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Our Program
Reach the World (RTW) is a unique nonprofit organization with the mission of linking students and teachers to online, global expeditions that have the power to expand learning beyond the four walls of the classroom.
Reach the World was founded by Heather Halstead and Marc Gustafson in 1997, in an effort to revolutionize the delivery of curriculum, enabling all classrooms, in all communities, to use interactive resources that bring the world’s environments and cultures vividly to life for students. RTW’s mission is to become a national organization that links travelers and their journeys with students in classrooms around the globe.
The website you’re looking at right now is Reach the World's online portal. RTW's website is a teaching tool that we hope will help you to enhance your curriculum, while also giving students a way to connect to a broader world at a time when intercultural understanding is more critical than ever. When learning is meaningful, students feel compelled to read, are excited to do research, and are motivated to work on projects. Reach the World’s online journeys are interactive, real-life learning experiences that engage and connect students to the world around them.
In New York City, Chicago and Odessa, TX, Reach the World supports networks of severely under-funded elementary and middle schools. We provide classrooms in each of our partner schools with teacher training, staff support and technology consulting. RTW hopes to expand to new locations in the coming years.
Although Reach the World’s online journeys primarily serve students and teachers in our networks, any classroom can participate, using this website as a portal. The RTW website enables all teachers to use online journeys to provide students with rich opportunities to communicate, develop new skills, and learn about the world from traveling educators.
Reach the World features multiple journeys on its website. All of our travelers are volunteers and write content for the website each week. You can see a menu of the journeys on our home page. Please visit each journey’s home page to see the new content for the week. You can use the “What’s New” page to view abstracts of the most recently posted articles.
To use Reach the World’s online journeys, begin by following the weekly Logbook. This dispatch from the field reports weekly on Travel News, Nature News, and the travelers’ personal experiences (“Our News”). Then, move on to the Field Notes. In each major stop, RTW’s travelers report on the seven themes that you will see in the left-hand navigation of the Field Notes section. You can use these articles to gain an interdisciplinary perspective on each region visited by the RTW travelers over time. Finally, visit the Journals section. Journals describe the travelers’ thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences as they travel around the world. Journals are a compelling tool for use in the Literacy curriculum due to the fact that they provide first-person, primary source reading material, and can be used as a model for journaling.
Over the next five years, Reach the World will continue to replicate in new communities. Through online journeys, RTW hopes to give students a reason to become caring stewards of the Earth’s environments and cultures. Given the geopolitical and environmental crises looming on our horizon, and the global outlook that we all must share, there may be no more important goal than this.
Thank you for your interest! For more information about how to become a Reach the World participating classroom, or to request materials, please contact Stephanie Shore, New York City Program Manager or call the Reach the World office at (212) 288-6987. |
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