Teachers helping students explore the world
Partnering with EF Tours, teachers leading trips to Europe, Japan
EF Tours offers students the chance to visit various places around the world with a teacher from campus. English teacher David Volkmar has taken students on EF Tours in past years and believes that these trips have helped their students open up their view of the world in a wider context.
“When I first started teaching, one of the things that concerned me was how small the worldview of many of my students was,” Volkmar said. “I’ve taken hundreds of students overseas. I’ve actually taken students through 11 countries in the past several years or so. It’s been a great experience for me, a great experience for them.”
The tours include a variety of activities for students to have a better understanding of the place’s culture and history while also providing the chance at credit for either high school or college.
“They come home and maybe it takes them a day or two to unpack but they’ll be mentally unpacking the trip for months afterward,” Volkmar said. “You know, it really opens their eyes to the world. It looks great student travel looks great on like a college application having that experience and my student travelers are also given the opportunity to earn college credit for the trip.”
This June, Volkmar will be taking more than 40 students on a six country, 10 city trip to Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and Switzerland.
Seeing the benefits, journalism teacher Brian Higgins is also planning an EF Tour, but switching gears in continents from Europe to Asia as he will be taking students to Japan in the summer of 2023.
“I think this opportunity with the school as diverse as it is to introduce students to part of the Asian culture, which that’s a big number of students here on campus,” Higgins said. “I think is important to help everybody understand each other more and just to open their eyes to how people live in different parts of the world.”
History teacher Colin Kantor took a couple of these trips in high school and believes that students benefit from experiencing different cultures.
“It gave me a lot of experience for understanding what it’s like to travel abroad, greater appreciation for the cultures and the places that I visited,” Kantor said. “All of those places are places that I’ve been able to go back as an adult and really enjoy more. I think they’re an excellent opportunity to increase your cultural awareness and sense of global perspective and also, they’re just a lot of fun.”
