A Day of Study-in-Residence
Place-Based Itineraries Designed to Teach Students How to Study Away From Home
The Tale of Two Cities Study-in-Residence Met Claire Tomalin, the Author of Our Dickens Biography, at Waterloo Station.
A Day of Study-in-Residence
On a Study-in-Residence trip, we don’t get up at the crack of dawn to get on a tour bus, nor do we spend most of our day in-transit, like with most company-led student trips. We get a good night’s sleep, get up at around 8am, chat over coffee, pack a bag for the day’s adventure, then head out to travel the city.
In the mid-morning, we meet to review the day’s agenda. We use the nearby public transportation to go to our learning experience, travelling the city like local explorers, uncovering hidden artifacts in museums, dusting off truth-telling papers in deep archives, engaging with eccentric experts who really know their stuff.
We usually have lunch on-site, or do grab-and-go at a local grocery and eat in the park. After our learning experience, in the mid-to-late afternoon, we do a nearby cultural experience of some kind–something to get a feel for the city, like an Afternoon Tea in London, take in a museum, or have a coffee at a Parisian cafe.
After that, we usually return to the residence to drop our bags, freshen up, and go to dinner and some sort of entertainment. Dinner isn’t fussy, and the entertainment is a mix of “must-do’s” and “just off the beaten path” experiences you won’t get from major travel companies. We get home at a decent hour to come together as a group to debrief the day, do some journaling, get the plan for tomorrow, and then hang out, call home, get ready for the next day!
Journaling in the Luxembourg Gardens After a Long Day Studying Artifacts at the Musée de la Préfecture de Police (Including a Guillotine!) and Paintings of the Mythology of the French Revolution in the Pantheon, Just Down the Street from our Residence.
Annotated Agendas to Help You Get a Feel for Study-in-Residence:
A Tale of Two Cities: The Victoria and Albert Museum and Chelsea Culture
9:15am: Meet in front of the Residence to debrief the day’s agenda. Make sure everyone is packed and ready to go.
9:30-10:00am: Walk to the Tube, District Line from Paddington to South Kensington
10:00-12:00pm: Learning Experience at the National Art Library, Second Floor of the Victoria & Albert Museum. The curator teaches us to handle rare artifacts from the Forster Collection, then we look at specific pages of Charles Dickens’ handwritten manuscript of A Tale of Two Cities (we see how he wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” which is a key to his mental state at the time), as well as original copies of Dickens’ works to understand how he produced different types of works for different audiences–including an original edition of A Christmas Carol.
12:00-1:00pm: Lunch at the V&A Cafeteria / Queen Victoria’s Refreshment Room
1:00-2:30pm: Guided tour of the Twenty Treasures of the V&A.
2:30-4:00pm: Unstructured time at the Natural History Museum: Dinosaur Exhibits and the Darwin Centre.
4:00-4:30pm: Tube, District Line from South Kensington to West Brompton
4:30-5:00pm: Walking tour of Brompton Cemetery, brief discussion of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries in London and the Suffragettes. This will be important for our later trip to Highgate Cemetery, where we will eulogize Dickens’ wife Catherine, his parents, and his infant daughter Dora at their gravesites.
5:00-6:45pm: Dinner at The Troubadour, one of Chelsea’s last remaining coffee house live music venues (where Ed Sheeran and Adele got their first breaks). While we wait for food, we see the historic underground music venue where Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix first played in London.
6:45-7:00pm: Tube from West Brompton to Knightsbridge
7:00-8:00pm: Window shopping at Harrods, the iconic and quintessentially British upscale department store.
8:00-8:30pm: Tube to the residence, Knightsbridge to Paddington
8:30-9:30pm: Group debrief of the day, individual journaling.
9:30-11:00pm: Free time at the residence, then lights out!
The Study-in-Residence Class With The Journals, Getting an Explanation of Charles Dickens’ Editing Technique from the Handwritten Manuscript of A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities: The British Library and Westminster Abbey
9:15am: Meet in front of the residence, debrief the day’s agenda, make sure everybody in packed and ready to go.
9:15-9:30am: Tube from Paddington to St Pancras
9:30-11:30am: Learning experience at the British Library Study Room. We have a special dispensation for British Library cards that allow access to the stacks and study carrels in the Humanities Room. We go through the process of getting our cards, submitting research slips to get access to copies of first editions of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History, the chief source material Dickens used for details and stories in A Tale of Two Cities. Then, using pre-prepared worksheets, the students find specific passages from Carlyle that Dickens borrowed for his fiction, and students take notes on what they find about similarities, tone, and interpretation.
11:30-12:30pm: Lunch in the British Library Courtyard, with time to visit the British Library Treasures Room
12:30-1:15pm: Travel to Westminster Abbey, Circle Line from St Pancras to Westminster
1:30-3:00pm: Westminster Abbey Tour with Blue Badge Tour Guide. Our tour is both general to the Abbey, but specific to Dickens: Our guide tells the story of Dickens overnight burial—against his wishes!—in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. This is a story we will have read about in Leon Litvak’s article on “Dickens Burial as Bodysnatching.”
3:00-4:00pm: Afternoon Tea and Snack near the Abbey
4:00-5:00pm: Queue for Evensong
5:00-6:00pm: Evensong at Westminster Abbey, the daily Church of England service in the main corridor of the abbey. Queueing at 4pm will usually get us in the ancient wooden pews with a view of the throne. Also have the opportunity to light candles for loved ones on our way out.
6:00-7:00pm: Take away dinner from M&S Food Hall, picnic in Jubilee Gardens
7:30-9:30pm: Show at the National Theatre
9:30-10:00pm: Tube back to residence, Bakerloo Line from Waterloo to Paddington
10:00-11:00pm: Debrief, journaling, agenda for next day, contact home.
Boston Massacre Study-in-Residence, Massachusetts Historical Society and Fenway Neighborhood
9:15: Meet at Residence, review the day’s agenda, make sure everybody is packed and ready to go.
9:30-10:00am: Walk to the T, Green Line to Hynes Convention Center stop
10:00-12:00pm: Learning Experience at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The curator introduces us to their primary sources, teaches us to handle rare artifacts from the Revolutionary Era, and then we view and interpret John Adams’ personal, handwritten notes from the Trial of the Boston Massacre. We will also view Phyllis Wheatley artifacts, including an understanding of how her penmanship tells us about the relationship she had with her enslaver family, with whom she lived just two blocks from where the Boston Massacre occurred.
12:00-12:15pm: Walk along the Back Bay Fens to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
12:15-1:15pm: Lunch at the MFA’s Garden Cafeteria.
1:15-2:30pm: Guided Tour of the MFA’s Revolutionary Era paintings, including Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty Bowl, Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington, and Mohawk Nation works from the same period.
2:30-2:45pm: Walk to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
2:45-4:30pm: An afternoon at the ISG, the former private residence of Mrs. Gardner, which houses one of the most extensive private art collections in a beautiful venue. We will see the blank spaces on the wall, each for the 13 paintings that were stolen in 1990 in the world’s largest art heist, and hear the story of the possible organized crime involvement. Also get refreshments in the ISG’s garden cafe.
4:30-5:00pm: Walk to Fenway Park, alongside the Fenway Garden Society
5:00-5:30pm: The “Fifteen Minute” Tour of Fenway Park
5:30-6:00pm: Take the Red Line to Dinner
6:00-8:00pm: Pizza and Bowling at an Only-in-Boston Candlepin Bowling Alley
8:00-9:00pm: Take the Red Line back to the residence
9:45-10:30pm: Group debrief of the day, individual journaling.
10:30-11:00pm: Free time at the residence, then lights out!
Study-in-Residence Students and Teachers Discussing the Performance Technique and Other-Worldly Lung Capacity of the Opera Singers We Just Saw
Meticulously Planned, But Not Exhausting and Overscheduled—At a Competitive Price Point Compared to Large Travel Companies
As you can see, each day is meticulously planned, but not overscheduled–lots of buffer to make sure we are always running on time. Study-in-Residence days are designed to maximize experiences, so we typically explore a particular area of the city with as little time spent on transportation as possible. There is a fair bit of walking, but we alternate between tours and being off our feet. If it seems like we do a lot, that’s because we do!
With Study-in-Residence, we step through the agenda as you will experience it, to create a plan that packs the most into a day without being exhausting. This is why we schedule so that teenagers can sleep in, rather than getting them up at the crack of dawn to make a train or tour bus. And, we understand that they don’t always have to be doing something. We schedule a lot of time for the group to just be together enjoying their surroundings, which is key to building the group camaraderie over the course of the trip.
And, this helps us keep costs down. Typically, we alternate between an evening with an “event” like a show or scavenger hunt, and something that’s more of a “hang out.” Usually, the educational experiences are free or very inexpensive, we control food costs with take-away and hang-out in a public space, with modest cultural experiences so that we can have some “big” nights out at shows.
Sometimes at the End of a Long Day of Learning, You Just Want to Hang Out And Have Some Gelato With Your Friends