Transforming Student Travel

Transforming Student Travel calls for a paradigm shift in the student tour industry: educators collaborating to create a student-centered, inquiry-based tour. Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” This resource guide explores ways educators can encourage students not only to see with “new eyes,” but also to understand how they know. The International Baccalaureate informs the first part of the book which includes educational research as well as practical suggestions for improving the tour experience, including an integration of academic subjects. Although much has been written about the impact of international travel, this book explores ways educators can transform domestic tours for public and parochial school students. The second part of the book offers resource guides for four cities – Washington, D.C.; New York; Philadelphia; and Boston. Teachers, tour directors, and tour operators, will find discussion questions activities as well as detailed background information for four of the most visited cities by students. Many of the questions and strategies can be adapted for other landscapes.

College has the power to transform students into intentional, critical, and engaged people. The recent trend of trying to measure higher education’s return on investment misses a fundamental point, argue Charity Johansson and Peter Felten. The central purpose of a college or university is to transform the lives of students—not to merely change them or help them mature. This transformation is an ongoing process of intentionally aligning one’s behavior with one’s core sense of personal identity. It is the university’s central role to lead students in this transformation, a process that shapes students into intentional, critical, and engaged individuals. Recognizing the remarkable influence of the college experience on peoples’ lives, the authors offer a guide to how colleges and universities can effectively lead students through this life-changing process. Drawn from extensive interviews with students and graduates, faculty and staff, Transforming Students gathers diverse stories to show how students experience the transformation process, which rarely follows a neat or linear path. The interviews illustrate central themes from the literature on transformative learning and the undergraduate student experience. A sequel of sorts to George Keller’s classic Transforming a College—which chronicled Elon University’s metamorphosis from struggling college to a top regional university—Transforming Students addresses the school’s core educational mission: to shape students into engaged adults who embrace learning as a lifelong endeavor. Given this effect, the college experience is much more than preparation for a career. It is preparation for life.

Transformative Student Experiences in Higher Education: Meeting the Needs of the 21st Century Student and Modern Workplace presents a thorough consideration of the role, use, and implications of transformative and active instructional strategies in higher education. It examines the changing landscape of higher education and serves as a foundational lens and framework for thinking through higher education from both an experiential and transformative instructional context. As instructors and administrators struggle with 21st century challenges, this seminal text serves as a companion resource that presents innovative 21st century techniques in a fair and balanced theoretical context.

The ability to recognise and understand your own cultural context is a prerequisite to understanding and interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. An intercultural learning approach encourages us to develop an understanding of culture and cultural difference, through reflecting on our own context and experience.

To convey modern China’s history and the forces driving its economic success, rail has no equal. From warlordism to Cultural Revolution, railroads suffered the country’s ills but persisted because they were exemplary institutions. Elisabeth Köll shows why they remain essential to the PRC’s technocratic economic model for China’s future.

Travel and tourism have a long association with the notion of transformation, both in terms of self and social collectives. What is surprising, however, is that this association has, on the whole, remained relatively underexplored and unchallenged, with little in the way of a corpus of academic literature surrounding these themes. Instead, much of the literature to date has focused upon describing and categorising tourism and travel experiences from a supply-side perspective, with travellers themselves defined in terms of their motivations and interests. While the tourism field can lay claim to several significant milestone contributions, there have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues arising from the travel/transformation nexus. The opportunity to explore the socio-cultural dimensions of transformation through travel has thus far been missed. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, literary scholars and heritage researchers, this volume explores what it means to transform through travel in a modern, mobile world. In doing so, it draws upon a wide variety of traveller perspectives - including tourists, backpackers, lifestyle travellers, migrants, refugees, nomads, walkers, writers, poets, virtual travellers and cosmetic surgery patients - to unpack a cultural phenomenon that has captured the imagination since the very first works of Western literature.

A Guide to Faculty-Led Study Abroad provides practical information on the curricular and administrative considerations necessary to design and implement a course-based study abroad experience of the highest quality. From techniques for funding the trip, to legal considerations, curricular development, and cultural preparation, this book explains how to create a meaningful and valuable international experience in a variety of settings and formats. The study abroad novice and experienced faculty or administrator alike will benefit from this step-by-step guide on how to create a truly transformative, course-based study abroad experience.