The 5th Literacy
Adventure, Company News | 30th September 2014
I was very lucky recently to visit my old school. Looking around I was, of course, struck by the smaller scale everything had but more than that I was immediately impressed by the simple joy everyone who was walking around was taking in their interactions. That observation caused me to meditate on how remarkably consistent that was across all the schools we are fortunate enough to visit.
Schools are such a key portion of our life and the crossroads we reach at various points in the final years of our formal education can have wide ranging and life-changing consequences. I know from the conversations I have with teachers and senior leadership teams at the schools we work with how conscious they are of the position they have in the development of young people. It is for this reason I feel the partnerships we form with our schools is so crucial.
Schools teach, through the curriculum and wider resources, the four key literacies of education: to read, to write, to calculate and to compute. These formal literacies are so essential for hard skills development and the roles we take up through our later lives from reading bedtime stories through to calculating the terminal velocity of inter-stellar travel.
However, these four literacies need a glue to bind them. They need to be meshed within communication skills, an understanding of risk, true empathy, a deep love of our place in the environment we inhabit on both a macro and micro level, a cross-cultural perception of the challenges others face and a perception of what to do to make a difference. We call these factors The Fifth Literacy.
We believe and know that many of the core elements of the fifth literacy can be perceived and understood very close to home. However, we also believe that to truly develop this literacy we need to experience life outside of our immediate comfort zone and to see, even briefly, the world through the eyes of others. Travel truly does broaden the mind. Travel in partnership with schools delivering the other four literacies brings a holistic approach that truly makes the decisions made at those crossroads of our lives have the greatest potential for the highest positive impact.
We count ourselves blessed to experience the positive change we see and to hear time and again from participants, parents, teachers and friends how much the whole process from learning to fundraise to returning from an expedition has changed people lives.
I can’t wait for the next chapter in our story…
