Volunteering to take students on an educational tour is a rewarding and enriching experience. If you keep in mind not every student will have travelled, let alone left the state or their hometown, you can be assured you are helping future generations to shine.
Experiences
For students, especially teenagers, the idea of venturing off without their parents is the start of independent life. It gives them an opportunity to be themselves, and discover deeper levels of relationships within their peer group. For many, it is a chance to be in a group with other classmates they may not normally hang out with as they are not in that social group at school. Teens tend to be quite cliquey, having best friends and tight social organisations.
Creativity Benefits
Traveling allows everyone to experience anxiety, anticipation and challenge, all of which stimulate humans to tell stories. Artistic students will benefit from expressing their interest in the educational tours through artwork; creative writing; verbal storytelling; drama and even joke telling!
Robbed of television, radio, internet and computer games – at least, when NOT given ‘free time’ – teens will have to engage with their world and explore new pleasures. Hopefully they will be drawn away from electronic entertainment that is so much a solo pursuit, and seek social interaction instead.
Sports and the Outdoors
Education tours normally have a ‘sports’ component, whether it be trekking, sight-seeing, games, adventure playgrounds, water sports or some other competitive sporting activity. Many of today’s teens recognise the need for exercise and are concerned about their weight. Being away from their usual comfort zone and routines, they may discover an exercise they had not tried before.
This sets up good habits for life. It teaches the students that exercise and activity-based recreation is unlimited and has many variations. Everyone can find something enjoyable to do.
Relationships with Teachers and Adults
Teens may not have vast experience with adult-teen relationships and they might ‘press some buttons’ when you take them away from home. Some have little freedom and will test the boundaries once they are away from home. Others will take more responsibility and show admirable leadership qualities.
Most significantly, they will see their teachers in a different light. Teachers I’ve gone away with on educational tours all report new ways they’ve seen the students grow and benefit. There is always a lot of laughs and good times. From the students’ perspective, they see a more casual ‘you’ as you are removed from the environment of classroom teaching. They will observe as much about you as you do about them.
Educational tours introduce them to other adults who are in charge of the tours and activities. This gives them a very important insight into how to create a good impression out there in the wider world.
For teenagers and teachers, educational tours are hugely beneficial, great fun and a chance to travel and gain wider experience of the world out there.
Multiculturalism Explored
We live in a global world, and many teens are only exposed to their own class or race in their home life. Educational tours abroad give them exposure to other students from different backgrounds, and many tours explore culture, race and interpersonal skills as part of the tour structure.
Multiculturalism is explored as a concept if the tour takes the group overseas, or to another site of significant national or cultural interest. Imagine how much students could learn from a tour around the Smithsonian for example. The group of traveling teens and teachers bond as they share tips on how to cope in a strange environment and how to get along with ‘difference’.
Eliza Doole draws her travel tips from her own personal experiences as a high school teacher.
