The Gap Year Frontier

Authors

  • Christopher Nye Educate the Whole Child

Keywords:

gap year, experiential learning, leadership, folk school

Abstract

Gap year programs offer unique opportunities for high school graduates to mature and find their inner compass before they go on to college. The best programs offer deeply transformative learning that engages each student’s head, heart, and hands. Inspired by the Danish Folk Schools and Deep Springs, a microcollege, these experience-based programs teach resilience, agency, creativity, empathy, and belonging. Students can earn college credit for their place-based environmental coursework and service learning. They spend time in nature and acquire some hands-on skills. The programs aim, in part, to instill leadership qualities that will be needed in the difficult times ahead.

Author Biography

Christopher Nye, Educate the Whole Child

Author Bio

Christopher Nye holds a PhD in American Studies and has been a professor and dean. During his career in higher education he instituted service learning programs and designed and ran several after-school programs at elementary schools using college students as mentors. He co-founded Educate the Whole Child, an initiative to identify and certify public schools that are doing just that. ETWC has national reach and is building a network of schools that are doing bold and pioneering work to restore child-centered and project-based learning to its rightful place in schools. He is also a published poet and author of the children's book The Old Shepherd’s Tale.

Currently he extends his Whole Child work into the gap year sphere. He is an officer in two foundations and also manages a nature preserve. The book he is completing ventures into future studies and imagines a new civilization with radically different approaches to education, farming, and the economy.

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Published

2024-05-29

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2024): Unthemed

Section

Peer-Reviewed Submissions