photo by Tania Westby

Bridges Face to Face Student Exchange Program 2008
Community Building through Global Understanding

To enhance and deepen the electronic student exchanges among Bridges classrooms, Bridges conducts an annual face to face student exchange. Each year selected students and teachers from Bridges international schools travel to Seattle for up to three weeks. Students stay in homes of Bridges families, and attend Bridges schools. In addition to learning alongside students in their partner classroom, the students visit other Bridges schools, engaging in powerful presentations and discussions about their lives and perspectives.

This year, Bridges was pleased to be host students and teachers from our partner classrooms in India, South Africa and Guatemala. In addition to the activities noted above, the students were participants and presenters at Seeds of Compassion, an extraordinary five day event in Seattle, Washington featuring the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Watch the final video of the Seeds gathering...all five days...which is now posted on the Seeds of Compassion site.

It is a really exciting time at Bridges! We'll have more photographs and details of their visit posted here soon, and in the meantime you can see some photos and read some of the students' own writings about their experiences on the blog created by Bridges' students from South Africa, India, Guatemala and Seattle.

Please see our Gallery page to view the digital stories the students created during their visit.

Read more about our past face to face exchanges:
Bridges Face to Face 2007
Bridges Face to Face 2006