Envoys GEO is a suite of synchronous micro-credential programs that develop the capacity and disposition to understand and take action on issues of global significance. They are recommended for students engaging in an intercultural exchange, preparing for an international travel experience, or looking to increase their abilities to serve as an active global citizen.
Ranging from 90-120 minutes, these highly interactive sessions focus on the development of specific skill sets. Students gain a foundational understanding of concepts through the use of structured thinking routines, while engagement in participatory role plays and case study discussions allow rapid testing of skills-in-practice.
Taking full advantage of the opportunities created by the virtual format, our synchronous sessions are open to students from multiple schools and geographic locations, prioritizing interactions between peers. Total groups can range in size from 8 to 48, while facilitated breakout rooms ensure individual development of skills. Following each synchronous session, individual students complete a summative assessment to receive a micro-credit for the topic.
Learning Domains and Micro-Credentials
Positive Youth Development
The expansion of a young person’s character that increases their aptitude to become independent and lead collaborative teams to make positive contributions to society.
Conflict Resolution: A Language of Life
This highly interactive workshop focuses on how students can improve their use of language to strengthen relationships, build trust, prevent conflicts, and ease pain. We build a usable toolkit for each participant to carry into future pursuits to reduce violence and create peace. Students receive training in communication styles across different cultural contexts, learning how to become a ‘cultural chameleon’ and effectively manage conflict worldwide.
Traveling Well: Ethics and Practical Tips
This course provides structures for participants to think widely and deeply about the relationship between travel and global citizenship. Participants confront tough questions around how and why they travel, and how they can improve in the future. We analyze the amazing growth of the global tourism industry, and delve into how the economic choices made by travelers impact families, communities, and cultures. Participants discuss their reactions to common travel scenarios, analyzing community behavioral ‘norms’ and reactions to violations and learning how we can best manage how our actions are perceived abroad.
Personal Identity and Cross-Cultural Sensitivity
This course is designed to build knowledge and facilitate reflective conversations around how the ideal abstractions of global citizenship are translated into the realities of our personal lives. Through a series of introspective and collaborative exercises, we begin the process of examining our assumptions around culture and identity. Participants tackle the concept of ‘the other’, seeking to better understand how instinctive reactions can color our framing of observations and thus influence our subsequent behaviors.
Culture: Behaviors, Beliefs, and Values
This course provides students with the analytical structures necessary to begin to effectively understand another culture. We examine patterns of behavior, beliefs, and values that lay behind our traditional practices, provoking conversation around the levels of heterogeneity within cultures and commonalities between age groups from different contexts. Upholding the principle that a cohesive whole exists that both comprises and transcends individual parts, students learn guidelines and practices necessary to engage with the world through the mindset of a cultural ethnographer.
Sociocultural Awareness
The ability to foster relationships across differences and engage in meaningful work with people from different geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Environmental Awareness
The development of an empathic understanding of the natural world that results in respect for nature as well as a vested interest to behave responsibly towards the environment.
Sustainable Travel: Promises and Perils
Every flight, bus, hotel, and meal contributes to the increased emission of greenhouse gases that are warming our planet. This course delves into the real actions that students can take to travel responsibly, including ways to calculate and reduce the carbon impact of travel experiences and make more responsible choices about how and why we travel. Selected case studies allow students to delve into tradeoffs inherent when moving in the world, and engage in debate on the best path forward to maintain stewardship of our shared global commons.
Environmental Ecosystem Mapping
This course provides students with the mindsets and skillsets necessary to act as an environmental advocate on a global basis. Students learn how to map interactions and interrelationships between living and non-living beings and their physical environment. We cover the basics of how nutrient cycles and energy flows keep components connected grounding students in their natural environment and sparking curiosity about the past and future of their local ecosystems. We are also introduced to the depth of knowledge acquired by indigenous peoples over thousands of years in direct contact with their environment, gaining insight into how to effectively engage with and learn from people from all walks of life.
Critical Analysis of Service
This course provides students with a usable framework for analyzing ways to ‘make a difference’, taking into account the reality of development aid regimes and ongoing debates around the optimal size, scope, and necessity for international aid. Students gain a common language and rationale for explaining choices on service opportunities, and learn how to better frame conversations about the quality and nature of the actions that they take. As a result of this short course, students get better at engaging responsibly and ethically with communities, and ensure that their choices truly reflect who they are as individuals.
Understanding Global Trade
This micro-credential program engages students in a series of simulations that demonstrate the key factors that shape the international organization of production and distribution and the resulting trade flows. Students will gain a foundational understanding of the sources of comparative advantage and how they lead countries to specialize in making products which they then sell to other countries. We move into breakout groups to debate the roles of multinational corporations, offshoring, and outsourcing in the international division of labor, giving students the opportunity to begin to clarify their own thinking on the way the world ‘ought to be’.
Elections: The Right of the People
This micro-credential first delves into the structure of political campaigns, the roles required, and how a candidate builds a policy agenda. The program then turns to the role of polling and predictions, hearing from professionals in the field to learn about the complex world of understanding and shaping the opinions and perspectives of the electorate. Students have the opportunity to work in small teams to design their own campaign slogan and 3-part policy platform, engaging in a debate about what matters most to them as well as the people-at-large.
Enriched Learning
The deeper understanding of complex cultural, societal, and political systems that allow an individual to formulate opinions and make informed decisions.
Interested in GEO?
Contact us to learn more about bringing GEO to your school!
