Honors students looking to do something a little unusual next Spring Break are in luck.
The honors program is offering an organized pilgrimage through France and northern Spain that will run March 9-18.
The trip will cover the medieval religious pilgrimage path winding through the South of France to the city of Santiago de Compostela on the northeastern coast of Spain.
Students will visit chapels and monasteries throughout the two countries, while learning about different facets of medieval culture.
“People will get to think about something very meaningful,” said medieval studies professor and course coordinator Bonnie Wheeler.
“These are sacred spaces in which steps are pretty deeply worn,” she added, referring to the almost one million tourists who travel the path yearly.
Wheeler, history professor Jeremy Adams, art history professor Annemarie Weyl Carr, English senior lecturer Jo Goyne and music history professor Donna Mayer-Martin have teamed up to teach the course and travel with the students.
The trip is part of a three-hour course, CF 3353, that’s being offered in addition to a separate pilgrimage course, CF 3351, that has been taught by professors from several different departments since the 1980s.
“We’ve been teaching it a long time,” said Wheeler. “Every time students ask, ‘why don’t we GO on the pilgrimage?’ This time, we really want to do it.”
According to Goyne, organizing the trip was a “monumental task.”
“Mounting a trip like this in a 10-day period and getting all the logistics planned” for five faculty members has been an obstacle in the past, she said.
This year, though, SMU alum and medieval studies minor Catherine Jones stepped in.
Jones works for Globus, which made all-inclusive arrangements for students.
The professors had been working with other travel agencies to try and get a reasonable price for students, said professor Adams, but the best they came up with was about $4,500.
Jones, on the other hand, offered a trip for $3,692 – including airfare, most meals, and lodging in four- and five-star hotels.
According to Jones, airfare alone costs $1,200, but it’s still “a hell of a bargain,” said Adams. And all of the money goes to travel expenses – “not one penny goes to the faculty or SMU,” said Wheeler.
Because SMU is making travel arrangements through an outside agency, registration for the class will be a two-part process. Students will need to register through access.smu.edu and turn in a registration form to Globus.
The trip has space for 88 students, and about 30 are already signed up.
The entirety of the deposit is due Jan. 2, but according to Honors Program Coordinator David Doyle several scholarship options are available.
Students can either apply for a scholarship covering half or all of the trip when they register for classes, or they can “do some extra paperwork” and apply for a Richter fellowship.
Choosing that option would require a research proposal along with a lengthier paper than is normally required for the class.
The coursework structure and content for the new pilgrimage class deviate from the traditional one. There are no regular classes, but students enrolled will be required to attend four Saturday morning lectures along with extended night lectures with guest speakers on Feb. 28 and March 1, said Wheeler.
During the trip, students will be required to keep a journal and at the end of the semester they’ll turn in a final paper.
“Our goal is to give [students] the information [about the pilgrimage sites] before hand” so they can appreciate the culture while they’re there, because the trip moves at breakneck speed.
“We’ve tried to pack in as much local flavor as we could,” said Jones, who referred to the trips activities as “sight-doing rather than sight-seeing.”
“We’ll be moving at absolute lightning speed … and exploring this fabulous combination of combustible belief systems that exploded together,” said Wheeler.
