I’m currently participating in my 6th study abroad and have recently been sharing with others how I approach things and have been getting astonished responses (in a good way), so I thought I’d share some of what we do and why.  My first study abroad I was just a visiting faculty member, embedded into someone else’s program and it taught me a lot about how to structure the course I created and am now leading for my fifth time (and co-leading this year for the first time).  In that original class, students did have a field component to their work, but most of the instruction was classroom-based with clear delineations of school time and non-school time.  Students partied a lot and for whatever reason, I associate the two.

So when I created my “Redesigning Cites for People on Bike” class in 2011 and expanded it in 2012, I wanted to do things very differently.  I didn’t want students in a classroom.  I didn’t want the delineation between school hours and non-school hours to be so defined.  I wanted to treat students like adults.  And I wanted students to experience being in a place, not just visiting it, as much as possible.  I’ve been around other study abroad instructors or others who work with study abroad groups to help with logistics and local tours and such, and it seems that some of the things we do in this class are quite outside the norm.  So I thought I’d share a bit of that.

The basic purpose of the class is for students to experience what it is like to be in cities where getting around by bike is normal, and then to understand all the ways society improves as a result.  The focus really isn’t on bicycle transportation, but on city design that works better for more people in all aspects of their lives.  Over the course of a month we typically spend about 7 days in Copenhagen, 5 in Utrecht, 7 in Amsterdam, and then take a 5-day journey from city to city by bike with a stop in Malmö to experience inter-city travel by bike as well.  So, with an objective of having students experience a completely different city transportation structure, we are on bike everyday just doing normal things.  There’s more to say, but here are some of the tangible things we do in this class that seem to be outside the norm:

• On Day 1 we meet around 3:30 in the afternoon, have a quick orientation, set expectations, and then figure out how to bike in Copenhagen. The orientation is basically: “1) everyone who has self-selected into a class like this is an amazing human being so over this month take advantage of getting to know everyone, otherwise what a waste.  Pair up with different people during the course, especially those who you find may be rubbing you the wrong way so that you can get beyond those initial stereotypes; 2) you will be treated like adults because that’s what you are; 3) drinking is fine and a normal part of things, but if we have to bail you out of jail or pick you up from the hospital because of excessive drinking, we will send you home; and 4) as cheesy as it sounds, you are ambassadors of the US and others will stereotype our whole country based on your behavior, so represent well and build positive connections.”
• Then comes the real fun part – we get bikes and we tell students to either individually or with only one other person to go pick someone on bike and follow them for 20 minutes (without being creepy of course) and do what they do as a way to understand how the system works.  Then, wherever students are after 20 minutes or when they start feeling comfortable, they have to use a paper map (no digital maps at first!) complemented by asking people if necessary, to figure out where they are and then how to get to a meeting spot for a first night group dinner in a park where there is food and a first chance to debrief.
• Again – only paper maps at first!  We want students to get lost, to pay attention to their surroundings, and to figure out how to get found.  We want students to experience that no matter what street they end up on, they 100% belong there on bike.  On almost every street, quiet or busy.  This is extremely hard to contemplate without experiencing it and getting lost helps.  Following a blue line on a digital map or audio instructions on when and where to turn does nothing for actually understanding that any street is as good as any other street in terms of safety and comfort on bike.  Not unexpectedly, this whole paper map thing sounds totally bizarre to students and universally they come to see the wisdom really quickly.
• Our days are never the same and may have some combination of: 1) meeting and maybe biking/walking tour with local professional; 2) an exercise like a scavenger hunt designed to go further and wider on bike than students may otherwise go, plus to build relationships among the group; 3) a debrief; and 4) some open time for students to explore the city on their own based on their interests.  The academic part is not necessarily confined between 9am-5pm; we might have days from 9am-10pm where are all together and other days where we have a morning professional meeting and a dinner debrief in the park.
• The Scavenger Hunt – again, the core part of the course is really for students to experience what it is like to be in cities where everything that needs to be done in life can be done via bike, including observing and engaging with families or seniors doing the same thing.  The Scavenger Hunt is designed to get students out and about, get lost, discover interesting things, and have fun.  We pick seven or so categories of things we want students to get photographic evidence of for which there is a competition for best pictures and prizes delivered (it’s not a race!).  Categories are things like: go to a supermarket and take a picture of a product you’ve never seen before at home, take a picture (and realistically, buy and eat) the best looking pastry, pick a country for your team and take a picture in front of that embassy, take a picture of a cool bike with the owners of that bike, etc.  Students pair up (biking in a group is no way to learn anything and as a pair for this fun exercise, a good relationship develops as the exercise could take 2-7 hours depending on how much fun everyone is having).  It’s a blast to see what students come up with, and of course along the way they have spoken with local residents, tried new foods, and found themselves in many parts of the city they might not have wandered into otherwise, again reinforcing just how ubiquitous, comfortable, and easy it is to move by bike in the cities we visit.
• We generally don’t ride in groups together – most days we meet someone somewhere or we meet as a group at a different place than we’ve met before like a park or plaza or canal.  Usually the night before we give the details for the following day (students have the basic itinerary / syllabus) as we are constantly making tweaks and scoping places out.  We discourage traveling to these places in groups, although realistically in the cities we visit, biking is always in a group because others are always out going this way and that.  But we do’t want our students biking in groups with other students because we want each student to be an individual navigator of the urban environment and when you bike with a larger group, only the person in front is really paying attention.  Biking with one other person is fine as so much biking in these cities also happens to be social biking – it is possible to bike next to a friend and still have others pass you because the cycle tracks are generally wide enough (on purpose!) to do that.  Otherwise, we tell students, “tomorrow, meet at 10am, at X address, and ride by yourself or one other person.  See you then. And allocate extra time in case you make some wrong turns.”  Of course, not all students arrive at the same time, but they all arrive.  And when of the local experts we meet with takes us no a bike tour around the city, we do ride as one large group (which inevitably splits into three smaller groups) and this contrast of biking experience also proves insightful for students.  Some students actually love being with our own group as a mass as it feels like an invincible blob traveling about.  Others hate it because it is too conforming and slow and a bit oblivious.  So much to experience, reflect on, and learn!
• Many study abroad programs to Europe are treated by students as excuses to visit different cities every weekend and party, but not this one. In this class, students do not have time to visit other places because we have some type of something 6-7 days a week, but because the class is immersive, fun and varied, there is no FOMO (fear of missing out) of not being able to visit other places in Europe during the course. Students are free to travel before or after the course as travel to/from Europe is on their own.
• We ask students to remain open and flexible so that we can take advantage of things that pop up like getting invited to a rooftop social by a local person or gathering at a brewpub when the US women’s soccer team is in the final or when the weather turns sour and we decide to mix up the order of things.
• We identify placeholder times for lectures, but reserve the right not to deliver them if unnecessary.  As we meet with local professionals and debrief as a group at various times, we assess if there are concepts and theories and information that students need to make sense of everything else they are experiencing and hearing.  Sometimes that means we need to take a couple of hours for a lecture-type session and sometimes such lectures are not necessary at all.
• We schedule a nice dinner early on as well.  Most lunches and dinners students are on their own and while students have varying budgets, few have the opportunity to go to a nice dinner.  With the generous support of the Scan Design Foundation, we have the opportunity to go out as a group to have a traditional Danish meal at a nice restaurant with a good vibe (we’ve been going to Puk and everything about it is incredible).  Students dress up, sit with someone new, and are as social as you would expect a group of 20 people going out for a 3-hour meal to be.  Yes, this is a nice ‘free’ meal, but it is much more – it is tone setting, community building, and it is fun.
• And there are assignments of course, but none that take students out of the flow from the purpose of this course.  The core assignment is to blog nearly daily, sharing their observations, thought processes, questions, and whatever else they are seeing, feeling, or thinking about.  This format gives students an opportunity to take a pause and wrestle and make sense of everything they are experiencing.  There is experience overload for sure and it is easy for students to just keep going and going and going because there is so much to experience in the cities we visit.  The blogging is a ‘forced’ moment to reflect and process.  It is also a record of the evolution of their thinking along the way and a way for their friends and family back home to follow along, an important piece of connection for most students.  The other main assignment is some type of final deliverable that reflects some of the main things students learned or focused on during the course.  The exact format of that project, however, is not pre-determined; instead, the students themselves come up with some meta-deliverable they would like to collectively create and share with people back home who have not had the experience students have.  This could be a podcast series, a coffee table book, a traveling photo exhibit, etc.  Each year’s students settle on something different.  And then within that larger deliverable, students are empowered to focus on the piece that most resonates with them, thereby allowing students to customize their studies while also contributing to this larger whole.
• In the end, perhaps the main overarching approach we take is to treat students like adults.  During my almost 20 years teaching at the university level, I’ve come to learn that students are almost never treated like adults.  They are rarely told they have value, good ideas, capacity to make a difference, or are responsible for their own learning and for helping create the community they are part of.  Thus, in some ways we have it easy – we tell students we will treat them like adults and then we structure our class to reinforce that we mean it.  And in return, students respond as we would hope.  And more.  Students then take responsibility for one another, helping someone who may be struggling, or recognizing the need to have quieter voices a space to speak up.  They bring things to an impromptu rooftop gathering even when told there is no need to bring anything, and then help clean up without prompting (just as all their parents had hoped they would!).  They keep each other in check if anything is on the verge of getting out of hand.  but more than that, they take things seriously, engage seriously, build relationships seriously, and grow as people in a short amount of time.  And in their free time, they actually go and see the city – museums, festivals, plazas, cafes, etc. – the types of things we would all hope our adult, college-aged children would do while in another country.  It’s magical.
• Of course, not all is perfect. I can’t tell you what the complaints have been over the years, although I’m sure there have been some suggestions for improvement next time, because much of the course has been co-created with students.  Of course, there is a ton of work that goes into a class like this where we are meeting with a different local professional almost every day for a month across multiple cities we have as a base.  That work isn’t easy, but the structure of the course around those more fixed time engagements allows for students to combine their own interests with our course objectives in their own customized ways.  For many students, this class is transformational.  Few start the class thinking their future professional and personal passion will be to redesign cities so that more people can use a bike more often, but many end the class exactly interested in that and subsequently find professional jobs that allow them to put into practice all they saw and learned while abroad. Every cohort of students gets connected with previous cohorts, meaning that there will be almost 100 students this year that have been part of this one course (and 8 professionals who have also been invited to be part of things), creating a national network of similarly trained people, many of whom are now practicing professionals in the field.
• Work with someone who helps with logistics (we work with Adam Beecham from Austin Adventures). Part of what makes this class work as well is having a third party who helps with logistics like hostel rentals, helping find a great spot for a group dinner, figuring out how to transport bags on our city-to-city riding portion, lending a hand to figure out how to replace a stolen phone, and more.  For our last three courses, we have worked with Adam Beecham of Austin Adventures, someone who both genuinely enjoys the course content and calmly handles so many logistical details.  We work in partnership from trip planning to the course itself.  Having someone who pays attention to some of the logistical details and is an additional resource t gauge the pulse of the group is invaluable, especially if you are someone like me for whom such logistical details can be a major source of stress.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things and hopefully I haven’t oversold what we do.  To many, the class can seem strange – “you just bike around every day and talk about it?” – but, there is a lot of intention that goes into everything we do because we not only want students to learn the material, we want them to make a positive difference in the world professionally, and be good people individually.  A one month study abroad course can’t completely deliver on all of that, of course, but this one seems to get pretty darn close.  And did I say it is fun as well?  Being in the places we visit, but more importantly, seeing the wonder and the growth of students, is pure joy.

2019 Study Abroad class – in Copenhagen