The long and eventful study trips

The study trips at Sund folk high school are long and rich in content. The shortest trips are two weeks long, while the longest study trips are eight weeks long. On the study trips, students have fieldwork or their own projects that they work on.

We travel on long study tours. There are two important reasons why we choose to have long study trips.

  1. Long study tours give us the opportunity to get to know the people we meet on the tours We want tours that are long enough for us to both remember and be remembered. We want to get to know people, and they want to get to know us.
  2. Long flights lead to high emissions, so it's important that we stay in the locations long enough to justify the environmental costs of travel. We do this by having study trips with meaningful content.

The content of the study tours

The purpose of all our study trips is to travel to learn. The content of the trips is different across all lines, but there are some commonalities:

  • Study trips provide strong cultural encounters
  • Students have their own projects that they work on during the trip
  • Students don't travel as tourists, but try to see aspects of the destination that tourists don't get to experience

Here are two examples of projects that students had on their trips in the fall of 2014.

Oil leak on Oleducto Norperuano

On the Rainforest study trip in the fall of 2014, the students lived with the indigenous people for several weeks. They carried out fieldwork in the area and documented, among other things, an oil leak on an oil pipe that carries crude oil out of the rainforest. Such leaks are quite common in the Amazon. When the water is contaminated, the indigenous people's livelihoods are threatened because it destroys drinking water, fishing and the forest, so this is very serious for the whole community. During the field trip, the students documented the oil spill, and when they returned to school they made a video documenting what they had discovered.

The difference between Fairtrade and other coffee production

In the fall of 2014, U-landslinja traveled to Guatemala. During the trip they had week-long stays in different Mayan communities. A group of pupils did fieldwork to find out how the coffee we drink is produced. They worked on both a Fairtrade coffee plantation and a regular commercial plantation and documented the difference in working conditions for those who work there. When they returned to school, they created a brochure about coffee production.