ZopED Academy’s three week program has been designed and built specifically to introduce you to the sites, sounds, flavors and stories of a place and a people in a way no other experience can. Tours and excursions will familiarize you with the geography, history and landmarks that have shaped and defined life here through the ages. Interactive sessions of ZopED’s Signature Workshop Series, facilitated by our Staff throughout the journey, will provide you and your travel mates the space and support to reflect, record and assimilate new ideas and knowledge. And, of course, plenty of recreation time will give you the opportunity to collect new friendships, memories and souvenirs.

Participants will:

• Create a lasting bond and enduring memories with the destination country, and a deepened sense of personal connection to its landscape, culture, heritage sites and people
• Gain knowledge of the complex narratives, value systems, and traditions that have shaped life and culture in that country, and the contemporary dynamics continuing to influence them into the future
• Recognize the value of an expanding world-view, and increase appreciation for travel as a path toward that knowledge and informed perspective
• Build capacity for facilitating meaningful encounter and effective dialogue across cultures
• Challenge and reshape fundamental notions of cultural and personal identity, beginning the lifelong journey toward a more inclusive, authentic and rigorously considered sense of self
• Understand the individual’s role in fostering the environment of respect, trust, risk and reflection in which collaborative learning can occur
• Consider the numerous and diverse ways in which new knowledge, understandings, values and sense of personal heritage will shape outward behavior and actions