How Does It Work?
Road Scholars is an educational travel program designed for college-aged learners to combine travel, education and community. We take day, weekend, and week long trips which focus on a common theme. Trips have no more than 12 participants and participants provide their own transportation to and from our starting points. In general, participants pay only for their own admissions, food, lodging, and transportation. Road Scholars is a not-for profit 501 (c)3 educational entity. At present, students do not receive academic credit for their participation in courses, however, they are encouraged to apply for independent study credits through their home institutions.
Our trips focus on a number of different types of education
including:
- Places of Creativity and History - We've read Walt Whitman in his
Camden home, sat beneath Emily Dickinson's oak tree discussing poetry, rolled
in leaf piles in Nathaniel Hawthorne's back yard, and made our own attempts
to cross the Delaware where Washington crossed on his historic Chistmas
night crossing. These trips involve going places to see the ways in which
the history we have learned changes when we see the circumstances and surroundings
of those places. Literature, history and art b
ecome
more personal when we can see the lives of the people who were involved.Who
knew Emily Dickinson used to lower baskets of gingerbread to the little
boys in her neighborhood from her bedroom window or that Walden Pond has
signs which tell you to "stay on the path" when Thoreau would
have suggested that you do quite the opposite!
- The Beauty of the Familiar- In these trips we take a close-up lens
to find the beauty an
d
diversity of our daily lives. These courses focus on raising our awareness
to the wonder we can find everywhere. We have spent time following Thoreau's
dictum to "Know Thyself" by taking different types of personality
and relationship tests. We have studied nonverbal communicatio
n
to see how it is we communicate with our bodies and with images. We've spent
days looking at Perspectives - New York from up on high and down below.
We've looked at underground places, and public transportation, and statues,
and trails, and followed people's stories and made up stories of our own.
We came to know the life of the Homeless in New York and Hoboken more intimately,
and discovered that there are no universals, each story of each person is
always unique. By hightening our awareness of the world around us and the
way we go through life we come to see the beauty in the diverse world around
us and see our place in it as well.
- The Big Questions - So much of our lives is about finding our own
personal philosophy or under
standing
the way we go through the world. All Road Scholars trips are grounded in
people trying to answer for themselves some of the essential questions of
their lives through the context of what we see and the stories we share
on each trip. A number of our trips have directly addressed some of the
big questions and they continue to help each of us shape our own life narratives.
We have asked What is Art by exploring the galleries of Soho and the street
art in Manhattan. Philadelphia and the Delaware River have been the backdrops
for questions of What is History and if we are guaranteed the pursuit of
Happiness, well what is Happiness after a
ll?
We have looked at our feelings about Death while exploring the Egyptian
art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and asked ourselves many times
why poetry, and art, and music matter by hearing poets and writers and musicians.
We have explored questions of love and family and even looked into Utopias
and wondered if they are still possible today. As more and more of our own
questions arise we try and hear each other's stories and come to understand
our own changing feelings on the big questions of our lives.