PROGRAM OFFERINGS

What’s in Your Backpack?

2026–2027 Global Learning Programs

Building curiosity, one journey at a time.

Why Yellow Backpack?

Every journey adds something powerful to your backpack—identity, empathy, courage, discernment, and connection.

Yellow Backpack Global Education Consultants designs immersive, standards-aligned learning experiences that meet students, educators, and institutions at the intersection of place, purpose, and global citizenship.

Our programs are intentionally designed to be:

Student-Centered
SDG-Aligned
Project-Based
Reflection-Focused
Rooted in Cultural Understanding & Justice

Whether experienced through curriculum-only learning pathways or travel-enhanced study tours, each program equips learners with transferable skills for an interconnected world.

I. Study Tours

Domestic & International | Curriculum + Travel Experience
Each Yellow Backpack study tour includes pre-learning, guided immersive experiences, and post-trip reflection or capstone options aligned to Sustainable Development Goals and global competencies.

II. Professional Development Experiences

Educator-Centered | Travel-Based Learning
Yellow Backpack’s professional development experiences immerse educators in place-based learning that strengthens practice, deepens perspective, and connects theory to lived experience. Designed for teachers, school leaders, and program designers, these journeys blend observation, dialogue, and reflection, supporting educators in translating global and community insights into meaningful classroom and institutional change.

III. Global Citizen Curriculum Development – Global Pathways

Curriculum-Only | Travel Optional Add-On
Programs are designed to align with family-directed education funding options where applicable.These programs deliver standards-aligned curriculum that can stand alone or be enhanced with travel.

STUDY TOURS

Domestic & International | Curriculum + Travel Experience
Each Yellow Backpack study tour includes pre-learning, guided immersive experiences, and post-trip reflection or capstone options aligned to Sustainable Development Goals and global competencies.

Faith, Justice & The Journey

A Three-Part Civil Rights Learning Series

What You’ll Pack: Legacy, Leadership, Moral Courage
Target Audience:Grades 5–12, homeschoolers, college cohorts

Description:
This multi-phase Civil Rights learning experience traces the moral arc of justice across the American South through place-based inquiry, oral histories, and civic reflection. Designed as a three-part series, the program scaffolds learning from historical foundations to contemporary application.

Participants engage with sites of resistance, faith, and policy—walking the same paths where ordinary people reshaped a nation through extraordinary courage. Reflection, dialogue, and capstone work anchor learning beyond the journey.

Backpack Highlights:

Mississippi Delta storytelling & Emmett Till legacy study
Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge + Montgomery’s movement infrastructure
Culminating reflection at the National Museum of African American History & Culture

War, Memory & the Making of a City

Atlanta’s Civil War Study Tour

What You’ll Pack: Perspective, Inquiry, Historical Empathy
Target Audience: Middle & high school students, homeschoolers<

Description:
A five-day immersive exploration of Atlanta’s Civil War history through divided households, battlefield landscapes, and post-war transformation. Using neighborhoods as classrooms, participants examine loyalty, loss, and resilience through primary sources, sacred spaces, and civic memory.

Backpack Highlights:

Civil War Trail Marker artifact hunts
Big Bethel AME Church & Oakland Cemetery analysis
Soldier letters, nurse payrolls, and Sherman’s writings

Martha’s Vineyard Dual Track Study Tour

Indigenous & African American Heritage

What You’ll Pack: Belonging, Identity, Cultural Joy
Target Audience: Middle & high school students, homeschool pods

Description:
This ten-day dual-track journey honors both Wampanoag history and the Vineyard’s legacy as a refuge of Black leisure, landownership, and belonging. Through land-based education and storytelling, students explore who gets to belong—and how place becomes resistance.

Backpack Highlights:

Indigenous history & coastal climate study
Inkwell District and Black heritage exploration
Collaborative art & student-led panels

*In select destinations, accommodations are arranged in partnership with Hostelling International USA.

Swamp Stories: Science, Culture & Conservation in Georgia’s Wetlands

What You’ll Pack:Curiosity, Stewardship, Systems Thinking
Target Audience:Middle & high school students, homeschoolers

Description:
This five-day immersive study tour explores Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp as a dynamic ecosystem shaped by science, history, and human choice. Through field-based inquiry, primary source analysis, and creative expression, students investigate how wetlands function, why they matter, and how cultural narratives—from Indigenous traditions to modern conservation debates—reflect evolving relationships with the land. Using the Yellow Backpack™ Framework, learners connect ecological observation to civic responsibility, culminating in student-led action projects that link local stewardship to global sustainability.

Backpack Highlights:

Canoe-based ecosystem exploration and biodiversity field study
Indigenous history, settler narratives, and primary source inquiry at Chesser Island
Student capstone projects connecting conservation, culture, and climate action

New Orleans: Climate, Culture & Community Resilience

What You’ll Pack:Environmental Literacy, Advocacy, Urban Insight
Target Audience: High school students, STEM & humanities learners

Description:This ten-day experience examines climate change, environmental justice, and cultural resilience in one of America’s most vulnerable cities. From wetlands restoration to second-line traditions, students explore how communities respond creatively to systemic challenges.

Backpack Highlights:

Bayou ecosystems & levee system analysis
Urban planning and green design workshops
Cultural resistance through music, food, and story

Black Hills: Sacred Land & Shared History

What You’ll Pack: Sovereignty, Ethical Inquiry, Historical Complexity
Target Audience: High school students, college cohorts

Description:
This immersive experience examines Indigenous sovereignty, land stewardship, and contested memory in the Black Hills. Students investigate how sacred land, federal policy, and historical narratives collide—and what reconciliation requires.
Backpack Highlights:

Indigenous-led site interpretation
Federal policy analysis & treaty study
Reflection on land, power, and narrative ownership

Iceland: Climate Science & Sustainable Futures

What You’ll Pack:Environmental Systems Thinking, Innovation
Target Audience: High school students, STEM educators

Description:This international study tour explores Iceland as a living laboratory for renewable energy, climate adaptation, and sustainable design. Students examine how geology, policy, and innovation intersect in climate-forward societies.

Backpack Highlights:

Geothermal energy and glacier studies
Urban sustainability case studies
Climate ethics & global responsibility dialogue

Professional Development Experiences

Breaking the Pipeline-A Justice-Centered Educator Experience

Location: Seattle, Washington Duration: 5–7 Days What You’ll Pack:Courage, Accountability, Liberatory Practice

Target Audience: Educators, school leaders, counselors, program designers, nonprofit and systems leaders

Program Description: Breaking the Pipeline is an immersive professional learning experience designed to help educators confront, understand, and dismantle the systems that funnel young people, particularly Black, Indigenous, and marginalized students from schools into incarceration. Grounded in abolitionist teaching, culturally sustaining pedagogy, trauma-informed and healing-centered practice, and Indigenous frameworks for justice, this experience moves participants beyond theory and into lived, relational learning. Seattle becomes both classroom and curriculum as educators engage directly with land, community, history, and those most impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline. Participants through dialogue, testimony, and reflection, will examine how discipline policies, curriculum design, and compliance-driven systems perpetuate harm and how classrooms can instead become sites of healing, accountability, and liberation.

Educators will explore:

The historical and structural roots of the school-to-prison pipeline
The difference between culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching
Trauma-informed vs. healing-centered educational practice
Abolitionist approaches to discipline, safety, and accountability
Decolonial and Indigenous pedagogies that reconnect learning to land, community, and relationship
Transformative justice as a framework for redesigning classrooms and school culture

Experience Highlights

Land-Based Grounding & Indigenous Wisdom
Direct Encounter & Testimony
Justice-Centered Design Studios

Outcomes

Practical, justice-centered strategies for classroom and school implementation

PRECE Brazil: Cooperative Learning & Community Transformation

Location:Fortaleza → Cipó → Salvador, Bahia. Duration: 10 Days
What You’ll Pack: Solidarity, Pedagogical Agency, Collective Responsibility
Target Audience:K–12 educators, instructional leaders, education faculty

Program Description
The PRECE Brazil Experience is an immersive professional development journey designed for educators seeking to reimagine teaching and learning through cooperation, autonomy, and community-rooted practice. Anchored in the internationally recognized PRECE Movement in Ceará, Brazil, this experience invites participants to study a living model of education that has transformed access, outcomes, and identity for rural and historically marginalized learners. Through workshops, classroom observations, curriculum studios, and cultural immersion, educators examine how cooperative learning, peer accountability, and student agency operate not as strategies, but as values deeply embedded in community life. The journey begins in Cipó, where educators engage directly with PRECE founders, students, and families, observing cooperative learning in action and participating in curriculum design grounded in lived context. The experience concludes in Salvador, Bahia, where Afro-Brazilian history, culture, and resistance deepen participants’ understanding of identity, joy, and justice in global education. This is relational learning, designed to equip educators with practical tools, redesigned mindsets, and a renewed sense of purpose for their classrooms and communities.

Educators will explore:

Cooperative learning as a framework for autonomy, agency, and belonging
Assessment practices that center growth, dialogue, and collective accountability
The role of the educator as facilitator, not deliverer
Curriculum design rooted in peer instruction and community contribution

Experience Highlights

PRECE Learning Communities in Practice
Curriculum Studio Labs
Afro-Brazilian Identity & Cultural Immersion

Outcomes

A deep understanding of cooperative learning as a justice-centered practice
Drafted lesson plans and unit designs grounded in student agency

Global Citizen Curriculum Development

Curriculum-Only | Travel Optional Add-On
Designed for school-choice funding eligibility, these programs deliver standards-aligned, SDG-anchored curriculum that can stand alone—or be enhanced with travel.

Global Citizenship Learning Pathways

What You’ll Pack: Inquiry, Reflection, Global Competence
Target Audience: Schools, homeschool networks, microschools

Description:
Yellow Backpack curriculum pathways integrate place-based inquiry, Project-Based Learning, and guided reflection to build global competence without requiring travel. Optional immersion experiences can be layered in as extensions.

Place • Power • Responsibility
The Global Pathways Curriculum is a modular, inquiry-driven framework that guides learners through essential questions of identity, land, power, and responsibility. Each pathway stands alone yet connects to a shared learning arc—moving students from historical understanding to reflection, synthesis, and civic or environmental agency.

CIVIL RIGHTS: FAITH, JUSTICE & THE JOURNEY

Focus:Civic Identity & Moral Courage
This pathway explores the U.S. Civil Rights Movement through the lived experiences of individuals and communities who challenged injustice and reshaped democratic participation. Students examine how faith, youth leadership, and collective action fueled social change and how those lessons remain urgent today.

Modules (8–12 weeks total):
Who Am I in the Story? • Foundations of the Movement • Faith, Youth & Moral Courage • Strategy, Resistance & Power • Place, Memory & Narrative • Justice Then & Now • Capstone: The Journey Forward

Enduring Question:
What does justice ask of me, here and now?

CIVIL WAR: CONFLICT, CONSEQUENCE & CIVIC RECONSTRUCTION

Focus: Democracy & National Identity — Through the Lens of Atlanta

Grounded in Atlanta’s role as a strategic city shaped by conflict, destruction, rebuilding, and memory, this pathway examines the Civil War and its aftermath as a living force in civic life. Students explore how urban history reveals national struggles over citizenship, power, and belonging.

Modules (8–12 weeks total):
A City Divided • War Comes to Atlanta • Emancipation & Urban Transformation • Reconstruction & Resistance • Burning, Rebuilding & Reinvention • Memory & the Cityscape • Legacy & Civic Reckoning • Capstone: Reconstructing the City

Enduring Question: How does a city shaped by conflict decide what it remembers—and what it becomes?

HOW GLOBAL PATHWAYS ARE DELIVERED

Flexible Learning Tiers

All Global Pathways programs are offered through three instructional tiers, allowing families and learning communities to choose the level of support that best fits their needs.

Curriculum Only
Self-paced access to digital modules, primary sources, reflection prompts, and capstone frameworks.

Curriculum + Guided Instruction Curriculum paired with educator-led sessions that deepen inquiry, discussion, and feedback.

Extended Instructional Cohort A collaborative, cohort-based experience with extended instruction and a culminating presentation or portfolio.

All tiers are delivered as curriculum and instructional services. Optional experiential extensions may be offered separately.

Program Pricing & Participation Overview

Yellow Backpack Global Education Consultants designs intentionally small, high-impact learning experiences rooted in curriculum, reflection, and place-based inquiry. Pricing reflects curriculum design, expert facilitation, program leadership, and in-country logistics (meals, ground transportation and program related activities).

Yellow Backpack also designs custom programs by request, tailored to institutional goals, learner age, geography, and budget.

Custom curation may include:

Destination and theme alignment
Standards-based curriculum design
SDG and global competency integration
Faculty-led or co-facilitated models

Custom programs are quoted individually following consultation and scope development. Airfare is not included in program pricing.

Student Study Tours (Domestic & International)
Minimum: 10 participants
Maximum: 15 participants

Professional Development Experiences
Minimum: 10 educators
Maximum: 15 educators
Small cohorts ensure safety, depth of engagement, and personalized learning.

Curriculum-only versions are available for selected programs for school-choice and funding-eligible pathways. Custom pricing available for institutional partnerships or pod buyouts

What Program Pricing Includes

Pre-experience curriculum & orientation
On-site facilitation and instructional leadership
Program-related ground and air transportation (in-country only)
Site visits, workshops, and expert engagements
Learning materials, reflection journals, and capstone support
Risk management planning and coordination

Travel insurance is required. We recommend our Travel Safety Partner Global Rescue.