AmSS Vision Unfolded  

Ambassador Service-Study

Vision

Students in American high schools empowered to be global citizens and mobilized as ambassadors of cross-cultural understanding through community service, study and friendships.

http://www.teacherweb.com/OR/AmbassadorServiceStudy/Collaborators

Vision Unfolded

Ambassador Service-Study (AmSS) is a course of study created in collaboration with schools, students, parents, and communities.   Rigorous and relevant, its student-centered, community-based activities

·          enhance a traveling student’s experience

and

·          reflect on and communicate that experience to people on both sides of the cultural/linguistic “bridge”: the ambassador student.

AmSS provides a flexible, clear-cut, online framework for creating and doing credit-earning, independent, integrated studies and service abroad. The textbook is the foreign place and people experienced. The curriculum is serving abroad, language-learning, individualized project or inquiry, and creating journals, e-communiqués and presentations. Community service and host families are most of the context and content of the student’s foreign immersion studies. AmSS inspires close observation and personal response through a variety of projects and choices of prompts. An ambassador also serves the home base through weekly e-posts to the student’s "home team” and through presentions at community gatherings: teens teach the “whole village”.

AmSS is unique in many ways.

It is service-oriented in two communities per ambassador. 

International experience becomes accessible to all students, including those who stay home.

The immersion experience is for more than one, being shared through cross-culture and “home team” communications, hence the name “Ambassador”.

Online class resources organize communications more than deliver content.

It is cost effective.

Schools keep or add enrollment and gain global resources thru each ambassador.

Standards-based activities deepen the experience, provide student (and teacher) choice, and earn credit.

It is integrated, rigorous, collaborative, student-centered, and relational.

It is a vehicle for teachers and schools to implement and evaluate independent study without extra prep.

It works with any place or program parents provide their child.

Students with limited foreign language skills can go, because foreign school enrollment is not required: students stay enrolled in their home school.

Quarter-long sessions abroad provide in-depth immersion, yet also allow for a student’s academic program and schedule adjustments. 

Partners for the Americas offers a similar, 2 mo. experience yearly in Costa Rica, without credit, for only 25 students from Oregon, for $1560, which includes travel and two chaperones.

Interested educators, students, parents, and community members, please be encouraged to write or call with questions and ideas to Bernie Weigand, vecinos1@msn.com  (541)512-9346, 3791 Hilsinger Rd., Phoenix, OR 97535.  www.MadroneArtwork.com