Meet Glen
Glen Turf is an educator, global learning strategist, and student travel risk management specialist based in Miami, USA. With more than three decades in education, he has worked as a teacher, department chair, upper school director, senior administrator, and global learning leader. Today, as Founder and Principal of Saudade Global Pathways, he helps K to 12 schools, universities, and educational organizations build stronger global learning programs through travel risk management, chaperone preparation, institutional systems, and thoughtful decision making.
When the Classroom Became the World
For Glen Turf, education has never been limited to what happens inside a classroom. His career has been shaped by a belief that students learn something different when they encounter people, places, cultures, and circumstances beyond the boundaries of their familiar lives.
That belief has taken him across four continents and into more than 45 student and adult travel experiences. Over the years, he has seen students participate in academic programs, cultural exchanges, service experiences, and study abroad opportunities that challenged their assumptions and expanded their understanding of the world.
For Glen, the value of those experiences is not simply found in the destination. It is found in the encounter itself. A student who meets someone whose life looks entirely different from their own may begin to ask questions that could never emerge from a textbook. A young person who enters an unfamiliar community may discover that many of the ideas they once considered universal were shaped by the small world around them.
That perspective has remained central to Glen’s professional life. It is also why he believes global education carries a responsibility that extends beyond providing students with memorable experiences.
“I am a fierce advocate for experiential and global learning, but it must be done safely and with care.”
For Glen, those two ideas belong together. Exploration requires openness, but meaningful exploration also requires preparation. The freedom to experience the world depends, in part, on the adults responsible for students knowing how to respond when circumstances become complicated.
A Career Built Through Experience
Glen’s journey into global education developed gradually through a career that gave him the opportunity to understand schools from many different perspectives.
He began with a foundation in language and education, earning a B.A. in Spanish from Colgate University before completing an M.Ed. in Teaching Foreign Languages at the University of Virginia. His work eventually brought him into leadership roles at schools including Charlotte Country Day School, Isidore Newman School, and Miami Country Day School.
One of the defining moments in his career came in 2000, when he participated in a Fulbright Teacher Exchange to Argentina. The experience strengthened his connection to international education and offered a firsthand reminder of how powerful learning can become when it moves beyond familiar surroundings.
Years later, in 2013, another opportunity changed the shape of his work. Glen was given the freedom to curate his own study abroad program for his students and school. Having the trust to develop a program from the ground up allowed him to think carefully about what students could gain from international experiences and what was required to make those experiences meaningful.
By 2017, his professional focus had shifted again. He moved from serving as an Upper School Director, essentially a high school principal, into a full time role focused on global studies. The change gave him more space to explore experiential learning and develop programs that connected students with the wider world.
In 2021, Glen returned to senior administration, where his responsibilities also expanded to include diversity, equity, and belonging. That period added another dimension to his understanding of education. Global learning was not simply about taking students somewhere new. It was also about helping them understand people whose backgrounds, identities, experiences, and perspectives differed from their own.
Leaving the Familiar Behind
After years of working within established educational institutions, Glen decided to build his own consultancy focused on advancing mission-aligned global studies programs and safer student travel.
Starting a business introduced an entirely new set of demands.
Suddenly, the work involved much more than designing educational experiences or advising schools. Marketing, finances, legal matters, insurance, business development, and the many less visible responsibilities of running a consultancy became part of his everyday life.
The challenge was not whether Glen believed in the work. He knew exactly why he had started. The harder task was making sure the people who could benefit from that work knew he was there.
Building recognition for Saudade Global Pathways has therefore become an important part of his current journey. It requires him to move from being known within educational communities to establishing a distinct identity within a broader industry.
Yet there is something fitting about that transition. Glen has spent much of his career encouraging students to step outside what they know. Now, he is doing something similar in his own professional life.
The difference is that this time, he is the one entering unfamiliar territory.
Preparing People to Experience the World
Saudade Global Pathways grew from Glen’s desire to focus more deeply on an area he believes deserves greater attention within global education: duty of care.
The consultancy works with K to 12 schools, universities, and educational organizations to strengthen the systems surrounding student travel. This includes risk management training, chaperone preparation, institutional planning, and decision making in the field.
The work is practical, but Glen’s motivation behind it is deeply human.
International travel can transform a student’s understanding of the world, but the quality of that experience depends on the preparation behind it. Schools have a responsibility to anticipate risks, prepare adults for difficult situations, and establish systems that allow them to respond thoughtfully when unexpected circumstances arise.
Glen’s experience leading international programs has given him an understanding of how many details exist beneath a successful trip. Transportation, communication, emergency planning, group dynamics, cultural differences, student wellbeing, and adult decision making all matter.
His role is to help institutions think through those details before they become problems.
At the same time, he does not want safety to become an argument against exploration. His work comes from the opposite perspective. Preparation exists so that schools can create stronger opportunities for students to engage with the world.
For Glen, meaningful global education asks students to move beyond the insulated environments they naturally inhabit.
He believes that remaining inside familiar communities can limit a person’s understanding of other people and, ultimately, of themself. Encountering different cultures and perspectives can interrupt those assumptions and create room for reflection.
That is where Glen sees the deeper purpose of global learning. The goal is not simply to visit another country. It is to return with a more complicated, more generous understanding of the people who live there.
The Moment That Makes the Work Matter
Among the most meaningful parts of Glen’s career have been the moments when he watches a student experience the world differently for the first time.
He has taken countless students and adults abroad for academic, cultural, and service programs. For some participants, those experiences represented their first opportunity to step outside the environments they had always known.
Glen describes those moments as almost magical, particularly because he knows how much preparation has gone into making them possible.
There is a particular satisfaction in seeing a participant encounter a real person in an authentic setting and begin to understand life from another perspective. The change may not always be dramatic or immediately visible. Sometimes it begins with a question, a conversation, or a moment of recognition.
But those small shifts can stay with people for years.
This is one reason Glen continues to see global education as an important part of learning. A curriculum can introduce students to history, geography, language, and culture, but experience gives those ideas a human face.
The work becomes especially meaningful to him when it contributes to people understanding one another more deeply.
That, ultimately, is how Glen measures impact. Not by the number of destinations visited or programs completed, but by whether an experience helped someone see another person with greater curiosity and understanding.
Building a Different Kind of Leadership
Glen’s approach to leadership has been shaped by several values that have remained consistent throughout his career: hard work, commitment to a cause, creativity, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.
Those values are now being tested in a different environment as he builds Saudade Global Pathways.
He is no longer operating within the established structures of a school. Instead, he is responsible for creating those structures for himself. The work requires him to think like an educator, consultant, business owner, strategist, and advocate at the same time.
Yet his motivation remains remarkably clear.
“If your purpose is strong, it will pull you through whatever challenges are present.”
That belief helps explain why Glen has continued moving forward through professional transitions. His path has not been about chasing titles or following a predetermined career ladder. It has been shaped by opportunities to serve students, educators, and institutions in ways that felt meaningful.
His network of friends and family has also influenced him. He sees pieces of the qualities he admires in the people around him, drawing inspiration from their experiences and perspectives.
Books have provided another source of reflection. Pippa Biddle’s Ours to Explore has influenced his thinking about the quality and integrity of work conducted abroad, particularly the importance of avoiding experiences that become performative rather than genuinely useful.
Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality has offered a different but complementary lesson. Although the book focuses on hospitality and the restaurant industry, Glen has taken its emphasis on small details and applied it to education. The way an experience is designed, the care given to participants, and the seemingly minor choices made along the way can profoundly influence how someone remembers an experience.
For Glen, those ideas fit naturally into global education.
A Future Built Around Care
Looking ahead, Glen wants Saudade Global Pathways to become a trusted name in duty of care and risk management training across the study abroad and global studies sector.
His ambition is focused on K to 12 schools and universities that want to expand their global learning opportunities while making sure their systems, staff, and leaders are prepared to support students responsibly.
There is a larger purpose behind that goal.
Glen wants schools to feel confident enough to embrace global education rather than avoid it because of uncertainty around risk. He sees preparation as an enabler of meaningful experiences, not an obstacle to them.
His future vision is therefore connected to the same principle that has shaped his career: students need opportunities to encounter the world, but the adults responsible for those experiences must understand the weight of that responsibility.
As his consultancy grows, Glen hopes to contribute to a stronger culture of preparation throughout the industry. He wants educators and institutions to approach travel with curiosity and courage, while also recognizing the practical responsibility that comes with taking students beyond familiar surroundings.
Beyond the Borders We Know
After more than three decades in education, Glen Turf has arrived at a point where his work extends beyond any single school or classroom.
His career has given him the opportunity to teach, lead, travel, design programs, mentor educators, and witness the transformative effect of global experiences on students and adults. Now, through Saudade Global Pathways, he is bringing those lessons into a consultancy built around preparation, responsibility, and care.
At the center of it all is a simple belief: education becomes richer when people are willing to encounter what lies beyond the borders of their familiar world.
Glen’s story is also a reminder that meaningful leadership does not always come from having all the answers. Sometimes it comes from continuing to ask better questions, preparing carefully, and creating the conditions for others to discover something for themselves.
For him, the real measure of global education is what happens when someone begins to understand another person more clearly.
That moment of understanding is what keeps him moving forward.
This is for preview purpose only. It is unlisted and unindexed on the Internet
For More Features
Be Featured in The Real Edit!
Every story has the power to shape how we see innovation, leadership, and purpose. If you’re a founder, creator, executive, or changemaker with a journey worth telling , we’d be honored to help you share it.
To inquire about being featured:
Email us at: info@realedit.site
Follow The Real Edit
