traveling while home: self-discovery through the local

How can you make the long trip home if you don’t actually leave there? How can you see what is already familiar as a new destination, a new place with which to reckon? What if that place is your campus or city, and where you already live?

In the Roosevelt University Honors Program, we ask students to experience space and place—our campus, city, and region—as sites for action, experience, and reflection, not simply as places we passively inhabit. A supplemental academic program for undergraduate students, the Honors Program serves students seeking immersive academic experiences and challenges to broaden and deepen their intellectual inquiry in and out of the classroom. Each year, as part of our co-curriculum, we offer a year-long experience called the Honors Exchange. We call it an “exchange” to emphasize acts of giving and receiving, especially as interlocutors and learners. There are two constants in this curriculum: being out and about, together, in the city and region, and inviting guests and experts into our learning community to bring their experience and expertise to bear on our inquiry. Our topics vary from year to year, but are always timely, broad in scope, and rich in possibility.

Marjorie, when she was new to her then-position as director of the Honors Program, attended a summer institute led by the National Collegiate Honors Council. The Council provided its members guideposts and reference points for understanding what Honors means in higher education, where we see learning as a means to thrive, and curiosity as an essential component of citizenship. At the institute, members discussed study abroad, as it’s one of the most common ways students encounter this kind of learning. It offers rich, immersive experiences that force acclimation and ask students to acculturate to the new and unfamiliar. Study abroad also challenges students to embody the cross-cultural experience—something which can be a complicated process. From deep within unfamiliar territory, students confront and engage with difference openly, knowing they will be changed (and can’t help but be) by the encounter.

It’s a complicated task to embed and teach to abstract and plural concepts like citizenship and intellectual curiosity, but one of the pedagogical models designed by NCHC works delicately and innovatively to do just that. “City as Text” invites students and facilitators, as Sarah Maria learned in another summer institute, to directly interact with and critically reflect on place as its own kind of living text, and to study it through multiple disciplinary perspectives for field-based, participatory learning.

We wondered: what would it mean for Roosevelt’s Honors Program to take this pedagogical framework to our local environment? Instead of seeking the unfamiliar, could we see the ordinary as novel, and the people and places with which we interact with every day as extraordinary and new? Where else could we be today, while still standing where we always do, while asking new questions about what we always see? And while leaving familiar territory is exhilarating, there’s also something especially rich about “traveling while home.”

We set out to invite students to experience our everyday spaces and places—our home, region, and city and their complex pasts and presents, their culture and politics—from fresh, even challenging perspectives. It’s as junior Cesar Gonzalez (he/him), an English major and political science minor, observes: “The Exchange is an experience that taught me to appreciate everyday things because everything, as I learned, has an exciting story waiting to be told.”

While this experience has some features of a college class—like assigned texts to read, watch, or listen to, and students producing work to demonstrate their learning throughout—this Honors education is not so much instructor-led as it is student-directed, nourishing students’ curiosity by having them discover that learning occurs everywhere all the time. When we start with the assumption that the ordinary, the commonplace, is worth our study, students lead with questions about that which they want to know. Sophomore hospitality major and psychology minor Madeline LaFrombois (she/they) explains, “[The Exchange] gave me an outlet to not focus directly on class. I love learning, but the structure of classes and stress of grades takes away from that passion.” In the Honors Exchange, students are free to explore what they discover in their journeys.

Angela, our intrepid docent, guided us throughout our year together in the Honors Exchange, to ask questions about design, about the “mapping” that orientates us to space and place. The most provocative question, the one that sticks with us and our students, is “Who is this city/place for?”Roosevelt’s origin story still poses that question: “Who is this university for?” Teaching about and for social justice, the Honors Exchange reveals to us, happens best through deliberate study, action, and immediacy. Just as Mia was transformed by her journeys with Chicago Janes, developing intimate relationships with our built environments changes our perspectives on the world and its locations, and also changes how we interact with them. Lydia, a senior English major with a creative writing concentration, grew up on a dairy farm; she describes her learning in the Exchange this way: “I’ve begun to understand successfully living in the city as a type of fluency. You have to know the social rules, expectations, and functions, which tend to be different from those in rural areas.”

Students carried this framing, that fluency and literacy, with them for a neighborhood walkabout, modeled after NCHC’s “City as Text,” for a project called “On Foot in Chicago’s First Five.” Small groups planned trips together during the winter months to Bronzeville, Chinatown, Greektown/West Loop, Little Italy, and Pilsen. These neighborhoods, the first five to be recognized as such in Chicago, are located close to our campus and their rich, unique histories factored into how students planned for their trips. They researched these places in advance, reading and learning through description and story. While there, they took field notes: What buildings did they see? What were their features? What spaces did they see? Were they for the public? Who was there? What were they wearing? How were people getting around? Also, importantly, who and what wasn’t there? Students considered what they didn’t or couldn’t learn from their preparatory research; how was being on foot a distinct kind of research, especially in that it cannot have a predetermined outcome? We came back to that CAC classroom where students presented collaborative storyboards and maps that narrated their analysis. What they brought to us revealed intimacy and amazement, hearkening back to that early neighborhood-building session, where students posited ideal neighborhoods, in contrast to the lived realities they experienced in the walkabout. Lydia notes, “It’s one thing to know a building every day by walking by, but it’s another to understand the context of why it was built and how it impacts the city today.”

For our final Exchange session in the spring, we all traveled, together, on a bus, with Angela as our guide, through those first five Chicago neighborhoods. She explained the past and the present iterations of these places’ features, architecture, and people. Cesar marvels about this tour: “Not only did I get to see all these fantastic neighborhoods, but I now looked at the city as a larger cultural entity than it already was. I loved how the town wasn’t only a new, modern skyscraper-topia. Looking closely, you could see the city’s history and the marks of the people who built it.”

Cesar now travels his city with and through this discovery. Madeline continues to find value in collaboration and in “learning how to learn.” Each year, in the Exchange, we invite students to travel alongside and collaborate with us, both literally and figuratively, and it is they who lead. Students see themselves in new ways, reconsider how and what they think, and ask where “here” is, those places to where you go when you leave “home.” A lasting memory for us, the authors, that haunts and fills us with hope, resonates: As we left the Lookingglass Theatre, after watching a Sunday matinee of the play Her Honor, Jane Byrne and engaging with some of the principal actors in a talkback, darkness and wet snow fell around us. Michigan Avenue and its buildings and sidewalks were awash in lights and color from cars and holiday decor, and the hum of the city and its people made us realize, in that moment–Here: Where we are, changed by this experience, by this play, by our study, by our students.

Like Cesar says, “It’s not just a world, it’s a story of the people who made it.” The Honors Exchange presumes we are already touring where we already are, but we can always ask “Where should we be today?” These trips are long, and worth it. Adopting this self-efficacy, combined with an amplified capacity for wonder, are necessary ingredients for lifelong learning, a central aim of Roosevelt’s Honors Program. We imagine our students radiating these traits over their lifetimes in their communities, workplaces, families, in the places they make their homes and travel to, equipped to do so through their education at Roosevelt University.