KSC Honors Program Students Twitter News from Peru and South Africa
Sophomores in Keene State College’s Honors Program are just completing a two-week spring semester travel-study course and have been sending home Twitter accounts of their adventures in Peru and South Africa.
In South Africa, nine students have been conducting research, interviewing locals, and experiencing a new culture and geography. “Spoke with 2 amazing women, Prudence and Agnes (from Tanzania and Kenya, respectively),” one student tweeted on May 25. “Great conversation, awesome people.” The short messages-from-the-field format initiated with these trips offered followers at home a window into the students’ adventures. And it offered students a way to express experiences that couldn’t be captured in a paper: “After seeing the conditions of the Imizamo Yethu township, giving our lunches away felt like a drop in the bucket,” a student wrote on May 23.
Ten students in Peru have stayed with families in Urubamba, a town in an area of the Andes Mountains often called the Inca’s Sacred Valley. A goal of the course is to “explore our role in contributing to what we perceive as ‘positive change’ in others’ lives,” and students have helped construct and install basic stoves and water filtration systems for local families. One tweet captures a strike over water privatization that students witnessed: “Went to Macchu Picchu today – amazing. Another strike tomorrow. Roads closed, no transportation. Protesting water privatization. Non-violent.”
The Honors Program includes five Honors courses, three offered each semester, including a freshman Honors Thinking and Writing section and sophomore-year courses in the Humanities and the Natural and Social Sciences (culminating in the travel-study course). During their junior year, students focus on completing requirements in their various majors, and, as seniors, they come back together to share a capstone seminar. Residential students may choose to be housed together in a living/learning community for their first year; sophomores and juniors organize their own living & learning community in Pondside III.
