Experience Canada - "Learning from the soles of our feet"

From 1994 to 1999 I initiated a travel-based program called Experience Canada open to students aged 16-19 in the Ontario public school system.  The goal was to provide students with an opportunity to get out of the classroom and discover their country and themselves, with hopes of engaging specific students often considered “at risk”. From February to June for 6 years I travelled with different groups of 18 students on 3 major excursions in Canada, ranging in length from 10 days to one month.  The rest of the semester was spent researching and documenting our trips, and fundraising to cover all of the travel costs.  We travelled almost exclusively by road, in a bus that I drove.  We slept in school gymnasiums and church basements, camped in tents, or were welcomed into the homes of interested Canadians. Students were expected to buy and prepare the food for all of their meals.

Intellectually, I wanted students to learn about difference of opinion and the importance of being an informed traveller. This often drew us to sites of controversial issues, usually matters of environmental conflict or human injustice. After each trip, students gave a public presentation of pictures, stories and music to explain to their families and others what they had done and learned. Conditional on completing assignments, students were eligible to earn four academic credits, the equivalent of one semester in a regular school. Learning how to live as a community of eclectic teenagers and the encouragement of self-reflection were hidden agendas.

Since then I have been working in international schools as a technology coordinator in Colombia, Turkey and Spain but again feel that it is time to reconnect with the messy world of experiential education. With the wave of incredible (and inexpensive) technologies that have emerged in the past decade I am hoping to combine my passion for travel-based experiential learning with my technology skills, primarily in the area of digital story telling.Through pictures, stories and a few simulated experiences with you I hope to recount some of what I learned from this adventure and see where it takes us next.
A review of relevant technologies will be discussed and demonstrated but is not the focus of the presentation … this would make for an interesting follow-up after we go our separate ways.

Bryan Scholes
Barcelona , Spain
Mobile: 617 140 351
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