The Impact of International Higher Education Mobility Programs in Citizen Diplomacy

• In Event: Poster Group 5
  In Poster Session: The Impact of International Higher Education Mobility Programs in Citizen Diplomacy

Proposal

This study examines the impacts of international higher education (IHE) on citizen diplomacy through empirical analysis. Citizen diplomacy is the concept that every global citizen has the right, even the responsibility, to engage across cultures and create shared understanding through meaningful person-to-person interactions. It not only aims to build person-to-person relationships but also has the potential benefit of sustaining goodwill, communication, and understanding between foreign peoples who have different cultural backgrounds when formal diplomacy suffers disruptions.

Based on this concept, this study examines the impacts of the five IHE mobility programs on citizen diplomacy by empirically verifying these impacts on cultivating empathy and goodwill toward the host country. The five programs are outbound study abroad, inbound study abroad, international service-learning, international internship, and online study abroad programs.

The literature review identified four major theoretical frameworks: psychological, communicative, epistemological, and developmental, to examine the impacts of IHE mobility programs on participants’ empathy and goodwill toward the host country. This study mainly employs the developmental framework, which focuses on the cognitive and non-cognitive developmental process of one’s intercultural competence.

The data was collected from 716 students who joined the five IHE mobility programs. The presenter sent invitations to potential participants by email or contacted international education educators and administrators at the students’ home and host universities. The educators and administrators who accepted the invitation forwarded the students a URL or the students’ email address to the presenter so that they could take the survey online. The collected qualitative reflection and quantitative data were analyzed by text-mining and statistical analysis, respectively.

This study concludes that not all IHE mobility abroad programs are effective in cultivating empathy and goodwill toward the host country. Simply studying abroad does not necessarily mean that students cultivate these qualities, which are factors that contribute to people-to-people relationships on citizen diplomacy. On the other hand, this study clarified that the impact of IHE mobility programs on citizen diplomacy could be improved through program design and management. International service-learning program is a good example of this. It was designed to encourage students to collaborate with local people to solve local problems. Interacting with local people outside campus is a touchstone of cultivating empathy and goodwill toward the host country. Given this, this study suggests that IHE mobility programs could encourage students to experience the process of developing empathy and goodwill by adding social contribution activities, even extracurricular programs to the IHE mobility programs. Presenting text-mining and statistical data, the poster presentation provides suggestions for improving the impact of IHE programs on the cultivation of the two qualities examined. Since data presentation is essential in this study, poster presentation is the best way to communicate with audiences.

Author

• Shingo Hanada, Toyo University, Tokyo