Who Is Organizing These Trips?

 

Road Scholars was founded by Leslie Van Gelder in 1998. Leslie has a long history of travel education in both formal and informal capacities. Raised by a mammalogist father and a literary mother, she and her brothers served as research assistants on many of her father's expeditions. At age four she was helping her father do research on nyalas in Mozambique and at ten and eleven she was involved in field research for the book Mammals of the National Parks. Throughout her teens and early twenties she worked in outport communities in Newfoundland, Quebec and Labrador teaching environmental education and collecting folklore for the Quebec Labrador Foundation. At the University of Michigan she was one of the founding members of the University of Michigan Outing Club and its leader for a number of years where she organized trips for a diverse university population. She also participated in the early years of Project Green, an international water quality monitoring program under the direction of Dr. William Stapp. In 1990 she became a high school English teacher in Allentown, New Jersey where she continued to lead outdoor education programs. In 1995 she began teaching at Northern Valley Regional High School in Demarest, New Jersey were she helped form learning communities through a book group which linked interested learners from two rival high schools. She retired from classroom teaching in 1998 to found Road Scholars.

Leslie graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English Literature from the University of Michigan in 1990. She received her Master's Degree in Literature with an emphasis on Native American Literature from The College of New Jersey in 1995. She is currently a doctoral student at the Union Institute pursuing a degree in Place Studies.

Leslie lives in both New Jersey and Oxford, U.K. with her partner, Kevin Sharpe. In New Jersey they live with Jasper the Wonderdog who frequently leads trips on his own and in Oxford, Miss Kitty has been known to lead local literary tours.