Padawan Travelers: Student Educational Trips

The best part about being a visual design teacher is the ability to create projects that force students to use Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. This is the example presented to students in "Episode 1: Educational Travel" so they could understand my expectations. In addition, the project teaches students how to create a podcast, create artwork, and write keyword content so they can promote it on social media and see how their podcast grows over the school year. Please listen and share with anyone you know interested in Educational Travel. The more I can get

Padawan Travelers is the website and non-profit I created to help students raise money through fundraising to support their travel. The idea started as a simple website, so I could put all the trips in one location and create a Q&A for parents to help them prepare their students for travel abroad. It's grown a bit since first starting in 2019. We have seven teachers traveling to places they are passionate about, and in 2023 we have over 300 students traveling to Australia, England, France, Italy, Peru, Ecuador, and Germany. It's funny how my love of photography and travel has developed into something that supports students' love of travel and adventure.

Cellphone Image with Padawan Travelers information of Italian countryside south of Florence, Italy, during a summer 2022 Educational Travel tour.

I retired from the Navy in 2011, and after a few adventures, I discovered that I love teaching visual design. However, the best part of serving in the Navy as a Photojournalist and Public Relations Officer is traveling and discovering our world. I was lucky and had the opportunity to travel to 64 countries, creating storytelling images of Sailors helping others and doing various global missions.

Educational Travel is an excellent vehicle for students to gain global competency. Whether domestic or international, travel provides students hands-on experience and life lessons that transcend the classroom. As a result, students can comprehend, recall, analyze, and apply real-world lessons learned through their personal experiences.

Our goal is to identify educational trips for students to tour historical sites and cities with rich cultural significance. These trips allow students to see and experience the broader world around them that books alone cannot provide.

You can never travel without taking a selfie. I always tell my students that I have a face for radio and a voice for print. (Photo by Ty Swartz, Photog.Cr., CPP)

Students are traveling more today than ever before. As teachers, we strive to impart multicultural awareness to our students, but the school environment's confines limit us, and exploring real-world global diversity is rare. Educational travel abroad allows students to meet people from different cultures and actively immerse themselves in culture, history, and diversity. In addition, students feel a sense of connection with others, encouraging respect and understanding while gaining knowledge from a new perspective.

In general, travel is an educational experience because going someplace new puts us out of our comfort zone and into a new perspective, a new place, and new self-awareness. When you add international travel to your student's experiences, they gain an abundantly valuable and memorable experience; you will never be able to replace them with a classroom lesson. Educational travel allows students to further their learning experience by seeing and experiencing what they learned in class, plus additional information that most studies don't cover.