Your Impact: SYA Capstone
The SYA Capstone is designed to provide students with an opportunity to showcase their evolving skills through a comprehensive project on a topic that captures their imagination and interest. It is up to each student to design an experiential project in which they learn by doing, and with the guidance of their Experiential Language class teacher. In other words, it cannot simply be a paper written on a topic that could have been researched in their school library at home. While background knowledge and research are integral parts of a successful capstone, the primary focus is the student experience and it is up to students to demonstrate their learning throughout the project.
This year, capstone projects ranged from interviewing cloistered nuns and religion professors in Zaragoza about why young women become nuns to creating a video showcasing how immigrants in Viterbo integrate into the local culture to studying the process of cheesemaking in Rennes and then actually producing cheese. There were countless exceptional projects and we are proud of our students for the ways in which they relied upon and engaged with the local resources available to them.
Here, we will share one exceptional example from each country.
Curricular innovation was a key initiative of The Campaign for SYA. Thank you to all the campaign donors who have enhanced the student experience by providing the funds for SYA to intentionally and creatively revise our curriculum, including adding a capstone project requirement at each campus.