Trip Leaders Research Articles

Medical Brigades to El Salvador and Honduras: Travel imaginaries and volunteer tourist recruitment

In this paper, I explore travel imaginaries in the recruitment of participants to short-term medical brigades in El Salvador and Honduras. I look in particular at how trip leaders and organization website frame the volunteer tourist experience, drawing on familiar, shared imaginaries of poor, backward international settings, and related performative interventions that echo white colonial relationships. Recruitment messaging offers little specific or informed sense of place, ignoring the national histories and socio-economic circumstances of the receiving countries. As a consequence, the health profiles and capacities of El Salvador and Honduras are finally obscured in favor of the valorized performance of visitors and externally-driven protocols and care. The efforts of some brigade sponsors and related organizations to improve health-care delivery to local communities, in particular fundraising among brigade participants and other donors, would seem to separate the link between travel and volunteerism. They continue, however, to reinforce broadly-held imaginaries of international poverty and economic backwardness and related rescue by the Global North. A more realistic understanding of Honduran and Salvadoran economies and politics remains elusive and requires a reorientation of voluntary engagement.

Between exploration and tourism: Carl Irminger’s Iceland travel diary 1826

Abstract In the spring of 1826, the young Danish naval officer Carl Irminger and two of his friends sailed with a cargo ship from Copenhagen to Iceland to stay there during the summer. This article is based on Irminger’s unpublished travel diary. Irminger and his friends blended in with the local elite, which provided them with equipment and contacts to travel. Their journeys out from Reykjavik were adventurous and depended on local guides and the hospitality of residents along the way. The tales of hardships during the travels, combined with contacts established during the trip, became important credentials in Irminger’s future career. He was hired as an adjutant to the Danish prince, and the narrative of his summer in Iceland ignited a royal expedition there in 1834, of which Irminger was to be the trip leader. Irminger’s diary reflects a broader shift from Enlightenment exploration reporting into Romantic travel writing, with more emotional and aesthetic emphasis. His journey was a forerunner of the nature tourism that eventually was to sprout in Iceland.

You Never Really go Home

It was a few days after I had returned, but my mind was still in Costa Rica. Returning from Costa Rica was infuriating; I found myself actually angry that people were just going about their normal daily lives while refugees in Costa Rica were going without water. I began to feel hopeless, like there was nothing I would ever be able to do that would help to resolve the injustices in Costa Rica, let alone the rest of the world, so I began to go about my normal routine. I went to class, hung out with friends, and did homework like I normally would, but this time I felt like I was walking in someone else’s shoes. Sometimes when we take time to slow down and think about a given situation, it can be too painful to deal with, which is why people often try to return to their “normal” lives rather than facing what they just experienced by continuing to think and talk about it. The experience of being in another country, living and serving with its people, and embracing its culture, is an experience that changes you. Stumbling over garbage and gagging on the smell of the dump while walking through a Nicaraguan village in Costa Rica changes you. When you return from service abroad, you don’t return to the same home you once knew. Everything you learned, saw, heard, and smelt stays with you. It impacts how you think, act, and perceive the world around you; quite like trauma.
 Debriefing and making sense of past experiences can help students to form creative ideas and can also prevent students from simply slipping back into their normal routine and unintentionally letting the thoughts and plans for action become memories. When organizing international service trips, the organizers always plan pre-departure activities that will prepare students for what will occur on the trip, but nobody prepares you for coming home. Nobody prepares you for feeling like a stranger in your own home. This is why a space is needed for students to gather when returning home; a space in which they can debrief and reflect. The first step in creating this space is to build the foundations. Trauma research, such as healing justice can be part of that foundation. Another part could be pulled from existing travel models, such as the Jafari model. Helping students to find meaning behind their experiences can help them to better process what they have seen.The type of spaces I am looking for are difficult to build, and will require creativity and careful planning to be strong and sustainable. Trip leaders will need to put as much thought into post-trip sessions as they do into planning the activities that will take place on during the duration of the trip. The materials needed to create this space already exist, now they just need to be put together to create it.

Alcohol Expectations of Short-Term, Faculty-Led Trip Leaders: A Survey of Current Practices

Although a growing body of research examines alcohol consumption among American university students during study abroad, there is little to no research on alcohol-related policies and behavior by faculty leaders during study abroad. This research reports survey results from 66 U.S. colleges and universities on the current state of formal policies for faculty-led trip leaders. The quantitative findings reveal: 1) 93.9% of responding institutions allow trip leaders to consume alcohol during short-term, faculty-led study abroad trips; and 2) even those institutions that discourage faculty consumption with students allow such consumption in certain situations, including group dinners, winery and brewery tours, religious ceremonies, and receptions. The qualitative findings reveal three themes: 1) faculty should exhibit responsible consumption; 2) drinking with students is discouraged but allowed in certain situations; and 3) faculty leaders are never allowed to purchase alcohol for students. The manuscript concludes with a call for additional research on several topics.

Comfort: Context for the Study Abroad Faculty Role.

Universities are increasingly undertaking student study abroad programs led by nursing faculty. The authors launched an inaugural study abroad nursing course. They proposed that the significance of the faculty trip role extends beyond the operational tasks required for international programs. Comfort theory was chosen as a good fit, since it offered a context for the significance of nursing faculty leading study abroad trips. It was consistent with the authors' experiences. Nurse faculty members applying technical and coaching interventions to relieve needs can strengthen students facing the demands of international experiences. It was concluded that comfort theory provided meaningful context for the international trip leader role.

Contested Perspectives on the Social Impacts of a Residential Field Trip

Background: Research into outdoor learning reveals social benefits for trip participants, both individually and collectively. However, this is not universal, and individual participants can experience increased isolation from the wider group. Purpose: This research investigated the underexplored negative experiences of an individual trip participant, in the context of a program promoting collectivist beliefs. Methodology/Approach: An ethnographic methodology was adopted to include full immersion into all aspects of the week-long trip. Data were collected by observation and interviews and analyzed using a conceptual framework around individualism and collectivism. Findings/Conclusions: The teachers perceived the trip as successful, in meeting their collectivist goal of enhancing group cohesion, and data revealed the building of community feelings among the majority of participants, alongside feelings of belonging, togetherness, and mutual support. However, one participant exhibited contrasting individualist perceptions and experiences around interpretations of freedom, privacy, adversity, and cohesion. Implications: Trip leaders need to be mindful of participants as individuals, taking care to neither seek nor project a blanket group identity over all. Within the confines of health and safety and duty of care boundaries, and commensurate with the age range of trip participants, accompanying teachers should understand and respect individual needs within collectivist group socialization agendas.

Setting the Stage: Pre-Trip Preparation for Short-Term Immersion Programs

The authors examine components of pre-trip preparation that influence student trip experiences and learning related to short-term immersion programs. With the use of a transformative learning framework and a multisite longitudinal case study, key components emerged as essential in preparing students for these experiences: community building, learning about social justice issues and trip location, trip leader training, and fundraising.

Effective Use of Personal Assistants for Students With Disabilities: Lessons Learned From the 2014 Accessible Geoscience Field Trip

ABSTRACTIn 2014, the Geological Society of America sponsored an Accessible Field Trip, designed to demonstrate best practices in accommodating a wide variety of participants with disabilities during a field experience. During the trip, an aide was deployed to assist two student participants with sensory disabilities, one with low vision and the other with deafness. The experiences and interactions between the assistant and the students were compiled into a thick description, which was subsequently analyzed through self-reflective case study. The lived experiences of the participants and the assistant are interpreted to describe the efficacy of personal assistants in field study. Effective assistants maintain an awareness that students with disabilities have varying comfort levels with self-advocacy. An effective assistant also facilitates a positive perception of the student with a disability within the full group. Key skills of the personal assistant include awareness of spatial placement, communication, and flexibility. Three fundamental recommendations are presented for the effective use of personal assistants: (1) open and continuous communication as part of pretrip planning, (2) trip leaders must be willing to be flexible and adaptable with their field sites and learning goals, and (3) trip leaders must recognize social and spatial parameters of assisting students with disabilities. Ultimately, trip planners must become familiar with the personal and cultural backgrounds and abilities of their students to plan for an effective instructional excursion.

Evidence-Based Review of Wilderness First Aid Practices

Wilderness First Aid is a common certification for outdoor recreationists, educators, and trip leaders. A panel of educators, researchers, and clinicians evaluated 15 core and eight elective WFA practices for strength of recommendations based on the quality of supporting evidence and balance between the benefits and risks/burdens according to the methodology stipulated by the American College of Chest Physicians. The strength of the evidence for these 23 WFA practices varies widely because of scant published research to date. When no evidence existed, the panel based recommendations on a consensus of the panelists for risk/benefit and best practices. This review clearly points out the need for conducting greater research to strengthen the level of evidence in numerous WFA topics and for educational strategies that improve retention of core knowledge, as well as skill application for the lay first aid provider. Subscribe to JOREL

Voluntourism, sensemaking and the leisure-volunteer duality

A key feature of voluntourism is that participants expect both to be entertained and to help others to different extents. The duality between the leisure and volunteering aspects of the trip creates ambiguities in expectations. This article focusses on group sensemaking about this leisure-volunteer duality and the role of trip leaders in its management. It uses a case study approach to investigate the behaviours of participants on a voluntourist trip to South America. Among other things, it compares participants’ ex ante expectations with ex post evaluations of the trip and tracks the events that shaped views on the quality of the experience. More concretely, the key events that triggered conflicts between the leisure and volunteer dimensions of the trip are identified and analysed using the factors that influenced the sensemaking outcome. Implications centre on the importance and use of sensemaking tools for voluntourist organisations and trip leaders in the management of the leisure-volunteer tensions that are part and parcel of voluntourism.

The Ordovician Exposed: Contributions from the 12th International Symposium on the Ordovician System

For nearly two centuries some of the world's most notable geologists and paleontologists have intensively studied the Ordovician rocks of North America. The "layer cake" sedimentary strata deposited in the vast epicontinental seas of the interior and the flanking folded and thrusted mountain belts provided both complex problems and fertile ground for new theories and methods. The problem of correlating between regions in the large cratonic interior and between disparate biofacies gave rise to exciting new studies in sequence, event, quantitative, and chemostratigraphy. Distinctive and traceable marker beds, geochemically fingerprinted K-bentonites, and carbon isotope excursions allow for correlation with unprecedented precision, which leads to new questions (and answers) about Ordovician climate and oceanography, global carbon cycling, and the timing of tectonic events. Recent innovations in using geochemistry to study the ancient environment has greatly increased our understanding of Ordovician climate cyclicity and its effects on Earth's biota. Advances in geochronology have given the geologic community amazingly precise dates on Ordovician K-bentonites, increasing the precision and usefulness of our most fundamental tool the geologic time scale. In short, it is an exciting time in Ordovician research and the highlights of this work were presented at the 12th International Symposium on the Ordovician System. The conference included fifty-nine talks and 18 posters presentations given by over 80 delegates representing 14 different countries. Its overall theme was Integrated Stratigraphy, and as noted above comprises the latest research in sedimentary geochemistry, geochronology, sequence stratigraphy, event stratigraphy, and quantitative stratigraphic methods. These studies provide the stratigraphic framework and paleoenvironmental context for examining the evolution, diversification, and extinction of Ordovician life. ISOS 2015 also offered 4 field trips - 3 to the southern, central, and northern Appalachian Mountains, and one to eastern and central Oklahoma - to examine classic exposures of Ordovician rocks and the only Ordovician GSSP in the United States. This theme issue includes nine contributed papers that are an expansion on the presentations of 12th International Symposium on the Ordovician System. We would like to thank the presenters, field trip leaders, and manuscript reviewers, all of whom are essential to a successful symposium.

The Ordovician Exposed: Short Papers, Abstracts, and Field Guides for the 12th International Symposium on the Ordovician System

For nearly two centuries some of the world’s most notable geologists and paleontologists have intensively studied the Ordovician rocks of North America. The “layer cake” sedimentary strata deposited in the vast epicontinental seas of the interior and the flanking folded and thrusted mountain belts provided both complex problems and fertile ground for new theories and methods. The problem of correlating between regions in the large cratonic interior and between disparate biofacies gave rise to exciting new studies in sequence, event, quantitative, and chemo-stratigraphy. Distinctive and traceable marker beds, geochemically fingerprinted K-bentonites, and carbon isotope excursions allow for correlation with unprecedented precision, which led to new questions (and answers) about Ordovician climate and oceanography, global carbon cycling, and the timing of tectonic events. Recent innovations in using geochemistry to study the ancient environment has greatly increased our understanding of Ordovician climate cyclicity and its effects on Earth’s biota. Advances in geochronology have given the geologic community amazingly precise dates on Ordovician K-bentonites, increasing the precision and usefulness of our most fundamental tool – the geologic time scale. It is an exciting time in Ordovician research and the highlights of this work are presented here at the 12th International Symposium on the Ordovician System. The conference includes fifty-nine talks and 18 posters presentations given by over 80 delegates representing 14 different countries. Its overall theme is Integrated Stratigraphy, and as noted above comprises the latest research in sedimentary geochemistry, geochronology, sequence stratigraphy, event stratigraphy, and quantitative stratigraphic methods. These studies provide the stratigraphic framework and paleoenvironmental context for examining the evolution, diversification, and extinction of Ordovician life. ISOS 2015 offers 4 field trips - 3 to the southern, central, and northern Appalachian Mountains, and one to eastern and central Oklahoma - to examine classic exposures of Ordovician rocks and the only Ordovician GSSP in the United States. Finally, we would like to thank the presenters, field trip leaders, and manuscript reviewers, all of whom are essential to a successful symposium. On behalf of the entire Organizing Committee, Stephen A. Leslie, Daniel Goldman, and Randall C. Ordorff

The "grand excursion" of the Fifth International Geological Congress (1891): Celebrating geological exploration of the American West

The first International Geological Congress (IGC) ever to be convened in North America (5 th IGC, Washington, D.C., 1891) allowed American geologists to present results of pioneering mapping in the American West to an international community in a field setting. A 25-day “grand excursion” by rail and stagecoach across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon for some 90 participants was organized by Samuel F. Emmons who had earlier served with the Fortieth Parallel Survey. Other trip leaders were G. H. Williams and I. C. White (Appalachian geology), J. P. Iddings (Montana geology), Arnold Hague (Yellowstone National Park), G. K. Gilbert (Basin and Range faulting, history of pluvial Lake Bonneville, and Niagara Falls region), J. W. Powell (Grand Canyon region), and C. W. Cross (Colorado geology). The stature of the U.S. Geological Survey in this golden age of geology was reflected in the large proportion of its members among IGC field-trip leaders and/or guidebook contributors.

Mother Nature's Child (2010)

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 21 No. 1 (2011) ISSN: 1546-2250 Mother Nature's Child (2010) Louise Chawla Citation: Chawla, Louise. (2011). "Mother Nature's Child (2010)." Children, Youth and Environments 21 (1). Produced and directed by Camilla Rockwell. Fuzzy Slippers Productions, Burlington, Vermont. See www.mothernaturesmovie.com for information on purchase, screening and publicity This beautifully conceived and realized 56-minute film seeks to demonstrate that experiences in nature enable children to most fully develop their human potential. The curiosity, wonder, animation, physical agility, pride of accomplishment, and sense of community that shines in the bodies and faces of the children and youth in its scenes suggest that this principle is well grounded. The film features successive stages of childhood and adolescence, beginning with toddlers in a Montessori preschool who use Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. as their playground. Next, the film moves to examples of nature journaling, schoolyard greening, fishing, hunting and tree-fort making in middle childhood, and ends with a group of teens on a six-month wilderness expedition. At each point in life, their teachers, trip leaders, and experts like Richard Louv, Stephen Kellert and David Sobel talk about the possibilities that the natural world offers for discovery and development. Jon Young, a tracker and naturalist, sums up one of the film’s main messages: “The health of a human being and the health of our culture lies in our ability to bring that connection with nature back in.” Some key topics covered are health, stewardship, risk management, uses of technology, spirituality, and community building. The film closes with the testimony of parents, enthusiastic about the benefits they have seen when their children play and learn outdoors. Richard Louv has the concluding statement: “If we start to think about our schools and workplaces and neighborhoods and cities that actually, through the infusion of nature into everyday life, become happier and healthier and smarter places—that is an exciting future!” The DVD includes a brief study guide for discussion groups for the audiences it seeks to reach: parents, teachers, community groups, high school and university students, professionals at environmental and educational conferences, families and friends. The guide suggests ground rules for open-minded dialogues about the film’s themes and offers questions and prompts. One of the film’s merits is that it includes children, teachers and parents from a range of ethnic groups and income levels and from rural, suburban and inner-city neighborhoods. It demonstrates that its themes are relevant no matter where children live, and it suggests how to create opportunities 368 for discovery, challenge and wonder in nature in a wide range of settings. Information on purchase, screenings, and posters is available on the film’s website. ...

The Impact of Participation in an Inclusive Adventure Education Trip on Group Dynamics

The purpose of this ethnographic case study was to understand the impact of participation in an inclusive 3-day rock climbing trip on the group dynamics of seven participants ages 10–14 years that included a 13 year old male diagnosed with High Functioning Autism. The five stage model of group development (Tuckman, 1965; Tuckman & Jensen, 1977) was used as the lens to guide the design and data analysis of the study. Not withstanding the limitations of this study the findings suggest that the participants in this 3-day inclusive rock bonded as a group over the duration of the experience. The catalyst for the change in group dynamics on this trip was the explicit teambuilding session conducted by the trip leaders. Recommendations are provided to help to facilitate positive group dynamics within inclusive groups.

<i>New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora</i> (review)

Jews: End of the Jewish Diaspora, by Caryn Aviv and David Shneer. York: York University Press, 2005. 214pp. $18.95. Buses whisked a group of Jewish college students from Ben Gurion airport to the room where the first Prime Minster of signed the Declaration of Independence in 1948. Welcome Home, the trip leader called out to the disoriented and exhausted participants in a Birthright program. As one of the counselors on this trip several years ago, I looked around to see how the students would respond. Even as a Jew who felt very strongly connected to Israel, I wondered whether the language of reflected my own understanding of the Diaspora-Israel relationship. I expected that the young adults wearing baseball caps and sweatshirts with college logos would find this message of homecoming even more bewildering less than two hours into their first trip to the country. I was reminded of this experience while reading David Shneer and Caryn Aviv's provocative study, Jews: End of the Jewish Diaspora. authors' argument that the State of no longer represents the central address for a new generation of contextualized my own response in the Hall of Independence as part of a larger trend. Contemporary Jews, Shneer and Aviv argue, feel increasingly at home and fully settled all over the world from San Francisco to Moscow. This phenomenon is transforming the role that plays in the construction of personal and communal Jewish identity among this population, whom they label the New Jews. No longer burdened with a sense of inferiority, outside the homeland have created locally nourished expressions of Jewish life and de-centered networks that render the dichotomy between and of questionable descriptive value. Subtitling the book The End of the Jewish Diaspora reflects the authors'conviction that the cultural, religious, and geographic hierarchies encoded within the concepts of Israel andDiaspora belie the experiences of the New Jews. Aviv and Shneer support their bold claims by providing ethnographic reports of thriving Jewish centers. These case studies illuminate overlooked corners of the Jewish world. We tour Crown Heights with the Hasidic Discovery Center, pray with a group of American tourists in neo-Hasidic synagogues in Safed, and visit with the first female rabbi of Russia. One particularly fascinating chapter, Castro, Chelsea, and Tel Aviv, explores how queer create different expressions of Jewish and queer identities in America and Israel. At the same time, queer also maintain global communities that transcend geography. Focusing on this rarely studied community provides an effective lens for clarifying the importance of considering local milieu in the formation of identity, the prevalence of multiple transnational Jewish networks each built around shared interests and concerns, and the give-and-take nature of the dialogue between Israelis and living elsewhere in the world. Other chapters, however, suggest that there remains a significant gap between the authors' ideal typology of New Jews as fully settled in their respective communities and the realities they encountered in their research. For instance, Let My People Stay, the first chapter in the book, sets out to replace perceptions of the Russian Jewish experience as moribund with images of a secure and thriving community which parallels patterns of North American Jewry. Yet the long discussion of the prevalence of antisemitism in Russia, particularly the disturbing popularity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, left me with more, rather than fewer, questions about the long-term viability of Russian Jewish life. …

Experiential Learning Activities for Leisure and Enrichment Travel Education: A Situative Perspective

ABSTRACT This paper explores how experiential learning activities can be incorporated in leisure and enrichment travel education. It presents a description of the process used in designing and implementing nonformal experiential learning activities for an educational travel program to Brazil based on the trip leader's reflections. Trip activities are analyzed based on the situative theory of experiential learning. The paper concludes with lessons learned and recommendations for educational travel program design.

Injury Rates During Water-Based Wilderness Recreation

This study came about after the author approached several people in the wilderness-recreation field about their risk-management practices, especially those related to training people who lead trips involving water exposure. The author was surprised that no widely accepted standards exist for training trip leaders or for the skills they need to deal with cases of water emergency. Some people even speculated that injury rates would increase if more water-safety training were conducted because injury rates during land-based activities were assumed to be greater. Although it was outside the scope of this effort to test all current opinions about wilderness water safety held by every practitioner in the field, the author hopes that this study will initiate more conversation about a topic that has not gotten much attention. The purpose of the study was to compare injury rates between water-based wilderness recreation and other backcountry activities and investigate whether more needs to be done to reduce the probability of injury during water-related backcountry activities.

Important Co‐leader Skills and Traits on Extended Outdoor Trips as Perceived by Leaders

Although wilderness trips are typically co‐led, there is a deficit of research literature exploring the dynamics of co‐leadership in the field. This study was conducted to determine the skills and traits outdoor adventure trip leaders perceived to be important for their co‐leaders to possess on an extended outdoor trip. Utilizing Q‐methodology, a 36‐item instrument developed from the leadership literature was administered to 17 outdoor leaders. Three factors representing three distinct leadership beliefs were determined and are characterized by the titles: People‐Empowering Leaders, Wilderness‐Power Leaders, and Universal Leaders. Five trends in leader/co‐leader preferences are discussed. This study offers implications to practice in outdoor recreation for organizations and outdoor trip leaders.

EMELEUS, C. H. & BELL, B. R. 2005. British Regional Geology: the Palaeogene Volcanic Districts of Scotland, 4th ed. x + 214 pp. + map in folder. Keyworth: British Geological Survey. Price £18.00 (paperback). ISBN 0 85272 519 1

This, the long-overdue fourth edition of this book, has been completely rewritten by two of the most knowledgeable petrologists currently working on the British Tertiary Igneous Province: Henry Emeleus (Durham) and Brian Bell (Glasgow). Given the undoubted petrological pedigree of the two authors it is no surprise that this publication is first class and is suitable for use by a wide variety of people ranging from undergraduates, school teachers, researchers, lecturers, field trip leaders, civil engineers to enthusiastic amateur geologists. The book is written in clear and lucid style and is lavishly illustrated with numerous colour maps, tables, diagrams and stratigraphic columns, all of which are ideal for teaching purposes. A significant number of well chosen clear photographs and some photomicrographs also illustrate the most salient geological features of the area. A useful A3 foldout colour map of the Scottish Palaeogene igneous province is also …