Monday, March 2, 2009

Vicarious Voyage

In addition to the friends and family members of the Voyagers aboard the MV Explorer, there are hundreds of school children across America and some others around the world who are following this semester’s voyage as well. They are part of Semester at Sea’s Vicarious Voyage, which pairs up classrooms of K-12 students with students, staff, and lifelong learners aboard the ship. It is a unique opportunity for us with SAS to share our experiences with others back home and it offers the students we are corresponding with a far more intriguing way to learn about the world than textbooks can provide.

Classrooms participating in the Vicarious Voyage program range from inner city New York to rural Virginia to the California coast, second grade through seniors, and include ESOL (English as a Second/Other Language) learners of all ages, art classrooms, Teach for America classrooms, Gifted Education programs, and two international classrooms in Thailand and Okinawa, respectively. The SAS Voyagers participating in this program exchange postcards, letters, and emails with their selected classrooms throughout our journey.

SAS Voyagers also send cultural packets to their classrooms that contain interesting items that will help explain the people and cultures of the countries that we are exploring. Amber Tullos, an SAS student from the University of Oklahoma has been corresponding with 21 students in a third grade class at O'Hara Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At our first “packing party,” where participants in Vicarious Voyage gather together to send out their cultural packets, Amber decided to include newspapers, postcards, maps, and other items that would help, “broaden their understanding of different cultures,” as she told me. She also put together a CD with videos and pictures taken in port, which is something that many of the SAS Voyagers I spoke with are doing. They find it a great way to make their exchanges more personal and the added media provide a great visual accompaniment that will allow Vicarious Voyagers to see more of what we’re seeing than ever before.

Below is a video of our first packing party, enjoy!




Created by SAS Staff Video Producer, Jerry Pratt