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Field Experience Reflections
Tales from Guatemala
Jillian Stein
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 2
Looking back upon my chosen field experience as a trip mentor with Global
Leadership Adventures, I am able to reflect on the components that make travel
experiences dynamic and life-changing youth development work. At the same time, I
can critically analyze the program and point to areas of growth in the youth
development approach. My experience in Guatemala was enriching and challenging,
both personally and professionally. The experience helped me to realize how much
the quality of my work with youth depends upon how grounded and centered I am
in my own growth and personal development. The following pages will serve as my
reflection on leadership, both in my own style of leadership and how to assist others
in discovering their own.
The context of my field experience was unique given it took place in a foreign
land with a group of staff and young people I did not know. With limited time to get
to know one another and our approaches to youth work, the other two leaders and I
dove headfirst into the experience. Luckily, the three of us were well matched in our
philosophical outlooks and came up with progressive material to challenge and
provoke our participants’ minds and experience in the complicated country of
Guatemala. We decided to focus on the idea of storytelling, which coming directly off
the Philosophy Camp experience, was something I was excited to explore in this
context. The stories or narratives we all tell ourselves before even setting foot in a
foreign place effects our attitudes towards “new” and “different,” with our
expectations impacting the reality of what we actually experience. During my time
leading a GLA trip in Ghana the previous summer, the most powerful changes that I
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 3witnessed with the teens were the moments when their preconceived notions of
what they expected Africa to be did not match what they were actually experiencing.
This pushed them to challenge and re-negotiate their worldviews around issues like
privilege and happiness. These travel experiences at a young age helps introduce the
complicated nature of living in a global society. The act of traveling and one's
reflections on the experience are inherently paradoxical. We marvel in the diversity
of people and landscapes, and also grasp the commonality of the human experience
around the world. We try on new versions of ourselves, yet are stripped down to the
core of who we are. Through challenges in language, social situations, cuisine, and
physical comforts, our comfort zones are forever stretched. We squirm with
discomfort to see others in suffering, turn to compassion, and reflect on what mark
we wish to leave on the world.
I personally struggle with the philosophical problems I see bringing
Americans to foreign countries in order to perform short-term community service
and experience an expensive “growth-opportunity.” This is why the idea of story
and narrative is very important to the process. When we begin to recognize and
bring awareness to the stories we have told ourselves, we begin to have choices in
what we believe and see around us. The same process can be used in pulling about
our own stories about self. Teens have the unique vantage point of having the
authority and opportunity to take charge of writing their own stories. This is the
magic moment when so much of life is still ahead of you, and you are just getting
comfortable in the driver’s seat. Giving them the tools of self and social awareness at
this age will allow them to reexamine their perspectives and choose how to navigate
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 4the journey ahead. Travel is not necessary to accomplish this, though it often helps
to have the opportunity to step outside our daily lives so that we can return to it
with fresh eyes. A main goal of mine as a trip leader has been to safely challenge
participants to make connections of what they are experiencing in new places to the
economic, social, political, and ethical circumstances of our own country and
hometowns. While there are many lessons to be learned by being a visitor and guest,
we oftentimes can make the most impact in our own backyards.
I deeply resonate with the Proust quote that, “The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” New landscapes can
lead to new eyes, though, given the proper opportunities for reflection and
guidance.
The official vision and mission of Global Leadership Adventures is a world where
students are empowered to create positive change in their home communities and
around the world. The mission as a GLA leader is to inspire the next generation to
realize their potential to change the world and their role in it (Global Leadership
Adventures, 2012). Achieving that in under a month’s time with 37 young people
and three leaders was no easy task. We needed to hit the ground running and lay the
groundwork to build a team that would develop leadership, build relationships,
create capacity for transformation, and articulate a shared vision on how the
students wanted to change the world. The following excerpt is from the first page of
the student packets that myself and the other two leaders designed for our arriving
students.
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 5
Because our vision is one of shared values, common purpose, and working together to
create change, this trip will allow us to develop a skill set and learn how to articulate
our values, define common purpose and work together to build strong, healthy
communities across the world.
You will be asked to tell your story of why you’ve committed to service with Global
Leadership Adventures, to define a common purpose with your fellow volunteers, to
organize yourselves as leadership team, to accept roles and responsibilities, to help
design leadership activities, to learn skills you will need to succeed, and jump into
action by planning your next steps when you leave here.
This is a unique and personal experience, but we will be always near to help and
support you when you need it. You are responsible for how successful it will be. The key
of this success will be your open and critical mind, kindness, empathy and, most of all,
your communication. This trip is about leadership—interdependent leadership. It’s
about learned to learning to take responsibility for engaging others to create purpose
in the face of uncertainty.
Please bring an “exploratory” sprit to your teammates—try new things, make new
friends, ask new questions. Learning is a life-long experience. Enjoy the adventure!
One of the first activities that I designed as an icebreaker for our group was a
story circle regarding an object from each person’s luggage. Everyone was asked to
choose something that they had brought that told something about their life story.
As we went around the circle, ordinary objects like notebooks, yoga mats, and t-
shirts were brought to life through what they represented to each teen. This process
helped us all to learn a little about one another and to begin to delve deeper into the
significance of objects and how we can apply that to our shared experience in
Guatemala. We had some common items from the Guatemalan culture, like coffee
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 6beans, cocoa, a typical man’s shirt, and a woven mat. We had the teens guess the
meaning of these objects and then explained their significance in greater details
through multiple perspectives. This resulted in a lively discussion and a great
introduction to the complex nature of group travel and being a “stranger in a
strange land.”
The notion of storytelling and looking at objects and situations through
multiple lenses was a thread we wove through the whole trip. We often would break
out into smaller, “story circles” to create rich, meaningful, and democratic
discussion and reflection processes. These circles allowed each person an
uninterrupted space for sharing experiences and thoughts on a particular subject,
turning what might be divisive debate into a diverse and multilayered discussion.
These debriefs gave our groups a chance to reflect upon their experiences, learn
from one another, and continually improve the program. Some questions for a
debrief session:
What went well today? What do you want to do better tomorrow? What has surprised you? What do you want to contribute to our group? What are you hoping to “take home” from this experience? What have you seen here in Guatemala that reminds you of home? What have you seen here that is most different from home?
Another practice we adopted from Philosophy Camp was the daily
acknowledgments circle. At P Camp, we began the day with each person voicing an
“acknowledgment” to something or someone that touched them during the previous
day. I always found this activity to be a critical piece of building community and
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 7encouraging sharing within the members of the group. It allowed for the active
reflection of our experience, helping to bring awareness and definition to each day
and give people an opportunity to show gratitude to others in the group. I brought
this to our GLA Guatemala program in a slightly different form, but to the same
effect. As our pre-bedtime end of the day tradition, we offered the students the
opportunity to express something or someone that impacted them that day. We
didn’t go around the whole circle, but made it a voluntary process in which usually
3-6 students participated in each evening. Students quickly locked onto this practice
as a key way to bring attention to the profound things they were experiencing in
Guatemala, as well as the relationships they were building within the GLA group. It
was fascinating for me to hear the students articulate these messages of gratitude
and awe. It helped me to see impacts that I would not have noticed otherwise, and
allowed us to gain further insight into the students so as best to serve them
throughout their trip.
Leading a trip in a foreign country always keeps you on your toes, stretching
you to stay flexible, positive, and ready to act in a moment’s notice. For example, we
had the unexpected experience of being caught in the middle of a political roadblock
between our hostel and town. We were staying up in the hills, about a 20-minute
drive from town, and the residents in the hills were boycotting the government’s
plans to put a more formal road through the area that would be used mainly for
army vehicles. This highly contentious situation made us refugees from our home
for two days and evenings, finding temporary residence at a local hotel and having
only the possessions that we had taken with us in what we thought would be a short
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 8afternoon outing (some toiletries were purchased). We eventually made the
decision to cross the roadblock, and students had to keep their cool while we came
face-to-face with angry local citizens who wielded weapons and shouted words
many couldn’t understand. This complicated situation gave us the opportunity to dig
into the political, economic, and social atmosphere of the country we were in from a
firsthand perspective that students were emotionally attached to. This
unanticipated event was probably the most memorable moment of the trip for the
students, and we called upon all our reflection techniques to help them process it
from a multifaceted point of view.
In conjunction to the debrief sessions and acknowledgments, students were
given time each day to do private journaling, and opportunities to share their words
and experiences in large and small groups. Oftentimes, we provided students with
basic and general prompts to write about. Examples of these are:
Describe what you expect your first day of community service to be like. Describe what your first day of community service was actually like. What emotions did you feel?
What social issues have you witnessed in the community? What are your strengths as a leader? What areas would you like to grow as a leader? What is a goal you have set for yourself? How do you think you will achieve
it?
The journaling and debriefs were two ways that we offered students to
actively process their experience while it was happening. GLA has a clear mission to
develop leadership skills in students alongside and in relationship to their
community service and tourist experience in each country. GLA’s philosophy of
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 9leadership is that leaders are made, not born. I agree with this, especially when we
open up the idea of what leadership looks like and how one “leads.” Getting into the
nuances with teenagers on what leadership looks like can be an exciting and
challenging process. Sometimes, it seems like the leader has to be the person in the
front of the room shouting the loudest. I worked with the teens, individually and in
groups, to show that leadership can be just as influential and powerful when it has a
different face. This meant leading by example, through one’s actions rather than
words. This was an especially important way of leading on the community service
project, keeping people motivated and displaying the efforts of hard work and
dedication to the task at hand. We were able to introduce language around different
types of leadership, like designated leadership, active followership, peer leadership,
and self-leadership. Each of these facets was integral to the success of our program,
and offered the participants opportunities to explore their own strengths and areas
of growth.
For example, active followership can be especially crucial on these types of
trips. Getting over forty people to get out of bed, dressed, organized, out the door
onto buses, working at community service sites, visiting tourist sites, and
participating in leadership curriculum takes an immense amount of buy-in and
teamwork from each person. Managing these logistical challenges of my role as trip
leader were constantly looming large, and it could make finding the opportunities to
support each student’s growth on an individual basis difficult. Behavior
management also becomes a very real part of the job responsibilities. If one student
has a bad attitude or refuses to participate, it effects the experience for everyone.
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 10One of the realities on trips like these (where there are too many participants) is
that the more challenging students get much more attention and one-on-one time
with the instructor team than the students who are acclimating well. There was
supposed to be 25-person limit on GLA trips, so 37 students with 3 staff was simply
not enough. I often felt like I did not have the opportunity to build individual
relationships with students or mentor the teens that wanted to go deeper into their
experience. An important factor of the success of programs like these is keeping the
student-staff ratio low enough so that each student gets the support and mentorship
they desire, and staff feel like they are able to do youth development work more
than just triage problems.
Another important leadership practice that we developed on the program,
partly in response to the large number of students, was Student Leaders of the Day.
We introduced this expectation during our initial community meeting, and asked the
students to create the roles and responsibilities for the positions. They decided that
the Student Leaders of the Day (SLODs) would be groups of 3 or 4, taking on 24-
hour shifts starting with wake-up in the morning. They decided that the SLODs
would be responsible for wake-up calls, head count before leaving for community
service and after tourism excursions, writing the daily blog for the GLA website,
maintaining the daily activities board and calendar, and debriefing the large group
on agenda for the day. The staff would meet with each group in the evening to
discuss their experience, which would also be attended by the next group of SLODs
in order for them to get pertinent information of the day and give them the ups and
downs and “pearls of wisdom” from their experience. This helped us tweak the roles
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 11and responsibilities and allowed us to go deeper with the students into their
leadership development in a small group setting. The students, for example, decided
early on that the SLOD roles should be on a 2-day cycle rather than just one day. The
first few groups agreed that it took the first day to get the hang of things, only to be
done right when they were starting to feel comfortable and gain momentum. The
second day allowed the student groups to gain confidence leading the large group,
get to rotate different roles within their small group, and take on more challenges as
well as enjoy more successes.
Supporting and mentoring the small group leadership teams was one of the
most rewarding parts of this program for me. Aiding the success of the small groups
helped the students to learn that leadership takes teamwork, and that attracting
other people to the causes you care about is a key skill to changing the world. The
GLA students are usually extremely smart, compassionate, motivated kids who want
to make a positive difference in their communities and abroad. I’ve stayed in touch
with many of them, and they are still posting about their GLA trips, keeping in touch
with their friends from the trip, and using the experience to inform their college
majors and extracurricular interests. I have taken a great deal away from my
experiences as a GLA trip leader that will inform my youth work practices in the
future. The programs have taught me about how to give the most of myself, while
emphasizing the simultaneous need for self-care in order to maintain the energy
and motivation to do the best job I can. It has taught me ways to empower young
people to take ownership of their experiences and make sense of them mentally,
emotionally, socially, physically, and spiritually. It has certainly raised many
Jill Stein LipsetYDL Field Experience 12questions regarding the design of an ideal abroad youth leadership program, and
made me grapple with my philosophical beliefs around such programs. I am
satisfied with my choice of this opportunity as my YDL Field Experience, as I believe
it truly tested my knowledge and skills in the field of youth development, and has
greatly informed my youth development approach and job choices since then. I am
encouraged that the students I have kept in touch with continue to draw meaning
from their travel experiences, and are identifying themselves as global leaders in
their communities.
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