Reach the World

Towards the end of August, I received an invitation to participate as a travel correspondent for an organization called Reach the World. The full description of the program is below, but essentially Americans travelling in foreign countries volunteer to write two articles per week on topics like tradition, food, transportation, or the environment. These articles are published to the RTW website where students and teachers can access what quickly becomes an up-to-date travelogue from hundreds of locations across the globe. Each traveler is also matched with a single classroom and will correspond with that group of students more personally from messages to video-conferences.  

Reach the World (RTW) is a global education non-profit based in New York City. Since 1998, RTW has been cultivating relationships between young students and volunteer world travelers through an innovative program of online journalism and face-to-face interactsions. Over the past 15 years, RTW has directly served 16,000 students and 800 teachers in under-served communities.

Reach the World’s mission is to help elementary and secondary school students and teachers to develop the knowledge, attitudes, values, and thinking skills needed for responsible citizenship in a complex, culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. The program hopes to address two major problems faced by youth in under-served communities: the narrowing of the curriculum, forcing out subjects other than literacy and mathematics; and the unequal access to technology tools. Through a standards-based program of web-based journalism, videoconferencing and collaborative project-making, RTW students go on virtual journeys with global mentors and engage in hands-on learning within the classroom. Global competence surveys reveal that in the process, RTW students are expanding their worldviews and developing an understanding of global citizenship.

Um…non-profit encouraging global competence and appreciation for diversity. It took me all of three seconds to know that this was a program I definitely wanted to be involved in. As much as I hope that some of what I teach my Nepali students will have an impact, deep down I believe that where my greatest potential lies is in bringing back artifacts, anecdotes, and pictures that can make the world come alive for my future students in the United States. Anything I can do as a teacher to help kids realize that there is more to the world than just their town, city, state, country; and that all of the other people out there matter just as much as the ones here… that’s what I want to be doing.

 

This picture has nothing to do with RTW. It's just a photo that I like.
I took it in Nagarkot and the people silhouetted are the other ETAs I was with.

 

Anyway, I applied and was accepted. So now I teach English to grades 1-5 six days per week, run afterschool intervention groups for struggling students Sunday-Tuesday, lead a poetry club for 7-9^th graders on Thursdays, take Nepali lessons twice a week, do teaching workshops for the staff at my school on Fridays…and write two articles per week for Reach the World. Perhaps that explains why my blog posts have been a little bit sparse lately. Despite being busy, I love everything and I wouldn’t give any of it up (well except maybe class 3 after a really hard day!)

If you are interested in learning more about RTW you can visit their general website at reachtheworld.org. From there you can access three hundred journeys that are currently on-going from Nepal to Germany to South Africa and beyond. Below are some specific links to my articles.

 

Already Published…

·          Autobiography

·          Logbook #1: Godavari

·          Field Note: What is transportation like in Nepal?

·          Field Note: What do people eat in Nepal?

·          Field Note: How do people cook in Nepal?  

·          Journal: Festival Season

 

Coming Soon…

·          Logbook #2: Nagarkot

·          Field Note: What is daily life like in Nepal?

 

**If you are a teacher and you would like more information about using RTW in your classroom, or connecting with a traveler, check out the general information on the website and then use the links on the homepage to get in touch with a RTW staff person. Same goes for international travelers interested in sharing their journey with students in the U.S.**