Great post up by Seth Godin about higher education.

The problem with much of higher education is that it is mass marketed — and so has to be average and bland, without being too challenging or too different. Being that ISDSI programs are pretty challenging and very different from a “traditional” college semester, this really resonates with us.

Here are some things Seth says:

Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is?… This works great in an industrial economy where we can’t churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But…

The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people. The question I’d ask: is the money that mass-marketing colleges are spending on marketing themselves and scaling themselves well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high?…

Things like gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.

The only people who haven’t gotten the memo are anxious helicopter parents, mass marketing colleges and traditional employers. And all three are waking up and facing new circumstances.

This great.  Seth is (once again) on to something important.

Two things come to mind.  First, “marketing” per se at ISDSI doesn’t exist.  We work to build relationships to students and faculty, so that the right students find our study abroad program.  We send out announcements, and go to an occasional conference, but don’t “market” the program.  Second (linked to the first), this study abroad program isn’t for everyone. Mass marketing wouldn’t work. We tried an advertisement once in a “study abroad” magazine. Total waste of money.

What we do instead is to strive to be the best possible study abroad program we can be.  Our focus is narrow (leadership/ecology/sustainability) and our approach isn’t easy — experiential learning in a new culture and country can be really difficult (ask any of our alumni!). We often joke that if we do our job right, we’ll ruin a student for returning back to “normal” college or university.  From the emails we get from students who’ve done the program, we are successful!  Once you’ve directly engaged the subject, sat with village elders talking about land rights, stood in a forest during a monsoon rain trying to figure out the different tree species, the PowerPoint presentation in a classroom aren’t going to be as engaging.

That’s not a bad thing.

Seth writes:

The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people.

ISDSI builds its ENTIRE study abroad program around interactions with great minds (villagers, activists and others) and non-class(room) activities (sea kayaking, ecology studies, working in the fields with your host family). And we’ve seen, year after year, how life changing that can be!

Jump over to read Seth’s full ’s post.  You might not agree with all of it, but it is thought provoking — like the best education should be!

Pi Kat, businesswoman, climber and occasional ISDSI Field Instructor, climbing at Crazy Horse. (Photo credit: Josh and Dan Morris)

A core part of what we do at ISDSI is to teach students about teamwork, leadership, and decision making. We believe that part of creating a more sustainable world is equipping students with practical skills in how to work and lead, so that their passion for sustainability can be transformed into action.

A great way to combine these lessons is through the challenge of rock climbing. We are fortunate to be near a world-class climbing destination, and have helped a bit over the years to develop Crazy Horse, from crag clean-ups to trail building to some initial meetings with local officals. Crazy Horse is a community effort spearheaded by the folks at Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures.  Each semester, ISDSI students go out to Crazy Horse to climb and have an amazing time. Josh Morris and Khaetthaleeya Uppakham (Pi Kat) have done a great job developing the crag into not only a world-class climbing destination, but also an example of how to develop a sustainable ecotourism destination. We’ve worked with both Josh and Kat, and Kat is a field instructor for ISDSI when she has time.

Climbing Magazine has featured them in an article, The Other Thailand, talking not just about the climbing, but also the history and unique development of Crazy Horse.

Leave behind Thailand’s farang-packed Tonsai, and you’ll discover Crazy Horse, a quiet crag that’s redefining sustainable tourism in Asia…

Crazy Horse Buttress rises above rice paddies 25 miles from the culturally vibrant city Chiang Mai. Named for its principal formation’s striking resemblance to an equine head, Crazy Horse comprises a cluster of 15 quiet cliffs first climbed in 1998 and now boasting 97 single-pitch and 15 multi-pitch routes. Spanning 5.6 to 5.13c, the climbs tackle everything from technical slabs, to overhanging tufas, to multi-chambered, stalactite-dripping caves — not to mention the wealth of untapped rock.

However, the cliff’s true essence lies in the tight-knit community of locals and foreigners who’ve developed it. With an emphasis on social and ecological sustainability, the motley Crazy Horse crew has endeavored to keep this a quality destination for the long haul. In fact, many climbers now hold up Crazy Horse as a case study on how climbing tourism can positively affect a foreign community. Turns out, one of the most important factors is for the locals to come to love climbing, too.

If you’re interested in sustainability, ecotourism and (of course) climbing, jump over and read “The Other Thailand.”

A core part of an ISDSI semester is learning about leadership and judgment.  We use hands-on training as well as the NOLS Leadership Skills to help students develop as competent and capable leaders.

Each semesters starts off with a retreat on the second weekend at the Mok Fa Waterfall, part of the Doi Suthep – Doi Pui National Park.  The weekend is a great time for students and instructors to get to know each other, enjoy some time out in nature, and relax.

Mok Fa Waterfall.

We also use the weekend to begin the process of training students in risk management and judgment.  Like any activity, studying on one’s home campus carries with it a set of risks and hazards. Learning and studying abroad has inherent risks associated with it as well, but the risks are different and students don’t have the “street smarts” they would in their home cultures. Because of that we do a number of things during the program, from training sessions to leader-of-the-day, to help students build their ability to make good decisions and lead in a challenging and different environment than their home cultures.

As a part of the weekend, we have modified a leadership tool used by Outward Bound (USA) that they use to train their instructors.  We first learned about how to do this at a workshop “When Judgment Is Crucial: Outward Bound USA’s Instructor Judgment Training” at the Wilderness Risk Management Conference. The basic idea is simple — take a realistic scenario, and then work a group through the options and consequences of decisions.

We start the training session with a discussion of some basic principles of understanding risk, accidents, and how to pull apart a decision to understand its consequences.

Risk, accidents and decision making.

Using these tools allow students to work through the scenario and begin applying a more sophisticated understanding of risk other than a “safe/unsafe” dichotomy.

Notes -- students often end up referring back to these throughout the semester when they are in the position of being leaders-of-the-day.

The students break into groups, and we introduce the scenario — a group of students backpacking through the mountains in Northern Thailand from village to village. This involves understanding objectives hazards of weather and jungle travel, as well as cultural concerns and group dynamics.

Talking over options.

The scenario is very close to the actual Expedition Field Courses they will experience, and is modeled to reflect some of the actual places and people they will meet during the Forests course.

At each point in the scenario where a decision needs to be made, the groups work through what they would do, and then share their decision with the larger group.

Matt sharing his group's thinking on their course of action.

Each group comes up with different solutions to the same set of problems.  Do you stop your group on the trail?  Turn back to the village?

Karen explaining their decision and possible consequences.

The real-life decision modeling is a very powerful way to get students to understand that their decisions have consequences. It is impossible to eliminate all risk and hazards — but it is possible to manage those in a responsible way.

A key thing we learned ourselves on our Wilderness First Responder course.

After the scenario we debrief and reflect on what students have learned — what was surprising, what take away points they want to remember, and how to apply it.

The next day during the retreat we spend the morning putting this into action — first with a “Threats To Life” class on what to do in case of an emergency where someone has gotten hurt, and then with an accident scenario where they work in teams to carry a “patient” out of the jungle with an improvised litter. Aside from being a lot of fun, it brings home how decisions have consequences, and how to be thoughtful and aware in a new culture, environment, and learning context.

———–

For more on our approach, see “The Objective Hazards of Culture” online (as a PDF), as well as other papers on our Publications page.

Also see our Wilderness First Responder page, with explains a bit about our approach and the training required for ISDSI instructors.

For the end of orientation week, we went climbing at Crazy Horse, a series of limestone cliffs and caves outside of Chiang Mai.  We went with Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures (CMRCA), a great organization that we work with and runs outstanding climbing and caving programs.

The goal of the day was to get to know each other, learn about leadership and responsibility, get outside, and start building a base of expedition skills for the semester.

Boi teaching belaying to Krissy and Lindsey.

Boom backing up Betsy belaying

Emily climbing.

Carrie "sanuk!"

Explaining safety and risk management for the tyrolean

Uan starting Lyndsey on the tyrolean

Molly crossing the tyrolean 53 meters up.

Pi Pu enjoying a day out of the normal office routine on the tyrolean traverse.

Student Ben rapelling after the tyrolean traverse

Pi Ben and Pi Pu resting in the shade (Ben may have been snoring...)

Sea kayaks and our support boat in Trang.

Good leadership is important, and helping students develop leadership skills is a key part of what we do at ISDSI.We worked with NOLS to tailor their leadership curriculum for our programs in Thailand, and have found their approach to leadership development to be excellent (see NOLS, Expedition Leadership for more).  We worked with NOLS in the development of our Expedition Field Courses, and have found their approach to leadership to work well in a very different context than wilderness expeditions.

NOLS defines leadership as follows: Expedition leadership means timely, appropriate actions that guide and support your group to set and achieve realistic goals. Great leaders create an environment that inspires individuals and groups to achieve their full potential.

Leadership on an ISDSI course is different than what most students are used to in an expedition setting.  Unlike leading in a wilderness setting, with an Expedition Field Course there are often more constraints.  We can’t just camp anywhere, but have to get to a particular village by nightfall.  We work with local guides, rather than just navigating by topographic map and compass/GPS. These constraints can make the leadership seem superficially more limited (not as many choices), but in reality, it makes it much more realistic and challenging.

In the real world, you are rarely in a situation where you have unlimited choices as a leader.  Even in the wilderness, your choices are constrained by the fitness of the group, the terrain, weather, and sometimes the permitting system for wildlands management. On ISDSI courses we add to that constraints based on logistics (we have to get to a particular village on a particular day), as well as cultural and social components (working with local experts and village teachers).We also have the constraint that we have certain academic objectives for the course (studying a particular watershed, local community, or farming technique).

Each day students are “leader of the day” and join the instructor team is setting goals for the group, and creating the environment where the group can achieve its potential. We have found that when students focus only on the limitations imposed by the constraints (what they “can’t do”) they often struggle with leadership — thinking isn’t “real” if they can’t really fundamentally change the course and decide to do something completely different than what the course objectives are. Of course, even on a NOLS course there are constraints, and in the real world, you face those constraints all the time.

When students embrace the constraints, however, it is magic. Rather than seeing working with local guides on a hike through a forest as a limit it becomes an opportunity –  the guides become companions and resource people. Embracing the constraints of leadership in the real world helps students realize that their “timely, appropriate actions” really do matter in how the group they are leading is able to function and thrive. Some days have fewer constraints (when to leave the beach while sea kayaking) some have more (a meeting with villagers after a hike studying ethnobotany with village elders, or a travel day).  The best student leaders bring out the best in their groups, and can take an otherwise boring day of transport out to the expedition start into an exciting day to study the local countryside and team building. That is leadership that “inspires individuals and groups to achieve their full potential!”