Two students and their professor in the Western Kentucky University geography department have successfully completed a 4,200-mile tour into remote areas of northern Argentina, an excursion that is the first of its kind for the university.Dustin Winchester, a geoscience graduate student and social studies teacher at Bowling Green Junior High School, and Ronnie Santana, a geology major, both of Bowling Green, spent a month making the journey under the direction of David Keeling. Keeling, the geography and geology department head at WKU, is a colleague of geography professor John All, who reached the summit of Mount Everest in May.
Even for these adventurous travelers, the journey was uniquely ambitious, Keeling said, both in its scope and purpose.
“This is the first time we have attempted this type of itinerary with students,” said Keeling, who has made about 30 trips to Argentina. “The goal in taking students to these destinations is twofold: first, to develop an appreciation of how other people around the world live, what their conditions are, how they manage their daily lives. The second is introspection; you really want students to think of their own lives and their own circumstances and get them to appreciate how incredibly fortunate they are to be living in the U.S.”
The team was joined by students and faculty from the Kentucky Institute for International Studies consortium colleges and journeyed to five of Argentina’s six major regions.
The first stop was the megacity of Buenos Aires, home to 14 million people. The group then traveled to subtropical environments in the 17th century colonial Jesuit settlement of San Ignacio Mini and Iguazu Falls, a spectacular landscape of 275 individual waterfalls.
The group then journeyed through the semi-arid Chaco region and indigenous settlements of the Quebrada de Humahuaca near Salta, a remote mining community of San Antonio de los Cobres, high in the Andes Mountains, and to Mendoza in the Argentina’s wine country. The trip also included stops in the central Pampas grasslands and agricultural centers of Santa Rosa and Azul, where the impacts of tourism were studied along with other cultural interests.
“Students really begin to understand and have a better appreciation of their place in the world,” Keeling said. “You always hear about the incredible level of ignorance Americans have about the rest of the world. We really don’t know much about anybody, from leaders all the way down to local communities. Anything we can do as educators to open students eyes to this wider world, and show how we are all connected in some, goes way beyond education. It is a personal awakening in terms of figuring out who you are, why you really matter and where you fit into the broad scheme of things.”
Both Santana and Winchester said the venture was eye-opening.
Seeing Inca descendants in the Andes was a life-changing experience for the 29-year-old Winchester, one he will share with his students this fall.
“It was such culture shock, the most remote place I’ve ever seen,” Winchester said of San Antonio de los Cobres, a mining town at 12,000 feet. “I felt like I was at the edge of the world.”
Getting there was even a bigger shock, he said, after a landslide closed the only road into the town and the group was forced to make its way up the mountains in dried-up river beds.
“It really made me question how dependent I am on things like cell phones and trips to the mall,” he said. “I really don’t need these things.”
Winchester said he plans to share a video he made of schools in Argentina with his social studies students. “I hope they get it,” he said. “We are so focused on bringing 21st century technology skills into the classroom that I don’t even know if its possible for them to do without it.”
Santana, too, said the excursion changed his world view.
“I can say without a doubt that my experiences in Argentina will be an impacting factor for me for the rest of my life,” Santana said. “It’s very refreshing to know that how things are here at home isn’t how it is everywhere else in the world. Things are different, and I’ve learned that it’s okay for that to be true.”
One of the highlights of the experience, according to all, was the trip to Iguazu Falls, a place known for inducing something called “Iguazu syndrome.” That is where you keep taking photo after photo, thinking you are getting very different shots but they all turn out the same, Keeling said.
“The place is absolutely mind-blowing in terms of physical setting,” he added. “It makes you think about the relationship between humans and the environment, about how insignificant we are when we try and control nature and how powerful forces of nature can be.”
By LIZ SWITZER, The Daily News, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it /783-3240
Source: http://bgdailynews.com/articles/2010/07/19/news/news4.txt
