ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a travel-learning course offered at a university in the United States that takes students to Uganda in order to learn about the impact of globalization on extreme poverty and environmental sustainability. Through experiential immersion and interactions with Ugandan social entrepreneurs and conservationists, the course seeks to give students an appreciation for the interconnectedness between the Global North and South as well as between poverty and other social and environmental issues such as public health, environmental conservation, and poaching. By introducing a systems perspective, the course emphasizes that in order to achieve any of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as eradicating poverty, it is imperative to also make progress on many of the other goals, as they are interrelated symptoms of larger underlying issues. To assess the development of systems thinking and personal transformation, the current chapter presents and analyzes students’ reflections from their travel journal assignments and argues that their writing demonstrates the development of sociocognitive mindfulness and a sustainability mindset, both of which allow students to see the bigger picture of our greatest global challenges and to critically evaluate their own role in larger social and economic structures.
