During the Spring 2023 semester, a group of Chinese III students embarked on a field trip: armed with the tools from weeks of preparation, they made the three-hour drive to New York City for a day of activities in Chinatown. That same semester, French classes journeyed north for a three-day adventure in Montreal. On the top floor of Slocum, thin sheets of metal bearing curses fit for ancient Rome hang on a bulletin board, and around campus students record themselves doing skits in Spanish.

The Language Department at Emma Willard School is embedding language skills into real-life experience, helping to connect students to the communities they’re learning about, and expanding that learning beyond the classroom.

Language classes in particular seem to fit an experiential learning model well. Last year students enjoyed authentic Chinese food at Rain Modern Chinese Restaurant in downtown Albany, NY. The weeks of class leading up to the trip were spent in preparation, practicing common words and phrases used in restaurants, studying the menu, and writing about what they wanted to try. Before the field trip, their teacher, Guangyu Hao, visited the restaurant to give it a try and to speak with the restaurant manager. This was important to make sure that a server who spoke Mandarin would be on site that day to interact with the class, and that the restaurant and server could accommodate the lesson. “He gave a lot of feedback,” Guangyu says, noting that the waitstaff took special care to instruct the students on “how to eat a particular dish; showing and speaking at the same time.” Such an authentic learning experience is valuable, explains Guangyu, because it “extends the learning opportunity from the original tasks as they engaged in communicative contexts and learned culturally related knowledge as well.”

That trip helped set students up for success as they ventured into New York City: tasked with a scavenger hunt, they navigated a given area of Chinatown in pairs, gaining points based on completing their activities (which included stops for snacks and treats, of course!) successfully. “Basically, this is real life! It requires them to engage skills beyond using the language in the classroom,” Guangyu emphasizes. “They have to work as a team and use their tools. They have to have the courage to talk to a stranger, to ask for help, to find a place on a map. It’s more comprehensive.”

French Instructor Manon Sabatier notes,“trips like these enable me to address various learning styles in my class differently and easily.” Getting outside the classroom means that “visual learners may pick up some grammar point on a street sign walking in Montreal, kinesthetic students may land their vocab learning by putting it in a brochure, auditory learners may memorize a phrasing by hearing it spoken in the hall of the Québec schools, etc.” A trip addresses many activities in an organic way, giving the students a true experience that builds confidence in their growing skills. Later this year, Spanish classes will head out on their own trip to Museo del Barrio in New York City, and spring will see students off on a Jestermester trip to Santiago de Cali & Cartagena, Colombia for a nine-day trip where students will engage with the history of the region while exploring food, dance, and varied natural and cultural spaces.

“The purpose of learning a language,” suggests Language Department Chair and Spanish Instructor Gina Egan, “is being out there.” The ‘out there’ is the world, the community, the space where students can create connections with people as they cultivate a sense of curiosity across different places and life experiences. It seems clear that the Language Department views learning a language as a glimpse into other worlds that points to a desire for true understanding: helping students build up their skills alongside their confidence and an awareness of the impact their learning has on and with cultures they are studying.

Confidence comes up in several discussions with teachers in the Language Department, largely through the lens of mimicking real-life experience, as they describe the many ways students are encouraged to get familiar with and try the languages they’re practicing. Projects and final assessments have moved towards assignments or experiences that allow students to get closer to real-life use of a language. Gina details how Spanish classes investigate museums, questioning and redefining concepts of stewardship. They look towards the communities represented by objects for guidance on how to create a space that is “responsible and inclusive, making sure that the information around artifacts is accurate and also collaborating: asking permission and what doing that means and looks like.” After these discussions, students create small exhibits to explain the cultural significance of the artifacts they’ve chosen. “It’s about doing and then reflecting on the doing,” Gina says.

Technology helps here, as many of the French classes are collaborating with French-speaking students around the world: what previously might have been a pen-pal relationship has turned into video, with students exchanging their work via platforms such as Flipgrid. Eloise Bererd’s class reads a book with students from her hometown, recording quick videos for the other as they work through the unit. Gina notes that the availability of technology helps to mimic real-life interactions that “get students to interact with each other in more natural and lifelike ways” that extend the learning beyond classroom time. Now, students can pull out a phone or screen record themselves quickly as a homework assignment anytime. These tools help students speak the languages they’re learning more readily and more often, and in a way that mimics relationship-building in real time. “It’s really easy to say, hey your homework tonight is to go on to Flipgrid and leave a question about a pastime that you enjoy, then ask another student a question about their chosen pastime. Then they can all go back in and answer each other. It gets students to interact with each other in more natural and life-like ways.”

Even in Dr. Robert Matera’s Latin class, students get hands-on. From looking at and creating historically accurate ancient Roman graffiti to carving their own versions of curse tablets and dressing up in chitons to spend the class as ancient Roman senators in debate, Latin classes are getting as close to the experience as a teenager in upstate New York can get.

There are seemingly endless ways language is suited to experiential learning: the act of speaking and inhabiting a language overlaps with so many other facets of life, and this is evident in the ways the department partners with others on campus: History Department teachers visit French classrooms to speak about colonialism in French-speaking parts of the world, art history faculty visit language classes to hone in on the work of Puerto Rican artist Pepón Osorio, and language classes have joined in a discussion of identity and DNA with a biology class. Signature, Emma Willard School’s capstone program, offers a language option for students who have taken all the classes available for a particular language: students can continue their studies with a team of teachers and experts to aid them in furthering their learning, often through the lens of a specific topic or project.

The common thread throughout all the classrooms and topics is seeking community and connection. In discussing the Language Department’s efforts, Gina references something Spanish Instructor Domenica Petulla said: “If I’ve taught you the way to communicate with another person and helped create better understanding and connection, then we’ve won.”

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This article originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2023 edition of Signature Magazine.