TRAVELING PROGRAMS AT MALCOLM SHABAZZ CITY HIGH SCHOOL

A unique aspect of Malcolm Shabazz City High School is its commitment to being a "school without walls."

For twenty-five years students have been offered opportunities to pursue their education in the larger world.

"Making relevance a virtue"
  
trip destinations

"Field trips have been essential to instilling life long learning in our students. These unique team situations cannot be quantified."

  
   
"Students become ambassadors of Shabazz and carry out their trip class plans with focus and discipline necessary to achieve the goals and problem solving in a "real life" learning situation."
 
"an opportunity to integrate academic learning with the reality they encounter on site."
 
"Trips reinforce the utility of learning as a means of deepening the experience of a culture, a place, an ecosystem, etc."
Valued by staff for three reasons:
  Provides students with experiential learning opportunity in which they can apply the knowledge and practice the skills that they have learned in class.
  Builds deeper relationships between students and staff as they travel together.
  Fosters a deeper understanding of self and intensifies the potential for significant personal growth.
 
"The trip itself always places students in situations which require adaptation cognitively, emotionally and socially, situations which extend the students beyond their accustomed comfort zones."
 
"The students gain the confidence and joy of seeing themselves stretched to successfully create solutions to challenges."
   
Trips emerge from a class that is centered around a shared issue and interest. In the past the issues have included the environment, wildlife ecology, the nature of life in different sections of country and in different communities, cultural heritage's, physical identity and self image, nuclear policy, value conflicts, and historical issues.
 
Students and staff work together to plan the trip and to raise the funds needed to support it. Any student in good standing in the school may choose to be involved in a trip class. Since the moneys are raised by the group, no student is ever denied access to the program due to lack of finances. Over the years more than five hundred students have participated in these programs.
 
While the experience gained in a new environment and the information and knowledge about the specific subject acquired by the participants is truly exceptional, the major personal effect comes from the demands of everyday problem solving and living in a diverse group in the relative chaos of the road for an extended period. As the students face these challenges, they grow and mature. They become increasingly tolerant and open, more and more committed to each other and committed to working with each other. Many of our students and their parents report remarkable changes in their outlook.
 
When students return they work together to communicate their experiences to the larger community and to create personal responses. Reflection and expression occurs at a evening open to the community where student works are presented in paintings, pictures, movies, story writing, journaling , slide shows bulletin boards, musical compositions, dances, food and web pages.
The trips have been primarily of two types :  
Camping Experiences   Service Learning Trips
 
In which the goal has been to deepen the sense of interdependency and community among students and staff that are traveling together, while experiencing the rich beauty of the natural world. 
 
Camping trips have been organized to the Everglades, Tetons, Isle Royal, the battlefields of the Civil War, a jazz festival in New Orleans. One in the early 80's ended in Washington, D.C., were students presented a petition making us the first identified nuclear-free high school in the country.
 
Service Learning Trips
In which a major goal of the trip was to become engaged in service projects as the group of students and staff traveled together. In addition to building relationships within the group, these trips emphasize networking with community groups and host families in the places where they travel. These trips have been called "An Education for Justice."
 
Examples of these trips have been the numerous trips between 1984 - 2003 to the Mississippi Delta - some of the poorest counties in the US. There students and staff lived with host families, interviewed community leaders and elders and did service projects in appreciation for the hospitality that they received. Two trips took students to the Native American Reservations of Northern Wisconsin to further their understanding of the Native American Fishing Rights and Sovereignty. A trip to Appalachia to study the culture and history of the Mountain People who live there. Recently, our first international trip class took students to Honduras to explore the impact of Hurricane Mitch, declining rainforests, and coral reefs.
 
Updated 10/12/06