GENERAL CAPABILITIES TOURS

GENERAL CAPABILITIES ACTIVITIES

Our itineraries allow your group to take in iconic sights, combined with as many classes, workshops, themed guided tours and curriculum-linked, experiential learning activities as you wish. We ensure that academic and practical endeavours are age and experience appropriate. Our knowledge of the curriculum and the General Capabilities within it, plus our consultative process, ensures that we understand the learning outcomes required.  You only have to choose what your focuses will be to have the ideal tour designed for you and your group.

Example experiential learning activities:

LITERACY

• This is an automatic focus of all our tours as there is much information to read, absorb and understand, as well as the need to be able to effectively handle the experiential learning activities, of which some will include written materials.  We also provide written projects on some tours
• Our English Literature tours, of course, have a strong emphasis on literacy

NUMERACY

• Numeracy is a focus of our STEM and MATHEMATICS tours.
• It is also a part of all our international tours, as students will need to understand and be able to convert currency
• Our Economics, Accounting, Business Studies and all similar tours will require numeracy as an underpinning skill and the activities in these tours will only improve this capability

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT) CAPABILITY

• On most of our tours there will be some use of ICT capabilities, through the use of project apps provided by Latitude Group Travel, use of their phones if calling home, wifi to connect to their ipads and other similar applications
• Our STEM tours can and do focus a great deal on this capability
• Our History tours often require ordering of primary source documents
• Our Geography tours require the use of technology and exposure to it during visits, tours and when conducting fieldwork
• Our Economics, Accounting, Business Studies and all similar tours will usually require some ability with ICT as a learning tool

CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING

• All our experiential learning activities have some, or a great deal of focus on critical and creative thinking.  We encourage students to think, question and take themselves outside their comfort zones to really engage in the learning that is being offered
• Critical thinking is fundamental to getting the most out of the activities, but to really engage with those running the activities and with the activities themselves, creative thinking will take them much further.  The activity leaders will all push the students to use these capabilities as much as the students can

PERSONAL AND SOCIAL CAPABILITY

• Being on tour with a group of students that don’t know each other well encourages each individual to develop their personal and social capability.
• If the school combines year levels or sometimes subjects, this will develop as a matter of course
• Where a student is keeping to themselves, the inclusive experiential learning activities will require them to interact with others in their group

ETHICAL UNDERSTANDING

• Ethical understanding can take on multiple forms and can be about race, religion, skin colour or simply just a sense of fairness and justice.  In all tours, students must understand how to behave and how best to interact with other students, teachers and chaperones, the tour director, guides and experiential learning activity leaders, not to mention interacting with the local people.
• If learning about religious beliefs or local customs, politics or governments, it is encumbent upon the student to learn about what feels right and wrong to them, yet to learn to respect how other societies conduct themselves (for the most part)
• Ethical understanding will, no doubt, be guided by the chaperones, teachers, tour directors and guides while the students are on tour. Discussions encouraged and questions answered while away will assist in this, while a post tour review may help embed positive ethical understanding by questioning some of what was seen, experienced and learned about another culture

INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

• Any international tour, or an Australian domestic tour with a focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, automatically requires students to develop intercultural understanding, or they may miss one of the major points of travelling
• While on these tours, the subject focus may be History or Languages  – or even Performing Arts, but it must include intercultural understanding, because our experiential learning activities require the students to engage with their activity leader and, often with the local culture as well
• By living, eating and using local transport in the tour country, students must interact with the locals, requiring them to think about how they do so.
• A language barrier will require them to try to make themselves understood – and then they can imagine what that must be like for someone in Australia who doesn’t speak English
• Learning about the local daily life, religious beliefs, history and more in the tour country ideally infuses the student with a more general understanding of the culture in which they are immersed.  Every tour should encourage this, whatever the subject and we try to do so in our itineraries