In August, a group of 13 GFS Upper School students journeyed across the Atlantic for an unforgettable nine-day school trip to the United Kingdom. This cohort was joined by three chaperones: Department Head of the GFS Theatre Department, Jake Miller; Head of the GFS English Department, Alex Levin; and GFS’ Director of Academic Program, Carol Rawlings Miller. 

The organizing themes of the trip were dramatic literature and theatre, which led the travelers to a number of remarkable cultural sites in Stratford-Upon-Avon, London, and Edinburgh, including Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Globe Theater, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 

Miller specifically wanted this trip to coincide with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which is why the trip took place in the summer, as opposed to when school trips abroad are often scheduled: during January in conjunction with J-Term, the month-long span of elective courses that enable students and faculty to explore hobbies, passions, and scholarly fascinations. Indeed, the Festival turned out to be a highlight of the trip.

“The kids loved the Fringe,” Miller says. “It’s such a beautiful city, and the energy, creativity, and joy at this festival were electric.”

Each day of the sojourn was well-documented through a student-run blog (with Faculty Field Notes provided by the chaperones, as well). The Upper School authors diligently reported on their experiences, with detailed accounts of their meals, their daily excursions, and personal moments, like tearing up in front of Chaucer’s monument at the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

“The kids took the blogging seriously, they really owned it in a major way,” notes Rawlings Miller. “Every day, we would read aloud the [blog’s] comments from the night before as a way to feel connected to home.”

There was a strong educational current running through the trip tying together theatre, poetry, history, and history of language. This was mirrored in both daily rituals, like reading a poem every morning from a book of British poetry provided by Levin, and in the special experiences the faculty were able to organize.

On the second day of the trip, the students attended a theatre workshop led by a Teaching Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company focused on the Shakespeare play, “Pericles.” The entire group—even those who don’t take theatre classes at GFS—participated in movement and tableau exercises, discussed quotes and characters from the play, and performed exercises that explored the play’s messages. 

“The work with the RSC was very rich because the kids were learning about the play and exploring it as actors, and it wove a lot of threads together,” Rawlings Miller says. “We even overheard some of the non-drama students saying, ‘Maybe I am into theatre after all.’” 

That same night, the group attended a performance of “Pericles” at the Swan Theatre. This was just one of the shows the group was able to catch on their trip; others included “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Globe in London (where they watched standing in front of the stage as “groundlings,” pictured above) and “Silly Little Things," a mime/physical comedy piece at the Edinburgh Fringe which was recommended by a GFS parent. Before catching an immersive performance of “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” in London, the group was given the opportunity to have a question-and-answer session with members of the cast.

International trips have long-been an important part of GFS’ education outside of the classroom, and are a dynamic way to expand the school’s “embracing the city” values to other countries and continents. The collective nature of these trips centers learning in community and creates lasting bonds between the students. As they put it in the closing post of their blog:

The memories we made together will stay with us for the rest of our lives! What a trip! What a group! What amazing things we did together! 

Plus, as Miller notes, there’s something so specific and powerful about learning from direct experiences.

“We can teach them all about Shakespeare and how his work would've been received by the audiences of his time,” he says, “but that’s a really different experience to watch the play in the sun for two hours with the actors in your face…now you understand it in a context that cannot be conveyed in words.”  

Levin teaches Shakespeare in ninth and tenth grade English classes, and every other year in junior and senior electives. He’s also collaborated on J-Term courses that cover the Bard’s work, like “Reading of the Will: Shakespeare’s King Lear,” offered in 2023. He agrees that bringing Shakespeare’s language to life allowed the students on the trip to experience firsthand how contemporary and exciting Shakespeare’s poetry feels. 

“There is a special magic to working on his text so close to the place of his birth,” Levin notes. “Our encounters with poetry, including our time contemplating great writers in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey and reciting poems each morning at breakfast, formed a meaningful through-line over the course of our journey.” 

Emi Wong Shing ’27, who first heard about the trip through Levin, was one of the student travelers, and counts exploring and taking photos in Stratford-on-Avon as some of her favorite parts of the trip. She confirms that being immersed in new places and situations changes what learning feels like.

“I think traveling makes you more susceptible to absorbing information,” she says. “For example, it’s one thing to just learn about the theatre, but actually touring theatres and learning how they work is so much more fulfilling.”

Rawlings Miller reflects that the learning opportunities presented through the trip were just as deep for the faculty chaperones, too.

“On a trip like this, the teachers and students are learning together—we’re all students in a way,” she says.