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About PER
Welcome to PER! PDF Print E-mail
cmu07
Central Michigan Univ - March 2007
The old axiom says experience is the best teacher.  While we all know that from, well, experience, the way we pursue knowledge does not always take that reality into account.  Most post-secondary education is delivered in the classroom environment.  Courses are designed with lab time, simulations or case studies that reflect real-world possibilities.  In most cases, students must imagine the context because they have never been in the environment, certainly not as an active player.
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Our Philosophy of Education PDF Print E-mail
PER's philosophy of education is simple...the value of an education to a student is defined by that student's ability to integrate learning into practice and to transfer that learning across disciplines.  The degree to which a student will be effective over time can be directly tied to that student's ability to treat every life context as a learning environment within which to glean new understanding and within which to integrate past learning.  PER's educational programming is designed around the idea that everyone must learn, including the faculty.  We constantly strive to model ongoing in-process learning for students, from every facet of our organization.
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Our Team PDF Print E-mail
PER employs a core team of educational developers and practitioners with a broad background in experience-based and institutional education.  All have spent a significant amount of time plugged into PER's leadership development process.
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Our Story PDF Print E-mail

Roots

Youth Group
Youth Group - 2007 - Photo by D Wolfe
The Pilgrimage wilderness program was officially founded in 1984 when Pilgrimage made the transition from a youth ministry program at Calvary Baptist Church (Grand Rapids, MI) to an independent organization headed by Dennis Wilhite.  However, the ministry's roots began 10 years earlier on and after a wilderness trip in Algonquin Provincial Park (Ontario, Canada) with a small group of teens from First Baptist Church, North Tonawanda, NY.

The gear was wrong.  The food was wrong.  Nobody really knew what they were getting into.  A young youth pastor struggling to find real access to real spiritual relationships with a bunch of uninterested kids in a small church in upstate New York read an article about some Boy Scouts from town that had taken a canoe trip to Algonquin.  So he decided to try it.  It was worth a shot.  Everything went wrong... except the important part.
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