Faculty Led Trips

These trips offer students first-hand experience and unique cultural immersion to expand their global citizenship with an experienced DA faculty member, while integrating their experience into a Deerfield education. Not only do students expand their worldviews, they also deepen their relationships with the faculty leaders and their fellow travelers.  Students return with new perspectives, enthusiastic and eager to learn more, and with a broadened worldview to prepare them for college and beyond.

For questions about individual trips, contact the trip leaders.

For more information about Global Studies at Deerfield, contact David Miller, Director of Global Studies, at dmiller@deerfield.edu.

France

French Language and Cultural Immersion

Trip Leader: Francoise Ellis

June 1 – June 29, 2013

On this trip, students travel to Paris, Normandy, the Golf du Morbihan in Brittany, and the Loire Valley. Immersion into the French language and culture enhances vocabulary and speaking skills, and the homestay in Loire Valley encourages many friendships with the host families. Touring around valleys, cathedrals, museums, and historic landmarks leave students amazed. Throughout all the adventures and learning, connections between Deerfield students and local people lie at the heart of the trip.

Uruguay

Spanish Language and Cultural Immersion

Trip Leader: Virginia Invernizzi

June 2 – June 30, 2013

Students on this trip will take Spanish classes in the mornings, along with tango, pottery, art, drama, cooking, and candombe lessons in the afternoons. The will visit museums, take weekend trips to extraordinarily beautiful places and much, much more. Host families are chosen from the St. Brendan’s IB School in Montevideo and have a teen the same age and gender as the DA student visiting. Students will greatly increase their language skills and return feeling comfortable with the Uruguayan culture. Deerfield students will gain friendships and learn about language, culture, and the world.

Italy

Classics and Culture

Trip Leader: Sam Savage and Kristen Veiga

June 2 – June 18, 2013

This trip is designed to complement the History and Culture components of the Classics curriculum at Deerfield. This trip will take us to Etruscan, Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman sites throughout central Italy and Sicily. By experiencing these sites first-hand, students will add a new dimension to the intellectual discoveries they have made on Deerfield’s campus. Students will be able to interact with Italian culture by visiting museums, traveling to various parts of the country, and getting a taste of Italian food. During the trip, students will create many bonds between their peers and the trip leaders.

 

Dominican Republic

House Building with Cambiando Vidas

Trip Leader: Sheryl Cabral

June 8 – June 15, 2013

A team of Deerfield Students will travel to the Dominican Republic to build a house for a family in the village of Lavapie with the organization Cambiando Vidas. When work begins on Sunday morning, the house will be one cinderblock high. By Thursday afternoon, the house will be finished — complete with running water and electricity. This will be Deerfield’s fifth house in the DR.

Costa Rica

Environmental Science & Research at CIRENAS

Trip Leaders: Mandy Irwin and Jeff Jewett

August 2 – August 14, 2013

This trip to one of the last undeveloped stretches of coastline on the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica will provide the unique opportunity to participates in the ecological restoration of a biological corridor and actively engage in sea turtle conservation. The majority of the trip will take place on CIRENAS campus on the 5,000-acre Ario Ranch. Students will learn about tropical ecology, conduct sea turtle patrols, and participate in an ecological restoration project in the recently established Caletas-Ario National Wildlife Refuge.

Great Britain

Honors Literature: Oxford

Trip Leader: Ada Fan

Spring Break

Honors Literature will contemplate the question of free will vs. fate/determinism. To what extent are an individual’s actions freely chosen, and to what extent are they pre-determined (and by what forces)? Are people actually capable of change, and to what degree? We’ll also consider other essential questions (if we’re able to choose), depending on the set of individuals in class. Students will be expected to read all texts closely, write extensively (critical interpretations, journals, creative pieces), and to engage fully. This course focuses on certain classic texts,beginning in the fall with Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Hamlet and another Shakespeare play, along with selections from the Bible and fairy tales. In the winter we’ll move on to poetry (Sidney and Spenser, Donne and Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Browning, Hopkins and Yeats, Stevens and Williams, Frost and Eliot), as well as Dickens, Heart of Darkness, Waugh, and meditations. Over spring break we’ll travel to Oxford (and London) to deepen our literary understanding with further readings and lectures at the university, experiencing the real English backgrounds of our texts through extended walks and even a play. And then in the spring we’ll read Joyce, Beckett, and Faulkner. (via the Course Catalog)

Upcoming trips in 2014: China, Spain, Jordan.