Gettysburg College encourages members of our community to explore immersive experiential learning. These experiences, including study abroad opportunities, engage students in personal discoveries about themselves and the world.
Last summer, Sherri McCusker ’03 hiked a mountain sacred to the Muisca Indigenous peoples, explored the marshes of La Boquilla in a canoe, and sampled handmade tamales with students in a rural South American school. Through experiences like these in Colombia, South America, the experiential learning she first encountered during her undergraduate education at Gettysburg College was magnified tenfold.
Her visit to Colombia was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad called “Colombia in the 21st Century: Youth, Civic, Social, and Political Engagement and National Reconciliation.” The program, hosted by Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, is open only to Maryland teachers and allows participants to experience Colombia in ways that other visitors cannot.
McCusker, a Baltimore County Public Schools Spanish teacher, had the opportunity to visit seven major cities and explore private and public universities to learn firsthand from Colombian educators about curriculum and culture in the country’s educational institutions. This experience, she said, not only enhanced her personal and professional growth but also allowed her to bring her experience with the Colombian culture back to her students at Arbutus Middle School in Arbutus, Maryland. Through her teaching, McCusker said she hopes to make intercultural experiences exciting, inviting, and welcoming for her students.
She recalls the excitement of embarking on her studies at Gettysburg as a Spanish major and Latin American studies minor. At Gettysburg, she took advantage of opportunities to study abroad in Sevilla, Spain, and Mendoza, Argentina. She took classes taught by dynamic faculty such as Spanish Prof. Emerita Paula Olinger and Prof. Rosario Ramos González.
During the Spring 2000 semester of her first year, participating in a Gettysburg College Choir international tour to Nicaragua, led by Sunderman Conservatory of Music Prof. Robert Natter, whetted her appetite for international culture, music, and travel.
“The classes I took were small, and you were face-to-face with your professors,” McCusker said. “It was a lot of conversation, but you never felt like you were put on the spot. What was great about the higher-level Spanish courses is that every professor was putting in their own personal experiences. They take their content to heart.”
She recalls a class with Ramos González that allowed her to meet and converse with a Spanish writer over lunch in Servo, the College’s Dining Center. In 2005, as a Gettysburg alumna, McCusker spent three weeks participating in Spanish Prof. Alicia Rolón’s five-week immersion experience for students in Argentina, Rolón’s home country. The course combined the learning of language, culture, and service at an orphanage and at a small elementary school, plus tango lessons.
“It was a 100% unique experience that could not be duplicated,” she said. “Professors [like Rolón] don’t keep these experiences for their own. You felt that every day in class.”
Today, McCusker continues to share her distinctive encounters with world cultures with her students—just as her Gettysburg professors did with her. For McCusker, these experiences resulting from A Consequential Education at Gettysburg College allow her to continually demonstrate to her students that the world is their classroom.
“They don’t always understand that as sixth, seventh, and eighth graders,” she said. “I’m able to say to them, ‘Here I am. I’m this person just like you. I was able to go to college and have these experiences.’ For my students, it’s getting them to see that they have access to the world.”
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By Michael Vyskocil
Photos provided by Sherri McCusker ’03
Posted: 12/20/24