The Cross Summer Academy is open to participants from Japan and around the world, and from all social, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.
The main language of program delivery is English, and the Academy is held within a native International English environment. For students whose native tongue is English, their participation will give them exposure and learning opportunity to all of the themes and subjects the Academy has to offer. As all participants, they engage in the community building emphasis of the program, and in particular they become English speaking mentors to those participants whose native languages are not English.
For those whose native language is not English, daily morning classes are separated by age and English speaking ability. These students learn as English second language learners as they engage in the same learning concepts and challenges as everyone else.
In the afternoons, activities replace the morning classes, and all students regardless of language competency participate in a variety of different groups depending on the challenges and events scheduled each afternoon.
For those students coming from overseas, the Academy offers a Japanese Language and Culture stream. During the morning class sessions that all participants are part of, this category of student engages in learning about Japan, its language, and its culture.
The Cross Summer Academy is an intense seven week program that is best described as a learning adventure experience. Everything that happens during the camp is tied together thematically from the start of the first week to the end of the sixth. The overall theme of “Open Minds Change the World” runs through each day, week, activity, event, topic of learning, location, challenge, and interaction. From the first moment of the first day of camp, participants sense immediately they are about to embark on something exciting, and they are!
For us, open-mindedness is the ability to understand the world’s social, cultural, linguistic, physical, conceptual, and technical dynamics, with the ability, flexibility, and aptitude to engage in those dynamics in different social and cultural contexts. In this spirit, each of the six weeks of the Cross Summer Academy is sub-themed accordingly: Eco-Environmental Studies, Technology & Engineering, Online Media & Design, Photography, Videography, & Production, International Dynamics, Remote, Virtual, & Real Flight, Communication and Social Awareness.
While each week introduces the camp participants to it’s particular sub theme through different sets of activities and experiences, the purpose of the entire Academy experience is to help participants learn how every individual activity they engage in is influenced by all of the weekly sub-themes simultaneously. Our approach is always interdisciplinary.
Take, for instance, learning to fly:
learning to fly requires technical and sensory-motor skills
flight enables new perspectives & ideas
new ideas are important to share
media and technology enables sharing and communication
communication has social and linguistic implications
socially and linguistically appropriate communication has presentational needs and requirements
presentation is highly dependent on form and structure
form and structure leads to design and ways and modes of communication
the ability to fly impacts, improves, and diversifies both action & behavior.
While each week of Camp introduces participants to subset themes, participants are constantly challenged to consider and apply those skills while taking into account the interconnectedness of all of the Academy’s sub themes and the overall intent of the Academy: to teach children how to use what they know to impact the world in positive ways, and to understand how their actions impact those around them, in whichever context they may find themselves.
So, while the first week may focus on International Dynamics and Awareness, the learning challenges and activities participants engage in during that week will be framed by awareness of the Academy’s overall goal: to help them understand what Open-Mindedness means, and the positive impact it has in any social, cultural, and communicative context.
We’ll also teach them what a disrupter is… since change at a large scale is accomplished by those whose open-mindedness ultimately leads them to impact the world with ideas they believe will improve it for everyone!
Key features of Cross programs are emphases on problem-solving, communication, creativity, challenge, diversity of experience, collaboration, negotiation, and community approaches to discovery and accomplishment.
Cross Academy learning experiences are intended to be “peeks under the hood” and adventures in discovering “how things work.” People learn and make things in order to fulfil perceived needs. They learn and make things to provide the means of interaction with each other and with the environment that surrounds them. Arguably, every idea, every thing, exists to meet the needs of people.
People are social creatures. Ultimately, the things we use, make, do, and engage in become parts of our “reality” because there is social consensus that they are necessary, useful, and important; they become means of interaction that make our communities work. Community is therefore at the center of the human experience: communities live, believe, do, make, and act in ways that are accepted by a majority as necessary to the success and well-being of the community itself.
Why is this important? Well, simply put, everyone within a community is an integral part of the process of the negotiations that result in what the community perceives to be its reality. Of course, there are always fundamental rules involved that are, perhaps to a great extent, determined and defined by the physical environment. Those rules are the foundational sciences that communities create (discover?) that give definition to the spaces that surround them. Those “natural rules” are themselves essentially “stories that work.” They help communities create the means to survive within the physical spaces they occupy. Most importantly, those stories are created, shared, tested, agreed upon, and used by the individuals within communities. In this way, the ideas, needs, wants, and desires of each individual ultimately affects the reality within which the entire community rests.
Cross programs emphasize learning through doing. We want people to learn to appreciate the world around them by discovering how and why things work. However, from that understanding, we would like people to develop the awareness that they too can create, add to, and perhaps modify their own behaviors, those of their community, and, by extension, reality itself. Finding ways to improve reality, to whatever scope or degree, is, perhaps, fundamentally, where creativity lies.
As a result, Cross wants people to experience, do, explore, and discover as much as they possibly can. We want people to appreciate that a plane flies; and we want them to discover how that happens by understanding the principles that allow it to happen. We want people to understand how to interact with each other in positive and meaningful ways, and so we teach them to dance, to play soccer, to work together to build, launch, and enjoy the experiences that only rockets can provide. We want them to eat, but we want them to understand not only the importance of food, but also the processes involved in where that food comes from and how it comes from those places. We would like people to learn to communicate, to understand each other, to work together to accomplish goals that benefit themselves and everyone around them. We want people to appreciate their environments, and learn to improve their abilities to interact with themselves, within their communities, within the spaces they occupy together.
Cross Education has come to Japan to establish its fully cultural & communicative immersive international summer camp experience to Japanese and offshore students.
There are certain places in the world where international education community building has happened and flourished. We’ve seen so historically in the USA, Switzerland, Canada, the UK. We believe that Japan makes absolute sense for may reasons: one for its global economic reach and impact; two for its positioning in the East, from where global economic growth is now largely being driven; and three, from a country that provides the connectedness, the safety, the security, and the richness of life and experience that inspire learning in all ways.
The directors have a long heritage in both Canada and Japan offering English-based experiential programs for international students. Through Cross Education, Japan, they proudly bring an exciting new brand of education to Japan to create a venue for people from all corners of the planet.
The Cross Summer Academy, coming next in the summer of 2019, is a multi-locational program based in the Tokyo and in the Kanto region. It brings a community of children and teenagers (from 5 to 18 years old) together from around the world, and from around Japan.
Together they engage in up to six weeks of challenge and discovery in the Cross Summer Academy:
Overall Theme:
Open Minds Change the World
Weekly Sub-themes:
Eco-Environmental Studies
Mechatronics & Technology Design,
Online Media & Design,
Photography, Videography, & Production
International Dynamics & Awareness
Remote, Virtual, & Real Flight
Program Contents & Features
(Applied weekly and thematically integrated into daily learning experiences.)
Technology: 3D, Mechatronics, Artificial Intelligence, Renewable Energy
Blockchain Innovation Theory and Application
Agriculture and Environmental Studies
Photography, Videography, and Digital Production
Aeronautics, Aviation, and Rocketry
Fine and Performing Arts
Sports and Athletics
Architecture and Design
Animation and Design
Outdoor Learning (Urban, Mountain, and Ocean)
Age Range: 5 to 18
Flexible & Variable Groups (same age, cross ages, by Academy “house”)
Full native English speaking environment and focus.
International Social and Cultural Awareness
Japanese Cultural and Language Studies
Integration and interaction between all ages.
Specialized focuses within age groups.
Collaborative Learning
Coaching, Mentoring, and Leadership Education
Weekly Social and Family Events that Include:
Performances, Parties, Presentations, and Park Barbecues
Cross Education Japan believes that children and young adults should participate together in a relationship that helps both learn. Older children help younger, and younger children are inspired to learn by the examples set by their older peers.
Equally so, Cross believes that in order to become inspired, at any age or level, inspirational figures and role models are essential. That’s why we tie professional in their fields into everything we do. Each theme and category of learning throughout the camp is tied to international professionals and organizations who are impacting the world with what they do.
We use the best examples and advice available in all of the learning opportunities we facilitate, from organizations and institutions such as Siemens, Platinum, Line, MIT, an more.
Cross Education Japan, and the Cross Summer Academy, provides educational opportunities, based in Japan, where ideas and people from around the world come together to benefit equally:
to inspire each other,
to learn from one another, and
to impact their lives each in ways that may later help each of them impact the world.
Check us out at www.cross.education and send us a note should you want more details: basecamp@cross.education.
