Develop customized and original student travel programs using our tried-and-true Collaborative Design Process. Our expert guides and long-standing in-country relationships offer participants unique, authentic access to global communities and help you create programs that foster leadership, empathetic learning, and communication skills.
Over the years, we’ve hand-crafted thousands of itineraries for student travel programs. Collaborative program development with WTBD will increase depth and quality, while reducing long-term cost, workload, and risk exposure.
Student programming should be intentional, integrated, and seamlessly facilitated from start to finish. Dragons programming is built from long-standing, carefully managed personal relationships that offer intimate, authentic immersion, and exposure to alternative perspectives on critical global issues. Our model emphasizes low-impact travel, which also allows us to get away from overly curated experiences catered to foreigners. WTBD will manage all details and logistical components of the program, including pre-departure communication and preparation, student paperwork, and management of country-specific risks, and post program debriefing and feedback.
Each student experience is the result of countless hours of careful planning—a weaving together of progressively more challenging and immersive experiences leading students into deeper levels of engagement with place and self. Our three-phase course-design process ensures that every program is customized to consider your vision and goals, offering multiple opportunities along the way to weave together academic themes, specific contacts and places, and most importantly, the passion of students and educators.
We begin with the end in mind. How do we want students to be impacted by their experience? What knowledge, skills, and mindsets do we seek to cultivate through our program? In-person conversations help to identify key learning outcomes, and your programmatic goals as well as institutional risk tolerance. In these conversations we also offer suggestions and feedback based on experience and local realities. A written questionnaire puts further definition to the course vision, and allows us to present a formal proposal, which initiates the next step.
A proposal is drafted using the framework of Dragons core curriculum—an intentional three-phase progression through up to nine program components aimed at fostering our core learning objectives. Because the most important global education outcomes are “caught” not “taught,” we link our defined outcomes with specific experiences, and work backwards to train skills, practice them and ultimately allow students lead their own learning.
Once a program is agreed upon, we begin the process of building the leadership container between Dragons instructors and your faculty. Our goal is to create a unified leadership front in which everyone feels empowered and secure in their role. During this phase, we align individual roles and goals for each faculty and instructor on the course.
Dragons has long benefited from the heroic work and incredible hospitality of our community partners. We’re excited to introduce you to their diverse perspectives on all issues, local and global. Apart from supporting students as they become familiar in a new environment, community partners are successful educators in their own right, bringing a passion for critical global issues, and a love of place to the experience. They are at the center of all that we offer.
Just a few examples include:
Pachitulul, Guatemala
El Alto, Bolivia
Northeast Nicaragua
Dakar, Senegal
