What are our duties towards communities of strangers who, living across town or across the world, host our students’ living and learning? And how might the decisions we make in program design operationalize those duties? 

Dr. Richard Slimbach, Professor of Global Studies at Azusa Pacific University, addressed these questions in “Program Design for the Common Good,” which he originally shared as part of a session at the forum on Education Abroad. Dr. Slimbach has been kind enough to share the document on this website and in the blogpost below. It begins with a realistic scenario – and ends with a thoughtful planning rubric for considering dimensions of programs that affect students, communities, and the public good. Enjoy:

Scenario

You represent a fairly typical international educator. Married or not, with or without children, you enjoy professional status and a middle-class income. You work upwards of 50 hours each week, not only because student development is your life mission, but also for the more subtle rewards. Travels abroad never fail to keep our minds mobile and our imaginations awake.

Your programs mostly run in European or Australian cities—London and Dublin, Paris and Prague, Seville and Sydney—places of high culture and high student demand. After completing a long-haul jet flight that carries them to their destination, our students typically adopt an on-the-ground lifestyle that is both segregated and sumptuous. They live with cultural similars in Wi-Fi enabled housing, sample culinary delights Anthony Bourdain-style, soak up the city’s elegant museums and art galleries, play the flirt at pubs, shop at upscale stores, and otherwise gaze into the “good face” of modern culture.

For purported health and safety reasons, you protect students from the “other” London (or Istanbul or Buenos Aires). That is, the city’s “back regions”—pockets of deprivation and struggle inhabited by the perpetual (and growing) underclass. Worldwide, this socio-economic underbelly is “home” to about two-thirds of humanity. They signify highly asymmetrical “contact zones” in which affluent foreigners and struggling natives rarely, if ever, make contact.*

All of this travel adventure comes at a fairly high cost—financially it’s about $14,000/semester to program providers; socially, the high life of students tends to reinforce the income and social divisions already in place; and environmentally, each American student traveling to Europe will add approximately two tons of CO2 to their already 20ton/person/year carbon footprint.** In short, ethical dilemmas surround each of these program-related costs. The $14,000+ could certainly be used to relieve great human suffering and promote greater social equity if it were taxed by some global authority and then channeled to distressed areas of the world. In the right hands, it could fund everything from mosquito bed nets and emergency obstetrical care to basic school services and landmine eradication—all without heating the planet and further depleting natural resources.

Considering these things, what do we owe to human and earth others? What ought we to do?*** (Choose one)

[   ] Nothing. “We should maintain a personal perspective—affirming the value and dignity of every person equally, including my own. Because everyone’s life matters in exactly the same way, all women and men have an equal right to live their lives in accordance with their own values. Resources have already been distributed unequally. Those of us with more should not be expected to surrender part of what we have to those with less. To the contrary, we should each pursue our own self-interest by maximizing the satisfaction of our own ambitions or desires. [Personal partiality]

[   ] Everything. “We should step back from our personal position in the world and assume an impersonal perspective—affirming the value and dignity of all humans, as well as sentient nonhumans, but without partiality. Because everyone matters (including me), and nobody matters more than anyone else, it follows that we should distribute resources sufficiently as to make for equal, or roughly equal, life chances.” [Impersonal impartiality]

[   ] Something. “We should attempt to achieve some form of reasonable integration between the moral claims for equality (neighbor-caring) and the equally moral rights of partiality (self-caring). Realistically, we cannot expect the US, or any other major western power, to cede their economic sovereignty to a central authority like the UN. But that does not absolve us from any moral responsibility. Our duty is to balance the equal importance of others with the special responsibility we have for our own.”

The choice of “something” entails an obligation, not just to do no harm, but also to do good. The question is, how? How do we best fulfill our “fair share” of responsibility to distant others? There are at least two ways: (1) make personal lifestyle choices to mitigate social and environmental damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, and (2) manage global learning programs that enrich disciplinary knowledge and skills in ways that are economically viable (affordable), socially just (reduce inequities, improve lives), and environmentally bearable (protect ecosystems).

Basic Dimensions of Sustainability

Source: Wikipedia – Sustainable Development

Specifically, what are our duties towards communities of strangers who, living across town or across the world, host our students’ living and learning? And how might the decisions we make in program design operationalize those duties?

Central assumptions

1.  Student outcomes and community outcomes belong together. Privileged education abroad students carry a responsibility to not use the lives of others—and particularly those within low power contexts—as objects of their own knowledge production and skills development. There must be reciprocity, mutuality, “give back.”

2.   Student and community outcomes flow out of particular hopes for the world, types of participating students, program designs, and partner organizations. Outcomes are fairly predictable, as they are a product of various inputs—some in our control and others not. We are responsible for the decisions (“conditions”) we make in each of these areas.

• Hopes for the world. Before we can answer the “what” question (What do we owe to host strangers?), we need to first settle the “why” question (Why are we running education abroad programs in the first place?). What purpose compels us? Is ours primarily an educational mission: to deepen academic learning, broaden student horizons (liberal learning), and foster some sense of global responsibility? If so, does the student learning goal attach to any community development mission that delivers social and economic benefits to host communities? How do these aims position themselves vis-à-vis prevailing market imperatives (e.g. enhance institutional reputation and student marketability)? Which purposes will drive the enterprise, and which will ‘ride shotgun’?

 Figure 1. Global learning purposes: from private benefit to public good

• Types of participating students. Global learning outcomes depend as much (or more) on factors internal to participants as on factors external to the program design. Students are not blank slates as they enroll in our programs; they bring their own motivations, expectations, and agendas that either enable or sabotage program potential. What we know intuitively is confirmed empirically: the time and effort students devote to intercultural learning activities link to desired outcomes (Kuh, 2009). Students are also at different levels of moral, psychosocial, and intercultural development. Consequently, they need programs that meet them where they are and take them to the next level of development. All to say we cannot expect a single program to enable students to achieve either a high level of “intercultural competence” or community contribution.

• Program designs. There are fundamental differences in the academic, intercultural, and community development potential of programs (Engle & Engle, 2003). Considering these distinctions, component-by-component, we come to see that all design decisions carry a trajectory: they “intervene” in the lives of students and communities toward one set of outcomes, and away from others. For example, a full semester program that incorporates pre-field training, family stays, voluntary service placements, community-based language learning, and participatory research experiences will likely produce very different outcomes from a three-week program that isolates students from the daily life of the host community.

• Partner organizations. Positive student and community outcomes depend on joining a certain kind of student to a certain kind of program in partnership with various grassroots organizations (GROs)—host families, service agencies, faith communities, etc.—that work directly within communities on issues specific to them. Ideally, all parties would negotiate their respective rights and obligations in ways that are respectful, equitable, and mutually beneficial. This usually entails a relational power shift in the favor of those (like southern NGOs) who are frequently least able to negotiate from a position of adequate capacity and relative strength.

Figure 2. Process model for re-balancing student and community benefits

 Exercise

The following 17 program features suggest a framework for global learning that serves the common good—that is, balances student and community outcomes. First, bring to mind a global learning program with which you are familiar. Then, as each component is discussed, rate how well that program satisfies the stated criteria: high, medium, low, or absent.

 Program design components and the common good