Academic ASB

Alternative Spring Break

As an affiliate of Break Away, every year Honors students have the opportunity to travel to a different city or country and give back to the community during Alternative Spring Break (ASB). A group of students, led by the Honors Service Learning Coordinator, work in conjunction with a volunteer agency to focus on a social issue. ASB is a partnership between students and a community organization. Communities see tangible results from the students' projects while students gain valuable knowledge and experience through the relationships built and the new perspectives gained from their contact with a different community and culture.

Jessica Rockwood, a sophomore, reflects on her 2004 Alternative Spring Break experience in the rain forests of the Amazon in Ecuador where students worked on an ecological preservation project with local villagers:

“From the fences in our yards to the borders on our countries, boundaries are everywhere. When we focus on the boundaries we lose sight of the mediums through which we can transcend those boundaries. Often, the subtlety of our mental boundaries pose far greater obstacles than mere physical boundaries because they cloud our perception of different experiences. Alternative Spring Break allowed fifteen individuals, myself included, to embark on a journey into the Amazon. By revealing the interdependence of perception and experience, Service Learning in Ecuador provided us with opportunities to confront mental and physical boundaries within service, time, and location. Consequently, the experience altered our perceptions of these ideas. Henry David Thoreau once said, ‘The value of any experience is measured…by the amount of development we get out of it.’ Now that we are back in the States, perhaps the greatest challenge we must face lies within our capacity for growth and development using the new perspectives we gained.”