to translate this perspective into a student travel and community service program. Our first day of training in Costa Rica, my co-lead and I laid out a big blank white poster board on the floor and asked students to brainstorm what this “Nat Geo spirit” might entail. With faces looming over the board, students chirped out ideas as we scribbled them down: witness, conservation, adventurer, documentation, photography, science, natural habitat, preservation, pioneer, diversity, education.

We eventually honed it down to one key phrase: As a participant on a National Geographic trip, you are a traveler and an explorer, not a tourist. Your aim is to witness, honor, and document differences, not try to change anything to fit your worldview and cultural assumptions or to try to keep things within the boundaries of your comfort level.

Thus, the service component of our trip took on a whole new meaning. Our goal was not to swoop in and “save those poor people,” but to come as humble students of the world seeking to learn and appreciate what we found in local contexts, such as food, how people treat time, roads, homes, religious views, political views, natural habitats, etc.

In the Nat Geo spirit – to dive deeper into what is authentic and to personally document –our students were challenged during orientation to create an artifact of their journey and learning. At our community service village, students slept on a tile floor in an open-air community center beneath tin tables draped with mosquito nets, while beetles and moths gathered in droves and the sunrise woke us up at dawn. Reminding the students to travel through the lens of the Nat Geo spirit, we asked them to document their discomfort, their insight, and their learning. Onto the poster board, they brainstormed what this might look like: photographs, poems, videos, painting a striking scene, learning how to cook a meal, investigating and reporting on a particular aspect of the community, exploring the local flora and fauna, learning a new skill with someone in the community and documenting it in some way, perhaps interviewing a community member and writing an expose.

I had never taken this angle with a service project before. Sure, I had kept a group journal, facilitated nightly reflection and switched it up here and there with a creative reflection, handing out paper and markers and asking students to draw a picture representing a powerful insight from their day. Yet, never before had I jointly focused on the group’s learning as a whole, and on unique individual projects.

We helped students hone in on a particular social issue, community asset or aspect, and how to document their topic – through photography, writing, critical thinking and/or technology skills. Their goal was to create an artifact to share with friends and family and to remind themselves of what they did, what they learned, and even who they were during this particular point in their life.

By challenging students to spearhead an individual project and supporting/mentoring them through the process, students benefitted from their intentional and individual intercultural contact, repeated opportunities for personalized reflection, enhanced communication and language skills, and critical thinking abilities. Examples of the final projects included a video asking locals what they wished for, a new sign a small group of students painted for a local “convenience” store and a subsequent video that documented their progress, and an essay on how Costa Rica changed a student’s view of the United States.

Short-term service-learning experiences are often powerful, eye-opening experiences for students, but it is all too easy for students to retreat back into their previous and comfortable mindsets. By explicitly treating students as explorers, scientists, and artists capable of producing powerful, tangible artifacts of their journey, students not only get more out from their experience, but also have a tangible reminder of their transformative experience for the future.  Such individual projects can also serve as powerful pre-education and fundraising tools as they give life and voice to the deep impact experiential experiences have on students, communities, and educators. At the end of the trip, a gallery or showing of the projects is a remarkable reflection tool and powerful way for the group to come together as whole to celebrate and honor everything that they saw, did, and created.

Cultivating the “Nat Geo spirit” and challenging students to create tangible individual projects are extraordinary tools for teaching them how to travel in a more culturally sensitive, environmentally conscious, and sustainable fashion, while also enriching the entire experience for individual students and the group as a whole.

I encourage other practitioners to develop a culture of travel, even if their experiential trip is just a few miles down the road, and to challenge students to imagine, create and share a tangible artifact of their exploration and learning.

For an example of an individual project from Julia’s National Geographic Community Service trip watch Mi Deseo es / My Wish is: