Place Based Learning

Why Place-Based Learning?

Our team learns best when we travel. Our personal immersions into different contexts, places, issues, communities, and projects have impacted our own values and ideas. These experiences inspire us to be more innovative, informed, and engaged.  

Place matters. Every place has its story and community. On one hand, each place has unique lessons, challenges, and inspirations. A place also shapes how you feel. Every place you visit can help you to question your assumptions about the world. That’s true whether you are trying to pick the perfect venue for a team meeting, or expanding the impact of an international trip.

Travel can inspire new ideas—by exposing people to different values, processes, perspectives, and places-—but this requires an intentional place-based approach.

Time to Move Beyond Tourism

Sightseeing and rehearsed cultural experiences are the tip of the iceberg. Too often programs, trips, or events, bring people to some of the most incredible places in the world, but don’t take the time to connect with the place, community, and context. This is the missed opportunity for place-based learning and travel. 

A trip to Paris might feel incomplete without a visit to the Eiffel Tower. But, some of the best travel experiences come with an afternoon stroll through the old streets, a conversation over coffee, an impromptu chat with an artist, a behind the scenes visit to a shop, and following your own curiosity. That’s where we come in.

By combining real-world work and project based-learning with our experience as global researchers, journalists, designers, and anthropologists, we create experiences that are highly tied to the context. Our travelers learn from the places we are in, no matter how famous or anonymous the environment.