Four colleges and universities in the region have joined together to create the nation’s first Great Lakes college consortium for study onboard a tall ship — The Flagship Niagara.
The announcement is the culmination of an eight-month planning process among the Flagship Niagara League and colleges and universities including Allegheny College, Gannon University, Mercyhurst College. and Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio.
Students from each of the participating institutions will voyage on the Niagara from May 15 to June 4. The program will include study of the Great Lakes and maritime history through a combination of shore-based and shipboard lectures. Each student participating will receive credit from their home institution.
Allegheny College history professor Ian Binnington will provide shore-based instruction in Erie, while Great Lakes Historian and Erie Maritime Museum Administrator Walter Rybka, who also serves as senior captain of the Flagship Niagara, will provide the ship-based instruction. The course will have a strong emphasis placed on experiential learning rather than focusing on traditional lecture-based learning. “This is a wonderful opportunity for our students to connect the academic and the experiential, the book history with the ‘lived’ history of the past,” Binnington said.
“While there are significant academic lessons that will be taken away from this experience, students will have an opportunity to learn more about themselves and others while honing their own leadership skills,” Rybka said. “These are the types of skills that are difficult to teach in the classroom, yet, they are the very attributes that employers want to see in college graduates.”
Tall ship voyages instill character skills to such a great extent that Scotland’s University of Edinburgh chose to study the phenomenon in 2007. The university’s research concludes that the “participants of education under sail experiences” show measurable improvement in social skills. Their findings were published in a report titled “The Characteristics and Value of the Sail Training Experience.”
In order to ensure that the Flagship Niagara course is as accessible to as many students as possible, the program fee for the college students is exactly the same as what a regular trainee would pay on the Flagship Niagara for the same three-week period. Caleb Pifer, managing director of Educational Partner-Ships, asserts “the cost for participating consortium students is unequivocally the most affordable ship-based experience in the country. In fact, students can expect to pay roughly 50 percent less for this experience than they would for a similar program on the West or East Coast.”
