ISEEN Northeast Regional Expedition 
Spring 2023

Partnerships in Place-Making:

Building Relationships Across Schools in Experiential Education 

Hosted By
The Pingry School | Pottersville, NJ

Friday, May 5, 2023
Thank you to those who attended! 

About the Expedition

Join us for a Regional Expedition at The Pingry School’s Pottersville campus, a satellite campus dedicated to experiential and immersive learning. Learn and experience first hand how programs rooted in partnerships and collaboration have contributed to the place-making of our campus. We will experience, share, connect, and depart as friends, with new program designs that bring partnerships in place-making home to your school.

You will engage in a hands-on “Ex Ed in Action” session* in the morning, led by Pingry faculty. These immersive experiences will meaningfully integrate our campus and illustrate how partnerships (with peer schools, organizations, and with Pingry) can enable and unlock transformative experiences in global citizenship, environmental science, team building, student leadership, DEIB, and civic engagement. In the afternoon, we will share Model Programs and Practices for school partnerships and satellite campus programs, and then participate in a Design Sprint with the objective of creating your own partner program and bringing it home.

*Ex Ed Action Sessions Include (choose one):

In this session you will participate in a mini DEIB Retreat modeled after the retreat in which 75 student leaders from Pingry and two peer schools participated last fall. The students spent the day exploring identity and building leadership capacity to help support DEIB club leaders (e.g., affinity groups, student unions). The intra-school partnership was an incubator for the exchange of fresh ideas and for building community.
Indoors.

In this session you will experience how a student-designed program connected Lower School students, Upper School student leaders, and faculty to learn about leave-no-trace principles and the importance of biodiversity and preservation through a brook study. 
Outdoors. *Please wear appropriate attire and closed-toed shoes that can get muddy. 

Immersive experiences can lead to some of the deepest learning and most meaningful intellectual engagement that our students experience. Discover how language and cultural immersion programs and hosting international partner schools can bring global Ed to your students without leaving campus.
No language requirement. Indoors. 

Outdoors. Accessibility note: entails participating in high and low ropes course.

Relationships between community organizations and Pingry is at the root of our Honor Code, Pillars, and Mission Statement. Discover how Pingry’s local partnerships foster a culture of community and engagement between the organization and Pingry students and are rooted in reciprocal relationships.
Indoors and Outdoors.

Schedule at a Glance

Note: The following schedule is tentative and is subject to change. 

Call for Proposals: 

Model Programs and Practices for School Partnerships and Satellite Campus Programs
We are seeking participants willing to showcase the work your schools and organizations are doing around school partnerships and satellite campus programs. These are 15-minute drop-in sessions in 3 rounds where you'll provide a short presentation about a specific innovative and replicable experiential program or practice. Typically presenters are given the option to take a round off to visit another session. Click here to submit a proposal by April 21st, 2023.

About The Pingry School: 
The Pingry School is a K-12 all gender independent school. The school’s mission is to foster in students a lifelong commitment to scholarly exploration, personal growth, and social responsibility while preparing them to be global citizens. Pingry was founded in 1861 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and today there are three campuses: Grades K-5 in Short Hills, Grades 6-12 in Basking Ridge, and a shared campus for Grades K-12 in Pottersville that focuses on experiential education. The diverse student body is composed of more than 1,100 students from nearly 100 towns in New Jersey and New York. 

Pingry’s Pottersville Experiential Education Campus is a vibrant home for intellectual curiosity and innovative programs, real world engagement and global partnership, and relationship and community building for all members of the Pingry community: K–12 students, colleagues, families, and alumni. The campus enables expanded programming anddeepens our students’ learning through hands-on learning, immersive experiences including short term overnight stays, global engagement, and professional development, strengthens Pingry through community relationship building opportunities, and offers Pingry summer and auxiliary partnerships and programs, as well as serves as a lively and loved home for the campus residents and their families.  

At The Pingry School, Experiential learning initiatives directly foster Pingry’s mission, encouraging intellectual, physical, and emotional learning and the cultivation of responsible and thoughtful citizens. Our experiential classrooms, environmental curricula, outdoor activities, and global education and engagement programs provide living laboratories for Pingry students to explore questions and make discoveries and strive to inspire a community of learning through programs that challenge the mind, body, and spirit.

Registration

Registration is open for ISEEN member and non-member schools until April 21, 2023. 

$125 for ISEEN Members/$150 for Non-Members. Registration fee includes all programming participation, breakfast, lunch, and happy hour on May 5th. 

Registration for this event has ended. 

Logistics, Travel, and Lodging

Pingry’s Pottersville Campus is located at 51 Pottersville Road, Pottersville, New Jersey 07979. Participants who wish to stay the night (May 4th and/or May 5th) may stay in the campus dormitories for $40/a night for a non-shared/single room. (You may select this option on the registration form.)

Other local hotels include (please note that transportation will not be provided to or from hotels): 

Southeast of Pottersville

• Delta Hotels by Marriott Basking Ridge
• Somerset Hills Hotel, Tapestry Collection by Hilton
• Courtyard Basking Ridge

• The Neighbour House Bed & Breakfast
• Raritan Inn

• Bernards Inn
• Olde Mill Inn

The Expedition will officially begin at 9:00 am on Friday, May 5th, and conclude at 3:30 pm (+optional happy hour) the same day. Please know that we value your participation at the ISEEN Expedition and we feel it is critical for participants to arrive on time and leave on time. Arriving late or leaving early not only diminishes the quality of your experience but also the shared experience of your peers. If you know that you cannot manage the full schedule, please consider joining us at a future Expedition.

Questions?

General registration questions? Contact [email protected].

For programming questions, contact Shoshanna Sumka, ISEEN Executive Director, at [email protected], Taras Ferencevych, at [email protected], ISEEN Director of Professional Learning & Programs or Rebecca Sullivan, Director of Experiential Education and Pottersville Programs at The Pingry School, at [email protected]