Thanks to 2,683 people who invested in The Campaign for SYA, over $18 million was raised to support four essential school priorities – the SYA Fund, student aid, faculty support and curricular innovation. Here, we share a few stories of your dollars at work for curricular innovation.

When students first arrive in country, their schoolwork begins with the Immersion Unit. This is orientation, innovated. The Immersion Unit was designed with great intentionality to help students explore their local cities through fieldwork activities (examples below), practice their language skills, and create community with their peers, teachers and host families. Importantly, the activities prompt students to answer the question of “What do you want to get out of your time abroad?” and challenge them to take ownership in pursuing those goals.

What makes fieldwork different? There have always been experiences outside of the classroom at SYA. In fact, that is where much of the magic happens. In recent years, we recognized that students were spending a lot of time in lectures at school and not taking advantage of the rich cultural resources available in the surrounding areas. Through our curricular innovation work, we have challenged our teachers to use the cities and regions as an extension of the SYA campus. Now, there are fieldwork modules in most classes, with at least one fieldwork activity in each country per week.

At SYA France, students were dropped, phoneless and in small groups, at a location in Rennes and were required to use their language skills and a paper map to identify landmarks and find their way back to school.

At SYA Italy, students were asked to visit a number of piazze around town. On the way, they were asked to collect words and phrases they observed and make note of architectural features in the city.

At SYA Spain, small groups of students visited four of the different museums in Zaragoza and had to answer questions about the building, the people they encountered, and pick a favorite work of art and describe it.

Keeping with the intentional nature of fieldwork, there is also a reflection piece in which students process their experience in a safe and engaging way with their peers and teachers. Considering the successes and failures of the exercise, they identify how they felt going through it, and what they might do differently. In addition to enhancing their critical thinking abilities, fieldwork also promotes a student-driven pursuit of discovery, and it develops a supportive school community.