Internalized Rhetoric or Real Change in Study Abroad in Higher Education

• In Event: 46.060 - Intercultural Development in Higher Education: Bridging Ideas, Concepts, and Practices

Abstract

This presentation offers a critique of how reflection is used in intercultural study abroad in higher education, and offers a new theoretical model that moves beyond traditional learning theories of experience and reflection to include a critical component necessary to foster student intercultural growth.

Empirical research suggests that study abroad students achieve greater intercultural proficiency, increased openness to cultural diversity, and become more globally minded than those remaining on campus (Clarke et al., 2009; Sussman 2000, 2001; Yoshida et al. 2002). The findings are largely qualitative in nature and the primary research question evaluates changes in attitudes and awareness based solely on the program and examines how to measure actual change. Since many of these samples are self-selected and collected data is based on self-reflection of participants it begs the question of whether students are already predisposed to being open minded or open to change. Critiques of how transformation as a goal is achieved focus on the rhetoric that surrounds the process. For example, if a “student is told to expect a first-hand look at another culture, she may very well believe that is what she has experienced whether that is the case or not” (Bishop, 2013, p. 410). This raises the important question of how much of students’ perceptions of change are based upon the rhetoric of expectations which they internalized. To measure actual change in student intercultural skills requires more than measurement using personal narrative reflections. It requires faculty to offer a critical component based in the actual, lived experience of the students that forces them to take an alternative perspective.

Growing evidence suggests that cultural immersion leads to change, either perceived or actual. This process of personal change is inherently about social learning, that is, acquiring social skills through observational learning (Bandura & Walters, 1963) which impact personal behavior and/or beliefs. Personal reflections are often used as a measure of the social learning that has taken place in study abroad. Using a combined model of experience and reflection that draws from Dewey, Meizrow, Boud, Schon and Kolb, we interrogate the limitations of a model that relies purely of the self-reflection process. We offer a new theoretical model that relies on an external facilitator to identify critical moments that move the individual toward more critical perspective taking.

In previous studies we note that when students returned from abroad and further analyzed their experiences, they then highly rated their abilities to have conversations in the foreign language. Their critical reflection ignored the complexities of their experience, and fostered a new narrative. We suggested that this means that the students’ own assessment changes significantly between the period of attention during the trip and the post-travel analysis of those reflections, creating a new version that tends toward overgeneralization of success. We then use this data to theorize a model of reflection with an external facilitator, whose knowledge of the students’ experience allows them to pose critical examinations of key experiences to promote more critical examinations of the intercultural experience

Authors

• Renee Gutierrez, Longwood University

• Cheryl A. Hunter, University of North Dakota