The 10 students I brought to Brazil in January didn’t come home talking about the white-sand beaches of Copacabana or the peak of Corcovado, though we visited both. They came home talking about Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, and the morning we spent listening to stories of urban reform in his chilly, Art Deco office. They revisited discussions we had with leaders of Vila Autódromo, the community slated for demolition to make way for the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Park.

In July, I brought another group of high school students to India to study India’s vast and rapidly changing education system. Highlights of our 48 hours in Bangalore were a meeting with Edumedia, an organization that designs quality multimedia for the classroom; a visit to a science class in a high-performing private school serving a predominantly poor, Muslim neighborhood; and finally a morning spent at a tiny rural primary school supported by the Sikshana Foundation. This bustling hub for technology and innovation was our first stop in South India; and though subsequent stops in Kerala and Tamil Nadu enabled us to explore more of India’s cultural and historic heritage, these focused visits and the insider access they provided us made Bangalore a favorite destination.

I founded Atlas Workshops, which leads short, focused international research trips for high school students (we design workshops for college students as well) to change how students engage the world. Our workshops each answer a central question: Who will benefit from Rio’s Olympics? What can we learn from India’s efforts at education reform? Then we weave meetings with leaders and organizations, as well as cultural visits, into an itinerary that promotes learning through discovery. At the end of each trip, we collaborate on a project with local partners that begins to address the problem we’re learning about; we visit new countries not as tourists seeking the most authentic experience or best photo opportunity but as researchers and collaborators, working toward global impact.

Our inquiry-based approach empowers young travelers to absorb the places we visit, to genuinely engage with the individuals and organizations we partner with — and then own that experience.  

After visiting schools and educational organizations throughout South India, we brought it all home with a collaborative project in Madurai, a dusty city in the heart of Tamil Nadu. Set in a poorly-paved, residential neighborhood a few miles from downtown Madurai, Vidiyal is a non-profit organization that empowers youth from one of the city’s largest slums. We spent three days working with students from Vidiyal to develop after-school lesson plans that met some of the gaps in education we’d observed. I watched as our students fought a language barrier to form friendships with their Indian peers and jointly invent new curriculum about environmental conservation and good teaching.

The next generation of global travelers needs to understand nuance and develop a comfort in navigating cultures, languages, social contexts and ideas. Project-based international workshops offer students the tools and impetus to do so. As our group left Vila Autódromo in Rio, we stopped to look back at the massive Olympic construction site next door. One of the students asked me what Jaime Lerner, with his record of promoting inclusive urban planning, would have thought of this project.

Together we watched the sun set over this urban landscape whose stories and complexities we’d taken on as our own, if only for a short while. 

— Adam White, online contributor