Learning by Doing; School of Education Students Put Boots on the Ground in Peru

Drexel University School of Education

School of Education Students Trip to Peru

October 24, 2025

By Basil Tutza

At roughly 8,000 feet above her hometown of Philadelphia, Madison Haney had assumed that getting to Machu Picchu would be more of a hike. “It’s all steps, so it’s not that bad,” she adds.

Haney had never ventured outside the country, much less travelled without her family, and yet she stood resolutely in the heart of Peru. “I was definitely very nervous,” she reminisces. “But once I got there, everybody was super supportive.”

This trip—the first of its kind to be hosted by the School of Education—was, according to Director of Student Recruitment Jack Barnes, “more service learning” than its previous sponsored trip to Japan. “You’re putting your boots on the ground in a lower socioeconomic environment,” says Barnes, “Getting education outside the classroom.”

The School of Education organized this study abroad experience with the help of GoEco and Maximo Nivel, organizations which connect education students to Peruvian after-school programs. “We were teaching them English,” Haney remarks. “We wanted to teach them things they could actually use and remember.”

Haney, who leapt at the opportunity after hearing about how much her classmates enjoyed the trip to Tamagawa University in Japan, had prior experience with English Language Learners through the School of Education—but, despite that, she emphasized how the teaching environment in Peru was unlike anything she could have found in Philadelphia. “In America, you may have an English language center, where you have 25 kids that all speak English, and then you have one child that does not speak English. How do you differentiate that? But here, even with only 10 kids, they all speak different levels of English and Spanish because they’re different ages.”

Despite the language barrier, Haney and her peers insisted on a positive learning environment that transcended culture. “We don't just want them sitting at a desk. We don't just want them sitting at the table doing worksheets all day.” Instead, they recalled a combination of their prior education experience and, as Haney puts it, “what our high school teachers did to teach us Spanish,” a combination of physical mnemonics and gamification. “We would play ‘Simon Says’ with them in English and Spanish to get them moving, get them to know the body parts. There was a day when we were teaching them the days of the week in English, and we had them all written up on papers around the entire room. We would tell them, ‘Run over to this one,’ and the kids were just running laps around the classroom the whole time.”

When they weren’t teaching, Haney and her peers immersed themselves in Peruvian culture. As well as Machu Picchu, the students visited the Sacred Valley—Haney particularly notes their visit to an encapsulated archaeological site, Ollantaytambo, “Where the Temple of the Sun was in the Incan empire. It had all these crazy big steps.” Even their hostel posed a unique cultural experience, situated as it was in the center of Peru’s capital, Cusco. “We had maybe three churches that were right next to our hostel. We would come out, and there'd be an entire parade going on right in front of our door. One day, I believe there was some very special day in the church, we couldn't even…” Haney pauses to laugh. “We had to Uber back from our school that we were working with in the evening, and we had to stop halfway through the ride and get out because the parade's traffic was so bad. I thought, ‘This isn’t like St. Patty’s Day in Philly.’”

Haney reflects that her most important takeaway from the trip was her connection with the students. “The kids that we worked with were so sweet,” she says. “Yes, there was the language barrier… but they would see us coming down to school, and they'd be like, ‘Ingles!’ We were like, ‘We're here!’” Though she doesn’t intend to focus on English Language Learners in her wider career, she highlights how the Peru experience further reinforced the importance of student-teacher bonding in encouraging learning. “I think a lot of the time, people get hung up on what we can teach the students. How fast they can learn it. It’s not about how fast we can prove that they know this, but rather, are these students able to make a connection with you?”

When asked if she would consider taking another trip with the School of Education, Haney says she would “absolutely love to.” Considering the program’s success, Barnes expresses that future trips are highly likely. “We want to enlighten students to see different perspectives of the world,” he comments. “That’s really the mission at Drexel.”