Foreign language students at Columbia High School have had a busy and exciting summer.

As previously reported, CHS students studying German participated in a three-week stay in Columbia’s sister city of Gedern in June, getting a taste of life as a German student.

Toward the tail end of that trip, CHS Spanish students took an adventure abroad as well, spending eight days in Madrid thanks to a chance partnership with Saint Louis University.

CHS Spanish teacher Elisha Arnold provided an overview of the trip and explained how it came together.

She noted this particular trip isn’t typically offered to schools and was instead something of an experiment that came about thanks to an encounter she had with Rebecca Bahan from SLU’s Office of International Services.

As the university has a campus in Madrid, the two decided that an overseas education experience would be a nice opportunity for students.

“It was her idea, and with her connections through SLU and with my access to the Columbia High School students, it just blossomed into this wonderful opportunity,” Arnold said.

Applications for the trip were fairly selective, as Arnold recalled, with over 30 students signing up and only 16 ultimately participating based on their language and writing abilities as well as their actual interest in experiencing a new culture.

Just like the aforementioned Gedern trip, the stay in Madrid was focused much less on sightseeing – though students did enjoy some tourist-oriented experiences – and much more on education and building language skills.

“The essence of the trip was less of being a tourist and more of an introduction to study abroad,” Arnold said. “We lived in a student residence building and walked to the SLU Madrid campus most days.”

Students stayed in Spain from June 26 to July 3, participating in a range of activities.

As Arnold described, they attended various courses at the Madrid campus through the week, listening to professors giving lectures in Spanish.

She said students would generally learn about a certain subject and then do sightseeing to build on that lesson, such as when they learned about the Spanish Civil War and later visited buildings still marked with bullet holes from the conflict.

Additional sightseeing had students learn about things like Roman aqueducts and the art of El Greco and Picasso.

Arnold offered great praise for Hammish Binns, a professor who served as the group’s guide throughout the week.

She also thanked Cole and Mica, two student volunteers who helped organize a number of activities from selfie scavenger hunts to interviews with locals to build the students’ Spanish skills, with prizes awarded for each daily game.

“In a way, I felt the way that it came together was kind of like summer camp meets study abroad,” Arnold said.

Students also participated in some distinctly cultural experiences such as attending a flamenco dance class and also watching professional flamenco dancers perform.

One activity also had students purchasing ingredients – speaking with shopkeepers in Spanish the whole time – and then participating in a cooking class.

At the end of each day, students would do a written reflection on their experience and what they learned.

Toward the end of the trip, Binns and his assistants were meant to decide which student had the best collection of journal entries throughout the week, evaluating their communication skills.

As Arnold explained, this selection didn’t go quite as planned.

Binns opened his speech to the students – he addressed them during a traditional tapas meal – by explaining he had a degree of skepticism when he heard about students from the U.S. visiting who had supposedly strong Spanish skills.

On reading each of the students’ journals, however, any concerns he had were dashed, and he and his assistants ultimately couldn’t decide on any individual winner for this journaling activity.

“They just couldn’t because all 16 journal entries coming from rising juniors to rising seniors to graduated seniors were so great,” Arnold said. “Although they had common errors, all students communicated themselves so clearly that Hammish said he could only hope that his college students could get to that level.”

Arnold had high praise for her students as well as her fellow Spanish teachers Carleigh Ottwell and Ashley Ramsey. She expressed a distinct pride in the way her students were able to communicate and carry themselves throughout the trip.

“When it came down to it in the real world, they were able to communicate and get their needs met,” Arnold said.

She also reiterated her idea about the trip serving as a sort of introduction to study abroad, expressing the hope that the students who participated will be interested in a larger experience later in their academic careers.

“I feel like the seed for studying abroad has been planted, and several students know that they will be studying abroad in college,” Arnold said. “They see how much they learned in a short amount of time. We were only there eight days, and a lot of study abroad experiences are for a semester.”

While Arnold had excellent things to say about the trip as a teacher, her students also seemed to have a very positive experience.

Lilly Arnold, an incoming junior and Elisha’s daughter, said she was initially interested in the trip given her general love of Spanish and her hopes to expose herself to native speakers and the country’s culture.

Concerning big highlights of the trip, Lilly particularly recalled the experience of shopping for food and putting it all together in the cooking class.

“It was a very diverse trip, and we did a lot of different types of activities with museums and landmarks, but one of my favorite things was we made paella, which is a traditional Hispanic dish with saffron, rice and various vegetables, seafood and chicken,” Lilly said. “I am still thinking about how amazing that paella was and how interesting it was to cook it.”

She said she feels that she developed greatly with her grammar skills, primarily through talking with the shopkeepers and having them correct her and provide a better understanding of the language.

Incoming senior Brooke Hayes said she was interested in the trip as she’d like to expand her skills with Spanish as a second language – having that flexibility as a prospective nurse would likely prove useful.

She spoke about how interesting the flamenco experience was as well as some of the bigger sightseeing moments. Though she and the other students were often tired during the classes they attended, she felt they were still useful given how they got to hear so much from a native speaker.

Hayes said she took away a number of benefits from the trip, chiefly in how the stay in Madrid helped broaden her world view.

“I got to venture out a little bit, make some new friends and really just explore on my own for the first time,” Hayes said. “I really felt like I got to mature and grow as a person.”

Given their behavior and with such a positive experience for the students now passed, Elisha said she is currently looking into the possibility of putting together a similar program in the future.

“The students represented Columbia and the U.S. so well that I’m enthusiastically searching for an opportunity to do this again,” Elisha said.