“Most students do not meaningfully develop either through simple exposure to the environment or through having educators take steps to increase the amount of exposure through ‘immersing’ them. Instead, students learn and develop effectively and appropriately when educators intervene more intentionally through well-designed training programs that continue throughout the study abroad experience…. Put differently, the data show that students learn and develop considerably more when educators prepare them to become more self-reflective, culturally self-aware, and aware of ‘how they know what they know'” (p. 21). 

By Eric Hartman

I began reading Student Learning Abroad: What Our Students Are Learning, What They’re Not, and What We Can Do About It (Vande Berg, Paige, & Hemming Lou, 2012) with two hefty doses of skepticism. The first stemmed from my earliest introductions to the study abroad field, a process facilitated by mentors in political science and service-learning who, to be frank, didn’t see the same quality of research in international education. This bias about the field stuck with me, and influenced my reading before I even cracked the book. The authors’ statuses as the leading researchers in the field arguably only deepened my concern.

As soon as I actually opened it, I turned the doubt up one more notch, when I realized the authors were going to draw on Thomas Kuhn’s work in philosophy of science to suggest, “during the nearly 100 years of its existence, study abroad has evolved through three significantly different accounts of the nature of knowing and learning – from ‘positivism’ to ‘relativism’ and then to ‘experiential/constructivism.’” (p. 10). This second bit of skepticism stems from fatigue with social scientists who window-dress their work with Kuhnian allusions in apparent efforts to increase rigor. This is often done sloppily; in a manner that does not enhance understanding.

And then I read. The quality of the authors’ arguments, the analytic precision, and the careful empirical methods overthrew my assumptions. Student Learning Abroad is an excellent book. It is essential reading for any international education administrator, practitioner, or researcher. Cumulatively speaking, decades of research and numerous programs, with scores of student cohorts, are critically examined and evaluated.  Taken together, this research points to the authors’ clear assertion that “Most students learn to learn effectively abroad only when an educator intervenes, strategically and intentionally.” This conclusion is buttressed by data from programs around the world, connected to or administered by universities large and small. It is an insight that is as relevant for incoming students as it is for Americans leaving the country (Chapter 14 demonstrates this nicely, including discussion of data demonstrating the differential impact of peer-facilitated or faculty-facilitated online intercultural learning modules during international experiences).

Engle and Engle bring nearly two decades of systematic program design, experimentation, and iterative improvements to their chapter on lessons learned at the American University Center of Provence (AUCP). Their specific insights are numerous and their attention to detail is impressive. They include in their approach to holistic program design, for example, avoidance of a group flight opportunity, which they have found can have an excessively strong effect on students as an in-group challenged to turn outward and connect with individuals in Provence, at homestays, etc.   They distill this and many other observations into “practical advice in the eight domains that we have found to have the most impact on the quality of student learning abroad” (p. 303). I would go one step further, in keeping with the spirit of this website, and call Engle and Engle’s insights The Eight Essential Elements in High Quality Study Abroad. They are:

1. Clarity of purpose: Identify your institution’s pedagogical and developmental mission in relation to the program.
2. Clarity of learning goals: Identify the specific skills you imagine students developing during their time abroad.
3. Cultural immersion: Identify the level of immersion most appropriate to learning goals. Recognize immersion as a foundation on which to build, instead of as an end in itself.
4. Holistic design: Identify what each program component or administrative policy is intended to do in terms of fostering student learning, and examine each one for pedagogical coherence.
5. Challenge and support: Keep the learning on the cusp between challenge and support, risk and reassurance.
6. Reflection and analysis: Address both the cognitive and emotional aspects of the study abroad experience using a developmental approach grounded in intercultural theory.
7. Student accountability: Guide students to see that the quality of their experience will ultimately result from the choices they make every day.
8. Assessment: Identify valid and reliable testing instruments and commit to the regular pre- and post- term assessment of targeted learning outcomes, both quantitative and qualitative. (pp. 303 – 305, This is an abridged version).

In addition to those listed above, transferable insights are shared from several other programs. The University of the Pacific offers several decades of research and innovation stemming from requiring all study abroad students to take a pre-departure intercultural communication course since 1977, as well as a separate requirement that has ensured since 1986 that all international studies students take a re-entry course. In both cases, these are full-fledged academic courses taught by tenure-stream faculty and wholly integrated with the students’ educational and developmental trajectories.

I am pasting the table of contents below. Each program chapter offers specific insights, relevant for different institutions with varying student populations and funding models. In addition to the program-specific chapters, this book also capitalizes on the incredibly transdisciplinary space that is intercultural education. One section is comprised of chapters that share discipline-specific understanding relevant to international education, from anthropology, experiential education, psychology, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and more.

The section that offers disciplinary insights also includes Bennett’s contribution, “Paradigmatic Assumptions and a Developmental Approach to Intercultural Learning.” The chapter is refreshingly self-reflexive and thoughtful. Bennett suggests:

For a praxis of intercultural relations, the minimum conceptual requirement is a self-reflexive definition of culture. There are two reasons for this. One is the obvious observation that how we define culture is itself a product of culture. Any definition of culture needs to take into account that it is defining the human activity of defining. When we realize this, we can spend less time arguing over the ‘best’ definition of culture and more time assessing any definition for its usefulness to our purposes.

The second reason for using a self-reflexive definition of culture relates directly to our purpose. When we encourage intercultural learning, we are asking people to engage in a self-reflexive act. Specifically, we are asking them to use the process of defining culture (which is their culture) to redefine culture in a way that is not their culture (p. 101).

The book is excellent at what it sets out to do. It will come as no surprise that I would like to see more emphasis on global citizenship development as a learning goal. Its lack of inclusion highlights the extent to which it is a term that has experienced relatively recent reification in higher ed. I also suspect it does not fit neatly with the paradigmatic assumptions of the intercultural learning field. Global citizenship, in most formulations, involves some commitment (albeit tentative, contingent, fallabilistic) to common human dignity and – often – human rights. While much of the intercultural education research base has its roots in European experiences, growing numbers of US students are involved in developing country experiences, often with community development and rights-advocacy organizations. The literature seems ripe for exploration of this tension between a well-developed capacity for judgment and a deep respect for other cultures and worldviews.

Table of Contents:

PREFACE
PART ONE: SETTING THE SCENE
1) Student Learning Abroad: Paradigms and Assumptions—Michael Vande Berg, R. Michael Paige, and Kris Hemming Lou
2) Intervening in Student Learning Abroad: Recent Research—R. Michael Paige and Michael Vande Berg

PART TWO: FOUNDATIONS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
3) Using Experiential Theory to Promote Learning and Development in Programs of Education Abroad—Angela Passarelli and David Kolb
4) The Brain, Learning, and Study Abroad—James Zull
5) Paradigmatic Assumptions of Intercultural Learning—Milton Bennett
6) The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI): A New Frontier in Assessment and Development of Intercultural Competence—Mitchell Hammer
7) What Happens When We Take Stage Development Theory Seriously?—Douglas Stuart
8) Anthropology, Intercultural Communication, and Study Abroad—Bruce La Brack and Laura Bathurst
9) The Psychology of Student Learning Abroad—Victor Savicki
10) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Support of Student-Centered Learning Abroad—Jennifer Meta Robinson

PART THREE: PROGRAM APPLICATIONS: INTERVENING IN STUDENT LEARNING

11) Shifting the Locus of Intercultural Learning: Intervening Prior to and After Student Learning Abroad—Laura Bathurst and Bruce La Brack
12) Maximizing Study Abroad—R. Michael Paige
13) Facilitating Intercultural Learning Abroad—Kris Lou and Gabriele Bosley
14) Developing a Global Learning and Living Community: A Case Study of Intercultural Experiences on The Scholar Ship—Adriana Medina-López-Portillo and Riikka Salonen
15) An Experiment in Developing Teaching and Learning: CIEE’s Seminar on Living and Learning Abroad—Michael Vande Berg, Meghan Quinn, and Catherine Menyhart
16) Beyond Immersion: The AUCP Experiment in Holistic Intervention—Lilli Engle and John Engle

CONCLUSION
17) Intervening for Student Learning Abroad: Key Insights—Kris Hemming Lou, R. Michael Paige, and Michael Vande Berg