Zaya Roberson remembers visiting UGArden as a seventh grader in the Clarke County School District.
On that Experience UGA field trip, she and her classmates tasted spicy peppers and made smoothies from the lush produce all while learning what the University of Georgia has to offer. Now, as a second-year student at UGA and an ambassador for Experience UGA, she’s helping to facilitate those same field trips for Clarke County students.
“It’s in our backyard,” said Roberson, who is majoring in human development and family science in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “UGA is achievable. Those students could be exactly where I am today. That’s why I wanted to be part of the program — to let students know that UGA is not out of their reach.”
Experience UGA is a partnership program between the university and CCSD that strives to bring every student in the district to UGA’s campus for an educational field trip every year. It began 13 years ago out of conversations for a community grant. One of the ideas was a campus visit program, and although Clarke County did not receive that particular grant, the idea took hold.
“It seemed like such a natural opportunity to make connections for and with the local community,” said Josh Podvin, assistant director for the Office of Service-Learning and Experience UGA program supervisor.
The program is coordinated by the Office of Service-Learning, allowing the program to create and foster partnerships across the entire campus. It also serves as a central connection, bringing together individual campus visits for one united purpose.
“The Experience UGA trips are a wonderful opportunity for students to broaden their world by visiting UGA’s campus. Students may have visited UGA for an event before, but they may not have learned much about academics or college life,” said Katie Green, an instructional coach at Clarke Central High School who coordinates Experience UGA field trips for all of the school’s students.
Each trip seeks to connect to the standards being taught at the grade level that is visiting. Pre-K students visit the State Botanical Garden and learn all about their senses. Kindergartners visit the Mary Frances Early College of Education for lessons on measurements.
At the middle school level, students learn about the land around them with the State Botanical Garden and UGArden and tour the Special Collections Libraries with the history department.
CCSD high school students start thinking about their futures by attending a science expo with hands-on activities and presentations from various departments and research areas, learning about the world around them from the College of Environment and Design, and engaging in a Life 101 simulation of responsibilities after high school graduation with the J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, the University Health Center and the Terry College of Business.
Experience UGA facilitates up to 90 field trips each year with more than 40 partners on campus, bringing nearly 8,000 CCSD students to campus. By getting students out of the classroom for these visits, CCSD teachers can make real-world connections to the content they’re teaching.
“On our recent ninth grade field trip, three students were learning about fruit flies from Shaun McCann at the genetics department booth. As soon as McCann began explaining the winged and wingless fruit flies, the students excitedly said, ‘We just learned this.’ It was so fulfilling to see students making connections to what they learned in class and being excited about their new knowledge,” Green said.
It’s not just CCSD students benefitting from these field trips. Every year, 950 UGA students have a hand in Experience UGA, including ambassadors like Roberson and Jordan Wyatt, who also attended these field trips as a CCSD student.
“A big goal for Experience UGA is exposing kids to higher education and the university, and I really wanted to be a part of that,” said Wyatt, a second-year student majoring in psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
By working on field trips, ambassadors gain communication and management skills. They’re also building leadership skills that will carry forward in their careers. They do weekly trainings to build self-identity, work on professional development and engage in the community.
“Our ambassadors are a big part and essential piece to making the field trips happen,” said Aiyana Egins, Experience UGA program coordinator. “They’re getting opportunities to grow as leaders, which we have seen come out in many great ways.”
Egins and Podvin want to see Experience UGA grow with more campus partners and more experiences for CCSD students. They added extended Experience UGA options like virtual content created during the COVID-19 pandemic and are exploring ways to bring CCSD students to additional areas on campus.
“That’s the hope — that it’s a launching point for lots of other conversations,” Podvin said.
“It’s a job well done if a student walked away with something, whether it is in relation to the content or just an overall excitement that they had the opportunity to come to UGA and then find out that they get to come back again and see a whole new experience,” Egins said. “That’s really rewarding for me.”
