Abstract
Educational travel has been demonstrated to be an effective means of education to develop sustainable and pro-environmental behaviors. However, as this paper reviews, recent scholarship has revealed that educational travel may harm the communities that host it even while it is achieving gains for students. This paper encourages educational travel providers (institutions, staff, and faculty) to leverage the need for a broader perspective towards sustainability in educational travel programs so that their host communities also benefit. The programs can accomplish this by engaging students in the process of making the programs and their participants more sustainable. The paper ends with several examples from the author’s own experience as an educational travel leader and several recommendations to reduce the negative impacts on host communities.
Highlights
Wits are needful for someone who travels widely . . . Hávamál [1]Educational travel programs, i.e. programs including field courses, study abroad, and semester exchanges where students have learning experiences in locations far from campus and typically abroad, have been shown to be effective learning environments where students develop sustainable and pro-environmental behaviors that extend beyond the programs regardless of the program’s thematic focus [2,3,4,5]
As awareness of the impacts of climate change today and in the near future increases, there is a growing call to limit travel and to avoid travel that generates greenhouse gases: A Washington Post opinion piece pleas to the reader with its title: “for the love of the Earth, stop traveling” [10]; in Sweden, a movement is afoot to vacation by train rather than plane, inspired in part by the actions of a 16-year old Swede, Greta Thunberg, who famously travelled by train from Stockholm to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019 to demand action on climate change from world leaders [11]
Educational travel in its many varied forms offers powerful learning opportunities for students. These opportunities can come with a price that we often have pushed off onto host communities and regions
Summary
Educational travel programs, i.e. programs including field courses, study abroad, and semester exchanges where students have learning experiences in locations far from campus and typically abroad, have been shown to be effective learning environments where students develop sustainable and pro-environmental behaviors that extend beyond the programs (in some cases, well into their adult lives) regardless of the program’s thematic focus [2,3,4,5]. Students who participate in educational travel, in programs that encourage experiential learning and focus on sustainability or the environment, are better equipped to face the challenges of today and tomorrow. Dvorak et al were not wrong—in a world striving to prevent catastrophic climate change, educational travel that involves greenhouse gas emissions begs rationalization. Educational travel programs can be intrusive in host communities and environments [13,14,15]. To make the benefits of educational travel sustainable for all stakeholders involved, program leaders and the universities or sponsoring organizations have to address the currently unsustainable aspects of their programs. Reflecting on my own experiences and research, I explore ways to engage the student learning process in crafting more sustainable educational programs
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