IMMERSION TRIPS AT BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY:

What Are They?

Immersion Trips take students into the heart of other cultures for one to three weeks, where they earn credit hours while living and working with people from another culture. In the South Bronx in New York City, the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest, or throughout the country of Peru in South America, students come face to face with the ideas and lifestyles of people from different cultures and backgrounds. Students directly experience the culture’s past and present and discuss with its people the prospects of its future. They walk the culture’s streets, hike its ruins, and live among its people.
Students study the entrenched social problems that these cultures face through direct experience. They learn how historical injustices continue to ravage the world’s poor.

• In Explore Poverty Urban US, students study how past segregation and huge economic gaps in society led to poverty in the South Bronx that persists today.
• In Exploring Navajo Culture,students learn how American policies of “culturing the Indian” wrought lasting damage on the traditional Navajo way of life. They discover how the American idea of “manifest destiny” robbed the Navajo of their land and resources, leaving them in a state of economic deficiency to this day. 
• In Exploring Art, Culture, and Social Issues in Peru, students explore the ramifications of globalization and unequal distribution of wealth on the poor in Peru, living and working with people in small agricultural towns hardest hit by these effects.
  Students learn the factors that have created these painful realities, and they also learn the ways community members are trying to address these problems. These problems become the students’ own as students build new communities with people from these cultures, who become their teachers and friends.
  In these unfamiliar environments, students come to a better understanding of themselves and the world from which they come. They grow daily, thinking critically about how they define a moral life and what it means to be part of a community. They question the ideas they have taken for granted as they talk with others whose ideas are different from their own. Students create strong bonds with other cultures and with each other that continue long after the trips are over. Most importantly, Immersion Trips create a common purpose among students who have taken the trip together: the trips spread cultural awareness, promote social change, and growing together for the good of all.  Nature a source of global interconnect ness. Date Updated: November 15 by Rachael Sample, BGSU Service Corps