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Institute of
International Education
809 United Nations Plaza
7th Floor
New York, NY 10017
USA
Tel: +1 (212) 984 5367
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The Promise of Integrated Program Design |
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By Thomas J. D’Agostino, Stefan Senders and Doug Reilly
The release of the Lincoln Commission report, with its call to dramatically increase the number of U.S. students studying abroad each year, reflects the growing recognition of the importance of providing students with greater exposure to other peoples, languages, and cultures. Colleges and universities are increasingly focusing their mission statements on “enhancing global competence” and participation in study abroad has steadily increased. While this is undeniably a positive trend, the mere act of sending students abroad does not in and of itself ensure that they will become more “globally competent”. What more can we do to promote the values and skills needed to navigate an increasingly interdependent world and to take full advantage of the powerful education opportunities afforded by international study?
At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, we have sought to re-conceptualize and broaden our understanding of the study abroad process itself, drawing on the insights provided by cultural anthropology. Through this lens, the study abroad experience might best be thought of as a right of passage. As anthropologists have long been aware, right of passage rituals transform individuals—from non-members into members, from children into adults—and they sustain communities. In the right of passage, participants move from a preparatory phase, through a liminal phase, in which their identities are in flux, and into a reintegration phase, in which they become members of new social categories.
As study abroad educators, we mirror these traditional ritual forms, framing our work in terms of a three-stage process: 1) preparing to go away or “predeparture”; 2) being away or “abroad”; and 3) coming home or “reentry.” However, given that most study abroad offices must allocate the vast majority of their limited human and financial resources to actually operating programs abroad, it is often the case that far less attention is paid to thorough facilitation of the predeparture and reentry phases. And yet, viewing study abroad as a right of passage suggests that to foster truly transformative experiences for students, we need to devote considerable energy and planning to each phase of the experience as well as to identifying the linkages between the phases.
This realization provided the impetus for the creation of the Partnership for Global Education (PGE), an initiative of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Union College funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The PGE has developed an approach to study abroad programming we call Integrated Program Design. This approach frames students’ time abroad with rigorous predeparture and reentry work, providing a more continuous and intentional international experience. Integrated Program Design better prepares students to have a deeper, more engaged cross-cultural encounter and it encourages them upon their return to campus to continue to process their experiences and share them with the wider community.
During the predeparture phase of study abroad, a great deal of practical information must be provided to students, ranging from passport and visa requirements, to travel and housing arrangements, to tips on what and how to pack for an extended period abroad. By and large, these details are what concern students and parents, consuming much of our attention. As educators, however, we should also use this time to fully prepare students for the cross-cultural experiences ahead of them. They should reflect upon their motivations for studying abroad and set goals. They should also acquire new skills that can assist them integrate into their host cultures, document and reflect upon their experiences, and ultimately, achieve their goals.
As a result, we have dramatically restructured our pre-departure orientation program to move beyond the “nuts and bolts” of study abroad. The half-day session includes a goal-setting exercise as well as an introduction to the concept of culture as defined by anthropologists and others. In addition, we present various approaches to cultural adaptation and discuss the complexities inherent in “crossing cultures”. Students who have returned to campus after participating in one of our programs are actively involved in the orientation. By fielding student-to-student questions during program specific break-out sessions, and sharing insights from their experiences, they contribute much to the process of initiating their peers into the community of study abroad students.
This orientation is coupled with two workshops that offer great potential for enhancing the students’ international experiences. The first, focusing on travel photography, is designed for the many students who go abroad armed with a camera but who lack basic technical training and have given little thought about how to use their camera as a learning tool. The second provides instruction in journal-writing, a powerful tool for analysis, reflection and documentation. Both workshops share the goal of helping students to learn how better to see and experience culture while they are abroad, and both ask students to become critical and reflective participant observers of the cross-cultural encounter.
A critical part of the pre-departure phase, of course, is providing students with opportunities to learn more about the societies in which they will live while abroad. To this end, we have coordinated with faculty on a variety of curricular development initiatives that have produced both credit-bearing courses and non-credit bearing orientation activities. We have recently completed a pilot project funded by the U.S. Department of Education designed to prepare students participating in our semester-long program in Hanoi, Vietnam. “IN FOCUS: Vietnam” is a video orientation program that includes a series of twelve short films and accompanying study guides, developed with HWS and Union faculty as well as outside experts, that introduces viewers to a variety of topics about Vietnam. This has proven to be a most effective preparatory device and we anticipate expanding the IN FOCUS project to cover other programs where we currently lack strong substantive preparation.
Merely being in a different location does not necessarily ensure that students will engage the host culture. Being constantly accessible to family and friends through cell phones and the internet has caused a real worry in the field about students failing to break out of their comfort zones. To address this concern, we are focusing more effort on providing opportunities to students to "get into" the local culture, to meet people and to experience the host society in meaningful ways. We structure program excursions around this goal, and think beyond the usual “tourist attractions” to include visits to local and national government officials, NGOs, schools, factories, and research stations. An increasing number of our programs now include internship and community service opportunities, and motivated students can receive funding to pursue self-designed projects to explore an area of academic or cultural interest through our Student International Initiatives Fund. Previous grantees have studied folk music in Ireland, self-published a poetry ‘Zine in Norwich, England, visited ecovillages in Denmark to learn about sustainable living practices, and interviewed Haitian immigrants about their lives in France. Returned students report to us that, through these opportunities, they were pushed them to experience things they might not have otherwise done—or even thought of doing—on their own. As study abroad practitioners we have to continually innovate new ways of helping our students make connections; the better we do this, the more powerful experiences they will have, and the more they will have to process and build upon during the reentry phase.
In Integrated Program Design, there is no “one size fits all” approach to reentry. Instead, we present each returning student with a menu of options. Students may: attend an international career workshop; visit local schools to talk about their experiences; join the “Global Ambassadors”, a group of returned students who help us publicize study abroad and orient new student participants; publishing their photographs, stories and poems in our journal The Aleph: a journal of global perspectives; curating a photographic exhibit in our Global Visions Galleries; and mentoring an incoming international student through the initial displacement of being in a foreign culture. All of these options are designed to help students make connections between the abroad and reentry phases, and their study abroad experience and the rest of their lives.
For some students, returning from abroad is more traumatic than the initial experience of being immersed in a foreign culture: their “home” culture now appears different and strange—and not always positive. Many of these students undergo a dramatic reordering of their social orientations on campus. To provide a creative outlet and supportive environment for these students, we facilitate the International Writer’s Workshop (IWW), a writer’s group that meets each week to discuss, reflect on and write about cross-cultural experiences. The group presents their stories at the Away Café, an open-mic night of stories that cross borders, and other members of the community are invited to tell their own tales of displacement and belonging. Through this outreach effort a new sub-community is being formed based on an identity that exists between cultures.
It is in the work of the IWW and efforts such as the Global Ambassadors that we see the most dramatic promise of the reentry phase. We are asking our students to reflect on how they have been (and are continuing to be) transformed by the experience of studying abroad. More significantly, we are asking them to take part in the transformation of the campus community itself. The students may experience study abroad in a linear progression of predeparture, being away, and reentry, but we as study abroad professionals, and the wider campus community we serve, experiences it as a continuous process of growth, enrichment and renewal.
Integrated Program Design has enabled us to help students to transform themselves and their community. It has also caused us to look beyond the utilitarian concept of “global competency” toward an ethos of “global citizenship,” in which the privilege of international study is linked for our students with a sense of responsibility and empowerment to become reflective, critical actors: they become participant observers for the rest of their lives. Integrated Program Design has also helped us reconceptualize our own work, from the narrowly-defined end of getting more students abroad, to the means to realizing a grander goal: campus internationalization.
Thomas J. D’Agostino, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Union College Partnership for Global Education and Director of the Center for Global Education at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Stefan Senders, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Doug Reilly is Assistant Director of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Union College Partnership for Global Education and Programming Coordinator of the Center for Global Education at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
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