A Roundtable on International Experiential Learning
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A Roundtable on International Experiential Learning Kenneth Osgood, Alison S. Burke & Dustin Walcher, Kimber Quinney, Matthew Masur, and Brian C. Etheridge Editor’s note: The essays that follow, with one exception (the most inspiring adventure and the most sobering lesson in Masur essay), are revised versions of papers presented at a panel human cruelty and folly. And yet the first thing you want on experiential learning at the 2016 SHAFR conference in San to know is what we read on the bus? How about: What did Diego. AJ we do? Where did we go? What did we see? How did we feel?” After all, ours was an experience that could not be What Did You Read on Your Study Abroad?: replicated in the classroom. For teacher and student alike, Balancing Academic and Experiential Learning in the journey was transformative, unforgettable. The most International Study Courses valuable lessons we absorbed through discovery. What we learned, we remember by that feeling in our bellies Kenneth Osgood when our minds conjure up those unforgettable images of the ovens and the gas chambers and the bones. By these experiences, we came to understand humanity in a e in academia may have a remarkably static deeper way. And yet to many of my colleagues, this kind view of what constitutes “education.” That’s a of learning did not seem interesting, and perhaps not even lesson I learned when I returned from my first important. Wstudy abroad trip in 2006. For four weeks that summer, I came to understand – or at least hypothesize – that fifteen students and I journeyed through five countries, two attitudes informed the oft-repeated question, “What exploring the European battlefields, monuments, and did you read?” First, as trained scholars acculturated by museums of the first and second world wars. We trudged our professions and our own educational experiences, we through the trenches of Verdun. We climbed the dragon’s tend to value “book learning” over other types of learning. teeth along Hitler’s west wall in the rain. We hiked the We test students on skills (how well they write) but we Argonne. We journeyed inside the Maginot Line, riding focus most of our teaching on delivering content, whether a railcar through a seemingly endless tunnel array in one through lectures, discussions, or readings. If there’s any of its largest fortifications. We investigated the meaning of doubt, recall an AHA job interview you participated in. resistance. We grappled with historical memory. We peered From one side of the table came the standard question, uncomfortably into Hitler’s office, now a music school, in “How would you teach x course?” From the other came Munich. We stumbled silently through the gates at Dachau. the answer, “I’d assign x, y and z for students to read.” For And so imagine my surprise, after completing such an ambitious and often moving excursion, to have the following dialogue repeat itself, virtually verbatim, as I shared my experience with my faculty colleagues. The fall semester was beginning, and the usual question opened the exchange. “How was your summer?” “It was fantastic! I took ten students through five countries in Europe studying World Wars One and Two.” “That sounds great. What did you read?” What did we read? This was the first question, every time, without exception. The first few times I answered politely, describing the readings and assignments that rounded out our coursework. But as it kept happening, as one colleague after another posed this as the first thing they wanted to know about our study abroad course, my internal monologue became increasingly agitated. The rant in my head went something like this: “What did we read? Did I hear you right? I just took ten students out of the country for the first time in their lives. For many of them, this was the first time out of Florida! Do you realize that we literally picked up pieces of shrapnel and barbed wire out of a colossal artillery crater in France? We had seen the bones, the piles of bones, of the unidentifiable Students from the McBride Honors Program and Ken Osgood in 2014 dead entombed at Verdun. We had interviewed a German on top of Montserrat, outside Barcelona, Spain. The jagged mountain veteran who had watched his comrades starve to death in is home to a famous Benedictine abbey and basilica, a destination an allied POW camp. We studied the terrain at the Hürtgen for religious pilgrims, and a location rich in religious, political, and forest to try to understand how so many were led like symbolic meaning to the region’s history and identity. lambs to the slaughter. We had experienced, at once, the Page 36 Passport September 2016 historians, readings in primary and secondary sources, about apartheid by visiting Nelson Mandela’s research papers, essays, identification questions and the prison cell, and so on. In effect, for this approach like are the currency of our trade. They offer metrics by the international experience determines much of which we assess the rigor of our teaching and the success the content. of our students. We don’t quite know how to handle other types of educational activities, some of which just seem All three approaches reflect differing ways to negotiate fluffy, “like the dioramas they do over in the College of the tension between academic content and experience. Education,” as a colleague once complained to me about a The first two privilege the academic: the achievement of non-traditional assignment in another professor’s class. learning outcomes that mirror those of a similar course at Second, and flowing logically from the first, an the home institution, albeit augmented in differing ways underlying suspicion of international study courses may by the locale. The third approach uses the experience to have lurked behind the reading question. My colleagues determine much of the academic content, with learning may have been sizing me up, trying to assess whether outcomes structured around the experiences provided, my study abroad course was a “real” academic course or albeit augmented by the expertise and direction of the merely a glorified vacation. Did the students “earn” the instructor. All three approaches have distinct advantages, three hours of academic credit they received? Or, for that and each offers a valuable learning opportunity for matter, did I earn the salary that I received for teaching students. Having interacted closely with students traveling them? Was the whole enterprise one big boondoggle? abroad, I know many students who have experienced each So herein lies the challenge for instructors of study of these approaches and they have returned from their abroad and experiential learning courses: how do we study abroad experience transformed: eyes opened to balance the learning that comes from experience against the differing cultures, they develop a sense of empathy and demands of training students in the pertinent disciplinary understanding, an appreciation of differing ways of life, field, to say nothing of the conventions of our university that are hard to develop in the classroom. system? For starters, we should acknowledge that such a And yet I also wonder if these approaches do all they can tension exists, and recognize the ways in which we seek to maximize cross-cultural learning. Each, in its own way, to strike that balance. Speaking very generally, and remains framed by an assumption that the international recognizing the exceptions, study abroad courses tend to component is meant to enhance the academic. That is, the employ one of three approaches: teaching of specific subject matter in ways akin to the home university setting is paramount. When my colleagues (1) International experience as backdrop: Students asked me “what did you read,” they were drawing on this take a course in a given subject area that is largely assumption, asking, in effect: to what extent did this study the same as it would be “back home,” except abroad course fulfill learning objectives in a university that it is taught somewhere else. This approach setting as we understand them? Viewed this way, cross- emphasizes meeting the learning objectives of a cultural learning will always be secondary, an ancillary given course, with the international environment benefit, but not a pedagogical priority. as a backdrop that provides students opportunities When I began preparing to teach my second study for experiencing life abroad on their own. A abroad course in 2014, I wondered if I could reverse the calculus course taught abroad would differ priorities. Could I develop an international study course little from one taught at home; only the setting that had a different emphasis: one that used academic would change. In this approach, the international content to help students learn more from the international experience is separate from the academic content. experience, rather than using the experience to augment the academic content, as seemed to be the prevailing (2) International experience as an accessory: trend? What would happen if I reframed my course by Students take a course on a topic related to the restructuring my pedagogical priorities? area in which the study was taking place, and Several factors prodded me to ask these questions. instructors use this environment to enhance Years earlier, when I taught the world wars course, I student learning about that topic. Teaching was in a History Department at a large public university a course on the Italian Renaissance in Italy offering a history course, so the disciplinary focus came would offer all manner of obvious advantages to student and instructor alike. In this case, the setting informs and enhances the delivery of academic content, but the course still privileges the academic content that would be taught in any university setting.