Bonjour Honors Educators!
The Abbey Experience is an intense academic semester abroad, during which all students will take at least 15 credit hours in the core of the Liberal Arts, while they also meet Europe and its citizens one village at a time. To learn more about our curriculum, click here: http://theabbeyprogram.org/home/academics/ Our teaching focusses on History, Art History, Comparative Literature and the French language. Although the Abbey Experience is pleased to accept French majors, our average student has no experience with French prior to our program. As this student blog reveals, part of The Abbey is always about lingusitic risks and fears being managed well: http://theabbeyprogram.org/2013/03/abbey-student-voices-my-first-host-family-sunday-dinner/
On behalf of the thousand-plus villagers who hail from the heart of France's Loire Valley in a town called Pontlevoy, the University of West Florida and its partner institutions would like to invite your top students to The Abbey Experience this September, 2014. www.theabbeyprogram.org
For more than a thousand years, monks and searchers and--more recently--America college students with high potential have come to the village of Pontlevoy to settle into the town's ancient abbey, where they live and learn with a deeply reflective engagement with their setting, academics and each other. Now it can be your students' turn to do the same, by experiencing The Abbey next fall. (As this student's blog post reveals, the village and program become a home very quickly for our group: http://theabbeyprogram.org/2013/03/abbey-student-voices-courtneys-very-busy-week-les-jours-sont-les-fetes/)
Of course The Abbey Experience is not for every student. It's for students from sophomore standing on who want to find an inner fearlessness and solder that together with how it feels to travel Europe and learn in active and dramatic ways every day. Our program size is limited to 50 students each fall, who will have 5-6 faculty as their mentors. This ratio allows us to do what can't be done at any home university: we hop trains for class or meet in a family's living room over tea. Or we bike to the organic winery down the road and hear how 7 generations of work and family have bottled the same product since before the time of Napoleon. Or we search for the perfect Parisian cafe to duck into and hide from the rain in, while our discussions of the "Lost Generation" are so lively that nobody can remember what regular "school" feels like. Students who've had The Abbey Experience mark it as the best learning time of their lives, as this digital short clearly reveals: http://vimeo.com/50303792
Students on The Abbey Experience have over three months to call Europe their classroom. Travel is critical to how our classes ask students to open up to a deeper learning. Whether at a 16th century chateau or standing on Omaha Beach, the academics of The Abbey Experience seek to combine what students learn with how and where that learning takes place. Is class today going to Rome's Sistine Chapel or to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam? Or at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just outside of Berlin, or somewhere in a storied literary pub in Dublin's infamous Temple Bar neighborhood? Every student has weeks of classes set in the incomparable Loire Valley, 6 nights in storied Paris and three nights along the canals of Amsterdam. Beyond those required classrooms, our academics will break away to go where they must go, while your students learn to travel and ask hard questions all along the journey. To learn more about how travel and learning weave together on The Abbey Experience, click here: http://theabbeyprogram.org/home/paris-travel/
Semester programs are often a dream for students that gets killed by budgetary considerations. That's why The Abbey Experience is priced to correspond so closely with what students tend to spend in any given semester at home. At $9899, The Abbey Experience fee covers everything a student will spend in a semester away, except for a plane ticket, the meals not covered by the program, books and any independent travel a student elects to do. Our best estimate for what a student will spend "all in" on The Abbey Experience is about $12,900. Financial aid can and does help most every Abbey student make the experience possible. To learn more about affording The Abbey Experience, take a look at our FAQ here:http://theabbeyprogram.org/home/faq/abbey-finances/
Students who want The Abbey Experience have national scholarships to apply for AND they have scholarships associated with The Abbey to seek. Students in good academic standing at the University of West Florida, for example, will have scholarship support available to help them fund their journey. While students hailing from any US university can compete for similar help through the Henry Douglas Mackaman Scholars Program, which will be awarding 20 scholarships for 2014 in the amount of $1000 to qualified students.
Your students will always find reasons to stay home next fall. We know from governmental research that over half of our graduating seniors who are college bound will swear up and down that study abroad is in their college future. We also know that out of about 14 million college students in the USA last year, only 300,000 made good on their study-abroad promise. The Abbey Experience is a special reason for your students to say yes to a study-abroad semester. And when your students have said yes, they will likely echo the kind of courage that is evident in this student's blog post from her term away:http://theabbeyprogram.org/2013/03/abbey-student-voices-dinner-with-my-host-family-mardi-gras-night/
Why should your top students apply for The Abbey Experience? Because our academics will help them regardless of their majors. Because our textured and dynamic learning model will give them a primer in self reliance and intellectual ferocity. And because our portable learning plans will become not just a semester itinerary of discovery and promise but a lifelong mantra about how to travel and learn with gusto, hope and reflection. Please review our attached brochure below, which is in Pdf format, to learn more reasons why The Abbey Experience is going to be right for your top students.
As Director of The Abbey Experience and The Abbey Experience Academic consortium, I will be available next week in New Orleans at the NCHC conference, together with Dr. Greg Lanier of the Honors Program at UWF, who is also past president of the NCHC. Find us all over the conference on Friday afternoon 8 November or Saturday morning 9 November, or look for us to be discussing The Abbey Experience with interested Honors Deans and Directors on Fridayevening about 8:00 pm in the bar of the Napoleon House. Click here for the link to The Abbey Experience Honors Fete Event to let us know that you can come! https://www.facebook.com/events/541484482593651/
Or to arrange a coffee, a cold pint or any other reason to chat next week in New Orleans about study abroad and how your students can access the benefits of The Abbey Experience, please text my cell at 651-341-1806 or shoot me an email at dougmackaman@gmail.com
The Experience begins this September, but the journey never ends.
Best,
Doug Mackaman
Dr. Douglas P. Mackaman
Professor of History
Mariah Birgen
Professor of Mathematics
Wartburg Scholars Director
Office Phone: (319) 352-8565
Office: SC 358
Professor of Mathematics
Wartburg Scholars Director
Office Phone: (319) 352-8565
Office: SC 358
Office Hours: Mon 2:30, Tues 2:00, Thur 2:00, Fri 2:30 PM Central time
Scholars Facebook: www.facebook.com/Wartburg.Scholars
Scholars Facebook: www.facebook.com/Wartburg.Scholars
Scholars Blog: http://wartburgscholarsprogram.blogspot.com/
Scholars WebSite: https://sites.google.com/site/wartburgscholarsprogram/
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