Making the Most of a Trip

Keep in mind that all Horizons Learning Adventures trips are designed by college professors.  This means that we plan the trips like we plan our classes, and that involves a lot of reverse engineering. For example, if i know that in my class on a specific day we're going to looking at a west African carving or reading a Rumi poem or listening to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme then I'm going to devote time to figuring out what intellectual tools I can give the students to make that moment more powerful; essentially, we're reverse engineering the course to make each moment as rich and transformative as possible.  We take the same approach with a trip.  When we're on Pemba we will witness a spirit possession ceremony.  If you just walked up to that ceremony it would you would doubtless find it interesting, but our job as educators is to give you the intellectual tools to take the experience to an entirely different level; to truly understand what we're witnessing.  On a HLA trip we'll start long before the plane leaves the ground, discussing articles and short films - and we'll continue while we're overseas in daily debriefs - to make the experience even more unforgettable.