"That's When It Hit Home": Creating Interactive, Collective, and Transformative Learning Experiences through the Traveling Classroom

In the epilogue to his book, Blood Done Sign My Name, Tim Tyson reflects on his experience co-teaching an African-American studies seminar that took a group of thirty-four students, five staff, and three professors from the University of Wisconsin on a two-week journey through the Deep South:

Black and white together, we rolled through Dixie, singing the songs of the movement and challenging ourselves to confront the deeper truths of American History. We held classes on the bus, on city sidewalks, in hotel lobbies, and at crowded soul food restaurants. Day after day, we met local movement organizers, toured slave markets and sugar plantations, heard great gospel singers, and talked with people whose memories of the movement made history walk and talk. Night after night, we huddled in hotel rooms and explored our deepest feelings about the meaning of race in America.

(312)

He goes on to describe a particularly emotional visit to Destrehan Plantation in Louisiana—the site of a slave rebellion that resulted in the violent massacre of sixty-six slaves, the history of which was entirely expunged by the historical site in favor of a "moonlight and magnolias" narrative. This visit, he wrote, was specifically chosen to teach us things "that were impossible to convey any other way" (Tyson 313). The collective experience that day left a profound and permanent mark on each of its participants.

As one of the students on that trip, affectionately dubbed "the Freedom Ride," I can attest to the power of that visit. That experience, combined with many others during those few weeks, became a turning point for my education. I understood the realities of inequality and the struggles for social change that shape and reshape our society in ways that I could not have before. In a sense, the trip sparked what Thomas Kuhn describes as a paradigm shift in how I viewed the world, my position in it, and my responsibility to contribute to greater social justice as I contemplated my own future aspirations.

This process of awakening is one many of us would ideally like to facilitate for our students, though the classroom does not easily allow us to do so. David Cunningham and Cheryl Kingma-Kiekhofer respond to the limitations of the classroom by designing a similar travel course along the East Coast to explore processes of community change. Bringing students into direct contact with unfamiliar communities and the organizations they were studying, they wrote, allowed them to "break down the walls that separate the classroom from our subjects of inquiry." Traveling allows student to engage directly with course concepts in ways that would have been impossible had they stayed within the confines of the classroom and their familiar local environments.

This is what I hoped to achieve when, inspired by my participation as a student in the "freedom ride" course and a later experience co-leading a follow-up service-learning trip to Selma, Alabama, another of our emotional stops, I partnered with Peter Green, a colleague in the psychology department at Barton College, to develop an interdisciplinary travel course for our students. Our experiences reinforce and shed further light on the unique benefits of travel as a powerful and potentially transformative pedagogical tool.

The Course

Our goal was to explore issues of identity, inequality, inter-group relations, and social change through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens while engaging students in hands-on qualitative research. We chose Selma because of the connections I had established there and for the unique in-depth service project it would allow us to conduct: recording oral histories with local residents to contribute to Selma's National Voting Rights Museum and Institute (NVRMI). A small homegrown museum, the NVRMI is dedicated to documenting the history of the struggle in Selma from the perspective of those who were there. Selma was a key battleground of the Civil Rights movement, where resistance to calls for an end to Jim Crow laws and the Black community's demand for the right to vote frequently erupted in violence...