León, Spain, Spain

Walk To Understanding Boost your 21st Century Skills and Master Global Citizenship

This course will take you to Spain - where you will train yourself in compassionate leadership, communicating and collaborating, while walking the Camino de Santiago -- the iconic pilgrimage, steeped in medieval charm.

This is not just a course. It is not just a walk. It is an odyssey of the spirit - an eight-day voyage towards mastering the 21st-century skills for global citizenship.

The course is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, bringing you insights and new capabilities that will be beneficial to you for the rest of your life.

This course is about the stuff that is rarely found in curricula at schools or universities. It is about you as a human being and how you relate to yourself, others, and other cultures. It is about the meaning and purpose of diversity and inclusiveness. It is about the four-mode perspective that broadens your scope and your communication and collaboration skills. It is about critical thinking, self-regulation and becoming your very best as a caring, responsible global citizen and professional.

The content of the course is similar to our successful course (B50) 'Boost your 21st Century Skills and Master Global Citizenship', which will be offered again in Utrecht from 29 July to 2 August 2024. We offer this new course as an additional specialty in combination with the challenge of Walking the Camino de Santiago with the class (!), with the aim of leveraging the positive effect of dynamic learning on creativity and reflection (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577)

The course is highly interactive: experiencing is key. With every challenge, you enter a new stage, a new level of maturity, discovering new insights and secrets about life and living. AND: it is so much fun doing it, together with fellow students from around the globe.

You should think of this course as a five-day voyage towards mastering the 21st century skills for global citizenship.

Globalization, polarisation, and a range of issues that affect people and nature around the globe, make a strong sense of global citizenship more important than ever before. We are living in an age in which technology has profoundly influenced the ways we think, feel, act, communicate and collaborate. This raises all kinds of questions, it reveals needs and requires skills for understanding ourselves and others in this constantly changing world.

The so-called 21st century skills are considered the most important skills to succeed in today's workplace, since they can be universally applied to enhance ways of thinking, learning, working and living in the world. These skills are: critical thinking/reasoning, creativity/creative thinking, problem-solving, metacognition, collaboration, communication and global citizenship.

In this highly interactive course, discovering, experiencing, and sharing are the key activities.

On days 1 and 2, you will be introduced to the Four-Mode Perspective. This universal principle entails that every challenge can be met, and that every message can be delivered in four different ways. Your skillfulness and effectivity in communicating with others will quadruple overnight!

On days 3, 4 and 5 you will immerse yourself into eight other 21st century skills: Collaboration, Socio-cultural awareness, Self-regulation, Critical thinking, Media literacy, Creativity, Problem-solving skills and Entrepreneurship. All in a global perspective, and broadening your scope as a global citizen.

Every exercise in the course is practical, fun to do, and highly educational. The course is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, bringing you insights and new capabilities that will be beneficial to you for the rest of your life.

Your discoveries and learning won’t end on the last day of the course. We will invite you and your fellow students to form a Circle of Understanding, and each of you will be offered 25 real-life challenges for 100 more days to further grow both personally and professionally. During that time, your phone will be your classroom and you will be able to share your experiences with your peers on a private online platform. This highly effective way of micro-learning is currently being adopted by universities around the world to support students (and staff) in developing global citizenship and 21st-century skills.

This course is offered in collaboration with Ewald Theunisse, co-founder of the Academy of Understanding.

Course leader

Jelly J. Offereins MA

Target group

We are looking for students in any discipline who believe that human understanding makes all the difference and want to train themselves in compassionate leadership, communication and collaborating and also like the challenge of walking/hiking a part of the world-famous Camino de Santiago.

The course is open to all students from different fields of study with an interest in becoming a better person and professional.

We set the route on the Camino in such a way that it should be doable for healthy, fit people, with no additional training required. We will walk between 2.5 and 4.5 hours per day.

Course aim

The sessions and assignments are highly interactive, challenging and fun: you will be invited to experiment, experience, reflect and discuss. You will learn by doing and explore different perspectives, while in the meantime being offered important professional and personal insights. The course will help you integrate your existing knowledge and skills with new insights, step out of your comfort zone and develop the mind-set to improve communication and compassionate collaboration.. During this learning experience, you will receive intensive coaching.

Fee info

EUR 1299: Course fee. Student fee €950
The fee includes the study programme, study material, and Bed & Breakfast (from Thursday 20 June up to and including Thursday 27 June).