At the end of the school year, I was counting down the days until I could take a break and catch my breath. Summer seemed to hold great promise. My daughter would be out of school. My classes would be over. The UWF campus would go into hibernation.
Champagne and bon bons for me!
Boy, was I naïve!
School was done for the year, but then my daughter had ALL THE CAMPS. My job as a full-time professor and as the new Kugelman Honors Director at UWF didn’t pause for summer. In fact, it ramped up significantly as we hosted a number of high-impact experiences for students throughout the community.
On two parallel tracks, my daughter and I rode a rollercoaster of a summer that left me feeling exhausted but completely transformed.
The original plan for this summer was to do study abroad with 30 students in Europe. For the third summer in a row, COVID safety precautions led to trip cancellation. As a teacher, I completely understood. As a parent, my heart broke for all the college kids who would spend their last summer on campus without the possibility of an international experience.
However, there was no way I was going to tell them this news without something else to offer. Our program quickly pivoted to provide a study away option open to all Kugelman Honors students. We built a 10-day trip to Washington, D.C., and I led an accompanying seminar on the theme of “American Identity in the Built Environment: Museums, Memorials, and Monuments in D.C.”
While it wasn’t what the students expected to be doing, they signed up! We traveled to D.C., and I discovered that a few of them had never flown, several had never been to a big city, and most of them had never visited the nation’s capital. For ten days, we trekked through D.C. on foot, by metro, in the heat, and drinking ALL the water. We marveled at how many of our national museums are free to the public.
We decided to plan a few events in which students on the trip could visit with alumni, donors, and trustees of the university. One was a chartered evening monument tour, and the other was a lunch and lecture event at the Army Navy Club. As I watched my precious students make conversation with executives and speak off-the-cuff about the impact of their studies in Kugelman Honors and at UWF, my eyes welled up with pride.
Many of them are only rising sophomores, but they have a strong sense of self-worth and personal drive, and they are feeling empowered to make their mark in every setting.
When we returned, I asked them to share how the trip impacted them. The caliber of their reflections blew me away. Some were struck by such a different culture around transportation. One remarked, “We spent 10 days in a city where the main method of transportation was public transit instead of cars, and that changed my perspective of travel and cities that I have yet to visit.”
Some had a renewed sense of patriotism and citizenship. One reflected, “I have a much more positive view of the country as a whole than I did before the trip. Many of the experiences gave me a much more optimistic view of our country’s future.” Another observed, “the trip significantly changed my view on the country as a whole, and I believe for the better. I will also be looking into jobs in and around DC once I graduate since I have seen how amazing the DC area is.”
Several of them found personal meaning in the journey. Kids from small towns in Florida began to consider career paths that would root them in urban settings such as DC. Some of them felt a strong calling to pursue a certain career path. One remarked, “I feel that this trip only pushed me hard into the career avenues I was meandering towards but not fully realizing the feeling that I have a calling there.”
They all intensely valued the time we spent together reflecting on what we saw and what we learned.
“I have a lot of hope in our citizens. The discussions our group had were amazing, and there are discussions like that happening everywhere and in so many settings,” one student remarked.
As a teacher and a mother, I struggle with the dependency we all have on devices – computers, phones, and gaming systems. I worry that we’re losing the human connection. We can’t talk to each other, and we would rather be engaged in a virtual world than fully present in this one. I’m guilty of this as well. But seeing these young people detach completely from their phones, experience the grandeur of monumental buildings and artwork, and devour critical reflection with each other gave me an overwhelming sense of hope.
COVID taught us the value of physical touch and togetherness. Students came back to the classroom ready to be with each other. Maybe the pandemic will leave us all with a greater appreciation of interpersonal experiences and global travel. That would be a silver lining.
D.C. is special to me because I worked there for a year on the Hill. I met my husband there. We experienced the terror of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks while there. I’ll never forget the drastic changes to airport security and the sense of vulnerability that took hold over the city. But still… even then, our public buildings were open to the general public, and the temples to democracy stood as testaments to popular sovereignty.
When we visited D.C. this summer, my students struggled to make meaning out of the closures we faced – at the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the White House. No branch of our government felt accessible to them.
One student stated, “I can never view the human condition the same. I can never view patriotism or nationalism the same. I have painfully realized the power of radical politics and prejudice.”
Another student found hope in the amount of diversity present in the nation’s capital but linked the closures and barricades to political divisiveness. “I think it restored some of my faith and hopes that diversity does still exist here, though it needs to continue being represented and encouraged. However, I think it also drives home the fact that the political discourse in this country is going largely unheard…there is so much back and forth and polarization, nothing is really happening. The amount of hopelessness that so many of us feel regarding our voice within the government was put in the spotlight by this trip.”
We didn’t get to Europe, but even domestic travel had dramatically changed these students’ worldviews. Not a single one of these young people will view the world in the same way again.
(And it certainly changed my daughter. She went from being terrified of escalators to running up them so quickly that I could barely keep sight of her!)
Dr. Jocelyn Evans
Jocelyn Evans was born and raised in the beautiful Florida Panhandle. Growing up in a home-schooling family, Jocelyn learned to see the world as one big classroom and to prioritize time spent nurturing curiosity. She received her BS from Berry College in Rome, GA, and her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. She has been a professor at the University of West Florida since 2003 and is now the Director of the Kugelman Honors Program. Jocelyn spends all of her free time with her husband (Jeremy), daughter (Selah June), and dog (Buster – a Great White Pyrenees). And when life permits, she enjoys yoga, crocheting, singing, and writing.
