When 20 Eastern Mennonite High School (EMHS) students set out on a 26-day road trip to explore food production, land and water issues across the United States this summer, they were accompanied by five Eastern Mennonite University alumni.
Discovery trips, which take place every other summer and are open to rising juniors and seniors and recent graduates, give students “real life problems, in context,” said leader and Eastern Mennonite School (EMS) science teacher Lee Good ’92, MA ’15 (education). “They contextualize the challenges.”
Also on staff for the excursion was Lee’s son, chef Kyle Good ’19. Silas Driver ’19, who will graduate from EMU’s nursing program in December, provided medical support. EMS director of advancement Andrea Schrock Wenger ’86 and teacher Kendal Bauman MA ’11 also accompanied the group.
With stops in Kansas, Arizona, California, Oregon, Montana, Ohio and points between, the group learned about biotechnology, urban gardening and family farming, sustainable architecture, native peoples and geothermal energy. On one leg, they visited the ice field headwaters of the Colorado River, which they then followed through the arid Southwest to Las Vegas and Yuma, Arizona.
The students’ takeaways are “varied, rich and deep,” Good said, as the trip brings myriad issues into focus. The group learned that without immigrants to harvest, crops would rot in the field. When a student asked a farmer, “What do you think of global warming?” he replied that dealing with its repercussions is “my everyday existence.”
“It was very eye-opening,” Good said. “The issues aren’t something abstract; this is food and livelihood.”
The Discovery trip program was launched 20 years ago by biology teacher Myron Blosser ’83, MA ’98 (education), who led the trips until 2013. Since then it has been led by Good, who had previously served as trip support staff in 2011 and 2013. Blosser now directs the Governor’s STEM Academy at Harrisonburg High School.
This year, for his second time, Kyle Good was head cook. He also participated in the trip in 2013 as a student and in 2011 – to Alaska – when he was a middle schooler.
Driver, too, participated as a student in 2013.
“The trip reminded me of EMU cross-cultural study,” said Schrock Wenger. “Students were learning how to learn. They read and prepared questions before stops, listened well, and reflected as a group along the way. I came back filled with hope for how the next generation will engage the complex problems of our times.”
“You can’t really care about a place until you’ve seen it,” Lee Good said. “Now students have a much greater capacity to identify with and understand these complex issues, since they’ve been there. They now know who their neighbor is.”