CDAE’s St. Lucia study abroad program recently marked its fifteen-year anniversary. Since 2004, UVM students and faculty have traveled to the Caribbean island state of St. Lucia to collaborate with the St. Lucian government and community partners on development projects.

CDAE Senior Lecturer Thomas DeSisto, who co-teaches the course with Lecturer Kevin Stapleton, explained that much of the success and the longevity of the program is based on the strong connection with St. Lucian community partners. He said, “It’s amazing how each year we gain so much extra ground to build with them.”  

CDAE Lecturers Thomas DeSisto and Kevin Stapleton have been co-teaching the St. Lucia course CDAE 195/295: Sustainable Development on Small Island States since 2011. In this interview, they reflect on how UVM students and St. Lucians have been changed by the program over its fifteen-year history. This service-learning course involves students researching small island development issues and planning their own projects to implement with community partners in a winter trip to St. Lucia 

Can you discuss the relationship between academic learning and real-world application in this program?

Kevin Stapleton: The academic underpinnings are critical because in order to solve the problems you need to understand the origin of those problems and possible solutions to those problems. That is what so much of the CDAE curriculum is meant to do: it’s meant to help people understand the problems facing the world. Although it may feel disjointed at times, if it weren’t for all of your experiences in classes, you wouldn’t be able to do all this. When students walk away from their projects in St. Lucia, they have succeeded. That doesn’t mean that the project has turned out the way they wanted it to turn out, but it means that they’ve done everything possible to accomplish something. A lot of times that means that most of the project was great, but sometimes it means it was a great learning experience, and students really do put to work what they’ve learned in classes.

How has running this course changed your approach to teaching international development?

Thomas DeSisto: I think it’s critical that there are just certain limitations to what you can work on and your scope, the limited resources available, and the resources that the community has available to them. The more focused and targeted you are, the better. It’s small scale things that make an impact on the day to day life. It doesn’t need to seem grand, because often it’s the small targeted things, connecting to people, that really matters.

Emma Lane, a graduate of the St. Lucia program and a Student Services Specialist in UVM’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, looks back on how the program made a lasting impact on her life and career.

Did you have any expectations going into the course?

I was expecting the faculty members to be more of the leads in the projects and students would just be the assistants. But I found that they really let the students take the reins on their own projects, with where to go with it and how we got to implement it when we got down to St. Lucia. I thought that was really interesting. I didn’t expect to have that much freedom and control over our own project.

Were there any moments which stuck out to you from the course? 

We were working with the government down in St. Lucia, so a lot of people respected our partnership with them, and were happy we were there to get their feedback and relay that information to their officials. That was really cool, that they trusted us with their opinions and trusted us to relay that information.

How has this class impacted you? Did it make an impact on your career or life in any way?

My major was Community and International Development (CID), and having St. Lucia to refer to as a reference and be like “here’s an excellent example of what the CID major embodies in one course.” I referenced that a lot to people [when] explaining what my degree was in by explaining some of the opportunities I had, and the work I did in St. Lucia. It was by far my favorite college experience, everything from the travel there, the people there, the island itself, to working on a team with my classmates and with Thomas and Kevin.