After a two-year hiatus, we were finally able to welcome students back to Italy! Twenty-two students from Ashley Hall in Charleston, SC, one of Spoleto Study Abroad's Signature Schools, have just returned home from Spoleto after taking part in the travel component of their Amalthea program. Amalthea is an interdisciplinary program at Ashley Hall open to 8-10th grade students. Over the course of about a year, those accepted research and study an object or place of their choosing to better understand its history, function, and significance. Students could choose anything from a machine from da Vinci to a fresco from the chapel in Orvieto to a Roman monument to natural caves.
At the end of their year of research, students travel to Italy for 10-days, where they use the Palazzo Leti as their home base and travel to each person's selected topic to see it in person. While there, students report their findings to the rest of the group. Upon returning home, the students write a paper and present the culmination of their findings in a science-fair-style presentation to parents back at school. This allows them to hone in on their public speaking skills and answer questions about the topic.
Amalthea is a combination of researching to learn something new, listening to peers, traveling to a new country and culture, and a final project that emphasizes presentation public speaking skills. Ashley Hall's Amalthea program is just one example of how our partner schools are bringing Italy into their humanities programming through a partnership with Spoleto Study Abroad.
The possibilities are endless though. If your school is interested in partnering with Spoleto Study Abroad, learn more about each level of commitment here. We'd love to help you create an ideal program for your students to learn valuable interdisciplinary skills that facilitates intellectual and personal growth and experiential learning.