The Wandering Scholar believes that the educational experience of travel starts well before embarking and goes beyond the trip itself. To make each scholar’s experience as fulfilling and impactful as possible The Wandering Scholar has created a number of accompanying programs:
>>Travel Mentors
Each participant is matched with a travel mentor. The Wandering Scholar mentors, in addition to serving as role models of global citizens, assist the participants and their family through the process of preparing and planning for the trip, participate in the pre and post trip workshops, and help the participants create a strategy for recording, presenting and utilizing the experiences gained during their trip.
>>Pre- Departure Planning
In preparation for each trip, scholars and their mentors attend an informational meeting with their families, complete a country profile on their destination and take part in a pre-departure workshop with fellow scholars.
>>Documentation Projects
Beyond full participation in the activities organized by the trip leaders, which vary from trip to trip, The Wandering Scholar participants also take time out of each day to reflect on their experience and record their thoughts. Each participant does this in a different way. With the guidance of their mentor they choose a method before leaving for the trip. Methods vary as greatly as the interests and imaginations of the participants but could include: photograph, videography, short stories, sketching, interviewing or collage-making.
>>Trip Log and Blogging
In addition to individual projects each participant is asked to keep a written log of their trip. When possible the participant posts portions of the written log onto a blog set up by The Wandering Scholar before the trip. This way parents, donors, teachers and peers from home can receive updates in real time about each participant’s journey in the words of the participant and post comments in return with words of encouragement and advice.
>>Post-trip Workshop and Presentation of Learning
Upon return home from their trips participants meet once again for another workshop to share their experiences with their mentors and fellow program participants. With their mentors’ help they prepare and practice giving a presentation of what they took away from their experience and of their individual project.
>>Peer to Peer Recruitment
As a final program requirement participants present their summer experience to their school community, guaranteeing that at least one level the experience goes beyond the summer and into their school community. The peer to peer recruitment component serves two functions. First recruiting future participants from the same community creates a critical mass of students in a community who have shared similar life changing opportunity and mutually support and build off of one another’s experiences. Moreover, participants, acting as ambassadors for The Wandering Scholar program and of the country they visited, have a vested interest in recruiting high quality applicants ensuring that the future of The Wandering Scholar is as vibrant as its present.
