Abstract:

Great teachers turn everyday encounters with their students into magic. They engage fully with their students, appreciate them as individuals, and enable the magic of relationships to blossom. With increased demands on teacher time, including increased paperwork, testing, and digital communication expectations, full engagement into the magical moments of teaching is decreasing. Furthermore, pre-service teachers are coming of age in a digitally curated, experience controlled world. Our future teachers must be shaken from their comfortable and predictable realities in order to learn about the random acts of magic that characterize great teaching.

An intensive travel study course from a U.S. university achieved this mystical outcome. Partnering with a network of social service and educational agencies in an economically-depressed yet relationship-rich fishing village in the Azores, pre-service U.S. teachers spent a week getting to know Azorian fourth grade students and their village. The leaders of the network identified the desire to increase the Azorian students' pride in their village, and the goal for the American students was to learn about how to learn from others and create relationships despite a language barrier. Azorian fourth graders, in groups of 3 or 4 students, organized a tour of their favorite places in the village, and they led U.S. pre-service teachers and an interpreter (students at a local university) around town for hours each day. All the while, they took pictures of their tour as they explained the importance specific places to their entourage. At the conclusion of their time together, the U.S pre-service students helped the Azorian students put together a digital story about their village, entitled "Where I am From and Why it Matters." In a final celebration, the students showed these videos to families, other students in the school, and prominent members of the community (e.g., Chief of Police).

The week of working together was a positive experience for all involved. Azorian students beamed with pride, families applauded their children, and school and community members expressed hope of continuing the project in the future. This presentation will focus on the impact this course has on the U.S. pre-service teachers, however. After providing an overview of the program and how it came to be, we will use the American pre-service teachers' words to delve into their experiences of the power of creating relationships with students, appreciating them as individuals apart from the bureaucracy of school, seeing them as part of a beautifully connected community, and understanding the magic that characterizes great teaching.

Keywords:

Travel Study, cross-cultural relationships.