Community Impact of Study Abroad: A Critical Ethnographic Case Study in Northern Thailand

• In Event: Dissertation workshop session
  In Special Session: Intercultural Education and Study Abroad

Proposal

Statement of Research Problem
There is a hidden curriculum (Apple, 2004; Mukherjee, 2012) in study abroad discourse, research, and practice that a study abroad destination’s main value is as a site for the benefit of U.S. students, with study abroad programs providing sites for U.S. students to accrue social, political, and economic capital. Through centering on how a study abroad program is experienced by a community my project is an effort to make phenomena typically invisible in the dominant discourse visible. Traditional study abroad research suffers from problems of exclusion, where U.S. students are the only unit of analysis which matters, and the lack of studies on host communities reflects this.

Relevant Literature
In developing my proposal, I centered on three critical frameworks – academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 1997; Slaughter & Leslie, 2004), neoliberalism, and neocolonialism. As I have begun to engage with my research partner, the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute, I have also begun to consider participatory rural development, reciprocal learning, and university-community engagement as themes frameworks that will take on significance.

Purpose Statement and Research Questions
Centering my project on the experience of host communities, who are the invisible and silent-by absence partners in study abroad, thereby moving beyond the expansive research on U.S. student experience, allows for new lines of inquiry to critique and complicate the process students participate in. This is also a stance in support of the intellectual responsibility of research to take a critical approach (Apple, 2004; Said, 1978). My project explores the specific impact of a study abroad program on a local community to understand the following:
• How do host communities experience and come to know study abroad students?
• In what ways are economic opportunities and behaviors of host communities altered through interactions with these programs?
• What opportunities exist for communities to shape what these relationships looks like?

My Research Approach
To center and explore the experience of a host community, critical ethnographic case study is the method I will be using. Critical ethnography has a broad definition, but as Lather (2001) argues, all critical ethnography focuses on challenging the status quo and in “breaking with conventional ethnographic practices of detachment, its particular interest is activist collaboration with oppressed groups” (p. 479).

Sample/Setting
I will be doing my case study in partnership with the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (ISDSI), a twenty year-old study abroad program based in Chiangmai, Thailand. This site was selected based on the willingness and interest of this partner, feasibility, and connections to the University of Denver. This partnership is valuable not only to ensure that my research does not just exist in an online library database, but also to help create connections with key community members, gain access to historical information and previous community impact assessment data, and provide findings that are useful and applicable in real time.

The semester long undergraduate study abroad program for American students that ISDSI developed is taught in a series of four month-long blocks, with residential portions of the program taught in Chiangmai, and the three three-week field studies programs based in small rural communities in other parts of Thailand. The focus of the program is broadly ‘People, Ecology and Development’, where sustainable development is taught through these ‘community-based courses’ or field programs that scaffold sustainability curriculum with “intensive study of place” (Ritchie, 2013, p. 3). My research loooks specifically at one of the host community locations ties to the farms curricular component that host field studies students.

Type of Data Being/To Be Collected:
-Historic Economic and Demographic Data about Host Community
-Semi-structured interviews with Program Leadership
-Semi-structured interviews with program staff about the program, community, and goals and aspirations
-Informal unstructured or open-ended interviews with local organizations and businesses about community and experience with the program
-Semi-structured open ended interviews with home stay families about community and experience with the program
-Informal open ended interviews with community members not actively engaged in the program
-Social media postings about students and the program
-Gifts of other artifacts that students have left behind
-Historical curriculum and syllabi
-Pre-field work semi-structured interviews with past study abroad program participants
-Participant Observation

Author

• Lauren Collins, University of Denver