Global Education
Christchurch is already a global community, with more than thirty countries represented among our students and faculty. But our Global Education program begins in the classroom. Years ago, Christchurch built its academics around place-based learning, connecting every grade to real places, real questions, and the skills to explore them. Global Education grew directly out of that work: the same way of learning that starts on the Rappahannock, reaching all the way around the world.
Because every trip is rooted in our curriculum, our students travel prepared to learn in a way students from other schools are not. It is also why we design, lead, and return to every trip ourselves, year after year, rather than handing our students to an outside tour company.
Our Aspiration
Rooted Here, Engaged with the World
As a community, we aspire to be aware of and actively engaged with the international community. To this end, we are committed to building curricular and co-curricular programs that foster a global understanding of learning and living. — From the Christchurch MissionAs a community, we aspire to be aware of and actively engaged with the world beyond our campus, building curricular and co-curricular programs that foster a global understanding of learning and living. Our Global Education trips are an extension of an experience our students already live every day.
We want students fully immersed in the places we visit: to understand how people live very differently from how we do, to see the connections between economies, environments, histories, and beliefs, and to come home more self-aware and more a part of the global community.
Go Deeper
A Decade of Stories, Mapped
Our dedicated Global Education site holds more than ten years of trip blogs, student writing, the issues behind each destination, and photo galleries from India, Senegal, Guatemala, and beyond. It is the best way to see the program through our students' eyes.
Visit the Global Education SiteWhat We Explore
Trips that follow an idea, not just a map.
Our trips are tied together by a few big questions, and the biggest is change: what drives it, who it touches, and how it looks on the ground. Students begin close to home, with a small place and their own identity, and build toward understanding the world in all its complexity. Three ideas guide the way.
Watersheds
The watershed is central to how we learn, starting with our own river and moving outward. In India, students trace how the people living at the headwaters of the Ganges shape the lives of millions downstream, in the world's holiest watershed. It is a powerful way to see how connected the world really is.
Globalization
Our world grows more connected every year. Students learn how a decision made in one place ripples into the lives of people somewhere else, and what that means for the choices they make.
Education
By seeing how learning happens elsewhere in the world, students come to understand the purpose of their own. It sharpens what they value and challenges assumptions they did not know they held.
2025-26 Trips
Windows on the World
Our core trips are scheduled around the school calendar so students can travel during a break without falling behind. Most are open to any student, first-time traveler or seasoned globe-trotter. Spain runs a little differently, as a language-immersion trip for our Spanish students.
Thanksgiving Break
GuatemalaGuatemala pairs Spanish-language learning with a real reckoning with the country's past and present. Students investigate the legacy of the civil conflict, work alongside long-standing local partners, and explore the environmental and cultural questions shaping life in Guatemala today. |
Thanksgiving Break
SpainOur original destination, and our language-immersion trip. Led by our Spanish faculty, Spain is built for language students to live inside the language, the kind of full immersion that turns classroom Spanish into the real thing. It is an especially powerful path for students who learn a language best by living it. |
Spring Break
SenegalA window into life in "The Country of Hospitality," with an itinerary built to reveal a history and a present that push past easy generalizations about Africa. |
Post-Graduation
IndiaThe Ganges and the world's holiest river system in the northern state of Uttarakhand, alongside the people, food, and culture of one of the planet's most remarkable places. |
What Sets Us Apart
Designed In-House, Built on Relationships
What sets our program apart is that we run all of it ourselves, with no outside tour company in between. We design, scaffold, and lead every experience, and we return to the same communities year after year. Those long-standing relationships are the heart of the program. They make our trips safer and more authentic, they let teachers build these places into four years of classes, and they make our presence in each community responsible and useful, because we are there for the long term, not passing through.
Designed In-House
Every trip is planned and led by our own faculty, start to finish.
Lasting Relationships
We return to the same communities and partners year after year.
Ethical, Lasting Service
Because we come back, our service builds on work already underway rather than starting over, and we can be sure it genuinely helps.
Student-Led Projects
Students turn what they see into real work, carrying research and projects forward long after the trip ends.
Safety First
Robust risk protocols, faculty trained as Wilderness First Responders, and trusted partners on the ground.
Open to All
Need-based financial aid, plus help with passports, visas, and vaccinations.
Value Beyond Travel
The Trip Doesn't End at the Airport
We support independent projects, student research, and classroom work that reaches well beyond the time abroad. Over four years, the experiences build on one another, and so does the work: a student who helped build a water pump in a Senegalese village returns the next year to add a filtration system to it. The relationships we hold around the world live inside our community every day.
It's all connected
Explore the Christchurch Experience
Global Education is the far end of a journey that starts right on the river.