When the students arrived at 2 AM, there was a line-up of cars waiting to transport them from the airport, across Calcutta, to Pilgrim’s Guesthouse. The car line-up included an off-duty ambulance. After a twenty minute drive the motley caravan pulled up to its destination. The guesthouse was little more than a hole in a cinderblock wall. That was it, just a dark hole. The instructors said to their bewildered students, “Grab your bags, go through the hole, and find room on the concrete slab. This is where we’re sleeping for the night.”
Genius.
The eighteen and nineteen year-old students were on the first day of their 92-day Himalaya Semester course. Their first day in Asia. Their first night in India. On the slab, beyond the hole in the cinderblock wall, dozens of people slept – for free, all of them religious pilgrims. What appeared to the students to be wildly frightening was, actually, a lesson in care, community and spiritual traditions. It was deeply grounding and profoundly tone-setting. Immediately the students were brought into the experience of living in and becoming part of the fabric of the communities in which they were traveling. And they were immediately drawn into the safety net that was provided by their competent, experienced instructors. From that moment on, the students realized an instant respect for boundaries – what was out of bounds and where the permissions were. They reliably looked to their instructors for guidance: the instructors would let them know when something was unsafe. Pilgrim’s Guesthouse wasn’t unsafe. But plenty of things were, and when the instructors said something was unsafe, it was simply understood to be unsafe. The students finished the course with no significant risk issues. And they realized profoundly intimate experiences with local life, from Calcutta to Darjeeling to numerous villages in Sikkim and the borderlands of north India and Tibet.
An instructor from a different course in Guatemala once told me about an open-air bumpy ride that she took with her students, packed into the back of a flatbed truck. “I can’t believe I spent so much money to be transported in the back of someone’s truck,” said a disgruntled student. “This is exactly why you spent so much money,” the instructor retorted.
A night at Pilgrim’s Guesthouse was a wholly unique way of initiating a course, and while it cost nothing for the students to stay there, the work of finding and training and supporting instructors who could get their students to Pilgrim’s Guesthouse was a complicated undertaking – sourcing, training and supporting, and making it work with a student-to-instructor ratio that we thought was pretty great. Bringing students and instructors together in that moment, to have that experience, or to bump along a dirty road in Guatemala with women coming back from marketing, with their chickens and their cackles and their smiles: those were the experiences that the students were paying for. They were paying for the opportunity to be well guided through a huge permission zone.
Expeditionary Learning is realized when students embark on an experience that is not defined by itinerary, but rather is defined by access to a permission zone. The permission zone is a contained space, the boundaries of which are determined by the guides. Expeditionary learning programs place their guides at center, and the best of them have found the best formulas for empowering their guides to exercise their judgment in the moment to realize the most beneficial learning outcomes. And though one might think that guide-driven programming would leave some things to chance, and increase some risks, my experience is that the more a guide is personally invested in the outcome of an experience, the more they are supervising the experience. The more they are ensuring a safe outcome.
I’ve read through feedback on nearly a thousand courses like the Himalaya semester and the program in Guatemala. I’ve visited nearly 70 courses in the field, and have run dozens myself. I’ve learned, unequivocally, that the moments of most profound learning are always in the margins: in the portions of a program that are entirely unscripted. They are the moments when guides are present with students in a big permission space. When guides use moments of ambiguity to help their students see themselves in a new, often unfiltered light, the students see themselves as they have before. They become tapped into who they are. They discover for themselves why they matter. On an itinerary-driven program, the guide is little more than a chaperone. But on an expeditionary learning program, the guide is the program.
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