Where There Be Dragons... in Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz welcomes a new member to our community: Aaron Slosberg. Aaron is the Director of Student Programming at Where There Be Dragons (“WTBD”), a 28-year old company based in Boulder, Colorado. We had the chance to learn more about Aaron and his company, and thought this might be of interest to others who love travel and experiential education.
Aaron Slosberg
SCW: What brought you to Santa Cruz?
Aaron: I grew up in Pleasanton, California. The mountains and the sea called me home. WTBD needed a west coast office near a major urban center for international travel. Many of our institutional partners are in the San Francisco Bay Area. Santa Cruz fit the bill.
SCW: WTBD is an unusual name for a company. How did it come to be?
Aaron: Some of our first programs targeted China. Ancient Chinese maps indicated a wilderness, uncharted territory with a dragon symbol. We believe these unexplored areas, non-traditional places to travel, are opportunities for personal transformation. We believe travel helps us find uncharted places within ourselves.
SCW: What is your role at WTBD?
Aaron: I oversee all global operations. I partner with educational institutions and corporations to create unique experiences for all ages.
SCW: Tell us about WTBD?
Aaron: We are 30 passionately dedicated employees, plus another 120 contracted staff around the world who facilitate our programs. While we don’t have any immediate plans to hire in Santa Cruz, we have contract staff jobs available. See WTBD Opportunities
SCW: Are there similarities between Boulder and Santa Cruz?
Aaron: Many. Both cities have liberal, progressive cultures, even a bit counter-culture. Both have a strong positive university presence. Both are being rapidly transformed by both tech and environmental & social economic concerns. And both cities have a healthy athletic community who appreciate and respect the outdoors, yoga, biking, and much more.
SCW: Are there Dragons in Santa Cruz?
Aaron: Ha ha! Yes, if you have an open mind and know where to look.
Left to Right: A Dragons student meets her homestay family in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo: Chloe Hall, Indonesia Summer. Trekking in the Cordillera Real, Bolivia. Photo: Ella Williams, Andes & Amazon Semester
Company Profile
THE LEADER IN CROSS-CULTURAL + EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION SINCE 1993
Since 1993, Dragons has pioneered expertly led, comprehensive travel experiences for high school, college, and adult participants. On course, we learn by doing. We travel like locals, live with families, apprentice with artists, and learn from scholars, sages, and community leaders. We access phenomenal beauty, engage deeply with local communities, and ignite our own curiosity.
We believe that the experience of living in the world and connecting with an unfamiliar culture has something to teach everyone. We are dedicated to cross-cultural education because we believe that future leaders will be required to think beyond borders when considering the implications of resource scarcity on a global community. Our courses are designed to help develop the self-awareness and cross-cultural competencies to be active participants in this conversation. We see exceptional beauty in diversity and believe that the health of the planet can only be optimized when individual citizens are internally motivated to care for a global community. We can’t predict exactly what skills will be needed to succeed in the future, but we’re willing to hedge our bets that a foreign language, well-worn passport, and healthy dose of empathy will serve our world well.
History
Our guiding pedagogy was originally formed in response to travel limitations in China. In 1992-93, when Dragons built its first programs, the Chinese government imposed numerous restrictions on visiting student groups making it difficult to go beyond a tightly curated and contrived experience. In pursuit of the intimate and authentic, we thought it necessary to travel beyond the tourist zones, to visit ethnic minority areas in the countryside, and open ourselves to meeting with intellectuals, artists, and activists in unscripted spaces. To access these sources of learning we traveled in small numbers with a high instructor-to-student ratio allowing us to move beyond government limitations as a band of independent travelers. The young academics we first hired possessed years of country-knowledge and specialized language skills, allowing them to mentor participants through nuanced cultural interactions and provide expert context. From those first programs we developed a training curriculum, assessment practices, and management structures to build our community of exceptional Dragons instructors.
Over the past twenty-five years, we have expanded our operations to over twenty countries. The history of Dragons is one of continually innovative programming in lesser visited parts of the developing world: no two Dragons programs are the same. We have developed extensive training to support innovation in international programs, from trainings in risk management and emergency response; to trainings in leadership, conflict-resolution and team-building; to trainings in developmental psychology and the adolescent mind. We have honed our curriculum to enable our instructors to best teach to global citizenship, self-awareness, and leadership through traditional didactic modalities as well as carefully built and tested modalities of cross-cultural experiential education.
What Sets Dragons Apart
We travel in small groups. A Dragons group typically consists of no more than 12 participants and 3 instructors. A 4:1 participant-to-instructor ratio ensures that each participant receives individual mentorship and appropriate challenges. Small groups allow us to create dynamic and flexible course itineraries.
We hire experts. Dragons instructor teams include an average of 4-12 years of in-country experience, communicate in local dialects, and bring cultural fluency to each program. When not guiding with Dragons, our instructors are typically graduate students, returned Peace Corps Volunteers, U.N. development professionals, veteran guides, and career teachers - all of whom share a passion for fostering humble and authentic cultural exchange.
We embrace the power of experiential education. By closely observing and engaging with local communities, we begin to ask questions about new cultural traditions, governance systems, religious beliefs, and human rights; we also ask reflective questions about who we are, where we come from, and how we’d like to live as empowered members of a global community. We employ experiential education to address the question, “who am I and why do I matter,” while embracing a leadership model of leading-from-behind, such that participants are encouraged to be self-directed leaders.
We understand that change doesn’t happen overnight. The process of knowing a place, and knowing ourselves within that place, takes time and we ask our participants to commit to the process of slowing down, feeling uncomfortable, and digging deep enough to become wiser about the world and themselves.
We foster responsible travel. Dragons defines responsible travel as travel that is culturally conscious, environmentally responsible, and focused on developing meaningful connections and mutual respect with local communities. Over the course of Dragons 25-year history, we have cultivated longstanding relationships with respected community leaders, academics, social entrepreneurs, and professionals involved in a diversity of fields.
We promote a paradigm shift from “volunteering” to “learning service.” Dragons service program component promotes a holistic experience that combines a study of effective development, a long-term sustainability assessment, and coordination with an established community-driven project. We acknowledge that while we strive to leave a positive mark in communities, it is often ourselves that undergo the most profound learning and transformation through authentic engagement and an exchange of culture.
Core Values
Profound travel experiences often provide a strong mirror for the lives we live at home. Dragons instructors guide reflective conversations, helping participants to better understand themselves and to realize their full potential. Dragons core values are at the center of this self-discovery process and integrated into daily life on course. Whether participants are asked to book bus tickets for the group or translate from Spanish to English during a speaker presentation, participants are offered daily opportunities to develop new skills and strengthen their abilities as leaders and global citizens.
On course, participants build critical skills in:
Global Citizenship: Connecting across cultures to discover the world, and a place within it.
Self-Awareness: Asking questions to learn more about one’s own core values.
Leadership: Finding a voice among a new group of peers. Gaining confidence as a responsible, self-reliant traveler.
Contact Details
General Inquiries: info@wheretherebedragons.com or 303.413.0822
Reed Harwood, Executive Director: reed@wheretherebedragons.com
Christina Cogswell, Communications Director: christina@wheretherebedragons.com
Aaron Slosberg: Director of Student Programming: aaron@wheretherebedragons.com
Website: www.wheretherebedragons.com