Ambassador Service-Study
Curriculum and framework are mostly written, awaiting a team of educators, students, parents, and community members to join the online presence athttps://sites.google.com/site/AmbassadorStudyService/
Vision
Students in American high schools empowered to be global citizens and mobilized as ambassadors of cross-cultural understanding through community service, study and friendships.
Vision Unfolded
Ambassador Service-Study (AmSS) is a course of study created in collaboration with schools, students, parents, and communities. Rigorous and relevant, its student-centered, community-based activities
- enhance a traveling student’s experience
- communicate that experience to people on both sides of the personal cultural/linguistic bridge, the ambassador student.
AmSS provides a flexible, clear-cut, online framework for creating and doing credit-earning, independent, integrated studies and service abroad. The textbook is the foreign place and people experienced. The curriculum is serving abroad, language-learning, individualized project or inquiry, and creating journals, e-communiqués and presentations. Community service and host families are most of the context and content of the student’s foreign immersion studies. AmSS inspires close observation and personal response through a variety of projects and choices of prompts. An ambassador also serves the home base through weekly e-posts to the student’s “home team” and through presentations at community gatherings: teens teach the “whole village”.
AmSS is unique among travel-study programs:
It is service-oriented in two communities per ambassador.
International experience becomes accessible to all students, including those who stay home.
An immersion experience is for more than one traveler, since it is shared through cross-culture and “home team” communications, hence the name “Ambassador”.
Online class resources organize communications more than deliver content.
It is cost effective.
Schools keep or even add to enrollment and gain global resources thru each ambassador.
Standards-based activities deepen the experience, provide student (and teacher) choice, and earn credit.
It is integrated, rigorous, collaborative, student-centered, and relational.
It is a vehicle for teachers and schools to implement and evaluate independent study without extra prep.
It works with any place or program parents provide their child.
Students with limited foreign language skills can go, because foreign school enrollment is not required: students stay enrolled in their home school.
Quarter-long sessions abroad provide in-depth immersion, and enhance and allow for a student’s regular academic program.
Interested educators, students, parents, and community members, please be encouraged to write or call with questions and ideas to Bernie Weigand,. Our world needs youths launched into their full destinies.
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