A Classroom With No Walls: Days With the Boruca Community

You can read about a culture. You can watch a video about a culture. Or you can sit on the ground while members of that culture teach you their traditional dance, and learn it in your body instead of your notes.

Our students do the third one. Each year, part of our field trip program takes them to the Boruca community to experience traditional dance and culture firsthand. It is one of the clearest examples of what we mean when we say place is the classroom.

Why a Visit Beats a Chapter

A textbook can tell a child that Costa Rica has Indigenous communities with deep, living traditions. It can’t make that real. A visit can. When kids meet the people, hear the stories, and try the dance, the abstract becomes personal. Respect for a culture grows fastest from contact with it, not commentary about it.

This is also how we keep our students rooted. It’s one thing to live in Costa Rica. It’s another to actually know the country you live in, its peoples, its history, its art. A child who has danced with the Boruca carries a relationship to this place that no curriculum could hand them.

What the Trip Actually Teaches

The obvious lesson is cultural. The quieter lessons run deeper.

Kids learn humility, that they are guests, and that being a good guest means listening more than talking. They practice the kind of curiosity we ask for in our four values, the genuine wanting-to-understand that good learning depends on. And they see, up close, that knowledge doesn’t only come from teachers and books. It comes from elders, from artists, from a community that has carried something forward for generations.

For our international families especially, these trips do something a brochure can’t. They turn “we moved to Costa Rica” into “our kids belong to Costa Rica.”

Part of a Bigger Pattern

The Boruca visit doesn’t stand alone. It’s one of roughly four field experiences per grade each year, alongside counting bats at Reserva Playa Tortuga, cleaning local beaches, and overnight trips to San José for older students. Together they make a simple point: the most important classroom isn’t always inside the building.

Some of what a child needs to learn can only be learned by going. So we go. And every time, the kids come back a little more curious, a little more respectful, and a little more rooted in the place they’re lucky enough to call home.