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LA MANCHA WORKSHOP
La Mancha is a journey that marks the end of a longer journey. It is a 13-day cross-cultural learning adventure designed to educate and inspire educational experience. The eighteen students who participated in the La Mancha experience of February 11-23, 2007, the essence of which this portfolio attempts to capture, were just weeks away from completing the emotional growth curriculum at Mount Bachelor Academy. For their La Mancha, these students were taken to two former communist countries in Eastern Europe, Romania and Poland. It is one thing to study a country, but when you actually visit that country—living in a village, eating the food, talking with people, learning from them—there is a deeper level of education. History comes alive when you are able to travel to Eastern Europe and study events like the Holocaust. You can see with your own eyes, study the evidence on your own terms. This is the beauty of experiential learning, the kind you can get no other way. Josh Lee said it this way: “What impacted me the most was going to Birkenau. In Auschwitz-Birkenau you saw the platform and things you saw in movies and documentaries. I’m a very kinesthetic learner. I don’t learn something when I’m taught it or told it, but when I get to experience it and go there and see it taste it and touch it-and really experience it and have someone kind of explaining things so I don’t assume, it’s really impactful.” In addition to the experiential learning, there is the unique challenge of discovering what it means to be an ambassador. The Romanian taxi cab driver will ask you, “What you think George Bush?” You have the opportunity and responsibility to represent your country in whatever you way you choose. The Romanian high school student will ask you, in more grammatically correct English, what it means to be an American. Again, you have the opportunity to explain your views and represent your country internationally. The big questions for everyone involved on the trip are: What does it mean to be an American in a global community? How do I balance my rights and my responsibilities? Though I come from a rich country, am I able to discover richness in history? Can I recognize the fragility of life and see living as a gift? An MBA Education The La Mancha Lifestep occurs in a particular context. The students who take part in this experience do so near the end of a twelve-month or longer stay on the MBA campus in central Oregon. Students who come to MBA do so because there have been struggles at home: family relationships, traumatic events, loss of identity, drug and alcohol abuse, performance in school, or any combination of these. It can be difficult to face, let alone overcome, these realities, so they are pushed on this journey by concerned family members and a caring MBA staff. When they first arrive, students spend a number of weeks with the Phase One staff, where they identify the reasons they are at MBA, the work they need to accomplish to move forward in the program, and begin to trust the process through which this work will happen: engagement with a positive peer culture and a firm and nurturing staff. Support from friends and help from trusted mentors is how growth happens in our lives. In addition, students begin to see how their attitudes and actions affect others as they learn how to be both a member and a leader of a team. Eventually, students enter Phase Two of the program and enter classes to get back on track with school. The academic program at MBA treats each student as an individual because they each come with a unique record of academic success and failure, learning needs and strengths. Some students are working toward credit recovery and getting in position to complete high school; other students will finish high school and are preparing for college. As students begin their regular academic coursework, they have the opportunity to participate in a series of personal growth workshops called Lifesteps (The Bridge, Forever Young, The Promise, and Venture) where, with guidance from adult mentors and support from peers, they learn lessons of true friendship, recover some of the innocence of childhood, begin to understand the importance of promises made and kept, and find a way to live at peace with themselves and others. Through the Lifesteps, MBA students embark on their own journey toward facing their past, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and developing a new sense of identity and purpose. La Mancha is the fifth Lifestep and provides an opportunity for students who are nearing the end of their work in Phase 3 to wrap-up all the things they have learned so far and to open the door to a larger worldview and the prospect of becoming an adult. The hope is that by the time a student participates in La Mancha, enough “issues” are dealt with so that the student can deal with the deepest issue of modern living: How do you make sense of your life in the fast-paced, materialistic, media-obsessed nature of an economically advanced country? When a student can answer this question, they are ready to go home. Amy Breliant tells the story of how her work in Lifesteps became significant on La Mancha: “In The Promise, my work was being self-centered. I realized who I wanted to be and the experience was impactful. Then I went on my homebreak and immediately went back to my old ways and didn’t do any of the community service that I had been so excited about. As soon as I was back in L.A., I was back in self-centered mode. Going to the village in Romania, I fell in love with gratitude and people—all of it. I was there and living it.”
The La Mancha Idea “Sometimes we have to go away to find out who we are,” says Alex Bitz, one of the founding members of MBA and the creative visionary behind the La Mancha program. “We’re so blinded by our ‘land of plenty’ that we’re unwilling and unable to see ourselves clearly. So we run away from everything, traveling thousands of miles to find a simple way home.” Which means that the journey away is in reality is a journey home—ultimately a return to families after a long period of separation. For Glenn Epstein this was true in a powerful way. He said, “It took a trip to Auschwitz for me to get in touch with my religion. At Auschwitz we gathered in a circle and I recited the Jewish prayer for the dead. This was the first Hebrew prayer I had prayed since my Bar Mitzvah, 4 ½ years ago. It inspired me to get in touch with my roots and my religion because I’m proud of it.” Jake Shinder noted, “Sometimes you need to be taken out of your comfort zone. When that happens you are open to new ideas. The idea for me was that the world is not so comforting everywhere. I can’t just be safe. I have to adapt and understand more about where I am.” Josh Lee liked that La Mancha “pulled me out of the fast pace of MBA so I could slow down and think about things but not overanalyze them. There was a schedule, but not too busy. It was open but I couldn’t run out and do things whenever I wanted like on the night floor. The schedule is revolved around time to think.” Jessie Tessler admits, “At home I was a spoiled brat. I’ve been working on it but at school never got out of my comfort zone. In the village I had to do things for myself and do what I was told and not blow things off. I had to be a long way from home to realize this.” The MBA community is small and La Mancha takes students into a bigger world, beyond their borders, relationships, language, culture, comfort zones. Romania and Poland are former communist countries with a rather short democratic experience (17 years compared to our 230), but with histories that are much longer than our own. America is a nation of immigrants and many of our students find origins in these or nearby countries. Going thousands of miles away can be a great high school trip, but it requires preparation and forethought or the return home will be nothing more than just a physical event and a collection of memories and photographs. For the members of the MBA staff who accompany the trip, the main problem is how to keep the experience from being just an expensive field trip. Four tools help to make the itinerary come alive: a controlling theme, seminar-style academic work, questions, and family work. peers, family, and strangers; connections with history, both their own personal history as well as the history of nations; connections between lessons learned at MBA and life lived away from MBA. Questions are a helpful part of this process. To the extent students are willing to answer questions for themselves, whether out loud or in writing, to this extent they are able to make these connections and identify what matters to them.
FOR MORE PICTURES FROM WINTER 2007 click here
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