Connecting Globally Through Language & Travel Transcript

Student: It’s really exciting to be able to immerse yourself into another culture.

Student: Being around the culture, it totally changed me. I didn’t wanna leave.

Student: I was able to really find who I am, and appreciate myself more.

Narrator: What we hope is that our students will develop this hunger for going out to the rest of the world to engage with the rest of the world and to advocate, connect and make change.

Narrator: What we’re really trying to focus on in our school is having high standards—holding students accountable, but at the same time holding them accountable for the things also that they wanna learn about and giving them exposure to what the types of skills and behaviors that they’re going to need as adults.

Student: From the first moment I walked in here, this school felt different than the education that I received. The focus on international studies, the focus on the languages, just to be aware that so much else is out there puts everything in perspective.

Teacher: If you guys just wnt to speak freely, like on your experiences, that’s be great.

Teacher: I hadn’t traveled a lot until I started working at DCIS. In the last year, I’ve had the privilege of going to Peru with students. I took nine students to Italy. It’s been a pretty unique few years.

Student: I was like comparing it to swimming, I guess. When you go and you visit a country, just kind of touristy, you’re kind of just dipping your feet in and you’re looking around. You’re like, “Okay, this is nice.” It’s really easy to get back out of the water. Then when you’re going into like a home state, you’re jumping in. When you go in and you stay with them it totally changes your perspective and it makes you just realize how alike we are in life and how you can just connect to someone.

Narrator: Every student takes a world language as a major course, with hopes that they will have fluency when they graduate and can speak another language.

Narrator: We have two of the traditional high school languages, Spanish and French. We also have Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Lakota and Korean.

Narrator: We’re trying to create students who are ready for college and who are prepared to be active participants in the world.

Narrator: When you’re able to connect abstract ideas to human emotion and what people experience living in a moment or living through a time of change, to me that’s deeper learning.

Student: The summer of my sophomore year, I was able to travel with bold leaders, which is a state-funded program, to Kenya for a month. While in Kenya, I did stay with a host family for a week. It taught me the value of a simple life and the beauty of that simple life. It has really helped me to look outside of myself, step out of my own shoes and step into other perspective and kind of realize what my values and my aspirations really are.

Student: My junior year I was fortunate to spend my entire year abroad as an exchange student in Peru. I think a lot of people when they travel, they focus on the differences between people. For me, after you’ve spent a year with people, you really learn the similarities and you sort of really see that there’s a human element to the world that goes deeper than the color of your skin, than the culture that you belong to that’s really something that we all can connect to.

Narrator: Their idea of taking action is to bring that culture here back to Denver. Particularly the students who may never have a chance to travel like that.

Narrator: Now as the year is progressing, you can see the growth already. They are able to have higher level thinking conversations and to see different perspectives and different points of view that they wouldn’t have necessarily had at the beginning of the school year.
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