Day 1: Arrive in Ho Chi Minh City
Arrive in Ho Chi Minh City, meet your guide, and transfer to your accommodation.

During an introductory orientation, learn about Vietnam, the program schedule, community engagement expectations, health and safety, and practical considerations for the days ahead. Faculty leaders may use this time to introduce course themes, establish reflection practices, or prepare students for their first field experience.

Enjoy a welcome dinner and an introduction to Vietnamese food and culture.

Day 2: History, Urban Change & Community Context
Begin with a guided exploration of Ho Chi Minh City. Visit sites such as the Reunification Palace, Central Post Office, Notre-Dame Cathedral area, and the War Remnants Museum.

These sites provide context for understanding Vietnam’s history and the social changes that have shaped contemporary life. As students encounter the city’s civic spaces, neighborhoods, and streets, they can examine how migration, economic development, infrastructure, and public services influence families and communities.

Continue to Ben Thanh Market, a gathering place for food vendors, shoppers, and family-run businesses that offers an introduction to daily economic life in the city. Before entering a community setting, students can consider the context they need to understand and the assumptions they need to question.

Day 3: Community Engagement & Relationship Building
Begin assisting with a local project at a school, kindergarten, children’s home, or community setting. Specific activities will reflect local needs, group size, timing, and availability.

The first day offers an opportunity to listen, observe, and learn from the people who work with children every day. Students may meet teachers, caregivers, staff, and children; become familiar with the setting’s routines; and support introductory activities such as games, storytelling, songs, arts, or name-learning.

Later, participate in an introductory Vietnamese language lesson. Faculty leaders may use reflection time to connect the day’s experience with course goals and prepare students for subsequent project activities.

Day 4: Child Development, Play & Participation
Continue assisting with the local project. Depending on the setting, students may support teachers and caregivers through early-learning activities, reading, games, music, art, movement, conversational English, classroom routines, meals, or hygiene education.

Consider the role of play and interaction in child development. How do children build communication, confidence, creativity, motor skills, collaboration, and problem-solving through everyday activities?

Later, continue Vietnamese language learning and use practical phrases to deepen cultural understanding and communication.

Day 5: Shared Learning Spaces, Care & Community
Continue project activities in the morning. Where appropriate, students may assist with improving a shared learning space through cleaning, painting, organizing, preparing learning materials, or creating child-friendly murals and artwork.

Explore how physical environments affect learning. What do children need from a classroom or shared space to feel safe, engaged, welcomed, and ready to participate?

In the afternoon, visit a pagoda or Buddhist temple. Learn about Buddhism and consider how cultural traditions, family values, and community institutions influence ideas about care, childhood, and responsibility.

Day 6: Family Livelihoods & Community Resources
Travel by road to the Mekong Delta, where waterways, agriculture, small businesses, and food production shape everyday life. Along the route, observe the infrastructure and changing landscapes that connect urban and rural communities.

Travel by boat along the Mekong River and visit local sites that may include gardens, fish farms, village workshops, food producers, or cottage industries. Through these encounters, students can examine how household livelihoods, transportation, seasonal work, and local resources influence family stability and children’s opportunities.

Day 7: Food Systems, Markets & Educational Opportunity
Begin with an early visit to a floating market, where vendors trade fruits, vegetables, and other goods directly from boats. Continue through the Delta’s waterways and visit a rice-noodle workshop or similar local producer.

As students trace food from producers to consumers, consider the networks of work, transport, trade, and relationships that sustain household life. How might food security, mobility, income, and access to services affect children’s readiness to learn?

Return to Ho Chi Minh City in the afternoon.

Day 8: Language, Belonging & Continued Engagement
Return to the local project for continued activities with children, teachers, caregivers, or staff. Having observed the wider systems surrounding family life, students can return to the learning environment with new questions about the resources, relationships, and routines that support children.

Later, deepen Vietnamese-language learning. Faculty leaders may invite students to consider how language shapes confidence, communication, identity, and belonging in learning environments.

Day 9: Education, Care & Everyday Life
Continue assisting with the local project. Students may support children through games, reading, creative activities, outdoor play, classroom support, or other locally appropriate activities.

In the afternoon, participate in a Vietnamese cooking workshop. Explore how food connects agriculture, markets, labor, household knowledge, cultural tradition, and shared care.

Day 10: Families, Work & Educational Aspirations
Continue project activities in the morning.

In the evening, share a meal with a local family, subject to availability. Through conversation, students can learn about daily life, caregiving, employment, household responsibilities, education, and aspirations for children’s futures.

Faculty leaders may use the experience to explore the systems beyond the classroom that affect learning and child well-being.

Day 11: Reflection, Synthesis & Departure
Gather for a final reflection connecting the program’s experiences: the local project, learning environments, child development, community resources, family livelihoods, language, culture, and food systems.

Return to the guiding question: What are the realities of creating learning environments where every child can thrive?

Conclude with a farewell dinner before transferring to the airport for your return flight home.