Global Awareness Program
 
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of people and things cannot be acquired by vegetating on a little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime."
 
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), Innocents Abroad
 
Evergreen teachers feel that it is important for children to recognize the ethnic and cultural diversity of our world. We are preparing them to be citizens of a global society. In our program we begin with the local and expand to the world. Our goal is to help our students understand and appreciate their own and other cultures and deal responsibly and respectfully with people different from ourselves.
 
The multicultural emphasis is prevalent throughout the school and culminates in the 8th grade student field study, a three-week journey to a non-Western country.
 
Go to China photo album
 
The goal of the field study component of the program is to move the student from intellectual understanding to experiential understanding of a people and a culture different than their own. For example, throughout the field study students will experience feelings of what it means to be "foreign," and a minority. Students will see the common humanity of people amidst cultural diversities in the world. Likewise, they will put what they have learned in their advisor classes into action as they learn to trust one another and to bond as a group.
 
Eighth-graders spend the year immersed in the economics, history, current events, arts, literatures and culture of the chosen non-Western country. Through readings, class discussions, guest speakers, and field trips, students examine the nuances of a culture and begin to understand their own culture more fully. Assignments are tailored to have direct application to the trip as students learn the country’s native language and compile individual research reports into a guidebook. While experiencing the sights and culture on their travels, students receive lessons from local artisans, meet pen pals, and participate in community service activities. Upon their return, eighth-graders share their experiences with the Evergreen community through a compilation journal, narrated slide show and exhibits.

 Go to Student Reflections

The grade 8 experience is a final element in Evergreen’s commitment to the development of the whole child – a global citizen. The grade 8 field study was described as "a remarkable finale to a process beginning years earlier…encouraging the children to see themselves as members of a peer group, of a community, and ultimately, of the world," in the 1995 Pacific Northwest Association of Independent Schools (PNAIS) evaluation of the school.
 
The graduating class of 2003 traveled to Peru (a change of China/Tibet travel plans due to SARS), class of 2004 went to Vietnam, class of 2005 China/Tibet, class of 2006 Vietnam, class of 2007 China/Tibet and our current 8th graders will experience Vietnam this school year.