Walpole High School has hosted several trips around the world throughout the 2024-2025 school year and there are many more to come. These trips are impactful for student learning because they enhance and expand students’ knowledge and allow them to experience new cultures throughout the world, something that can’t be taught in a typical classroom.
These school trips are extremely beneficial to students as it allows them to experience new cultures. Students benefit greatly from traveling because it allows them to become more independent, meet new people and gain new perspectives on our world. WHS gave students the opportunity to travel to Chile and Argentina this past February break. Additionally, scheduled over April break, a trip to Sicily has been planned.Students at WHS have expressed great interest and excitement about these trips, which have been strongly encouraged for many years due to the numerous benefits the trips offer.
“I picked to go on this trip [to Chile and Argentina] because it gave me insight to traveling abroad, which is something I was thinking about doing in college, so it allowed me to get a feel for being far from home and with my friends,” junior Alexa Larkin said.
The Chile and Argentina trip took place from Feb. 13 to Feb. 21. Students boarded the plane on Feb. 13 and flew to New York, then to their destination in Chile. The students and staff visited three destinations, two in Chile, Santiago and the Atacama Desert, as well as the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires. This trip gave students more insight about other parts of the world which can help students expand their knowledge and gain understanding. Visiting other countries also helps students and can be beneficial to learning outside of the classroom by making connections to different parts of the world. Being immersed in countries with Spanish as its first language forced students taking Spanish to practice the language and apply it to real life scenarios.
“I was able to apply my skills of maintaining a conversation in Spanish, and was able to use my knowledge to comprehend Spanish, as well as speak it a lot, which was really cool to experience overall,” Larkin said.
Simultaneous to the Chile trip, around 20 students had planned on travelling to Rwanda, Africa; however, during the time of the trip the country of Rwanda suffered from some political unrest. Due to the intensity of the issue the decision was made to cancel the trip. Unlike the Chile and Argentina trip, the Rwanda expedition was a community service trip, so students would be participating in various different activities in the community service category. Community service trips help students gain experience similar to regular trips by exposing them to helping with real world issues but also allowing students to gain more empathy, adapt new skills and make students more comfortable with getting out of their comfort zone. Stephen Imbusch, WHS principal, explained the main factors to why Rwanda was chosen as one of the 2024-25 school trips.
“ [Rwanda] it is an evolving country that has had a long history, and our students could learn a lot from the experience of visiting,” Imbusch said.
The last trip of the school year is to Sicily, Italy that is approaching in April. This voyage will be beneficial to the students attending because of the culture, language and experience of the adventure. Being immersed in new cultures and forced to look at things from a different point of view can be really impactful by allowing students to think of things in a new way; their knowledge will expand along with their understanding of things.
The school trips here at WHS have impacted students in many ways. The trips are educationally beneficial, improve language skills and teach students more about the world. However a student might benefit from joining a school trip, they will definitely gain something positive from going.
