Every spring, Beijing World Youth Academy’s (BWYA) four campuses become unusually quiet as students from all age groups embark on exciting journeys of exploration and experiential learning. Students get the opportunity to benefit from the best of local traditions, customs, and heritage, while also crossing borders to expand their international horizons, in keeping with the BWYA motto of ‘locally grounded, globally aware’, throughout what has become know as Trip Week.

Trip Week activities are educational, rewarding, and fun

Trip Week takes place every year as part of BWYA’s Classroom Without Walls Programme (CWWP). At BWYA, staff and students alike understand that some of the best learning takes place when away from the classroom and out into the real world and Trip Week represents the highlight of the CWWP every year. As well as being a valuable learning experience, Trip Week also provides opportunities for worthy CAS and SA projects which encourage students to give something back to the communities they are learning from and spending time with. It gives students a deeper experience of local traditions and customs, both in China and overseas and the BWYA teaching staff and Enrichment Team work very hard in collaboration with each other to arrange trips that are educational, informative, rewarding, and fun.

Young learners, big adventures

BWYA’s Primary School students take advantage of everything Beijing’s bustling city center and surrounding countryside have to offer, spending the week doing exciting activities and day trips.  This year they took on the challenges of hiking, climbing, rafting, and kayaking, as well as visiting fun and interesting places like the Beijing Planetarium, Aquarium, working farms and The Summer Palace. Each of their destinations was chosen by teachers and the BWYA Enrichment Team to make sure they were suitable with plenty of activities that would provide fun but valuable learning experiences as well as personal development activities and team working opportunities. Many of the places the young learners visited also had links to the Units Of Inquiry they had been working on in their classrooms. For example, grade 5 students ended their week with a trip to the Beijing Planetarium to see just how much they had learned from their Space Explorers Unit of Inquiry.

BWYA upper primary school children got to try adventurous activities such as rafting

For BWYA’s Upper Primary School children, Trip Week includes overnight stays at the Terratribes Adventure bases. For grades 3 and 4 this is one night, while for grade 5 it’s two. For many of the young adventurers, this is their first time staying away from home without their parents and is, therefore, a valuable learning experience for their personal development. It helps foster their independence in a safe environment with support from their friends and the familiar faces and reassuring presence of their teachers.

Middle School Students Go The Extra Mile

By traveling around China, BWYA’s middle school students can get hands-on with local traditions, culture, and history, and give a little back to communities around the country.  This year, grades 6 to 10 students visited some spectacular destinations in China. They enjoyed Kung-Fu lessons from Shaolin monks, took part in ancient local ceremonies while wearing traditional costumes, learned all about local arts, crafts and music and tried them out for themselves, as well as benefiting from visits to museums, art galleries and places of interest and cultural significance all over China.

BWYA middle school students traveled around China during Trip Week

Trip Week is also about community and making a difference, so BWYA students enjoyed school exchange activities with local schools in the regions they visited, working with local communities and participating in their daily lives, as well as spending time with disadvantaged children, and those with learning difficulties.

Plenty Of Highs For High School Students

The Trip Week programme for DP1 students was created with CAS in mind and is strongly linked to their studies. This year, for example, humanities students who had been studying modern European history traveled to Germany and Poland to visit sites of historical significance to that time period. Other DP1 students traveled to Thailand where CAS activities included working with local disadvantaged communities and helping out at wildlife conservation projects.

BWYA DP1 students got hands-on with community initiatives important to their Thai hosts

Not all the DP1 students traveled. However, those who stayed in Beijing benefited from a week-long programme of student-led CAS activities researched and organized by the students themselves. These included painting murals at the Shunyi Art Zone, cycle tours around Beijing city center, and a hike around Fragrant Hills.

BWYA staff and students are dedicated to a rich and rewarding learning experience, whether that is behind a desk or out and about exploring China and beyond. Whether it’s staying local or traveling globally, Trip Week sees BWYA contributing to the communities who are such welcoming hosts and learning from the places and people they encounter on their journeys.

This post is provided by Beijing World Youth Academy (BWYA)
Photos courtesy of Beijing World Youth Academy (BWYA)

CAS: Creativity, Action, Service.  50 hours of each in order to get the IB Diploma. CAS seems like the formula for the ideal well-rounded student, as it forces juniors and seniors to become the epitome of what it means to be well balanced.  Not only must they wade through hours of schoolwork, but they also have to be athletic, creative, and caring.  By the time they graduate at the end of senior year, IB students will have struggled through difficult academic courses, learned to manage their time, and honed their many talents.

However, oftentimes, CAS forces students to participate in activities that are meaningless to them outside of the valuable CAS hours they offer. Because of this sentiment, students often put minimal effort into their extra-curriculars. The old adage in IB seems to be “I’m only here for the CAS hours”. 

I recently joined a service group and the first thing I was asked was “do you need CAS hours?” At first, I was mildly offended – yes, I was there because I needed CAS hours, but I could have been there because I wanted to make a difference.  I could have been there because I really cared.  How did she know I wasn’t joining out of the goodness of my heart?  She had only expected me to join just because of CAS. This exchange in itself is distressing- people should participate in activities that they genuinely enjoy, not,as the norm is, because they just want CAS hours. 

When people only join teams, clubs, or groups for CAS, the gratifying experiences for those who participate for genuine enjoyment are diminished.  When everyone around you only puts in half the effort, it can be seriously disheartening. And when people say, “I’m only doing this because I need CAS hours”, it weakens the objective of community service, which,at its most basic level, is to care. 

Furthermore, CAS takes time away from those students who may be exceptionally skilled at one specific thing.  Students who are especially talented in music or sports, those who practice their skill many hours a day, find it difficult to fit not only Diploma subjects but also CAS hours into their schedules.  In trying to make us well rounded, CAS minimizes time we could be using to develop true competence in one area. 

The CAS requirements are 50 hours each of community, action, and service.  Maybe it is a good thing to force people to try new things, and maybe CAS really does benefit students in the long run.  However, it should be noted that the need for CAS hours can end up taking away from the enjoyment of extracurricular activities and could also prevent us from developing genuine skill.  Should CAS obligations really consume the spirit of creativity, action, and service by turning them into nothing more than hours to be logged?

This article originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Riena Harker, a student at the International School of Beijing.

About UNIT-E
UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photo: Ken