Enlight Global’s itineraries are between 10-12 days long, and can be planned at each traveling school’s convenience.

Enlight Global offers the following handcrafted itineraries for schools in 2025-26:

Vietnam: The Mighty Mekong

Norway: Journey to the Arctic

Enlight Global is able to organize short-term cultural exchanges for secondary schools interested in hosting traveling groups from overseas schools in Colombia, Turkey, and more. 

For more information about working with Enlight Global to bring a short-term group to your school, please contact us at director@enlightglobal.org. 

Short-term visits can be arranged according to availability and school schedule at any time. One year advance notice is required to plan a successful exchange. Often, the opportunity exists to exchange back, with students being reciprocally hosted by the visiting school. 

Small exchanges are a manageable step towards internationalizing the community, leave lasting impressions and memories, and open doors for lifelong friendships, school collaborations, and more.

Enlight Global’s itineraries are uniquely focused on regions with extraordinary yet fragile biological and cultural diversity.

When travelers choose an Enlight Global experience, they are choosing an immersive experience in the biological sciences, with an emphasis on ethnobiology (i.e., how human cultures interact with and use the plants and animals in their environment) and conservation biology (i.e., the critical role of biodiversity in maintaining a healthy and vibrant planet, and the tools and strategies for protecting it).

In addition to exposure to western scientific knowledge which relies largely on analytical and reductionist methods, Enlight Global’s immersive travel experiences provide students with a framework for understanding traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as rational and reliable knowledge that has been developed through generations of intimate contact with the land.

Enlight Global’s travel programs challenge students to consider the highly complex relationship between ecological and social processes, especially in places with generational poverty and/or strenuous political dynamics.

These focal areas of our program provide a transferable framework that students can use as they engage with their own diverse ecosystems and cultures at home and abroad.

Enlight Global anticipates these focal areas to be highly relevant to our students’ worldview and potential career paths. As we are now well into 'the century of extinctions,' conservation biology is an increasingly crucial discipline, and progress in this field is increasingly reliant on a combination of traditional indigenous knowledge and Western scientific approaches.

• Enlight Global works closely with students during the pre-trip orientation phase to spark curiosity, provide foundational knowledge of the culture and biodiversity of the chosen place, and deepen their learning experience from day 1. Students also find this orientation helpful in adjusting to a new place and culture upon arrival. 

• During the orientation phase, each student receives a package of carefully selected foundational material and curriculum, designed to provide the context for a much deeper learning experience on the trip. 

• Pre-trip foundational material provides students with a framework to help them select an Independent Project centered on an interest area they would like to more deeply develop on the trip. This project will be completed during travel and shared post-trip with their fellow-students and community back home. 

• From orientation to post-trip closure, students are guided through Enlight Global’s learning process (guided by design which includes self-examination (e.g., what bothers you in relation to environmental issues? Or, what do you not understand, that you wish to understand?), identifying/defining the scope/concern of interest, brainstorming (e.g., outline creative solutions to illuminate or answer key questions), and sharing with others (often via creative communication approaches designed or selected by students themselves).