@prefix vivo: . @prefix edm: . @prefix ns0: . @prefix dcterms: . @prefix skos: . vivo:departmentOrSchool "Education, Faculty of"@en, "Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of"@en ; edm:dataProvider "DSpace"@en ; ns0:degreeCampus "UBCV"@en ; dcterms:creator "Mergens, David"@en ; dcterms:issued "2017-04-13T19:03:59Z"@en, "2017"@en ; vivo:relatedDegree "Master of Arts - MA"@en ; ns0:degreeGrantor "University of British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:description "This study investigates the impact and value that high school social studies students and teachers see in educational travel. Many students and teachers participate in school-based trips, but little research has been done that investigates the deeper implications of educational travel, as to identify and maximize the positive benefits of such experiences. For the purposes of this project, educational travel is defined as school-based educational trips that last longer than a day, and involve elements that include guided tours, hands-on learning, interactive tasks, and community service. Further, I have divided educational travel into three categories that pertain to a trip’s design and focus: 1) tour-guided; 2) task-specific; and 3) socially immersive. Participants in this study included six of my former students and three of my former teaching colleagues. All participants had experiences with educational travel prior to this study. Data were collected through a series of conversational interviews, which I transcribed and analyzed. This allowed me to analyze participant responses and form organizing concepts, to which I plotted emergent categories. My findings showed that students and teachers see tremendous value in educational travel with respect to developing confidence, building historical and global mindedness, and fostering empathy and self-awareness. My findings also showed how educational travel experiences can influence the choices students make later in life regarding post-secondary education, careers, and philanthropy. This study contributes to social studies education scholarship in that it shines light on the impact educational travel has on high school students and offers insight into maximizing the positive benefits associated with such experiences. Nevertheless, this study is small-scale, and further research is needed to address some limitations, which include the implications of educational travel for students from different socio-economic contexts, as well as attaining a deeper understanding of the long-term benefits of educational travel."@en ; edm:aggregatedCHO "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/61221?expand=metadata"@en ; skos:note """THE IMPACT OF EDUCATIONAL TRAVEL ON HIGH SCHOOL SOCIAL STUDIES STUDENTS by David Mergens B.A., The University of Hawaii at Mānoa, 2007 B.Ed., The University of British Columbia, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Curriculum and Pedagogy) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2017 © David Mergens, 2017 ii Abstract This study investigates the impact and value that high school social studies students and teachers see in educational travel. Many students and teachers participate in school-based trips, but little research has been done that investigates the deeper implications of educational travel, as to identify and maximize the positive benefits of such experiences. For the purposes of this project, educational travel is defined as school-based educational trips that last longer than a day, and involve elements that include guided tours, hands-on learning, interactive tasks, and community service. Further, I have divided educational travel into three categories that pertain to a trip’s design and focus: 1) tour-guided; 2) task-specific; and 3) socially immersive. Participants in this study included six of my former students and three of my former teaching colleagues. All participants had experiences with educational travel prior to this study. Data were collected through a series of conversational interviews, which I transcribed and analyzed. This allowed me to analyze participant responses and form organizing concepts, to which I plotted emergent categories. My findings showed that students and teachers see tremendous value in educational travel with respect to developing confidence, building historical and global mindedness, and fostering empathy and self-awareness. My findings also showed how educational travel experiences can influence the choices students make later in life regarding post-secondary education, careers, and philanthropy. This study contributes to social studies education scholarship in that it shines light on the impact educational travel has on high school students and offers insight into maximizing the positive benefits associated with such experiences. Nevertheless, this study is small-scale, and further research is needed to address some limitations, which include the implications of educational travel for students from different socio-economic iii contexts, as well as attaining a deeper understanding of the long-term benefits of educational travel. iv Preface This thesis is original, unpublished and independent work of the author, David Mergens. The research process described in Chapters 3 and 4 was approved by UBC Research Ethics Board (certificate # H16-01667). v Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................... ii Preface ....................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ......................................................................................... v List of Tables ............................................................................................ viii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... ix Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................. 1 1.1 Educational Travel ....................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Guiding Themes .......................................................................................................... 2 1.2.1 Social Studies Education Pedagogies .................................................................................3 1.2.2 Quality and Design of Educational Travel ........................................................................7 1.2.3 Educational Travel and Possibilities for Transformative Learning ....................................7 1.3 Research Questions ..................................................................................................... 9 1.4 My Thoughts on Different Types of Educational Travel .......................................... 11 1.4.1 Tour-Guided Travel .........................................................................................................13 1.4.2 Task-Specific Travel .........................................................................................................13 1.4.3 Socially Immersive Travel ................................................................................................14 1.5 Reflections .................................................................................................................. 14 1.6 In Summary ............................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 2: Literature Review ....................................................................... 21 2.1 Global Consciousness Revisited ................................................................................. 21 2.2 Literature Pertaining to Global Awareness and Perspective ...................................... 24 2.3 Literature Pertaining to Design and Quality of Field Trips ...................................... 28 2.4 Literature Pertaining to Transformative Learning through Service ......................... 31 vi 2.5 Other Relevant Literature ......................................................................................... 35 2.6 In Summary ............................................................................................................... 38 Chapter 3: Methodology .............................................................................. 40 3.1 Selection Criteria and Participants ............................................................................ 40 3.2 Teacher Participants (3) ............................................................................................. 41 3.3 Student Participants (6) .............................................................................................. 43 3.3.1 Mike and Megan – Tour-guided Educational Travel ......................................................43 3.3.2 Eli and Ari – Task-specific Educational Travel ................................................................44 3.3.3 Zara and Ben – Socially Immersive Educational Travel .................................................45 3.4 Data Collection and Analysis ..................................................................................... 46 3.5 Limitations ................................................................................................................. 48 Chapter 4: Findings .................................................................................... 50 4.1 Tour-guided Travel ................................................................................................... 51 4.2 Task-specific Travel ................................................................................................... 56 4.3 Socially Immersive Travel ......................................................................................... 61 4.4 Teacher Participants .................................................................................................. 67 4.5 In Summary ............................................................................................................... 74 Chapter 5: Discussion ................................................................................. 78 5.1 Discussion: Tour-guided Travel ................................................................................ 78 5.2 Discussion: Task-specific Travel ................................................................................ 81 5.3 Discussion: Socially Immersive Educational Travel .................................................. 83 Chapter 6: Conclusion ................................................................................. 86 6.1 Influences on My Professional Practice ..................................................................... 89 6.2 Implications and Limitations Revisited ..................................................................... 90 vii References ................................................................................................. 93 Appendices ................................................................................................ 95 Appendix A: Student Participants ............................................................................................ 95 A1: Questions for all Student Participants ..........................................................................................95 A2: Tour-guided Educational Travel ..................................................................................................96 A3: Task-specific educational travel ....................................................................................................97 A4: Socially Immersive Educational Travel ........................................................................................97 Appendix B: Teacher Participants ............................................................................................ 99 viii List of Tables Table 4.1: Tour-guided Associated Categories ................................................ 51 Table 4.2 : Task-specific Associated Categories .............................................. 57 Table 4.3: Socially Immersive Associated Categories ...................................... 61 Table 4.4: Associated Categories Pertaining to Teacher Participants ................. 68 Table 4.5: A Summation of Associated Categories ........................................... 76 ix Acknowledgements To many of the teachers I’ve worked with and from whom I learn so much: I offer my gratitude for the passion, wit and joyful enthusiasm you bring to our profession. To Dr. Penney Clark and Dr. Peter Seixas: thank you for challenging me to think about my work critically and creatively. You have encouraged me to enrich my understanding of Social Studies education, as to inform my day to day teaching practice. To my parents: your unconditional love and support have made so many things possible for me. Thank you for being so accepting and encouraging. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction This project stemmed from my interest in developing my understanding of the value teachers and students see in educational travel. Throughout this thesis, I use the term educational travel to refer to field trips that involve travelling with students for specific educational activities and focuses. This study focused on trips that last longer than a day. Several of these trips in which I have taken part have influenced my professional practice as a social studies teacher in meaningful ways. My initial interest in investigating the impacts of educational travel is rooted in the importance that many teachers, including myself, place on helping students develop global awareness, historical thinking abilities, social empathy, and confidence; all of which are components of an education focused on democratic citizenship. Through educational travel, many teachers work to create meaningful opportunities for students, and I have addressed questions that pertain to the value attributed to educational travel by teachers and students. 1.1 Educational Travel Educational travel should involve a responsibility on the part of teachers and students to be critical and socially aware, which perhaps highlights a difference between how students travel with their families during holiday seasons. Setting apart educational travel from recreational and vacation travel is not meant to imply that its positive impacts cannot be realized outside of a formal educational context, but the notion of responsibility being foundational to educational travel experiences is important. This study centered on three trips I was a part of along with a number of high school students. I will explain the differences between these trips in more detail later in this chapter, but they were similar in the sense that they were educational in nature, as all were sanctioned by the high school where I worked at the time. Each trip aligned with the British Columbia Ministry of 2 Education mandated social studies curricular objectives pertaining to global and historical awareness. Two of the three trips also had service-learning elements, which is a teaching strategy that integrates instructional methods with community service activities to enrich students’ learning experiences. Part of the teacher’s role in educational travel has to do with helping students become travelers who possess self-awareness and respect for their surroundings. This will help students become more mindful as they travel in their personal lives. Week (2012) discusses a division between contemporary mentalities of the tourist and the traveler, where travelers prefer to see themselves apart from tourists because of the impact that mass tourism has on local economies, societies, and environments. Tourists in this sense are viewed as complicit in profit-driven travel and hospitality industries and are also seen by travelers as naïve and ignorant consumers of experiences that lack authenticity because they only skim the surface of a destination’s culture. Travelers prefer to venture off the beaten-path and see themselves as frugal and world-savvy, and to immerse themselves in ‘authentic’ foreign surroundings while having little to no impact on local communities. Week contends that travelers fail to remove themselves from problems associated with mass tourism, and in fact are also complicit in similar patterns of consumption and offenses to local communities. Week’s observations are helpful when considering educational travel opportunities for high school students, as teachers should view educational travel as in part an opportunity to help students learn how their experiences abroad impact local environments in a variety of ways. 1.2 Guiding Themes The positive educational and social impacts of educational travel can be understood from a variety of vantage points relevant to this study. These include: a) social studies education 3 pedagogies concerned with helping students develop into contributing citizens who are empathetic, think critically, and have global awareness and historical thinking abilities; b) the importance of the quality and design of educational travel, field-trips in general and service-learning programs; and c) the theory of transformative learning, which often coincides with service-learning programs. 1.2.1 Social Studies Education Pedagogies Social studies education plays a vital role helping people develop into contributing citizens who are knowledgeable and possess both global awareness and historical thinking abilities. Attainment of a level of global consciousness is a stated goal in social studies curriculum, and can be realized through tasks concerned with developing global perspective and awareness. Global consciousness refers to an ability and inclination to place one’s self, other people, and places within the context of the broader world. This means understanding the complexity and interrelatedness of global processes, and that we are actors positioned along a continuum of contemporary space (Boix-Mansilla, 2007). Global consciousness informs a teaching practice concerned with students developing the skills and sensibilities needed to deal with the contemporary world, and educational travel is an obvious space in which educators can help students develop global awareness and perspective. Where global consciousness concerns contemporary geographic space and the nature of the human interactions in a globalized context, historical consciousness provides an orienting function in time, and similarly informs teaching practices concerned with developing historical thinking abilities in students. People concerned with shaping history education to account for the complexity of dealing with the past, a group that includes historians, education scholars, and teachers, incorporate historical consciousness when synthesizing activities aimed at fostering 4 historical thinking abilities in students. The premise of historical consciousness is that we as beings are situated in the ever-fleeting present, have no access to the temporal past, yet our understandings of the past, which we attain through national narratives, academic processes, and degrees of memory, informs our decisions towards the future. Historical consciousness speaks to an awareness on this level, and provides an epistemological context to help us historicize narratives, objects, and our own lives. While we envision how locked-in we truly are, thinking historically can help us avoid looking at the past through the lens of our present-day sensibilities and convictions; Seixas (2012) describes this challenging endeavour, in that “we are immersed in change, and it is a difficult challenge to transcend our own changeable historical situation, to interpret texts from a different era, and to see things from outside the flux of which we are nevertheless aware” (p. 4). As with global consciousness, historical consciousness can be applied to maximizing the impacts of educational travel, for instance when students visit monuments and are exposed to national historical narratives of visited locations. Both global and historical consciousness are important frames of critical thinking and conceptualizing for social studies education, and ought to be considered during educational travel endeavours. Educational travel is not by any means mandated by British Columbia’s social studies curriculum guidelines, but the positive educational and personal impacts it can have on students and teachers are apparent and deserve focus. This is why I examined specific student experiences from several educational trips; to help shine light on the merits of educational travel as well as to provide insight towards how to maximize the quality of educational travel. A primary goal of this study is to help other social studies educators with their educational travel endeavours. Since, based on my review of the recent relevant literature, the body of academic literature concerned with the impacts of educational travel at the high-school level is relatively 5 thin, this study is a useful contribution to social studies education. The literature I examined in the following chapter is representative of the fact that the body of research concerned with educational travel at the high school level is smaller than that which concerns educational travel for graduate students, as many of the studies I looked at involved doctoral and masters students. The role of Social Studies educators is tied to citizenship development. Notions of what constitutes an informed citizen are implied though curricular mandates, and the choices teachers make are informed by implicit views pertaining to the role social studies education plays in shaping students. While teachers navigate curricula and intended learning outcomes, they do so with varying degrees of professional autonomy. In Canada, this autonomy is strong and allows teachers flexibility in what they teach (e.g. historical content, current events, and civics) and how they teach (e.g. a thematic approach vs. a chronological approach, or an inquiry-based learning philosophy as opposed to a more prescribed content delivery style). Ultimately, the actions taken by social studies teachers reflect attitudes towards what constitutes ideal citizenship, and are also informed by ideas about the most effective ways to foster the development of citizenship. Many social studies teachers and education scholars believe that teachers ought to be clear in their educational aims, and thus be mindful of the decisions they make as they teach. Osborne (2016) discusses how teachers, possessing different teaching approaches, can attain similar results in respect to developing a sense of democratic citizenship in students. In this light, effective teaching practices, regardless of style, are informed by well-thought out philosophies of social studies education and citizenship. If teachers acknowledge their roles in fostering citizenship, they must “keep in mind a clear picture of what democratic citizenship entails and conduct our classes accordingly” (p. 13). Clark and Case (2016) state that if teachers are to “take seriously [their] role as educators 6 charged with making complex judgments about our students’ well-being, then we must articulate with some clarity our ultimate educational aims” (p. 25). Clark and Case discuss how social studies teachers can align their professional motives with what they frame as four defining purposes of social studies education. Two of these purposes concern the relationship between the student and society; a social initiation approach involves preparing students to participate in society without instilling motives to change it, whereas a social reform approach is conversely aimed at transforming society. Of course, these two purposes represent ends of a spectrum, and teachers often operate fluidly along its axis. The other two purposes are likewise situated on opposite ends of a spectrum, but are focused on individual development rather than the relationship between an individual and society. The personal development purpose speaks to fostering a student’s abilities and interests, whereas the intellectual development purpose concerns a student’s intellectual ability, including developing specific skills and processes as well as knowledge acquisition. In the context of social studies education and citizenship, Osborne (2016) and Clark and Case (2016) encourage teachers to be mindful of their choices, the intentionality behind their choices, and how societal forces inform one’s teaching practice. The principles of democratic citizenship can be justly applied to a teacher’s choice to incorporate educational travel into one’s practice, as educational travel opportunities resonate with the four purposes outlined by Clark and Case (2016), and likewise relate to what Osborne (2016) discusses about the effectiveness of teaching approaches informed by a well-thought out philosophy. Ultimately, citizenship is an important aspect of how social studies teachers view education’s purpose. My research elaborates on this notion while discussing impacts educational travel can have on global consciousness, historical thinking abilities, compassion, and social awareness, all of which many teachers 7 recognize as tenets of democratic citizenship. 1.2.2 Quality and Design of Educational Travel The quality of an educational travel experience relates to the level of the impacts on students. These impacts involve students acquiring more substantive knowledge about the world, and also point to growth in areas like confidence, interpersonal skills, and willingness to participate in community engagement at home. A trip’s ability to have an impact on students in any of these areas relates to its respective quality. Different types of educational trips are impactful in different ways and therefore have different levels of quality. The design of an educational trip pertains to length, destination, planning and logistics, on-site activities, stated educational objectives, and implementation. A trip’s design is a mediating factor to its overall quality. From my experience, teachers need to be acutely aware of a trip’s design to facilitate its quality, i.e. to ensure that students are given the most opportunity to be positively affected. 1.2.3 Educational Travel and Possibilities for Transformative Learning As present day social studies education processes aimed at citizenship imply the need for growth in critical thinking, and reflecting abilities, in some cases a profound transformation may occur in students. In order to maximize its positive impacts, educational travel needs to be approached with efforts to shape students’ worldviews, develop their understandings of global and historical perspectives, and foster inclinations towards compassion and community. This suggests that some students may have to go through a fundamental shift in thinking in order realize some of the aims of educational travel. Transformative learning is therefore an appealing component of some designs of educational travel. Much of the relevant literature connects transformative learning with 8 elements of service-learning, but as a pedagogical theory, transformative learning is primarily centered on higher learning and adult education. This is apparent with the work of Mezirow (1990) and Kiely (2004). Despite this, the basic principles of transformative learning are appropriate for high school students, particularly within the context of educational travel. Mezirow (1990) describes how difficult it is for learners to acquire a fundamental shift in thinking, as meaning schemes, defined as sets of habitual expectations that govern our anticipations and interpretations of unfolding events, are acquired and ingrained at a young age, as are meaning perspectives. Meaning perspectives take the notion of schemes further and refer to a structure of assumptions, which within new experiences unfold, allowing for an individual to reference past experiences to assimilate and transform new ones; in other words, a process of interpretation applies one’s habits and expectations to new events and experiences (p. 2). Basically, meaning schemes are the implicit rules for interpretation, whereas meaning perspectives relate to the application of these rules within an interpretation process. From this, transformative learning suggests an ability to govern an interpretation of a new experience differently, essentially because of the expansion of one’s schema. This transformation can be attained through critical reflection, which helps enable us to correct “distortions in our beliefs”; a process of reflection involves critiquing the presuppositions on which our beliefs have been built. Mezirow’s description of transformative learning emphasizes the importance of reflection: “By far the most significant learning experiences in adulthood involve critical self-reflection—reassessing the way we have posed problems and reassessing our own orientation to perceiving, knowing, believing, feeling, and acting” (p. 13). An idea that transformative learning can and should occur with high school students in everyday classroom environments may come across as somewhat lofty and perhaps even 9 unnecessary. Yet educational travel, particularly in conjunction with service-learning activities in local communities, can provide students with experiences that call for the type of critical reflection needed to spur a transformation in one’s thinking. That is, of course, if the goals of an educational trip include shaping students’ worldviews and global perspectives in meaningful ways. If anything, an emphasis on reflection as part of any educational travel experience can meaningfully influence a student’s thinking if not fundamentally change it, and that should be seen as a tangible goal for all types of educational travel experiences. 1.3 Research Questions To measure the value of educational travel and understand its impacts, I framed my research questions to guide my inquiry, and they informed the design of an interview that served as my research tool. Addressing the following questions yielded results that I analyzed in conjunction with my own reflections about my educational travel experiences. 1. Considering how travel involves time, money, and commitment, what are the initial reasons why students and teachers participate in educational trips? I anticipated that this question would have obvious answers, and my results confirmed what I predicted. Students generally enjoy activities that involve missing school days, and they also find the opportunity to travel with friends appealing. Students and teachers who participate in educational travel tend to be curious about the world and enjoy travelling in general. 2. What were some specific experiences during educational trips that were particularly significant to students and teachers? 10 My findings in this respect were varied and personal due to the locations in which participants visited and worked. From orphanages in rural Africa to national historic sites in Europe, the range of individual experiences offered a wealth of insight related to questions pertaining to the value of educational travel. 3. How have such experiences and impacts influenced students and teachers in their daily lives in respect to social awareness, daily behaviour and long-term goals? I was initially very interested in what my participants were going to say in response to this question, and my findings reflected extremely personal experiences participants had during various educational trips. Prior to completing this study, my only evidence was the casual conversations I had with my students in the months that followed an educational trip. As far as teachers are concerned, I had only discussed educational travel with colleagues from time to time; conversations that were also casual in nature. The topics of these conversations ranged from logistical planning to underlying reasons for why such endeavors are worth the effort. My study addressed these questions with an organized approach, providing me with deeper insight towards the impacts of educational travel. I formed conclusions based on my personal reflections on my experiences in conjunction with what my student and teacher participants provided during the interview sessions. I removed the passive form of have and had throughout Ultimately, my study clarifies and helps me explain the importance of educational travel, particularly with respect to students developing into thoughtful and informed citizens. The design and quality of educational travel are vital in this respect. The subjects of global 11 consciousness and transformative learning are also relevant to my research questions and underpinned my interview design. A review of relevant literature in the following chapter helps to establish what is known about outcomes of educational approaches and programs tailored to these aims. 1.4 My Thoughts on Different Types of Educational Travel I have taken high school students on educational trips to Great Britain, France, the United States, and South Africa. All these trips involved a great deal of detailed planning on my part, most of which was done outside my typical work hours; the amount of effort put into organizing educational travel exceeds the typical duties of a public-school teacher. Time-consuming tasks include collecting payments, organizing fundraisers, and keeping detailed records of students’ travel documents. I assume legal responsibility for students and a large portion of my time abroad is spent looking out for their safety and making sure things run smoothly. Field trips of any nature require educators to be aware of logistics, planning, and issues pertaining to health and safety, mainly so things run smoothly. Organization must be handled with care and efficiency, and only then are teachers able to provide and facilitate meaningful learning opportunities that allow students to engage with the world through concrete experiences. Minimal organization by the teacher can lead to micro-managing on the fly, stress, and missed opportunities. Considering the already busy schedules teachers have, the extra work and responsibility associated with educational travel deter many from organizing these types of travel opportunities. It is understandable why teachers often dedicate certain periods in their careers to educational travel. And while some teachers travel with students throughout their careers, this usually involves significant breaks between trips. A teacher’s ability and willingness to organize educational trips are also affected by inhibitors stemming from education paradigms. For 12 instance, educational mandates that emphasize performance standards have resulted in attitudes that stress the importance of every instructional minute in a calendar school year; educational trips can be seen as incursions on valuable class time and create stressful games of catch-up for students and teachers. Despite all of this, I find myself willing to put effort towards making such opportunities available to students. This is because I realize that once planning and logistics are handled, the rich opportunities for valuable educational experiences are worth the effort and can profoundly influence how students behave in the months and years following a trip. I see a long-term upside to educational travel, and this informed my questions pertaining to the association of educational travel with global awareness, historical consciousness, and empathy. As I discussed above, my inclinations towards educational travel prior to this study had been based solely on my own general reflection and casual conversations with students; my reflections at that point were somewhat superficial and at times extremely self-serving. For example, I highlighted my educational travel experiences quite colourfully during the job interview that resulted in my first continuing teaching contract. Also, during spirited discussions with friends over the merits of our different career choices, I have at times alluded to my experiences working with students in impoverished areas to fortify my somewhat self-satisfied justifications for why teachers are society’s unsung heroes. Clearly, my efforts with educational trips are difficult to criticize and easy to praise, and have benefitted me professionally and personally. Administrators seem to like me, and it would be unfashionable and politically incorrect for my friends to disparage my career choice. I have cited my experiences for social capital and professional advancement, and I know my high school students do the same thing in their worlds, albeit more unknowingly. Perhaps I harboured a blemish of personal guilt that 13 developed into a search for meaning, but it is in this context that I felt somewhat obligated to further investigate how the value ascribed to educational travel plays-out meaningfully in our lives through empathy, community mindedness, and personal growth. For this study, I wanted students whom I have travelled with to reflect and describe connections between their experiences and their current lives. I also wanted other teachers to share their thoughts on this subject. Through conducting a series of interviews, I acquired descriptive data that helped me shape and articulate my own reflections pertaining to the value of educational travel. My findings resonate with and inform my professional rationale and are useful to other educators and to social studies education as a whole. This study required me to consider the nature of the trips I have experienced. Generally, educational trips have interactive and hands-on elements but differ in scope, focus and length. 1.4.1 Tour-Guided Travel I describe one type of trip as tour-guided, where the itinerary and overall scheduling are controlled predominantly by a third party. When I took 19 students to Europe, I went through the agency EF Tours. EF organized our visits to historic sites and monuments and essentially guided our group for the duration of the trip. 1.4.2 Task-Specific Travel I term another type of educational trip task-specific, which involves travelling to a location where students participate in a specific activity, such as a conference. I recently travelled with students to San Diego to participate in an International Model UN Summit focused on conflict resolution. This trip was also documented with photographs. 14 1.4.3 Socially Immersive Travel One trip I was a part of involved immersing students in an environment where they worked with members of a local South African population on specific community needs for a significant length of time. I have chosen the term socially immersive to refer to such field trips. Our team consisted of two teachers, six high school students, two university undergraduate students, two firefighters, and a police officer. We went on site visits, did infrastructure work, and participated in community outreach in several impoverished areas. This socially immersive trip was extensively documented with photographs, video, and blog entries. 1.5 Reflections It is fair to say that all three types of educational trips I described have both merits and problems. It has been a little over a year since the tour-guided and task-specific trips, and the socially immersive trip occurred approximately ten months ago. I was able to reflect on my experiences in ways that helped me as I moved forward with this study. Also, I have no regrets about my experiences as a whole, yet there are definitely aspects I would change pertaining to the quality and design of each trip. Prior to this study, I could say with a fair amount of conviction that I would probably never go on a tour-guided trip again, at least not without several major design changes. For example, out of the 19 students who participated in the UK/France trip, I only personally taught two of them in my social studies classes. The rest were students whom I did not know as well. Though I conversed closely with several of the students throughout the trip, I was unable to make certain connections to what I cover in class with my students back at home. This was particularly frustrating at site visits like Normandy in France, where we visited Juno Beach along with the Canadian and American War Memorial Cemeteries. Locations such as these are 15 deemed important and historically significant, and I felt that on this trip I was afforded opportunities to facilitate how the students took in their experiences. Having said that, our guide was very knowledgeable and developed a good relationship with our group. He did a good job providing students with substantive knowledge about locations we visited throughout the tour. Also, the students were mature and respectful and seemed to get a great deal from the trip. I do not think I would have wanted to be a guide for the entire trip, nor do I think I was qualified to replace our guide, but there were moments where I feel I could have extended my classroom teaching practice into the bigger world as we visited certain historic sites. My initial suspicions were students viewed their experiences with a tour guided trip as largely positive but probably more in regard to developing positive interpersonal relationships with other students through shared travel experiences, and the trip probably fueled inspiration for future travel plans amongst the students. I also predicted that much of the substantive knowledge peppered on the students throughout the trip had most likely flown from their memories. My study’s findings showed this to be the case. Also, because the trip mainly involved hopping on and off a tour bus, students were not able to benefit from any long-term immersion with place, leading to my conclusion that tour-guided trips offer very little in ways of transformative learning opportunities. This trip was a blitz of more than a dozen site-visits across two countries in a ten-day span, and at times I felt like I was trapped inside of a giant Lonely Planet book that a group of high school students were flipping through on spring break. Yet in the end, the positives of such a trip became evident to me; students were able to travel with friends, see new places that were familiar through media and books, and generally experience the larger world to certain degree. We were clearly tourists rather than travelers, but I felt the trip as a whole was largely beneficial for the students. If I were to be a part of future educational travel 16 with a tour guided structure, I would ensure a majority of the participants were actually my students so I could make substantial connections to our classroom topics, and I would do more prior planning to ensure that students were given more time at sites. Task-specific trips are effective in that they are focused and can be highly educational. The two students I travelled with to San Diego, California were part of our school’s Model UN and Interact Club, and the focus of our trip was to participate in a student-led Model UN that took place at San Diego State University. It was a great experience for the kids, as they mingled and hammered out resolutions to world crises in a very organized and detail-oriented UN General Assembly session over two days. The students also took in speeches by social justice lawyers, former American UN ambassadors, and host Rotarians from a local San Diego Rotary chapter (Rotary sponsors high school Interact Clubs). All things considered, the location of this task-specific trip was in some ways incidental. Yet with an extra day to spare, I took my students to the San Diego Natural History Museum as well as the San Diego Pier. The Model UN conference was serious in tone and mentally exhausting for the three of us, but that extra day allowed us to absorb a bit of Southern California, and the students were exposed to some local history, current issues, and recreational fun. The students developed an awareness of California culture, including the prevalence of Hispanic culture, political and social issues pertaining to the proximity to Mexico, and they also developed an awareness of a very prominent public concern regarding local water supply. Overall, from my perspective, it was a great trip, well-balanced, and I think extremely impactful for the two students. The socially immersive trip to South Africa lasted for almost a month during summer. The majority of the trip was spent in a community called Refilwe, situated near a slum 17 community called Joe Slovo (named after the anti-Apartheid political figure) in the Lanseria area, which is about an hour away from Johannesburg. Like the model UN trip, this trip was an Interact Club initiative, which means it was sponsored to some degree by Rotary International. I travelled with eight students whom I knew well from being their Interact Club teacher-sponsor, and seven of the students had been my students at least one time in the years leading up to the trip. Refilwe is a community centered around a preschool, health-clinic, orphanage, and community center, and works to serve the nearby slum communities, particularly Joe Slovo. Yet Refilwe, supported largely by NGOs and Rotary, can only serve a small fraction of the neighbouring communities’ children. The children who do attend the preschool are given a safe place to go to school and play and are given nutritious meals throughout the day. There is also an after-school program that serves the local high school and grade school, and students go there to receive help with homework and to participate in recreational activities like soccer and arts. Refilwe’s orphanage deals with potential adoptive parents in Europe and cares for infants ranging as young as a few weeks to several years. The community has dedicated staff and volunteers and is largely successful for what it offers. However, Refilwe is somewhat of an aberration when looking at the scope of poverty, unemployment, and the numerous other deeply entrenched societal issues. Refilwe is where the majority of our social immersion experiences took place, but we did have the opportunity to venture into neighbouring communities with health workers. My students were tasked with helping maintain and develop Refilwe’s infrastructure, as well as with helping local children in the afterschool programs. I worked with my students on our various projects, and we were accompanied on this trip by firefighters and a police officer. On several 18 occasions, members of a local South African Rotary chapter took us sightseeing to various places—kind of a tour guided trip within our social immersion experience—and hosted us at a variety of functions related to their local Rotary efforts. Ultimately, this was clearly a powerful trip for my students, and this was clear to me prior to conducting this study. It was powerful for me as well, particularly because in addition to bearing witness to some of the cruel realities of people living in deep poverty, I was able to observe how my students handled difficult situations. One of the primary reasons for me pursuing this project was to learn more about students’ personal experiences during this trip, partly to help me understand and rationalize my own interpretations of events. The positives of this educational travel opportunity dominated our group’s experience, but there were clearly negative aspects that I would seek to minimize and handle better with future trips. Once again, this points to the relationship between the design and quality of educational travel. This trip was clearly ripe with meaningful experiences and opportunities for transformative learning. Yet I think more effort on my part was needed in respect to prepping the students for certain encounters, and also with follow-up discussions to encourage critical reflection. For instance, the community of Refilwe embodies a spirit of community, intrinsic human value, and equality. In fact, their slogan reads “Refilwe: Life for All”. Given that Refilwe is largely a Rotary sponsored project, it makes sense to assume that Rotary embodies similar principles of equality and justice. And it does, and that is why I have enjoyed and valued being a part of Interact Clubs. Yet members of the local Rotary chapter, our tour guides on our off-days from Refliwe, at times abruptly contradicted this sentiment with their behaviour towards others. This Rotary chapter was largely made up of elderly white members, whereas the people on the ground at Refliwe and certainly the people it served were predominantly black. There 19 were instances where local Rotarians, typically the sponsors of specific outreach project we visited on top of Refilwe, would speak abusively to local community members and workers. I witnessed this on several occasions as did my students, and I could sense they felt a degree of hypocrisy permeating their overall experience. I have had time to reflect and now see this not as a necessary failure of the trip’s design, but more as providing me with insight as to how to approach similar issues that can arise from other travel experiences. The students were confused because some of these Rotarians at one time were decent and friendly, but were at other times racist and rude. I had a better ability to view these encounters as expressions of residual white supremacy that continues to linger in post-Mandela South Africa and surfaces in certain situations where there is a paternalistic power dynamic; be it class-based or an employer-employee relationship, this power structure is typically played out along racial lines. These Rotarians dedicate much of their time and energy to helping people as well as trying to overcome the effects of South Africa’s damaging racial history. Yet at times the vestiges of racism surface even in their own behaviour. This was startling for my students, who brought with them a democratic and Canadian inclination for seeing people, regardless of class and ethnicity, as inherently equal. Though Canada is far from perfect and owns its share of inequality and prejudices, South Africa’s past in this regard is much more visceral and the present consequences are more widely apparent. The students interpreted such encounters in a way that produced feelings of discomfort, anger, and confusion. I was proud of my students for how they dealt with these encounters, but I feel that more sessions before such trip as well as more follow-up sessions would be of benefit, particularly regarding critical reflection. 20 1.6 In Summary The review of literature in the following chapter helps explain what is known about the impacts of service learning, transformative learning, and the overall value of field trips and study abroad programs. My study contributes to these fields, but with a direct focus on high school social studies education and educational travel. Chapter three explains my methodology, where I introduce my participants, who are identified with pseudonyms to protect identities. In this chapter I also discuss my research tool, an interview that is comprised of questions and incorporates relevant photographs and video footage from educational trips that the participants were a part of. Subsequent chapters (four through six) present my findings and contain a discussion of the qualitative data extracted from interviews with teachers and students. They shine light on the impact of educational travel as well as its value for social studies education. Also, my personal reflections on educational travel supplement the discussion of my findings. My concluding chapter ties together my findings and explains the implications for social studies education, as to share with teachers, school officials and educational scholars my study’s insights on the value of educational travel. In my conclusion, I also provide questions designed to address both the gaps in my findings and inquiries for further research. 21 Chapter 2: Literature Review I organized this review of the literature into several categories as the studies I examine are relevant to mine in a variety of ways. The first section of this review concerns studies that pertain directly to the term global consciousness, and I discuss this theory to elaborate on its importance to social studies education, and specifically to educational travel. The second section builds on the subject of global consciousness by looking at studies that do not use that term specifically, but are centered around themes of global perspective, awareness, and citizenship. The third section discusses literature on program design and quality, and though the studies I examine pertain to domestic field trips, their relevance to my focus on maximizing the impacts of educational travel is evident. The fourth section of this chapter examines literature pertaining to the transformative aspects of service learning, relating to my interest in the potential educational travel has to be transformative in respect to students’ experiences abroad. I conclude, from both the existing research literature and my research, that educational trips with an element of service learning offer the most in the way of possibility for transformative thinking and learning. A fifth section briefly examines other relevant literature and helps frame the body of scholarship that pertains to my research. 2.1 Global Consciousness Revisited As my study concerns the impact that educational travel has on students, I was interested in analyzing the development of global consciousness. The three categories I defined for educational travel, tour-guided, task-specific and social-immersion, differ in that that their respective focuses range from historical study and participation in student-centered events to community service and humanitarian work. Yet developing global consciousness, along with empathy and to some extent historical thinking abilities, are binding factors with all three 22 categories of educational travel. My study investigated how educational travel fosters an ability in students to contextualize their own behaviour and sensibilities in local and foreign contexts; this relates to research that discusses how global awareness plays a vital role with students becoming more civically engaged, developing interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, and in how they are able to objectively value and appreciate their daily-lives after having learned more about how people live and behave in other areas of the world. Boix-Mansilla and Gardner (2007) describe the importance of developing global consciousness in students, an interest incited by their empirical study that involved Massachusetts high school teachers and their classes. The teachers taught in public urban and suburban schools, as well as one charter school. The authors make their intentions clear, stating that developing global awareness and perspectives is an important feature of preparing students for the rapidly changing world. Participants were selected through a criterion-based process in which teachers had to demonstrate a commitment to excellence in interdisciplinary teaching. The process involved questionnaires and interviews. The selected teacher participants worked with the authors and their research group for two years developing comprehensive experimental units on globalization, which the teachers incorporated into their daily practices. Examples of classroom tasks and activities were varied and tailored for specific disciplines, yet all were underpinned by a focus on globalization. In the humanities, tasks included examining historical patterns of human migration in conjunction with present day patterns of immigration and the forming of cultural identities. Science classes looked beyond understanding the reasons behind climate change and explored both local and global approaches to dealing with the consequences of global warming. A photography class created visuals that represent contemporary globalization trends and identities, and a dance class examined transnational cultures while 23 learning contemporary forms of urban dance such as hip hop. The common ground throughout the different disciplines was that they included a focus on globalization. Resulting from effective methods of teaching, the authors observed that teachers were able to get their students to engage with subject matter in ways that allowed for the development of global self-awareness, as students perspectives were sharpened to the changing reality of the contemporary world. Also, students demonstrated increased sensitivity to ways in which global economies are present locally (p. 55). The authors described these observations as the results of teachers’ aspirations to nurture students’ global consciousness. In this vein, teaching informed by global consciousness has students work through various analytic processes that move beyond the acquisition of surface knowledge. Teachers act as “brokers between children and their rapidly changing environment—not mere conveyers of certified information” (p. 62). The authors were encouraged by their findings, and in post-unit discussions with teachers they collaboratively framed three different orientations of global consciousness: global sensitivity, which describes an awareness of local activities as expressions of a wider global developments; global understanding, which refers to the ability to think critically about circumstances and developments around the world; and global self, which involves contextualizing and historicizing one’s own sense of identity, cultural belonging and personal history, to attain a “sense of planetary belonging and membership in humanity that guides our actions and prompts our civic communities” (p. 59). The authors state the need for further research to expand on the implications for global consciousness as a vital cognitive structure for education, and suggest that a psychological examination of global consciousness may help differentiate and make sense of different types of global consciousness formed in different cultural and global contexts. The authors recognize that 24 their conclusions pertaining to global consciousness functioning as a goal for education is culturally positioned. This study is not only relevant to mine, but also provides a useful frame of reference for educational travel concerned with developing global perspective and awareness in students. This applies to tour-guided, task-specific, and socially immersive types of travel, in that teachers can employ strategies and learning activities that encourage students to analyze their own experiences, sensibilities and judgments. In this sense, the goal of attaining global consciousness with educational travel speaks to both the design and quality of trips, as well as to notions of transformative learning. 2.2 Literature Pertaining to Global Awareness and Perspective As stated earlier, the following studies do not explicitly use the term global consciousness. Though Boix-Mansilla’s and Gardner’s (2007) study was aimed at students learning about globalization, their conclusion led to a formulation of global consciousness as a theoretical framework as well as a goal for education. The literature in this section concerns global perspectives and citizenship, and the methods employed by the researchers, notwithstanding their intentions and conclusions, resonate with a tacit goal of developing global consciousness. In “Developing Global Perspectives in Short-term Study Abroad: High Impact Learning through Curriculum, Co-curriculum and Community,” Ferrari and Fine (2015) discuss high-impact learning experiences for students. They conclude that short-term study abroad programs are as effective and impactful as long-term programs. Further, short-term study abroad programs are beneficial to students and educational leaders alike. The authors claim that their study contributes to a field that is largely unexplored. They cite literature that discusses the value of study-abroad experiences for students, and emphasize that experiential learning programs that 25 bring together students and communities yield greater learning and impact than classes without an experiential learning component. This is because of how experiential learning is centered around engagement and immersion in foreign environments, where hands-on work with community members and reflection on personal experiences is integral. For educational leaders, whom the authors describe as teachers, administrators and academics, experiential learning and study-abroad programs shape global perspectives and “encourage a self-authored worldview that in turn impacts the way they lead schools” (p. 3). Ferrari and Fine (2015) employ a framework called the Global Perspectives Inventory, which was designed to comprehensively measure a respondent’s global perspective in respect to categories that make up the GPI Scale. The scale includes cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal categories. Their participants were forty American graduate students enrolled in a course entitled “Instructional Leadership: Cultural Context for Informed Decision Making,” and the study-abroad site was Rome, Italy. The general aim was to discover cultural components of Western civilization to help interpret issues in contemporary educational controversies. The program was designed to target the GPI Scale categories through course activities, classroom lessons and on-site experiences; the authors divided students’ program experiences into three broad categories that they termed curricular, which basically involved classroom lessons and site-visits in Rome; co-curricular, defined by the experiences that students recorded in journals; and -community, which refers to the aspect of the program that had the students living and learning together, as well as collaborating with other education students and professionals. Ferrari and Fine’s (2015) data collection was mixed-method, in that they used pre-tests, post-tests, and qualitative follow-up surveys. They state their findings may have been influenced by the fact that many of their participants potentially harboured social justice dispositions prior 26 to their experiences and may have influenced results, but overall their study provides insight into the positive impacts that short-term study-abroad programs can have on students and teachers. The impacts include increased social awareness and the ability to recognize multiple perspectives. Ultimately, the study illuminates how developing global perspectives is positive for students and educators, particularly for becoming agents of social change (p. 15). Ferrari and Fine’s (2015) study is very relevant to mine in intentions, design and questions pertaining to the impact of educational travel. It is also similar in that it contributes to a field that is somewhat unexplored, although their study focused on masters and doctoral students and my study looked at high school students. Yet the insights and conclusions they share resonate with what my study revealed. I draw a direct parallel with my study in how the authors describe their study-abroad program as cultural-immersion, which they define as “a series of experiences in another country that allow students to examine societal issues and engage in critical reflection” (pg. 3). This is very similar to my definition of educational travel as social immersive. Other relevant aspects of their study include a focus on short-term trips, as well as how the pre-disposition of students may influence findings. My findings indicated that students who experienced educational travel, particularly task specific and socially immersive trips, typically harbour inclinations towards social justice, community engagement, and global consciousness. Wilson (1993) discusses why it is important for education students to gain a global perspective. She claims that teachers are better equipped to help students develop global perspectives and consciousness if they see themselves as global citizens. Her study describes global perspectives as comprised of substantive and perceptual knowledge, both of which can be attained through cross-cultural experiences. In this sense, substantive knowledge involves basic information about places and cultures, and perceptual knowledge ranges from being able to 27 recognize different worldviews and cultural norms to the ability to exercise empathy and adjust attitudes. Also, Wilson states that international experiences lead to personal growth and interpersonal connections. Wilson analyzed reflective papers written by American education students who were part of an immersive ESL conversation program with international English language students. She concluded that such cross-cultural exchanges are of value for teachers. Though Wilson’s (1993) study is not focused on educational travel, it does emphasize the importance of global perspective development through international experiences. The conversation program Wilson analyzed was fruitful in this respect, as partners engaged in lengthy conversations, exchanged ideas and worldviews, and spent a significant amount of time together. These types of cross-cultural exchanges are more likely to occur on task-specific and socially-immersive travel, and my research involved examining similar experiences of students who had opportunities to interact with individuals on their trips. In another relevant American study, Myers (2006) stresses the importance of global perspectives in social studies education. He states that global citizenship education can be an ideal curricular frame for orienting social studies education, particularly because it accounts for the evolving nature of national citizenship in the context of globalization (p. 371). Myers states that global citizenship in American social studies education is nothing new, but has historically fallen short of helping students break free of mindsets possessing notions of cultural superiority, as citizenship education can often re-enforce feelings of patriotism and nationalism. In this regard, it can be difficult for teachers to allow critical discussions pertaining to American government policy, and they are alternately accused of ethnocentrism when they avoid critical and honest examinations of global issues. 28 Myers concludes that the US education system has yet to overcome some of the themes mentioned above, and fails to address a “political and cultural stigma of globalism as anti-American” (p. 389). He proposes a re-envisioning of global citizenship education to create better engagement with the world, and suggests three strands of focus to enhance global citizenship education: international business training, which is important because it involves preparing students to be able to competently become involved in the global economy; international studies, which should attempted to break free of ethnocentric approaches while honestly appraising the United States’ role and interests in the global scope; and a world systems approach that includes elements of international social justice, peace studies and conflict resolution. Myers employed an interpretivist case study approach, examining teachers’ and students’ experiences with global citizenship education. He worked to reveal his participants’ views of reality by gathering detailed descriptions of their beliefs about the curricular framework in which they operated. My research utilized a somewhat interpretivist approach, as I attempted to understand students’ and teachers’ perspectives in drawing conclusions as to whether global consciousness can be attained through educational travel. Also, Myers’ discussion about how national education systems have the potential to cultivate patriotism and complicity in ethnocentrism is relevant to my work, because my study considers how we import and negotiate our personal notions and expectations regarding equality and justice to the places we travel. Relevant to Myers’ work, I gained insight towards how educators can make developing such awareness a tangible goal of educational travel. 2.3 Literature Pertaining to Design and Quality of Field Trips It makes sense to discuss educational travel in the same vein as field trips, which are typically one-day excursions to local museums, historic sites, monuments, and parks/nature sites. Much 29 of the literature that discusses the educational impact and benefits of field trips correlates with similar discussions on the impacts of educational travel. One of the clearest parallels has to do with the design and quality of educational travel and field trips. Simply stated, field trips and educational travel are more impactful if they are designed and organized well. Ferrari and Fine (2015) are very clear about how the design of their study-abroad program as culturally immersive offered a multitude of meaningful learning experiences, which potentially transform into profound long-term impacts. Similar emphasis on the importance of program design and quality can be found in literature pertaining to field trips. For instance, Behrendt and Franklin (2014) describe how field trips need to be reinforced with preparation and de-briefing in order to realize educational benefits that include personal development, increased interest in school subjects, and valuable opportunities for firsthand experiences. I found preparing for the task-specific trip that I was a part of extremely important and beneficial; helping the students draft Model UN resolutions as well as reflecting on the experience when we were back home provided a structure that in my perspective made the trip more meaningful and relevant. I feel that this level of reinforcement could have similarly enhanced the tour-guided and socially immersive experiences. Similarly, Dewitt, and Storksdieck (2008) stress the importance of field trip design in regard to maximizing cognitive and affective learning in students. They cite several factors including “the structure of the field trip itself, setting novelty, prior knowledge of students the social context of the visit, teacher agendas and actions on the field trips, and the presence or absence and quality of preparation and follow-up experiences” (p. 3). These are elements of design that are pertinent to the quality of educational travel. In another relevant discussion, Anderson, Kisiel and Storksdieck (2006) compared three separate studies to determine the common ground in teacher perspectives towards the value of 30 fieldtrips. The studies took place in the US, Canada, and Germany. The authors found program design was key, as many teachers found field trips can better reach their educational potential when there are pre-trip and post-trip activities. This places responsibility on teachers to prepare students for what to expect on site visits, partly so students’ experiences align with curricular goals but also, that valuable learning opportunities, be they formal or informal, are maximized during field trips. The authors found that a majority of teacher participants (60%) claimed that venues have some degree of responsibility for planning field trip experiences, and overall one-third of teachers believed that the onus is primarily on the venues. These perspectives make logical sense when considering sites such as museums and galleries employ curators and guides, but they also speak to the notion of program design and quality. In addition to pre-trip and post-trip activities, an important component of good field trip design involves how well educators research potential sites. The same can be said for educational travel, as in my view there ought to be a shared burden of responsibility between a trip organizer, who is typically a teacher, and site representatives. In this light, my students’ tour-guided experience may have been more meaningful and impactful had I discussed site-visits and topic coverage with both the students and our tour-guide prior to the trip, and follow-up sessions would have also been beneficial. This points to a responsibility that extends beyond logistics and organization, typically where a great deal of teacher energy is focused when it comes to field trips and travel, and into areas of content focus, curriculum alignment, and social values. As the balance of this shared responsibility between teacher and site-representatives varies depending on the field trip, it likewise shifts for tour-guided, task-specific, and social-immersive trips due to differences in design. 31 2.4 Literature Pertaining to Transformative Learning through Service In an American study extremely relevant to mine entitled, “A Chameleon with a Complex: Searching for International Service Learning,” Kiely (2004) investigates whether participants in a service-learning program underwent perspective change a result of their experiences. To explain the process of perspective change, Kiely liberally cites Mezirow (1990) and his theory of transformative learning. Kiely recognizes the difficulties in changing one’s meaning schemes, stating that for someone to attain an ability to interpret an experience apart from ingrained schema, a new reflective skill set and cognitive awareness is needed. This is particularly relevant to international contexts where learners must negotiate their worldviews as new experiences unfold, as “transformation of ‘false’ sociolinguistic assumptions results in developing critical consciousness regarding how oppressive ideologies, relationships, norms, and rituals representing dominant interests are reproduced, legitimated, and enforced through culture, the media, and other social institutions” (p. 7). According to Kiely, an ultimate aim of service-learning is for learners to develop “more valid meaning perspectives,” i.e. higher-order interpretation ability, in order to better guide actions throughout new experience. Kiely (2004) is interested in the long-term impact of service-learning on undergraduate students’ perspectives. His students were part of a service-learning program that took place in Nicaragua, which he facilitated for ten years. As he discusses relevant literature, Kiely situates himself as a veteran service-learning educator and candidly admits his own complicity in perpetuating the overwhelmingly positive claims pertaining to the transformative power of service learning. He also states that such claims are largely unsubstantiated, where a large number studies consist mainly of mutually affirming anecdotal evidence. 32 In this regard, Kiely (2004) contributes to service-learning theory and practice, as his study was long term and followed up on participants’ actions years after their experiences. Kiely utilized a longitudinal case study design that followed a number of participants over a seven-year period. His data collection consisted of field observations, interviews, and document analysis, which included pre- and post-trip questionnaires, photographs, journals, interviews, reflection papers, and contracts for future action. This study shines light on the meanings students assigned to the long-term impact of their perspective transformations, as well as the future actions they sought to take because of how their experiences influenced them. My study is similar in this respect, albeit focused squarely on the long-term impacts of educational travel on high school students and how such impacts play out in their lives in the years following their experiences. In “The Impact of Participation in Service Learning on High School Students’ Civic Engagement,” Billig, Root and Jesse (2005) explore the effects of service-learning activities on students in regard to increased academic knowledge, civic knowledge, and engagement, and skills acquisition. The authors take into account the design and quality of service-learning programs as well as teacher characteristics and practices, which are considered moderating elements within the association between service-learning and student outcomes. The study discusses research that describes a growing problem of civic-disengagement among youth in the United Sates, a trend particularly evident in urban youth. Civic-engagement is tied to academic achievement levels, in that students with higher achievement tend to be more politically aware and become more engaged with civics and within local communities. In addition to findings that reveal detachment between youth and civic-engagement, the authors highlight a growing trend of service-learning opportunities offered in schools, as 50% of public schools and 80% of private schools implement some form of service-learning. The authors then 33 point to several studies that shine light on positive effects that service-learning can have on students: “A gradually accumulating body of evidence suggests that service-learning helps students develop knowledge of community needs, commit to an ethic of service, develop more sophisticated understandings of politics and morality, gain a greater sense of civic responsibility and feelings of efficacy, and increase their desire to become active contributors to society” (p. 4). The study’s research questions are focused on how service learning affects students’ civic knowledge and engagement, academic achievement, and content knowledge, and how teacher characteristics and the quality of service-learning programs contribute to student outcomes. To address their questions, the authors chose to look at a number of high schools that offered service-learning programs or provided students with instructional methods that were aimed towards civic responsibility, knowledge, and engagement. Sites for study were selected with the help of service-learning experts and active researches in the field. Interviews with teachers from potential sites helped the authors make the final selections. The availability of comparison sites and the approval of school districts were also considered. The authors state that efforts were made to have a representative sample of diversity in respect to socioeconomics, ethnicity, and localities. This led to selecting research sites from various regions of the country. Participants included high school students and teachers, and participants who were not involved in service-learning programs constituted comparison groups. In addition to tests, quantitative and qualitative data were collected through surveys and academic achievement indicators; subscales were created for each of the survey constructs, which included categories such as valuing school, school attachment, civic knowledge, community attachment, and efficacy among others. Additionally, interviews helped the authors collect 34 information pertaining to the quality of service-learning programs and individual participant experiences. The authors found that service-learning contributed to some significant differences between service-learning participants and comparison groups. Findings for service-learning student participants included a willingness to vote, more overall enjoyment of school, and the notion that service-learning is more engaging than conventional learning environments. The findings also indicated that many of the outcome areas related to civics strongly correlated with program quality. School attachment was also a factor in this respect, as was duration of service, with semester-long programs yielding greater impacts than shorter ones. Other moderators that contributed to outcomes included student agency in selecting the type of service program, how specific types of service activities led to different gains in different areas, and the relationship between teachers’ experience with service-learning programs and student outcomes. The authors state that more research is required to attain greater understanding. The study’s limits primarily had to do with a disjunction between research sites, as quality differences between sites turned out to be a significant source of unevenness; even though sites had strongly matched comparison groups, the main hypothesis was not tested well because of the lack of controls on the parameters of service-learning and program design. This made it difficult for the authors to draw concrete conclusions, yet the data was suggestive of the variables that acted as moderators of outcomes. As a result, the authors indicate the need for future research on the subject to be more focused and even in order for researchers to draw more definitive conclusions. Yet the study’s qualitative data highlighted content and quality differences between service-learning programs, and therefore the authors intend to document specific teacher practices and program designs that incorporate service-learning, primarily to help them investigate which 35 students benefit from service-learning in the right conditions. Ultimately, the authors conclude that service-learning can be as effective as other instructional strategies/teaching practices that are aimed at producing civic responsibility and engagement, yet they clearly state that more data is needed to explicate how such effectiveness can be maximised through service-learning. 2.5 Other Relevant Literature In their work, Pitts and Woodside (1986) employ value theory in their research pertaining to the travel decisions people make. Citing Rokeach (1986), the authors write that all values, or central beliefs of individuals, are related to attitudes, and that market research has built upon this foundation to better understand the motivations of consumers. Their study examined 161 responses from a survey in a two-step process that involved a segmentation and cluster analysis. Pitts and Woodside’s study provided implications for the travel industry with regard to marketing destinations. Though this research was more based on understanding consumer motivations for recreational travel, it did focus on notions of how attitudes are causally related to values, which plays a part in decision making regarding travel choices. This relates to my study in that I wish to further understand the motivations and reasons for why students and teachers participate in educational travel. In a related qualitative study, Crompton (1979) examined the motives behind recreational travel. Though the study involved participants who were adults, it is relevant to my work because it was geared towards understanding the motives that influenced people’s selection of the type of recreational travel as well as the destination of the trip. Some of the motives Crompton identified involve socio-psychological reasons, an escape from daily routine, an enhancement of kinship relationship, the facilitation of social interaction, and regression, where a vacation provided opportunity to partake in activities “that were inconceivable within the context of their 36 usual life styles” (p. 417). All of these motives Crompton discusses can be bridged to my study’s focus on the initial reasons why teachers and students partake in educational travel. Petrick and Huether (2013) are interested in the general benefits of travel, and state that it creates opportunities for witnessing other cultures, learning history, and strengthen bonds with others. Their study involved a five-step process that produced a comprehensive list of articles organized into relevant literature categories, which the authors closely examined to highlight the gaps in the research field; Petrick and Huether state that further research could possibly lead to prescriptions to travel by doctors, relationship specialists, and educators. The fact that the authors were interested in documenting the benefits of travel makes it relevant to my study. Coryell (2009) discusses the need to develop intercultural responsiveness as a necessity to being able to interact with the sensitivity needed for situations that involve cross-cultural contexts, beliefs and communications. Although her study is centered on adult learning, the implications of her research are extremely relevant to the aims of my study, particularly with respect to the quality and design of an educational trip, and also in regard to the value learners see in their experiences abroad. In her extensive examination of a short-term learning abroad program in Italy yielded four identifiable themes: 1) Learner with other learners and professors, which involved the relationship between pupils and instructors and the benefits of the extensive time that these two groups spent together over the trip; 2) Learner with academic content, which related to how learners appreciated being immersed in the context of which they were studying; 3) Learner with native culture/individuals, which stressed how participants valued experiencing cross-cultural interaction with their location’s ethos and people; and 4) learner with self, which had to do with participants benefiting from free time in which they could choose their activities, which they described as contributing to growth in areas such as independence, confidence and 37 decision-making abilities. Coreyll discusses how the design of this study-abroad trip, such as a number of pre-trip sessions geared towards developing base cultural awareness of Italian culture and language, were beneficial to the participants’ overall experience. She states that “well-designed objectives and a required learning journal with reflection prompts can guide learners in producing meaningful reflexive writings concentrated within the content of the academic course” (p. 10). Gmelch (1997) is concerned with what students actually learn during an educational travel experience. He gathered data by examining journals, numerous informal interviews, and reliving some of the activities and movements of students who had travelled in Europe. Gmelch states that students do not learn about European culture to the level that their professors would hope for, and describes the engagement that students have with European culture as superficial. Yet Gmelch claims that students benefit from such experience because of a growth in personal areas, such as adaptability, self-confidence, and maturity. Although his study is centered on college students, his concerns regarding the benefits of educational travel as well as his findings are relevant to my research. Juvan and Lesjak’s (2011) study focuses on the Erasmus Exchange Programs, and poses the question whether or not such a program, which is sponsored by the United Nations and is meant to foster the growth in inter-cultural understandings and sensitivity, ultimately contributes to an individual’s ability to develop “stronger personal skills as well as better job aspirations” (p. 23). Employing a structured questionnaire that was distributed to Erasmus students to determine the motives for student enrolment in the program, the authors conclude that professional motives are secondary to students’ desires to gain new experiences, improve language skills and meet new people. The implications of this study suggest program co-coordinators need to be acutely aware 38 of what motivates students in order to better help them select an appropriate travel destination. All this speaks to maximizing the benefits of an educational travel experience through acknowledging initial motivations from the outset. This can rightfully be applied to educational travel at the high school level. Though not focusing squarely on educational travel, Kuh (1995) describes the value of out-of-class experiences for students. His exploratory study involved identifying experiences senior college students can meaningfully connect with in-class learning experiences and personal development. The out-of-class experiences Kuh’s study considered were wide ranging and included international educational travel. In this regard, he states that it was often a powerful experience with respect to how it affected students’ personal development, for example enhancing a capacity for reflective thought and interpersonal communication ability. Kuh’s findings relate soundly to my study. 2.6 In Summary The literature in this review is relevant to my study, and I conclude that my study is a somewhat original contribution to social studies education scholarship with respect to the impacts of educational travel. This is partly because much of the literature on global perspective development deals with post-secondary students and adult learners, and my focus is on high school education. The same is true of studies on transformative learning through service experiences, as many of them were conducted with undergraduate student participants. The studies that focus on service learning at the high-school level are locally based and do not incorporate international travel aspects. I have not reviewed studies that pertain to the design and quality of educational travel at the high school level; articles and reviews about educational travel planning are typically focused on basic logistics such as providing information about basic 39 organization and safety precautions and procedures. Continuing in the tradition of many of the studies in this review, my work brings together their respective focuses. My study combines the main themes I recognize in the literature. Taken together, these themes form the theoretical foundation for my study: global perspective development (stemming from an understanding of the educational function of global consciousness), transformative learning and the effect of service experiences, and the design and quality of educational trips. 40 Chapter 3: Methodology In this chapter I briefly discuss sample selection criteria and my study’s participants. I also describe how I acquired data through an interview process, which I analyzed by examining transcripts. The final section of this chapter discusses the study’s limitations. 3.1 Selection Criteria and Participants My study employs a qualitative case study research design, which is personal and descriptive in nature, and I had direct contact with participants leading up to in-depth interview sessions. My project proposal for this study was approved by the UBC’s Behavioral Research Ethics Board on August 2nd, 2016. Subsequently, interviews were conducted at places convenient for both potential students and teacher participants, who live in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The three teacher participants are currently employed at one suburban high school. I worked at this particular school for three years, and it was during this time period when I facilitated the educational trips that are the focus of my study. The teachers who were a part of this study are enthusiastic about meaningful educational experiences and have all had different positive experiences with educational travel. Although a number of teachers at this school have experience with educational travel opportunities, my study selected three teacher participants. Considering I worked at this school for several years, I had an idea of who would be ideal participants, and I am aware that my teacher participants constitute a targeted and convenience purposeful sample. Student participants were also a purposeful sample. I interviewed two students from each type of trip for a total of six student participants. Some of the students who agreed to be a part of this study are former students of mine, whereas others were simply part of one of the trips I facilitated. In all, I had an idea of which students would be ideal for this study based on what I 41 knew about their enthusiasm and personalities when it came to educational travel and social studies. Teacher and student participants received informative letters and consent forms to indicate whether or not they agreed to be a part of my study. As I described earlier, I interviewed three teachers and six students for a total of nine participants, but I provided more than nine people with letters and forms to account for potential refusals. I finalized my selection based on my ability to schedule a manageable interview timeline. 3.2 Teacher Participants (3) There were three teacher participants selected for this study. Pseudonyms are used to ensure participant confidentiality: 1. Dean 2. Brandon 3. Dorothy Dean is a veteran teacher who has taught at a British Columbia high school for many years. His subjects are biology and videography, and he is the head of Incentive, an enrichment program for students in grades 8 through 10. Dean has a great rapport with students and cares about long-terms impacts of educational experiences, and many of his photography and videography students have pursued successful careers in these fields. Dean is also a sponsor of the school’s Interact Club. The Interact Club provides opportunities for students to participate in local and global outreach initiatives through various activities, and is sponsored by Rotary International. Through his efforts with Incentive and Interact, Dean has championed many educational travel experiences for students, and he was largely responsible for the school’s connection to Refilwe, which has resulted in several trips by different cohorts over the past 15 42 years. I asked Dean to be a part of this study because of his wealth of experience and his reputation as a teacher who truly dedicates his time to education and meaningful extra-curricular activities. Dean clearly sees value in educational travel, and encourages students and teachers to get involved with educational travel through fundraising, promoting and participating in trips. His thoughts and experiences helped shine light on the meaningful, long-term impacts of educational travel. Brandon is alumni of the same high school described above and is Dean’s former student. Brandon teaches Social Studies and Physical Education and teaches in the Incentive program. He is also an Interact Club sponsor. Like myself, Brandon has facilitated one of the school’s trips to South Africa and has taken students on tour-guided and task-specific educational trips. Brandon is a dynamic and influential mentor to his students, and I suspect that he inherited some of these traits from Dean. I asked Brandon to be a part of my study because I was interested in what he would share regarding the value and impact of educational travel, as he has experiences similar to mine. His interpretations and insight served to resonate with my inclinations towards subjects of global consciousness, transformative learning, and program design. Dorothy is an art and photography teacher who has taken many students on task-specific and tour-guided trips to locations such as Dublin, Rome, Paris and New York City. She clearly sees value in educational travel and I was curious about what she views as impactful and important about travelling. Her trips are typically designed with an art focus, yet she incorporates historical content and site visits on her trips. From my perspective, part of her rationale appears to involve teaching students how to be mindful travellers, particularly in respect to photography. Week (2012) discusses how travellers who practice photography do so with a multitude of intentions, ranging from impartial documentation and artistic imagery to carefully 43 orchestrated juxtaposition and scene selection, all of which may or may not result in representing a place accurately and even respectfully. Dorothy’s experience with educational travel illuminated some of the impacts of educational travel. 3.3 Student Participants (6) There were six student participants selected for this study. Bearing in mind that there are three types of educational trips, I have organized this section into three subsections; each one discusses the two student participants that were a part of that particular trip. 3.3.1 Mike and Megan – Tour-guided Educational Travel Mike and Megan were my students in Socials Studies 11, and both participated in the UK/France trip. Mike is a confident student who is currently in grade 12, and he seemed to enjoy his time in Europe. Mike was not an exceptional student in terms of academic performance in my class, but he participated in discussions and put a fair degree of effort into his studies. I was interested to see if he would draw any connections between material we covered in class and some of his experiences on the tour-guided trip. Megan was an extremely diligent and focused student in my class, yet she was not very talkative and often doubted her academic abilities. She was always quite anxious about her grade and exams. Despite this, she consistently achieved a level of academic success in the course and finished at the top of the class. I was curious as to whether the trip allowed her to experience enjoyable learning environments, and perhaps if her experiences had any positive effects on her overall confidence levels. It was helpful and interesting to hear what Megan had to say in regard to the value of educational travel, as she was a very articulate and thoughtful student. 44 3.3.2 Eli and Ari – Task-specific Educational Travel Eli was my Information Technology student at one point was also in and my Social Studies 11 class. I was not overly fond of Eli’s behaviour when he was my Info Tech student, which was when he was in grade 10. I found him to be somewhat solitary, which is not an inherently bad thing for a student, but his behaviour came across as arrogant. He finished his work quickly, and his assignments were always completed to spec but rarely exceptional. It was clear to me that Eli was very bright but lacked the motivation to go beyond in creative or technical ways; he put his head down, ploughed through his work with seemingly minimal effort and stress, and finished the course. In my Social Studies 11 class a year later, Eli seemed to enjoy himself more. He was involved in class discussions, wrote insightful essays, and appeared generally interested by the subject matter. As his socials teacher, I began seeing another side of Eli, one that was more participatory and selfless. I believed that this had to do with him feeling more challenged and interested in the subject matter of Social Studies compared to his interest in Info Tech. My impression of him changed dramatically for me on our task-specific trip to San Diego. He was positive and a pleasure to be around. Given that the design of the trip involved looking out for just Eli and Ari, I was able to engage with them as their teacher and chaperone on a much less institutional level than if more students had been on the trip with us. On our down time, we reflected on the Model UN conference, discussed school back at home, and talked about what kind of personality changes students go through during their high school years. Eli expressed quite candidly that he thought he used to be arrogant and disagreeable, and he was consciously trying to be more relaxed and friendly and was also trying to take himself less seriously. I was impressed at his maturity, but it also made me curious as to whether the context of our trip 45 encouraged him to reflect on his own behaviour as a person. When considering potential participants, I was very interested in what Eli had to say about to how this trip impacted him. Ari is the only student participant who has never been my student. Yet I knew her from the Interact Club, and she had a reputation for being extremely bright, articulate beyond her years, and tenaciously confident. In the weeks leading up to our trip, having learned that I was the facilitator, Ari would come to me with questions and ask me for help with her Model UN speech drafts. At times she would seemingly appear out of nowhere, locked and loaded with a San Diego related question that demanded a timely response; at times I dreaded walking down the halls because I felt unprepared to deal with an Ari situation. She did extremely well in the MUN conference, as did Eli, and it was beneficial to me as an educator to see Ari outside of our school environment interacting with students from the US and Mexico. On our down time, she also seemed to bring out Eli’s sense of humour, and together they made fun of everything under the sun. Though our trip was only three and a half days long, the students seemed to have benefitted great deal from the specific event in which they participated, as well as from the additional things we did on our off day. I anticipated that Ari’s contribution to my study would be quite insightful and mature, and it would help me understand and articulate the valuable impacts of educational travel. It is worth noting that Ari also participated in the UK/France trip. As I selected potential participants for this study, I was very interested in what Ari had to say regarding how each of the trips impacted her differently. 3.3.3 Zara and Ben – Socially Immersive Educational Travel Like Eli, Zara was my Information Technology student at one point and my Social Studies 11 student later. She has been a member of the school’s Interact club since she was in grade 8. Zara is extremely intelligent, possesses mature interpersonal skills, has a good-natured sense of 46 humour, and is unusually compassionate for a teenager. One hundred and fifty students applied to go on the 2015 Refilwe trip, and it came as no surprise to me Zara was selected. Among her peers she stands-out as a leader and is well respected. Zara is an exceptional writer and articulates her thoughts well. She always seemed to be particularly interested in Social Studies when our class was examining a historical or contemporary issue that carried a theme of social justice. She was visibly affected by her experiences working with young children in South Africa, and her reflections and thoughts profoundly contributed to this study. Ben was my Information Technology student when he was in grade 9, where I noticed his keen ability with digital photography and videography. He is extremely studious, analytical, and intelligent, and his skills have taken him to several international destinations as a Rotary sponsored reportage photographer. Ben was selected for the 2015 Refilwe trip because of his friendly personality and skill set. Ben was tasked with documenting the students’ experience through photographs and video. Ben contributed a great deal of his time to documenting the trip for everybody involved, and it was clear that he also felt obligated to help with infrastructure work and other service tasks. In that sense he performed a double duty, and his thoughts and refection contributed immensely to this research project. 3.4 Data Collection and Analysis I conducted one interview with each of my participants. I utilized two interview designs, one for student participants and another for teacher participants (see Appendix A and B, respectively). Interviews lasted between 30 – 45 minutes and contained a series of questions that pertained to my research inquiry and guiding themes. The interviews were conversational, in that they 47 followed a sequence of design but allowed for some flexibility in terms of participants’ responses and my questioning. I documented the interviews by a using a Zoom recorder. Interviews were tracked individually in one master session, and I simultaneously used an iPhone running the Voice Memo application as a backup recorder. I also compiled photographic and video evidence. During the interviews, photographs and footage from specific trips were shown to participants, and participants were afforded opportunities to respond to questions while referring to images that related to their respective experiences. Students were asked questions prompting them to reflect on specific experiences and activities, and I anticipated that the photographs and footage would be helpful in this regard. The inclusion of relevant photographs and video footage helped participants reflect and provide rich descriptions of their experiences and interpretations. Data analysis involved transcribing interviews, which I did myself. I anticipated the process of transcribing using headphones in close-listening sessions would allow me to re-visit the interviews and help me identify patterns in participants’ responses, particularly in respect to indications of transformative-learning, developing global consciousness, and the potential long-term impacts of educational travel. This turned out to be the case. Once transcribed, I went over the transcripts in detail to identify themes and patterns, which I then synthesized into a more condensed and useful document. Guba (1981) discusses criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries, to which I refer to explain my study’s credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. The credibility of my study is rooted in my treatment of the interview process, in that I compared data—gleaned from the various perspectives and interpretations of subjects—to test for conflicts and contradictions. As participants shared their views and ideas, their varied perspectives towards experiences lead at times to contradictions; my role in this case involved providing an 48 interpretation of such contradictions to explain their existence within the context of my study. Also, my methods allowed me to collect descriptive data, which help with the transferability of my findings. I subsequently developed “thick” description of my study’s context, and this allowed judgments to be made about how my project fits with other research contexts with similar aims. I established an “audit trail” (i.e. a record of my data analysis) that will allow external investigators to perform a dependability audit of my work. Finally, the confirmability of my study is rooted in how I have positioned myself as a researcher and provided reasoning for my underlying questions (see chapter one), and I elaborated on my intentionality in a later chapter that concerns my own experiences. This allowed me to delve deeper into the meaning and value that I associate with educational travel as informed by my findings while serving the overall confirmability of my study. 3.5 Limitations My study is limited in that it is small-scale and focused only on students and teachers from a single school in British Columbia. I did not compare my findings with data gathered from another focus group; the students and teachers from this school were my only participants. All my student participants came from similar socio-economic backgrounds (i.e. middle-class to upper middle-class, and reside in a safe neighbourhood), and they were all fairly strong academic students. This poses challenges in demonstrating how educational travel positively impacts academic achievement; but my focus is on examining personal growth and transformation as well as the long-term impacts of educational travel experiences. Further, my student and teacher participants all appeared to initially harbour inclinations towards social justice and global awareness, so this presents problems for drawing conclusions as to whether educational travel experiences plant the seeds of compassion and global consciousness among those who do not 49 start with those inclinations. My conclusions and findings successfully address my research questions and themes, yet more research will be needed to strengthen the results. 50 Chapter 4: Findings In this chapter, I describe the analysis of my interview process. I created tables to plot themes (superordinate concepts) and relevant subcategories (emergent subordinate concepts). It was logical for me to create five tables; three that pertain to interviews with student participants for each of the three educational trips, one that relates to the data I analyzed from interviews with teacher participants, and a final table that brings all subcategories together. All data were analyzed with respect to three broad themes I deduced from my research questions: 1) initial reasons for participating in educational travel; 2) significant experience during an education trip; and 3) influence with respect to a shift in awareness, behaviour, and long-term goals. I explain in sub-section 4.4 why I added an extra concept, teacher and student responsibilities, to the table pertaining to teacher participants. Further, I provide examples of student and teacher responses in the various sub-sections of this chapter to illustrate how I identified and organized subcategories. A deeper discussion about how my findings can benefit social studies education as well as a discussion pertaining to the limits of my study can be found in the next chapter. This section essentially provides examples of student responses that illustrate my process of analysis and helps show how I designed data tables. Data tables allowed me to organize emergent subcategories in relation to the superordinate concepts, which are the broad themes described above. Further, the data tables will serve as helpful reference tools in the next chapter. It should be noted that the excerpts shared in this section constitute a sufficient representation of emergent sub-categories from interviews with participants who participated in the three types of educational travel; there are many phrases and language in my data that similarly represent sub-categories, but including them all would prove excessive given the purpose of this chapter. 51 4.1 Tour-guided Travel Table 4.1 reflects my analysis of data acquired from interviews with student participants who participated in tour-guided educational travel. The participants, Megan and Mike, both travelled to Europe, specifically to the UK and France, as part of a tour-guided school-based trip. Some of the emergent associated categories are the same as in Table 4.1, and the data from these interviews also yielded subordinate categories unique to this type of educational travel. Data from other student participants and teacher participants will be highlighted to form a different subset of categories relating to the same concepts (see Tables 4.2-4.5.) Table 4.1: Tour-guided Associated Categories Concepts Associated Categories Initial Reasons for participating in educational travel Independence, camaraderie, language development, experiencing different culture, design of trip Significant experiences with educational travel Language development, design of trip, site visits, being with friends abroad Influence/effects re. awareness, behaviour and long-term goals Site visits, expanding one’s comfort zone awareness of independence, historical and global perspectives Regarding the first superordinate concept, both participants described how travelling to Europe had always been something they wanted to do. Megan shared that the school-based aspect of the trip afforded her with an opportunity to become more independent, explaining that “it was a place that I’ve always wanted to visit, and places I knew I was going to visit after the trip, but I just talked to my parents and they thought it would be a good opportunity to go on a trip without them for once.” 52 Connor also highlighted the notion of independence, as to him it had “always been a dream to kind of be away from home. Like, you still have kind of strong connections to it, but it’s very nice to be away for a while. And just to kind of explore, growing up independently, kind of knowing that I can do that independently was amazing.” He mentioned that this was the first major opportunity to travel away from his family and viewed that as a reason to go on the trip. Megan stated that her parents were in favour of her going on this trip because, as with Mike, it marked the first time she traveled without family. Megan explained her parents knew of another student who signed up for the trip as well, and they viewed this particular student as a good influence: “They only encouraged me because Julie was going; if Julie wasn’t going and I had no other friends going, they definitely wouldn’t have wanted me to go I don’t think.” Both Mike and Megan described a camaraderie aspect regarding their initial interest in being part of this trip. Mike highlighted how he did not want to miss out on an opportunity to travel with close friends, saying, “you want to enjoy the experience with as many friends as you can. It almost becomes like a little club, like a little unit. We share that experience together; we’ll never lose that.” He tied his excitement leading up to the trip to the fact that his friends were going, and said that he probably would not have been as excited about the trip otherwise. Megan also mentioned that the fact that a couple of her friends were attending gave her more reason to take part in this particular school-based trip. An aspect of his initial interest in the trip that Mike described in more detail than Megan had to do with the trip’s destination of Europe. Where Megan simply mentioned her interest in the destination, Mike described his with enthusiasm: “I’ve always loved the, kind of European culture. The culture they can provide for me, it’s kind of rustic, kind of old. That was my initial interest; I wanted to be immersed in their culture.” 53 Mike described the trip’s overall design as appealing, and that it contributed to his initial interest. He appreciated the trip’s tight itinerary and sightseeing components. Megan alluded to this as well, but more to the fact that her parents felt a degree of security knowing that this was a highly organized school-based trip with a rigid structure. Her responses in this respect relate to the second superordinate concept, which involves participants recalling specific feelings and experiences. She described how the nature of the trip’s design, given that it involved a large group of high school students travelling as tourists, gave her a feeling of uneasiness: “we were just like a spectacle. You could tell that other people that lived there, were like annoyed by us. And I remember just feeling so much pressure from that.” Learning a foreign language constitutes another emergent category that relates to the first two superordinate concepts. Megan described the trip as appealing because it would allow her to build her French language skills. Mike described how he found himself in frustrating situations where his limited French language skills contributed to a communication barrier: “That’s where it was tough; and I remember trying to order pizza from one stop in France—they didn’t have a menu, like you had to know what you wanted…But one last thing that I do kind of recall as frustrating, the streets are actually very difficult to manoeuvre around. Here it’s numbered, but there the streets are a lot more curvy, a lot of architecture kind of blocks your view, and obviously in an unfamiliar area, but it’s very frustrating because it’s not like you can ask.” Though Mike highlighted trip design, i.e. the appeal of itineraries and schedules, as an initial reason for participating, he also described that it was frustrating that the group’s tour-guide could speak English but not French. This speaks to the quality of the trip’s design—the structural aspects of the trip that included chaperones and guides—and in this case the linguistic limitations of the group’s tour-guide contributed to several frustrating episodes for Mike. 54 Where Mike appreciated the trip’s itinerary, he also mentioned that he would have appreciated more built-in space for free time. Megan also recalled being frustrated on account of not having enough free time. She mentioned that the tight schedule was limiting in that there was not enough space built in to explore in smaller groups: “we didn’t have too much time for that, we did, but not like, as much as I wish we had. Or the option of having like our breakfast and dinner was like set for us, but like the option to go for dinner somewhere else with just friends; everything else was just really set in stone.” Despite sometimes being frustrated by the tight itinerary, Megan recalled specific experiences from her trip that she enjoyed and thought were valuable. This included visiting specific sites such as the Canadian and American war memorial cemeteries in Normandy. Mike described similar feeling toward such site visits, but in much more detail than Megan, as he made connections to what he had learned in social studies class prior to the trip: “When we were on the beaches of Normandy, you being my social studies teacher at the time, you made things stick-out very much, but when we got to the actual beaches of Normandy, I think I heard in the itinerary we were going, and I think you might have brought it up, even more information, even more detail, you know it kind of breaks your heart a little, being in the battlefield of where so many people died, and it just kind of breaks your heart.” Mike also talked about activities that were built into the itinerary that he particularly enjoyed, relating again to quality of the trip’s design. He explained how he appreciated a guided bike-tour around London, and he also recalled feeling awe-struck during a visit to Mont St. Michel, explaining that “it was the type of architecture you would see in like a background, or backdrop of a computer. It’s like a fantasy. And when I say that it kind of blew my mind.” 55 Mike and Megan described how their experiences during this trip influenced their attitudes to varying degrees, thus forming the emergent categories that relate to the third superordinate concept. Megan mentioned she appreciated how the trip provided her with the opportunity to step outside of her comfort zone, allowing her to make new friendships with people she had not been so close with prior to the trip. Mike took this notion further, explaining that this trip helped him see how travelling can help break down ignorance, as he claimed that “you definitely become less ignorant, as I say you become a new person, but I think more specifically you’re open, your arms are open to more.” Both participants described how this trip influenced their sense of independence. Megan tied the independence she gained on this trip to a more recent trip she went on: “It impacted me that way to, like know that I can go on trips without parents. I just went with my other friends, we planned the trip ourselves, this one was a tour, but we planned this one ourselves.” Mike’s responses in this regard highlighted his similar appreciation of how travel can affect one’s sense of independence: “travelling is impeccable to growing as an independent adult…A lot of children nowadays, they never have that. They always have their families, but what happens when you’re 25 and you can’t necessarily leave the house, its hard on your life, but travelling, even if you go with your friends, its different than not being with your family, you grow as an independent human being.” It is evident from Mike’s responses that certain experiences impacted him regarding recognizing global and historical perspectives. For example, reflecting on the group’s time on the Normandy beaches, Mike “thought that it was really stupid for soldiers to go up on the water, and like on the shores, the generals and the command know that they’re going to just get shot down, and they know that those soldiers are going to die. And those soldiers know that too.” 56 He goes on to describe how he could not help but imagine himself in the place of front-line soldiers on D-Day: “I kind of had this really ethereal kind of feeling in my head like what if I was on, like the first line of boats. I knew I was probably going to die.” It is evident in their responses that Megan and Mike had similar initial reasons for participating in a school-based trip. They also reflected on experiences that were enjoyable, frustrating and educational. With respect to the third superordinate concept, both participants emphasized heightened confidence and independence as a result of their trip, and they shared their intentions to continue travelling due to the positive experiences they had as part of a tour-guided trip. More examples from the data could have been included in this section, but the examples I have provided serve to illustrate fully how the categories emerged and were aligned with the general concepts. 4.2 Task-specific Travel Table 4.2 reflects how the data obtained from the interviews relates to the research aims explained in chapter one. It shows three superordinate concepts and eleven subordinate categories. The concepts reflect the core aims I have articulated in my research questions, and specific interview questions were informed by these concepts. I examined the participants’ responses to highlight axial codes, i.e. certain phrases that relate to the superordinate concepts, and thus form the associated categories. 57 Table 4.2 : Task-specific Associated Categories Concepts Associated Categories Initial reasons for participating in educational travel Prior interests, beneficial specific experience/good opportunity, independence Significant experiences with educational travel Enjoyable experiences, frustrating experiences, valuable learning experiences Influence/effects re. awareness, behaviour and long-term goals Perspective shifts, personal development, confidence, influence in daily-life, effects on long-term goals Regarding the first superordinate concept, both Eli’s and Ari’s responses to relevant interview questions formed emergent themes. For example, Eli described how his previous experience with Model United Nations and general interest in conflict resolution and global politics was supported by the encouragement he received from other students who had gone on a similar trip: “I know I had some friends who had gone on the trip the year before, and they had told me that it was the perfect trip for me.” Ari responded in the same vein, explaining that she was “encouraged by basically everyone that you said; teachers, because they knew that I had interest in social studies, history, politics, and my parents just saw it as a really good opportunity that I shouldn’t waste.” Both participants cited the MUN conference as more important than the destination of San Diego. This resonates with my thoughts toward task-specific travel in that the location is somewhat incidental to the main point of the trip. For example, Eli recognized the appeal of Southern California, but he explained that the conference “could have been anywhere. I more wanted just to get into a bigger atmosphere with more people and more diverse thought, because if you just keep talking to the same people again and again, you get in a pattern, you don’t learn 58 anything new.” Once again, this points to his prior interest as being a driving force for his participation in this trip, which he saw as an opportunity to develop his public speaking and interpersonal skills in a new environment. Another emergent category was the notion of independence. Ari described her feelings in anticipation of the trip as “a really good exercise in independence,” and saw the value of travelling away from her family, as she recognized she would need to “take care of yourself, pack for yourself—you have to be responsible.” Eli responded likewise, describing that “It was the first time I had really gone anywhere by myself and there wasn’t going to be anyone on the other side who knew me personally. So that was fine.” Categories relating to the second superordinate concept emerged from statements pertaining to the participants recalling specific experiences that stood out as enjoyable, as when Eli remembered “sitting in our host, Mr. Cahill’s living room, with my classmate, Ari, playing the piano, all of us spinning tops, and just having a good time, before everything started, and I remember just sort of feeling like this isn’t what I came here to do, but I’m having fun.” Eli also described frustrating experiences, such as when he received peer feedback after presenting his resolution at the Model United Nations conference: “I remember I got a note after my speech, criticizing it because it didn’t line up 100% with my real-world counterpart on this issue, and I remember sort of getting it, and showing it to my partner and we both kind of just looked at it like, what point is this guy trying to prove here; he’s not helping anything. He’s just being critical for the sake of being critical.” Ari also shared frustrating experiences. For example, she described how when she was with a group of her MUN peers, someone used the derogatory term for people of Chinese descent, which made her uncomfortable. She tied this experience to other times she was 59 travelling and felt uncomfortable due to homophobic, sexist, and racist slurs. In addition to simply describing these frustrating experiences, both Ari and Eli attempted to contextualize these episodes, and this showed the participants were intent on understanding other people’s behaviour as well as their own feelings. From this I deduced a subcategory of personal development, which pertains to the third general concept. For example, Ari bridged her frustrating experience in San Diego to something that happened to her during an educational trip to Quebec, where she had an experience that involved being on the receiving end of sexist and hurtful comments: “I was just so shocked that I would get home to my homestay, and I would have to like sit-down and cry, because I had just been made to feel so uncomfortable for just being who I was, and obviously I knew that existed, I wasn’t ignorant of that, but just having experienced it first-hand made it personal.” Eli also reflected on this level. His analysis of his experiences indicates a shift in his perspective and that his experiences on this trip influenced his daily behaviour back home. For example, and relating in this case to a positive experience and impact on the plane, Eli described how on the plane ride home “we were all just sort of talking very casually just about everything, and I remember feeling like this was the first time—I’ve had conversations with teachers, I’ve had deep conversations with teachers—it was the first time I felt like I’d been on an even level with a teacher and had like a completely neutral, back and forth conversation. And I remember that being a good feeling. So I went back, and I tried to develop that relationship with some other teachers, and I felt like it really does make a difference.” Ari reflected similarly, explaining that “you start off with a very high respect for your teachers, and then as you get older you still respect them, but they become less of a teacher and 60 more of like a friend. So the teacher that I went with, we weren’t that close before, but by the end of the trip there was a good rapport between the two of us.” Both Eli and Ari talked about their experiences with the MUN, and they described how the specific focus of this trip helped them with their critical thinking skills, interpersonal skills, and public speaking abilities. In this regard, Ari reflected on the impact that the MUN had on her in this regard: “when you move from public speaking in front of a crowd that is listening but doesn’t have to listen, versus to a crowd that is looking for flaws in your speech, a crowd who is looking for ways to undermine you, every single word has a different meaning based on the politics that we were in, so I was much more careful with my words, and I think that it made me more confident, and basically having a neutral stance on things.” She elaborated by describing how she still values having strong convictions and opinions, and does not mind voicing them during discourse, but she now makes a point to “phrase things to be more non-offensive to either side of the political spectrum.” Eli described how being around other bright students with varying personalities influenced how he approaches collaborative learning environments, as he explained how “that was a good lesson for me, like make sure you remember the little guy, because they usually have good ideas, so it’s good to listen to them…In group projects I’m still a bit of a domineering personality. I definitely try my best to get everybody involved as much as I can.” Both Eli and Ari described specific experiences and reflected on their time in San Diego thoughtfully. As I mentioned earlier, there are more axial codes that could have been included in this section to illustrate how the emergent subcategories were formed in relation to the general concepts, but the excerpts I have included are sufficient in this respect. 61 4.3 Socially Immersive Travel Table 3 reflects my analysis of data attained from interviews with students who participated in a socially-immersive education trip. Zara and Ben both travelled to South Africa as part of a team that included other students, firefighters, a police officer, and two teachers. Like previous sections in this chapter, several emergent categories from data pertaining to socially-immersive travel overlap with categories from the other two types of education travel. Table 4.3: Socially Immersive Associated Categories Concepts Associated Categories Initial reasons for participating in educational travel Prior interest in service, encouragement, extending the classroom, new experiences, opportunities Significant experiences with educational travel Pre-trip team activities, feelings of frustration and helplessness, team-bonding, making a difference Influence/effects re. awareness, behaviour and long-term goals Specific career goals, academic goals, perspective shifts; meaningful application of interests/hobbies Both Zara and Ben described an interest in partaking in service-learning opportunities, desires that they possessed prior to this trip. Zara explained how she knew about this trip opportunity before she was in high school, and the fact this school offered this opportunity influenced her choice to enrol there: “one of the reasons I initially picked [my school] was because I wanted to go on this trip, and I wanted to contribute however I could to a culture and community that was beyond my own, in some kind of tangible and sustainable way.” Ben responded in a similar vein, tying his interest in service-learning to a family connection to the continent of Africa: “there is also the personal aspect for me; I know that my 62 family is from Africa, I still have family in Tanzania. I think that being able to help where my parents came from was something that would be very special to me personally.” Ben also discussed how he sees travelling as an opportunity to gain a richer understanding and perspective towards subjects learned predominantly in one’s local school environment: “I think that the experience of travel and being able to see new cultures and people do things differently really adds to what you can bring back to the classroom. I know that for me personally, being able to read something in a textbook about Africa or about any of the other locations is one thing, but being able to actually go there and see that first-hand, uh gives you totally different outlook and experience on specific topics.” Zara’s responses echoed Ben. She was encouraged by family, friends and teachers to travel in general because they “understood the value that travel can have for a student, the kind of horizons it can open up, and the kind of experience and life-experience it can give a student so pivotal to have outside of the classroom.” In fact, both participants talked about the encouragement they received from family and friends with respect to participating in this particular school-based trip. Ben emphasized the encouragement he received from his parents, and Zara highlighted the support she received from teachers during her high school years leading up to the trip. When responding to questions pertaining to specific trip-related experiences, the second superordinate concept, Ben and Zara both talked about things they were involved in prior to the trip. Zara spoke about how the team had “gone to crazy lengths to make this trip happen…our team of six executed and organized and supplied and prepared and ran everything that we had to for the cafeteria, from food to drinks to snacks; we’d duck out of class and make lasagna and penne, and whatever we could—we did whatever we could to make the trip work.” 63 Ben described pre-trip activities as well: “we were packing all of the teddy bears and blankets and stuff at Ms. Leung’s office, I think that was when it kind of set in where it’s like, wow the next time I see this I’m going to be in South Africa, and I’m going to be opening these and handing these out. I think that that definitely added to the anticipation, and added to the real, uh skill of what we were doing, uh and how much stuff we were giving as well.” Regarding positive trip experiences, Zara highlighted feelings of camaraderie and bonding with the team, as well as witnessing the reactions of the children she worked with in the location’s orphanage, as she described “all the times we spent with the kids in the pre-school we were working with; they were just lovely kids, and I’ve worked with kids in North American countries before, and I’ve worked with kids there after that, and I can see the difference in upbringing and values in personalities, in gratitude, in energy and excitement.” Both participants claim their experience was overwhelmingly positive, but each shared aspects of the trip that were frustrating for them. Shortly into the trip, Ben shared how he was injured during a tile demolition project, which sidelined him from hands-on work for a significant portion of the trip. He articulated how he felt about not being able to contribute to the level he wanted: “that was the most frustrating thing for me; just not being able to help with the rest of the team was an unbelievably frustrating experience.” Ben was also bothered by the quality of treatment he received for his injury: “I probably severed nerves in my leg. But I went to the nurse there, I went there to figure what she would say, and kind of what she would do, and what she did was…said that it was the cold, that was the reason that I couldn’t feel my leg. And I was like no, it’s not the cold and I knew that and it was frustrating because I guess she was a nurse and I guess I respected what she had to say but I knew for sure that wasn’t the outcome.” 64 At this point it should be noted that Ben has plans to become a medical doctor. He went on to explain that the nurse’s husband subsequently massaged his injured leg, which Ben felt exacerbated the injury and potentially prolonged his recovery. As he explained a frustrating experience, which pertains to the second superordinate concept, another emergent category that relates to the third concept became evident. Ben realized he had to come to terms with his expectations regarding what would have constituted an appropriate response to his injury from healthcare professionals. To this, he juxtaposed his view of the quality of care he witnessed: “I was like if they’re using this as a legitimate form of, you know, healing, it’s not exactly up to medical standards that we would experience in Canada.” Zara shared a frustrating experience as well, also in relation to the local healthcare system. Ben was frustrated at the level of care he received personally, but Zara’s frustrations stemmed from her encounters with local economic and societal issues, and contributed to feelings of helplessness and sadness: “There was a case of a girl who lived a few days walk away from the Refilwe clinic, and she would visit the nurse at the Refilwe clinic to seek medical help for a growth, a tumor on her neck. This was the same nurse who showed us around the other settlements. She said that one doctor that the Rotary club had paid for had said that she was terminal and she needed chemo. She said that she gave the girl some herbal medicine because the girl couldn’t afford that kind of healthcare, and when that didn’t work because it’s not chemo, they stopped all treatment…this really pisses me off still.” Zara’s feelings of frustration also came from her witnessing the widespread economic disparity evident within much of South Africa and also between regions of South Africa and Canada. She explained how it was difficult at times to come to terms with her standard of living back home as she met people who lived in extreme poverty. She also explained how she 65 witnessed first-hand the difference in standards of living between different groups of people she interacted with during her trip, “There was one weekend where we stayed at Rotarians’ houses—very important experience, because we lived in a place that was 30-40 minutes outside of Johannesburg, outside of the city, and the quality of life deteriorated very quickly as you drove away. Where we stayed was in the houses of very well-off Rotarians, who had a stable job, who were mostly immigrants from European countries, and they live on the one end of this wealth disparity, this wealth gap, and who we were staying with…just seeing that contrast, it highlighted for me an economic aspect for the trip that I hadn’t even thought about before, the idea of a wealth gap, and it launched me into economics.” Zara explained how having the opportunity to stay with Rotarians for a period of time in a location far removed from the realities of main camp in Refilwe, where the team was stationed for the majority of the trip, made her uncomfortable and to her “just felt wrong.” Zara went on to explain how her experiences, particularly ones that involved feelings of frustration and helplessness, influenced her academic choices and long-term goals. Her response relate to the third superordinate concept. Zara explained the influence her experiences had on her long-term goals and post-secondary academic choices: “I’m literally studying what I’m studying now, in part, because of this experience. So I want to double major in public policy and international relations, and I want to explore areas of law that have to do with policy, and eventually to get into education in some way, or help with educational policy…for the duration of my grade 12 year I worked with the school board of Richmond to talk about different ways of testing, and certain educational issues in high school, so that was an effort to see how I like education on like a federal policy level.” 66 Ben similarly explained how experiences with this trip, as well as with other trips that involved Rotary, have influenced his decision to one-day join Rotary, which he views as an effective organization that deals with local and global social and economic issues. Ben explained how his experience travelling to South Africa was made possible in part through Interact and Rotary, and that “Africa was simply one of the projects that they help, but our Rotary club and Rotary International as a whole help so many locations…and being able to see that there is a need for something, and being able to go and actually give, that is something Rotary does, and I hope to be a part of that in the future.” Ben also spoke at some length about how his work as a photographer and videographer becomes more meaningful when he gets to document experiences from service-based trips, as he explained how he set up a make-shift photo booth to take portraits of local children. He appreciated being able to document the joy he witnessed in the children. His experience in Refilwe helped solidify his view of the role of the photographer and videographer, in that “one thing that’s very important is to try and not change the moment but document the moment.” It was clear Ben reflected on his experiences from the trip in a way that helped him hone his skills and outlook as a photographer and videographer: “being able to see something in real life, that was one thing, but being able to see it in a lens and being able to document it and then try and explain that to other people at home, is also yet another aspect of photography—and that’s something that we all strive to do as photographers.” Ben went on to explain how he has travelled as part of Rotary service initiatives, and his role during those trips mainly involved documenting medical procedures performed in impoverished areas. Yet he emphasized that his main goal with the South Africa trip was to work directly with locals and teammates on infrastructure and outreach projects that his team was 67 tasked with. This speaks to the first superordinate concept, but the fact that he was naturally drawn into the role of trip videographer and photographer speaks to an emergent category that involves finding deeper meaning with specific interests and talents. Ultimately, both Ben and Zara reflected on their experiences and made meaningful connections to academic goals, career choices, and their personal interests. 4.4 Teacher Participants This section deals with data pertaining to interviews with teacher participants. Teachers were not selected for this study on the same basis as student participants; that is, where students were selected based on their participation with one of the three types of educational travel I framed in chapter one, the teacher participants were selected on the basis of their experience facilitating educational travel. I analyzed data from teacher participants and organized emergent categories in relation to three new but similar superordinate concepts: 1) rationale for facilitating educational travel; 2) specific experiences during educational travel; and 3) the positive impacts that educational travel has on students. As with the previous sections in this chapter, relevant sub-categories emerged from the data I acquired from each interview, and in some instances, categories overlapped. The organizing concepts for the teacher participants are different than those for the student participants. This is because I anticipated teachers’ reasons for participating in educational travel to be different from students. Also, it was logical to create organizing concepts related to both teachers’ motivations as well as their ideas about student participation in educational travel. I was mindful of this as I analyzed the data, and this led me to create an additional category, teacher and student responsibilities, which was not utilized in the tables for data extracted from interviews with student participants. The three other concepts are similar to 68 those from the student participant tables, to the extent that they relate to motivations, specific experiences, and overall impacts of educational travel. They also relate to the fact teacher participants were asked questions that directly pertained to their thoughts about how students appreciate and benefit from educational travel. Additionally, it was logical to structure this section differently than the previous three. This is because the teacher participants have varying experience with the three types of educational travel, and the questions they responded to were more general than the ones posed to students. This made the data more scattered when it came to phrases and insights that pertained to a specific type of educational trip. When teachers brought up examples from specific trips they were a part of, I could then determine what types of trips they were. In this section, as I reference such examples, I also state the type of educational trip to which the example belongs. Table 4.4: Associated Categories Pertaining to Teacher Participants Concepts Associated Categories Rationale for facilitating educational travel Personal experiences as a student, enjoyment, independence, continuity and community, citizenship, benefits, global perspective, extending the classroom environment, Specific experiences and teacher observations during educational travel Student tasks, site visits, pre-sessions, post-sessions, unintended circumstances/spontaneous circumstances Teacher and student responsibilities Cultural awareness, logistics, learning experiences Positive impacts that educational travel has on students Global perspectives, maturity, developing skills, curiosity, long-term goals 69 Regarding the first superordinate concept, all teacher participants shared how they all enjoy travelling, and that was a necessary starting point for any teacher thinking about facilitating an educational travel experience. Brandon described that his interest in facilitating educational travel was rooted in experiences he had as a high school student when he participated in an exchange program to Japan, known as the Jonai exchanged. The Jonai exchange classifies as socially immersive travel. He explained that “being able to learn culture, being able to learn language, being able to have that ability to explore on my own, to make my own decisions as a grade 9 kid” were experiences that continue to inform his practice as a teacher, as he likes to “see and witness my students making their own [experiences] and seeing that if what they were getting out of it was the same as what I got out of it as well.” Dean, who also has experience facilitating this particular Japanese exchange program, shared how aspects of continuity and community appealed to him, as this particular exchange program developed a rich tradition between the two schools involved: “I mean tradition is amazing; what was really neat is when we went there, they had the office set up for us to reside in while we were at the school and they had all the photos of the past trips. And all the different teachers, some who I still knew, were ten years younger, twenty years younger. And all the students were back then in grade 10; now they’re adults. So it was neat to see those images, to be a part of that tradition.” Teacher participant responses also suggest how travel plays a part in developing independence and citizenship with students, something that all the teacher participants highlight as an important reason to facilitate educational travel. For example, Dean explained how “the common thread with these [trips] are, us as teachers our job is not just to teach science, it’s not just about the curriculum, or the learning outcomes, it’s about understanding that we have a role 70 in developing the students in every aspect that we can so they become well-balanced, good citizens.” Dean’s insights in this regard pertain to potential benefits that teachers see in all types of educational travel. Similarly, Dorothy explained how during educational trips students “learn a certain independence. Even though we’re responsible for them, they are becoming more independent.” All three teacher participants shared their thoughts on how the benefits of educational travel outweigh risks and make the effort required to implement an educational trip worthwhile. This seems to tie together a unifying rationale as to why teachers put their efforts towards educational travel, regardless of what category of trip an experience falls under. Dorothy, while discussing the amount of work and preparation required for tour guided trips, simply stated that “the benefits out-weigh the risks. I love travelling with students; some people think I’m, crazy, but I’ve always enjoyed it. And I love the tours, and I think I do so much more on these tours, versus me just planning a holiday on my own that I actually learn a lot more about the places we travel. And learning with the students is really enjoyable, because they’re learning with you.” Dean responded similarly with respect to the logistics and difficulties in planning educational trips, explaining that “as I’m putting in all of this extra work, that a lot of the times if you get disgruntled about it, if you’re working late at night, and you’re not being paid or not being at the moment thanked, you question. Why are we going through this, why are we doing this? At times I get under a lot of pressure and stress to get things done, yeah those questions pop in my head. But you get to the place that you’re going to, and you start seeing the kids achieve those goals and objectives we’ve set out, then it becomes extremely clear that all the effort was worth it.” 71 Teacher participants all spoke about how educational travel helps develop global perspectives in students and students. Dorothy described that she’s “really lucky as a Canadian to have this, we’re really lucky as [name of school] students that we have what we have, perspective, yeah. Seeing difference helps you appreciate what you have.” Dean described how trips such as the Jonai exchange allow students to witness a different culture, experiencing daily life from the host family’s perspective. Similarly, Brandon, while referencing task specific and socially immersive trips, described how travel experiences allow students to see how “their daily lives differ, from students their own age.” Brandon has facilitated several trips that involved taking high school football teams to Texas, which can be classified as task specific travel. Even though the main focus of these trips is athletics, the students are exposed to different cultural norms, as they are able to see “some of the effects of that football culture, Texas A and M, different school system, different demographics and what not, how resources are allocated.” All teacher participants also described how trips create rich learning opportunities for students, as they effectively extend the classroom environment. Dorothy stated how during tour guided trips students learn “so much about art and history, that you can’t learn in school. You can, it’s in a different way.” Dean also discussed the impact of educational travel on students’ learning: “think of layering; you can have a kid read a text book about a historical event. But what do you do to sort of? layer that experience, to try you know; seeing images, photos, voices, music, adds levels of emotion that a textbook can’t. But if you take that a step further and say that now you are at the location where this historical event happened and you go and see some of the artifacts of the 72 event that happened, or talk to people who were at that event, now that’s as real as it can get. In terms of sort of supplementing the curriculum, these educational trips are as real as it can get.” Brandon described the relationship between educational trips and school-based learning similarly, explaining how being at a historical site first-hand helps students recognize the magnitude of the subjects they study in classrooms. He also discussed how such visits can lead to an increased passion in the students’ interest levels and learning. The nature of the educational trips these teachers facilitated varied tremendously. The second superordinate concept pertains to specific examples of tasks and experiences the participants spoke about as they described their rationales for facilitating educational trips. Dean described a particular problem-solving and skill building experience during an urban-based camping/adventure trip, a task-specific trip, where students were required to figure out how to feed over a hundred fellow students within certain guidelines that included municipal bylaws and limited cooking equipment, and the kids “brainstormed and we came up with the idea of ordering bbq chicken from Costco and potato salad. So we drove to Costco with our student leaders. We bought 27 chickens and so forth, brought them back, taught the kids how to carve up chickens, you know, and take care of everybody, and that’s so, again, different set of goals, and the kids did great.” Dean’s example speaks to notions of trip-design and the aims of an educational trip. In this regard, all of the teacher participants described both teacher and student responsibilities pertaining to educational trips. The categories that relate to the third superordinate concept in Table 4.4 emerged from comments made by all teacher participants; Brandon and Dorothy both discussed the importance of pre-trip and post-trip meetings with parents and students, in order establish the educational aims of a trip as well as to raise awareness in regard to a new cultural 73 context. Dorothy explained how “teachers need to help provide that cultural awareness to help open their eyes; that things are done differently in different places.” Brandon discussed how it is important to “do cultural lessons prior to going, and so the social norms in Japan are different than in Canada…and we expect that when they’re on the trip they’re adhering to those expectations. And then you have the typical things; meeting times, and all of that, proper equipment.” In addition to preparing students with respect to cultural awareness and logistics, Dean explained teachers need to make sure everything is organized so “all of the kids are going to be enjoying themselves. Because it’s not just our time invested, but it’s their time invested. They’re taking away from their clubs, or their family time or friend time, basketball games, vacations, so you have to understand that it’s not just enough to plan the structure of the trip, you have to actually make sure you’re looking at it from the kids’ perspective to make sure they’re getting something out of it.” His comments in this respect applied to all categories of educational travel. Where teachers’ responsibilities involved planning, logistics, safety, and facilitating learning experiences, student responsibilities, as discussed by teacher participants, pertain to behaviour (e.g. respect for school rules abroad and being respectful of a new cultural environment), fostering a sense of curiosity and open-mindedness, and participating in the activities that are central to a specific educational trip. In this sense, student responsibilities also emerged as a subordinate category to the fourth general concept, because certain student behaviours and ways of thinking develop as a result of their experiences during educational travel. This speaks to how educational trips impact students in a variety of ways, such as developing global perspective, cultural awareness, and independence, which also bridge emergent categories from the first superordinate concept (teacher rationales) with the fourth. 74 In regard to the impact of educational travel, Dorothy described how her rationale for facilitating educational travel, which in her experience primarily involves tour guided trips, is validated by witnessing how students benefit from educational travel: “I think seeing things they’ve never seen before, because I’m a photography teacher, having the opportunity to take photos of places they haven’t been before, maybe being inspired and going home saying ‘I really enjoyed seeing that artist’; bringing it back with them. I did see a lot of that happening and just their eyes opening up to different possibilities.” All teacher participants spoke similarly about students developing more curiosity and interest towards various subjects, and student participants’ responses highlighted similar impacts of educational travel. Dean described how certain trips, such as the Jonai exchange, increased students’ interest towards other cultures and in some cases led to students choosing to be a part of future trips because “they just love going there. So every year they come back and chaperone.” Brandon described how socially immersive and task specific trips influence students to points where they become more involved in volunteer and community service efforts at home: “What we see with Refilwe and even with Model UN, you have a kid coming back saying ‘I’m not done, I want to create a club, I want to volunteer, I want to give back. I’ve seen what the other side looks like and I realize my position where I am, how fortunate I am’”. Just as one of the student participants did, Brandon also discussed how one student in particular was so moved by his experiences abroad in South Africa that “he’s moving to Refilwe because it had such an impact on him.” 4.5 In Summary This chapter deals with the data analysis, and to help with my explanation I provided examples of axial codes. As I mentioned earlier, the examples I included are sufficiently representative of 75 my data with respect to responses from participants that underpinned the emergent categories I identified in relation to superordinate concepts. Table 4.5 simply brings together all emergent categories from tables 4.1 – 4.3 (student participants), but still separates the categories from table 4.4 (teacher participants), which emerged in relation to different superordinate concepts. 76 Table 4.5: A Summation of Associated Categories Concepts (Student Participants) Associated Categories (Student Participants) Initial reasons for participating in educational travel Independence, camaraderie, language development, experiencing different culture, design of trip, prior interests, beneficial specific experience/good opportunity, independence, encouragement, extending the classroom, new experiences Significant experiences with educational travel Language development, design of trip, site visits, being with friends abroad, enjoyable experiences, frustrating experiences, valuable learning experiences, pre-trip team activities, feelings of frustration and helplessness, team-bonding, making a difference Influence/effects re. awareness, behaviour and long-term goals Site visits, expanding one’s comfort zone awareness of independence, historical and global perspectives, perspective shifts, personal development, confidence, influence in daily-life, effects on long-term goals, specific career goals, academic goals, meaningful application of interests/hobbies Concepts (Teacher Participants) Associated Categories (Teacher Participants) Rationale for facilitating educational travel Personal experiences as a student, enjoyment, independence, continuity and community, citizenship, benefits, global perspective, extending the classroom environment, Specific experiences and teacher observations during educational travel Student tasks, site visits, pre-sessions, post-sessions, unintended circumstances/spontaneous circumstances Teacher and student responsibilities Cultural awareness, logistics, learning experiences Positive impacts that educational travel has on students Global perspectives, maturity, developing skills, curiosity, long-term goals It is evident that the reasons students and teachers participate in educational travel are varied. Clearly, the different focuses and designs of educational trips account for the variations in 77 students’ initial reasons for participation, types of experiences abroad, and the overall impacts of educational travel. Yet, there is also a degree of observable overlap when it comes to emergent categories, and this overlap is evident when comparing student participant responses from different types of educational travel, as well as when comparing teacher participant responses to those of students. This is also apparent regarding the value and impact that educational travel has on both teachers and students. In my next chapter, I weave my findings into a larger discussion pertaining to the value of educational travel for social studies students, which I will also bridge to my personal ruminations on the subject. 78 Chapter 5: Discussion In this chapter I discuss my findings in conjunction with my personal ruminations on the subject of the value and impact of educational travel. My discussion chapter is also written with respect to the relevant literature, which I covered in Chapter Two. Keeping in line with the format of my introduction chapter, in which I introduced the subject of the study, presented the problem, and framed guiding themes and questions, I divided this chapter into subsections that deal with each of the three types of educational travel. A fourth subsection is comprised of a summative discussion pertaining to value and impact of educational travel in general; that is, after considering the implications of each of the three defined types in the previous subsections. 5.1 Discussion: Tour-guided Travel It is clear educational trips that fit the category of tour-guided travel offer the least possibility for transformative learning experiences when compared to the other types of educational travel. This is evident from student and teacher responses, my reflections on my experiences as a teacher facilitating tour-guided travel, and relevant literature on the subject. This is not meant to suggest tour-guided travel is not valuable to a social studies education concerned with citizenship development, fostering empathy, and global and historical perspectives. In fact, tour-guided travel offers a wide range of useful and impactful avenues for students to develop interpersonal skills, confidence, curiosity about the world, and independence. Yet to maximize these impacts, facilitators of tour-guided educational travel need to consider the design and quality of tour-guided trips. I stated in my introduction chapter I once thought I would never go on a tour-guided trip again. After completing my research, my mind has somewhat changed, particularly because of the positive benefits and impacts of tour-guided educational travel recognized by students and 79 teachers. Prior to my study, my experience facilitating tour-guided travel felt somewhat rushed, and much of my time and energy were spent with logistics and the general planning of the trip. The design of the trip was good in that all students were safe, and we were able to see everything on the itinerary. Yet I felt somewhat disconnected to the students’ learning and how the students may have appreciated what they experienced. I knew only a small number of the students before the trip, and I quickly realized I was more of a chaperone than an educator. In my view, the trip’s overall quality could have benefitted from more sessions prior to, during, and after the trip that would have given me opportunities to frame learning objectives, facilitate discussions, and help the kids make connections between the classroom and the bigger world. Yet my findings suggest students and teachers see value in tour-guided travel. Student participants described how their experience with tour-guided educational travel influenced them in a variety of ways, for instance regarding global mindedness, independence, and historical perspectives. Student participant Megan discussed how her experience with tour-guided travel helped her gain the confidence and willingness to organize future trips with friends. Mike described similar growth in independence and confidence, and he also made connections to things he learned about in Social Studies 11, particularly when he toured the beaches of Normandy and war memorial cemeteries. It is clear the impacts that tour-guided travel had on student participants do not constitute what Mezirow (1990) defines as transformative learning, as the participants’ meaning schemes and perspectives likely did not change as a result of this trip. However, I have already discussed that this is not necessarily a fundamental aim of educational travel or a high school social studies education. Teacher participants with experience facilitating educational travel discussed certain impacts that tour-guided trips have on students, including developing global perspectives, 80 maturity, and curiosity. They also highlighted the notion of “extending the classroom to the bigger world” as a key responsibility of teachers during educational travel. Teacher participants also discussed that with any type of travel students are responsible for acting as ambassadors of their schools’ values, which ultimately reflect those of Canadian society and culture. This resonates with what Osborne (2016) discusses with respect to educators’ roles with social studies and citizenship education. I argued in chapter one that teachers operate fluidly along a spectrum that connects a social initiation and social reform approach on one side with a personal development and intellectual development approach on the other. Given the nature of tour-guided travel and considering my findings, educators certainly possess agency with respect to a social initiation approach during a tour-guided trip. The notion of ensuring students act as ambassadors of Canadian values while abroad connects with this. It is because of the positive impacts both student and teacher participants received from tour-guided travel that I feel somewhat inclined to facilitate such trips in the future. My experience with tour-guided travel did not involve enough space where I could contextualize my own choices as an educator with respect to identifying and communicating student learning objectives; as I mentioned earlier early, this could have been implemented in more sessions with students prior to, during and after the trip. Osborne (2016) encourages this type of mindfulness, or rather the importance of teachers being aware of the intentionality behind their choices. In my view, this would have improved the overall quality of the tour-guided trip I facilitated and perhaps increased some of the positive impacts realized by students. Yet, my findings suggest teachers and students—notably students who were on a trip about whose educational value I still harbour some reservation—both recognize positive impacts can be realized through tour-guided 81 educational travel. A number of these positive impacts align with the tenets of democratic citizenship. 5.2 Discussion: Task-specific Travel Based on my findings it is evident students and teachers value task-specific educational travel, albeit differently than tour-guided travel. Nonetheless, my research indicates that certain specific benefits realized by students and teachers who participated in tour-guided travel are also realized from task-specific travel experiences. These benefits include increased confidence, global perspective, and independence. Yet task-specific travel offers in some ways more benefits than tour-guided, and this is evident from my research. For instance, participants discussed how task-specific travel allows for the development of specific skills. Students Eli and Ari both described how their experience participating in the MUN allowed them a multitude of opportunities to develop interpersonal skills, oral speaking abilities, debate skills and political and historical knowledge. Similarly, teacher participant Doug described that task-specific nature-bound camping and outdoor trips allow students to gain increased confidence through problem solving tasks, survival lessons and activities, and nature tours. Ultimately, students and teachers recognize the value of task-specific travel because of the benefits that are also apparent with tour-guided travel, but also because such trips allow students to develop skills necessary for the specific task or tasks relevant to a particular trip. The desire to develop skills through task-specific educational experiences is often rooted in a student’s prior interests and strengths that are relevant to the trip’s main focus. The honing of one’s skills in this regard, particularly if the trip is designed well and offers ample opportunity for students to negotiate their perspectives and sense of ability in new surroundings, contributes to higher confidence, independence and empathy. 82 My initial thoughts towards task-specific travel were validated in light of my findings, and I understand more clearly the value students and teachers see in this type of educational trip. In Chapter One I reflected on my experience of taking two of my students to San Diego to participate in the MUN. I described how the entire MUN conference, complete with guest speakers, debates, and conflict resolution debates, was a valuable educational experience for the students. My findings confirmed this; specific tasks and activities connected to this type of educational trip allow for opportunities for students to develop certain skills and students and teachers recognized value in this. My findings also indicated that task-specific educational travel, more so than tour-guided educational travel, offers opportunities for transformative learning to take place. For instance, student participant Eli contextualized his own behaviour; he described how the trip impacted him with respect to developing interpersonal skills, his disposition towards others in a collaborative working environment, and understanding power dynamics in student-teacher relationships. Likewise, Ari described how task-specific travel impacted her similarly. Students’ ability to realize these benefits has to do partly with the design and quality of task-specific educational trips. Like tour-guided travel, a task-specific trip centred on something like a MUN conference is highly organized with a detailed itinerary is built-in to its design. This involves a responsibility on the part of a teacher facilitating such a trip to help students prepare for specific tasks that the students are involved in during the trip. For example, I facilitated several sessions prior to the MUN trip in which Eli and Ari where able to discuss their roles and responsibilities. Teacher participants Doug and Brock also described such responsibilities on the part of teachers, which ensure students maximize the benefits associated with the specific focus of the trip. This being said, the value students and teachers see in task-specific educational travel stems from the fact that those who participate in this type of travel typically have a keen interest 83 in the focus and main activity of a trip, and are therefore motivated to get the most out of the educational travel experience. 5.3 Discussion: Socially Immersive Educational Travel The value students and teachers see in task-specific educational travel is similar to how students and teachers appreciate socially immersive educational travel. Also, teachers and students who participate in socially immersive travel are typically inclined to get the most out of their experiences during an educational trip with respect to broadening one’s worldview and developing one’s global perspective. In other words, there is more deep thought that goes into a student’s decision to partake in a socially immersive travel experience than with a student’s decision to partake in tour-guided travel. Further, based on my research, it is evident that socially immersive travel offers the most possibility out of the three types of educational travel with respect to transformative learning experiences. In Chapter One I reflected on my own experiences with socially immersive educational travel, focusing on a trip I facilitated to South Africa. I discussed that it was a powerful trip for the group of students whom I accompanied, but this claim was based primarily on my observations during the trip and from conversations I had with students, which were casual in nature. My research confirms that socially immersive travel is indeed valued by students, particularly when it comes to the myriad of frustrating, enjoyable, and empowering experiences that are possible with this type of trip, experiences that are rich with learning opportunities and have long-lasting impacts on students. I also explained my frustrations with my experience as a teacher and facilitator, which stemmed from witnessing borderline racist behaviour on the part of some of our local hosts. 84 My research indicates that my initial reflections and thoughts regarding frustrating and unsettling encounters as a part of socially immersive educational travel are accurate; such encounters are not shortcomings of a socially-immersive trip’s design or quality, and in fact they can provide insight and jumping-off points for discussions and lessons. Teachers who have experience with these kinds of trips obtain a wealth of real-world examples they can use to help facilitate student learning in their development of historical and global perspectives. Further, student participants spoke vividly about their frustrating experiences during their socially immersive experience. One participant even broke down emotionally and cried as she described her frustrations. Some of the encounters that participants described involved witnessing economic disparity, the shortcomings of a local healthcare system, and social inequalities and prejudices. My findings reveal that students appreciate the full range of experiences associated with socially immersive travel, from frustrating to enjoyable ones, and therefore place a high degree of value on this type of educational trip. Further, socially immersive travel affects students’ long-term decisions regarding post-secondary educational and career choices, as well as plans for becoming involved with philanthropic endeavours and organizations. This marks a similarity with how students value task-specific travel, yet the long-term nature of socially immersive travel allows for a larger array of impactful experiences. Socially-immersive travel has tremendous potential to affect students’ global perspectives. The potential impacts realized from this type of educational trip bridge soundly with Boix-Mansilla and Gardner’s (2007) discussion pertaining to global consciousness, as my research indicates, students’ global sensitivity, global understanding, and global self can be impacted through socially immersive educational travel. My findings indicate teachers value socially immersive educational travel largely for these reasons. Socially immersive educational travel 85 provides students with hands-on and interactive experiences in foreign contexts, and involves more than just the acquisition of surface knowledge. Boix-Mansilla and Gardner (2007) state that teachers need to act as “brokers between children and their rapidly changing environment—not mere conveyers of certified information” (p. 62), and this is paramount to a teacher’s role during a socially-immersive trip, particularly when students are faced with situations that spur feelings of frustration and being overwhelmed. 86 Chapter 6: Conclusion This final chapter discusses the implications of my study regarding its contribution to social studies education scholarship, and revisits the limitations of the study and suggests possibilities for future research. In Chapter Three, I briefly touched on my study’s limitations. Here I build on my earlier comments, which were anticipatory in nature. In this section I expand on these comments in light of my findings as well as my personal reflections on educational travel. In this regard, I offer possible new areas for research focus pertaining to the benefits of educational travel. For reference, here are the three research questions I posed in Chapter One: 1. Considering how travel involves time, money, and commitment, what are the initial reasons why students and teachers participate in educational trips? 2. What were some specific experiences during educational trips that were particularly significant to students and teachers? 3. How have such experiences and impacts influenced students and teachers in their daily lives in respect to social awareness, daily behaviour and long-term goals? Prior to this study, it was clear that students and teachers see value and realize benefits from educational travel experiences. The fact that teachers spend significant amounts of time facilitating different types of educational trips speaks to this, as does the fact that students eagerly participate in a variety of educational trips. What my research shines light on, however, is that students and teachers value different types of educational trips in a variety of specific ways. This 87 relates to the initial reasons for participating in an educational trip, the quality and design of educational trips, and the specific benefits different types of educational trips offer. As I have explained throughout this study, I have broken the types of educational trips common to high school educational travel into three categories: tour-guided; task-specific; and socially immersive. The initial reasons why students and teachers participate in educational travel relate to the value that they see in educational travel experiences. For example, students typically become involved in tour guided trips for reasons related to camaraderie, developing independence, and visiting specific destinations. Teachers become involved for similar reasons, but also because they see value in the possible connections students can make between classroom learning and what they experience during their time abroad. The data indicate that students who have participated in tour guided travel see value in making connections between the classroom and bigger world, which validates teachers’ initial reasons for facilitating tour-guided trips. When it comes to task-specific and socially immersive trips, students become involved in these types of trips for similar reasons. However, as I described earlier in this chapter, students who sign up for task-specific and socially immersive trips are typically keen to participate in the specific tasks and activities associated with a particular trip, be they academic, service-oriented, or recreational. Teachers who facilitate these types of travel recognize this level of pre-disposition in students. As with tour-guided trips, if the quality and design aspects of a trip are considered with care, teachers see tremendous value in task-specific and socially immersive trips with respect to students having a variety of opportunities to develop specific skills, broaden perspectives, gain confidence and independence, and bridge classroom learning to the bigger world. The quality and design of an educational trip, regardless of which category it falls under, largely determine the type of benefits that can be realized by students, and also influence how 88 students and teachers value a particular travel experience. Quality and design include organization, itineraries, the qualifications of local guides and tours, as well as the opportunities provided for students to interact and learn. As the findings of this study have shown, students and teachers recognize that different trips have different educational aims. Participants described that such aims can be best realized if certain quality and design aspects of a trip, such as the ones listed above, are considered and the necessary effort is put forth to ensure a valuable learning and travel experience. My research indicates that if the logistics, organization and learning aims of a trip are put in place, then teachers will be in a better place to facilitate student learning and help guide students through a variety of experiences that are part of educational travel. Also, students respond well to a trip that is well organized, has a clear focus, and offers interactive and hands-on learning experiences with a degree of self-direction. Ultimately, students and appreciate the general experience of travel, regardless if a trip has hiccups or not, but they place the highest value on trips to which organizers and facilitators have taken quality and design seriously. When it comes to the propensity of educational trips to provide students with powerful learning experiences that verge on transformative, this study suggests that tour-guided travel offers the lowest possibility in this regard. As I discussed earlier, this does not take away from the value that students and teachers see in this type of educational travel but rather speaks to the different types of impacts and benefits that are yielded by different educational trips. For example, an important benefit that tour guided educational travel has on students is increased confidence with respect to travelling independently later in life. This is an important aim of tour-guided travel, and students and teachers place value on this, but such benefits are not rooted in transformative learning experiences. 89 Notwithstanding, certain task specific and socially immersive travel experiences are more likely to have influence on the significant decisions that students make later in life. For example, students’ post-secondary and career choices, as well as plans to join philanthropic efforts and organizations, can be directly related to experiences from task specific and socially immersive travel. My findings reveal that of these two types of trips, socially immersive travel offers the highest degree of possibility for deeply impactful experiences, largely because of the long-term nature of this category of educational travel. 6.1 Influences on My Professional Practice This study has allowed me to reflect on my own practice as a social studies teacher in several ways. First, I plan to continue facilitating educational travel, and I intend to apply what I have learned from my study’s findings to future trips. Attaining a deeper understanding of student and teacher perspectives towards educational travel has simply reinforced my own appreciation of such experiences. Also, learning more about the value students see in education travel has given me a heightened awareness that will serve me well with future endeavors. Second, I plan to investigate and facilitate local opportunities that allow students similarly valuable learning experiences. Many of the benefits that students associate with educational travel, particularly those realized from task-specific and socially immersive experiences, can most likely be realized from participating in activities and initiatives that are closer to home. For instance, students do not have to travel half-way around the world to participate in activities that involve helping others; students can learn about and partake in numerous local issues and initiatives that pertain to subjects of income equality, infrastructure repair, and community outreach. Of course, this is not to take away from the benefits of travelling far and wide. In fact, local experiences in combination with global ones can help foster rich understanding of what it means to be a 90 globally-minded and empathetic citizen, particularly with respect to becoming mindful of the varied conditions people face at home and abroad, and that such realities are all important and deserve attention. Finally, my study has also illuminated for me the importance of ongoing reflection as part of any learning experience, especially ones as complex and daunting as educational trips. Opportunities for reflection can allow for a better understanding of student learning, as well as help students and teachers work through difficult and frustrating experiences that can occur during an educational trip. Ultimately, reflection is paramount to developing the ability to contextualize situations, one’s own behavior and feelings, and reflection can also help with negotiating a sense of self-identity in a complex world. 6.2 Implications and Limitations Revisited I discussed in my Methodology chapter that my study is limited because it is small-scaled case study which focused solely on the case of one high school in British Columbia. There is no large-scale comparison of results between different sets of participants from differently cultural and socio-economic contexts as this was not the intent of my study. A larger scale study would provide more information about how educational travel can affect large-scale patterns pertaining to academic achievement and socialization. The students who participated in task-specific and socially immersive travel all appeared to initially hold inclinations towards social justice and global awareness prior to their trips, and as I stated previously, this makes drawing conclusions problematic as to whether educational travel experiences plant the seeds of compassion and global consciousness among those who are not already predisposed prior to a trip. A larger-scale version of this study may help fill some of these gaps. For example, an extensive interview process that involves a more socio-economically diverse participant roster 91 would shine light on the value that students and teachers from an array of backgrounds place on educational travel; and perhaps help address questions pertaining to how educational travel can affect one’s ability to negotiate a sense of identity with a given locality and cultural context. Also, a longer-term version of this study could involve following participants through subsequent periods in their school years to see how educational travel experiences may affect achievement, willingness to participate in new things, and interpersonal engagements. In other words, it may be of value to observe some of the experiences participants of this study described as being direct influences and impacts from their educational experiences. This study contributes to social studies education scholarship because it discusses and documents benefits and impacts associated with educational travel. Educational travel helps with developing global and historical perspectives and knowledge, as well as provides opportunities for students to partake in interactive activities ranging from developing specific skills to service-learning efforts. Experiences students have during educational trips have the potential to be deeply impactful to the point where they can inform major decisions students make later in life, notably with respect to post-secondary education, career opportunities, and philanthropy. The implications of my research are helpful to social studies educational efforts, particularly when considering education systems that aim to foster notions of democracy, open-mindedness, and empathy. Considering this, another area of possible study could involve researching how the value and benefits of educational travel align with curricular goals and pedagogy, particularly within the context of social studies education. For example, recent curricular changes in British Columbia involve mandates that hold educators responsible for helping students develop abilities to “impart and exchange information, experiences and ideas,” and to “explore the world around them.” This resonates soundly with the aims and benefits of 92 educational travel as identified by teachers and students. In fact, the Core Competencies, which are learning benchmarks that anchor much of BC’s new curriculum, represent a paradigm in which curiosity and empathetic worldviews are vital to intellectual development, notions of global citizenry, and personal awareness and responsibility. Again, these educational motives clearly align with the value that teachers and students see in educational travel. Ultimately, there are numerous possibilities for further research in this area, and my findings indicate that students and teachers see tremendous value in educational travel. 93 References Anderson, D., Kisiel, J., & Storksdieck, M. 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Journal of Travel Research, 25(1), 20-25. doi: 10.1177/004728758602500104 Seixas, P. (2012). Indigenous historical consciousness: An oxymoron or a dialogue. In M. Carretero, M. Asensio & M.R. Moneo (Eds.). History education and the construction of national identities, (pp.125-138). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Week, L. (2012). I am not a tourist: Aims and implications of “traveling”. Tourist Studies, 12(2), 186-203. doi: 10.1177/1468797612454627 95 Appendices Appendix A and B contain the interview questions that were used to collect data for this study. Appendix A contains the questions posed to student participants, and Appendix B contains the questions posed to teacher participants. Appendix A: Student Participants NOTE: The first sub-section in this appendix contains questions posed to all student participants. The remaining subsections in this appendix contain questions that were posed only to the students who were part of the type of educational trip that each subsection concerns. A1: Questions for all Student Participants 1) Please describe your initial interest in travelling to (France and the UK; San Diego; South Africa) as part of a school-based trip. In other words, why did you want to go on this trip? 2) Were you encouraged by parents, friends and/or teachers to travel to _____ as part of a school-based trip? Why do you think they encouraged you to take part in this trip? 3) Describe specific things you remember about how you felt in anticipation of your trip to _____. 4) School trips offer a chance for students to travel in ways that may not be available to them otherwise (explain if needed). Please explain how your trip to _____, being a school-based trip, factored into your feelings and anticipations leading up to the trip. Consider how this trip involved being away from immediate family, friends, and the comforts of home, and also how it promised to tie-in to a school subject or focus. 5) Explain why you think other students participated in this school-based trip to _____. 6) Please describe one or two things you experienced on your trip that you remember as enjoyable. 96 7) Please describe one or two things you experienced on your trip that you remember as a valuable learning experience that more or less fit with your expectations and anticipations of your trip. 8) Can you describe an experience from your trip that you remember as particularly frustrating or challenging, and perhaps even made you uncomfortable or confused? 9) Would you describe your trip as overall a positive or negative experience? A2: Tour-guided Educational Travel 1) What do you remember about these particular experiences? Can you connect what you remember about any of these experiences to anything you covered in social studies class before and/or after the trip, to any pre-trip or post-trip discussion inside or outside of school? 2) Did this trip influence you as a student, in that perhaps it provided you with a first-hand look at things you may not have covered in a class? Please explain how this trip changed your perception of school and affected you as a student. 3) In what sense was this trip impactful for you inside and outside of school? Was the camaraderie the most important aspect of the trip for you, or was it a particular site visit, or simply the experience of busy travel? Please explain how this trip influenced your life in a variety of ways. 4) This trip was essentially planned-out from start to finish, and we did have some prep/planning sessions, as well as one wrap up session that involved sushi and a slide show. What do you think could have been handled differently, if anything, in regard to such aspects as planning, itinerary, support from a teacher, and more pre- and post-sessions to make the trip more meaningful, enjoyable, and academically impactful? 97 A3: Task-specific educational travel 1) What do you remember specifically about your experience participating in the Model UN in respect to meeting new people, feeling prepared, nervous, and excited? How did prior preparation (at school, on the plane, and at the host Rotarian’s house) factor into your experience? 2) Do you feel that this trip contributed in any way to your confidence level with regard to presenting, debating and researching? 3) What kinds of things happened on this trip that you did not anticipate, and how did they impact you? 4) Do you feel that this trip affected you in any way in respect to how you interact with peers and view the role of teachers? 5) What from this trip continues to influence you in your daily life and future plans, both academically and personally? A4: Socially Immersive Educational Travel 1) What particular experiences do you feel were particularly significant and important for your group as a whole, and why? 2) Can you tell me about how the structure of the trip, i.e. the itinerary and what you were tasked with doing, allowed you to experience things that gave you a sense of accomplishment? 3) Can you tell me about a situation in which you witnessed something that contributed to a sense of frustration or helplessness? Did you discuss this with your fellow group members, or anyone else for that matter, and were your feelings validated in any way? 98 4) How does what you have learned and experienced continue to affect you in life? In other words, are your interests (new and old), plans for your future, and your worldview informed/influenced by your experiences from this trip? 5) Based on your relationship with the group you travelled with, what do you think other students took away from this trip, and how do you think that plays out in their lives? 6) Do you think that this kind of travel experience is beneficial to students’ overall development as they go through high school? 7) Are there any significant changes/developments in how you view things in your daily life as a result of your trip? 8) Did your trip affect you as a high school student in terms of how you engaged with your classes? 9) Do you view anything about the world differently as a result of your trip experience, and does that affect your daily life in any significant way? 99 Appendix B: Teacher Participants 1) What were some of your first experiences with educational travel and how did you initially become involved? 2) How many educational trips have you been a part of as either an organizer or chaperone? Where have you taken students? 3) Can you talk about the different focuses of the various trips in which you have been involved? Considering the different focuses, which trips do you feel were the most successful in achieving their aims? 4) Can you tell me about some of the logistical challenges that teachers face when organizing trips? 5) Given the logistical challenges of organizing educational trips, why do you continue to facilitate and chaperone them? 6) Do you think, based on your experiences, that teachers become involved with educational travel for different reasons? Is there a unifying rationale that you can identify in teachers who facilitate educational travel? 7) What do you think students need to be responsible for during an educational trip, considering that school based trips are often different in nature to recreational or vacation travel? 8) In your view, how should students benefit from educational travel, considering the different types of educational trips? 9) What are potential hazards of educational travel in your view? 10) Do different types of trips offer different benefits for students? 11) What do you think teachers need to be responsible for with regard to educational travel, that is, once logistics and general planning are taken care of? 100 12) Can you talk a little bit about educational travel in respect to the opportunities it creates to foster a sense of community, empathy and citizenship in students? Can you elaborate on specific experiences in this regard? 13) Do you feel that educational trips can impact students in ways that regular classroom instruction can’t? What, in your view, needs to be considered with any type of educational trip to maximise the positive impacts? """@en ; edm:hasType "Thesis/Dissertation"@en ; vivo:dateIssued "2017-05"@en ; edm:isShownAt "10.14288/1.0343604"@en ; dcterms:language "eng"@en ; ns0:degreeDiscipline "Social Studies Education"@en ; edm:provider "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en ; dcterms:publisher "University of British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:rights "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International"@* ; ns0:rightsURI "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"@* ; ns0:scholarLevel "Graduate"@en ; dcterms:title "The impact of educational travel on high school social studies students"@en ; dcterms:type "Text"@en ; ns0:identifierURI "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/61221"@en .