Teaching Study Abroad

By: Ron Delph, Professor and Graduate Coordinator of History and Philosophy

One of the absolute highlights of my career at Eastern has been teaching students in study abroad programs run by the university. A few years back, in 2004, I launched my own study abroad program, “Power, Place and Image in Florence and Rome.” In this program, students travel with me to Italy, where for eight days over our winter break we study the history and culture of Florence and Rome in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance eras. I’ve been fortunate enough to take students to Italy with me on this program seventeen different times over the years. Hands down it’s the best thing I do as a teacher at Eastern.

I enjoy teaching in Florence and Rome because of the shift that takes place in my pedagogy. Teaching in a brick and mortar setting on campus, I find myself struggling to get my students to appreciate that the people who lived in the past, whether in ancient Rome or in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, perceived the world differently than they do. Their values were different, their perception of their place in the world, and their relationship to the world were all different from how students in the twenty-first century understand and perceive these things. My ability to draw upon a wealth of historical artifacts, ruins, paintings, monumental buildings, statues, and the urban landscape to illustrate these differences enables students to quickly grasp just how foreign to them were the ways in which the people of the past perceived their world and carried out their lives.

From a pedagogical standpoint, there are several other advantages that I’ve come to appreciate while teaching in Florence and Rome. First off, surrounded by students in the Roman Forum while I’m talking about the Roman Empire, I don’t have to struggle to convince students of the importance of what I’m lecturing on. Similarly, as students gather around Michelangelo’s magnificent statue of David and I begin to lecture on why this statue came to represent the fierce republican sentiment of the Florentine people in the early sixteenth century, I don’t have to work to capture their interest or hope they are paying attention to what I am saying. Students just devour the material. Best of all, I don’t have to use PowerPoints!

One of the toughest parts about teaching my course in this study abroad program is actually the abundance of material that I have at my fingertips. Rome and Florence both have such rich histories, not just during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance eras, but from antiquity all the way through up to the modern era. I learned early on that for my course to succeed, I was going to have to make some very brutal, heartbreaking choices about what I just couldn’t talk about.

As a teacher, it’s my job to help students make sense out of the history that unfolded in these two cities in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance eras. In order to do that, I have developed several themes that give me the flexibility I need to lay out developments in the political, social, religious, and cultural realms in both cities in these eras. Once I had identified the themes to use to explore these areas, then I began to look for the monuments, ruins, works of art, statues, palaces, bridges, and streets that would allow me to illustrate my ideas. I built each day’s set of lectures and tours around these themes and accompanying artifacts and pieces of the historical record. But it’s hard to just walk by some jaw dropping work of art or ignore some of my favorite sites and streets in these cities because they don’t fit into the themes I’m developing.

The learning that takes place on this trip goes far beyond the material that is covered in the lectures however. Both Florence and Rome are vibrant, thriving European cities, pulsating with life and culture. Students are not only exposed to the past in these towns, they are immersed within the present, and this present is a southern Mediterranean, European culture which is quite different from their own in many ways.

Every street, every restaurant, every market, every shop, holds a new experience for them. They see people dressed differently from them, talking differently from them, eating food that is different from what they are accustomed to. They see public transportation that works spectacularly well, they learn what a walkable urban landscape looks like, and they begin to appreciate the value in restoring old buildings instead of tearing them down. And along the way, it slowly begins to dawn on them that there are other, viable ways of doing things than what they have been exposed to back home.

For most of the students who participate in my study abroad trip to Florence and Rome, there is a tremendous amount of personal growth that takes place as well. Many of them have never been out of the country before and many of them have never flown on a plane before. This trip not only offers these students the opportunity to experience any number of such things for the first time, it does so in a safe, friendly environment. And it doesn’t take long for the students to screw up their courage and begin going out on their own in the late afternoons and evenings when the program is over, exploring and shopping and meeting Italians. By the end of our stay in each city, they have become very comfortable with getting around and foraging on their own. Their confidence soars as their ability to navigate the streets, markets and shops grows.

Another area of personal growth for the students on this program is the numerous, sometimes life-long friendships that they develop with other members of their group. These friendships last because they are built upon some pretty stupendous shared experiences. What really warms my heart, however, is when I think of the two sets of couples who met while on one of my programs, and are now married. Talk about a life-changing experience!

I can’t guarantee you will help your students find love, but perhaps, in a far-off place, you can help them find powerful moments of learning.