BELIZE IS OUR CLASSROOM

When I was a student in the public schools in North Carolina, and even in college, it was always a treat to go outside for a class when the temperature was tolerable, and the sun was shining.  The lessons didn’t always pertain to where we were, but it was pleasant to have no walls holding us in.  Belize and CELA deliver a different kind of learning experience because the amazing environment and diversity of cultures here allow us to use the country as a classroom all year.

CELA is well known for the engaged learning opportunities we create for our students and faculty-led groups.  Our classrooms are created from our deep connections to Belize; on medicinal trails, on farms and ranches, at the Belize Zoo, with nurses at the local hospitals and clinics, in villages, towns, and Belizean homes. The forests, the Mesoamerican barrier reef, and the Caribbean Sea, the local markets, rivers, and farms bring a variety of topics to life.  Belize provides its own visual aids and presentations.  Living a lesson is often the best way to take in new knowledge.

The variety of people a student or group meets in Belize is a great source of engaged learning, too. With lecturers and knowledge bearers providing new faces, accents and different ways of looking at the world, rich texture is offered.  Meeting healthcare leaders and providers, seeing how domestic animals are cared for, listening to a Maya guide talk about his/her ancestors and their monumental, ceremonial sites are great educational components. Walking with a guide along the Belize River at the Community Baboon Sanctuary, viewing a Creole way of living and thriving, by sharing their space with the black howler monkeys, highlights a different way of existing and brings with it a lesson of how shared space and destinies can create a new way of being.

It’s not just the people and places that are part of the learning.  The exuberance of life in Belize, from morning birdsongs to evening concerts presented by bugs, toads and frogs, and barking dogs, creates a different backdrop to life.   The air and the fragrances carried on the wind, the humidity and the dusty, bumpy roads are teaching without students knowing they are learning.  Even the length of the days is a lesson in global positioning!  Many students see the vastness of the universe in the night sky for the first time.

One of the big takeaways for our students and their professors is encountering different ways of being.  Stepping out of their comfort zone, students look at their lives and living spaces in a different way, from the outside in.  They usually arrive at a place of appreciation for other ways of living and become thankful for their own.  Recognizing an interconnectedness, from here to there, from me to them, and how the whole fits together to make us, is one of many very enlightening lessons learned in Belize.  Belize is our classroom™ and the learning is engaging.

Author: Cynthia Reece, Communications and Enrollment Officer at C.E.L.A. Belize