All Education Entails a Form of Travel

By Dorothy Barenscott, Ph.D.

When students ask me why I became an art historian or when I knew I wanted to become a professor, I tell a story about education and travel. It happened on the first day of a Grade 12 Western Civilization class when the teacher, Mr. Kennedy, coming in slightly late, out of breath, and with a freshly processed stack of slides from the printing lab, regaled us with stories about his summer trip to Europe from which he had literally returned the day before. Over the next hour, he showed us slide after slide of his adventures, featuring many of the amazing architecture, paintings, and sculptures we would be studying in his class. The passion and enthusiasm with which he spoke was infectious, and the connection between education and travel would bear out over the remainder of the semester as Mr. Kennedy took us on a journey through the history of art and culture, using both his knowledge and his travels as part of the collective class experience.

It is true that all education entails a form of travel. This idea has occurred to me in many ways as I have gone through the trials and rites of passage of being a student myself, and then later as an instructor, navigating students out into the unknowns of a new topic area, only to steer them back at the end of the semester with new certainty and depth of knowledge. But it wasn’t until I finally had the opportunity to physically travel with a group of students to see the very art and architecture they studied in my classes that the profound nature of this connection struck me as never before. Inspired by Mr. Kennedy, I had connected my own love of travel and research with my passion for teaching and education, but nothing could compare to facilitating the collective experience of an actual traveling classroom. There is something wonderfully unique about watching the individual faces of students light up when they come face to face with an art object recognized from a textbook or seeing them master the ability to travel the Metro system and find confidence in navigating a new city alone. 

What might surprise students is that my first field school to Europe (chronicled on this blog) changed and transformed me as much as it did them. Not only did it make me a more engaged and committed educator, the trip served as a powerful catalyst to more directly fuse education and travel beyond its powerful metaphorical dimensions. There is something about physically traveling to a new place to learn that is unmatched in power and possibility.

Dorothy Barenscott is an art historian and full-time faculty member of the Department of Fine Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She is currently coordinating a field school to New York and the Venice Biennale for May/June 2015. For more information about the trip and application details, you can contact her directly at dorothy.barenscott@kpu.ca  or visit http://www.kpu.ca/fine-arts-field-school-2015