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Armand V. and Donald S. |
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International Studies at Union 2005 Feigenbaum Forum home page
Union's International Programs: A Brief Introduction Introduction Thank you. Every year, the IIE (Institute of International Education) in New York publishes statistics about students who have studied abroad in the previous year, and every year the number of students who participated in the traditional junior year abroad declines at least slightly. And thus I know that at the end of May, at the annual NAFSA (National Association of Foreign Study Advisors) conference, I will hear any number of people of a certain age—mine, unfortunately—bemoaning the diminution of the Junior Year Abroad. And while I agree with them to a certain extent, I also think that they are being unrealistic. Not every student can afford, both academically and/or financially, a full year away. What I found especially peculiar about these conversations was that as these people enumerated all of what students missed by not going abroad for a full year, they demonstrated they had no very clear idea of how students behave while studying abroad. They were talking about the junior year abroad in 1960, when they did it, not in 1995 or 2000 or 2005. It took me a while longer to figure out what was going on. I became Director of International Programs at Union in 1979. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, I would get asked fairly often to be on a panel about something or other relating to study abroad. I couldn’t really understand why I was asked. After all, there were lots of people out there with far more experience than I had. I was discussing this with a friend once, and he said, “Yes, but you are one of the very few directors who has taken students abroad. So, you have a unique perspective on what goes on.” At first this puzzled me, but then it made sense. I was a faculty member, while most directors were administrators, so why would they be taking students abroad. And they had offices and programs to run. Well, so did I, but I had the luxury of having a colleague who was familiar enough with our programs so that he could handle at least the non-tricky issues while I was in France. But this situation did explain why my friends and colleagues at NAFSA were reliving their own college days, days that had long ago disappeared. Back in 1960, when you were leaving for your junior year in Paris, in all likelihood Mom and Dad did not drive you to the airport, but to a pier in NYC where you boarded the far-famed Aurelia and spent a week crossing the Atlantic with 1000 other students who would be doing exactly what you would be doing for the next year. There would be a brief stop in Southampton so that the London bound students could get off, and then it was on to Le Havre and a train to Paris. You were introduced to your French family and knew where you would be for the next year. And you studied and partied and did all the things that students are supposed to do when abroad. But you did so in an isolation that has unfortunately disappeared. Not isolation from France – cultural immersion was a far simpler process back then than it is today – but isolation from America. Perhaps your program director allowed you one phone call home to tell your parents that you had arrived safely, but that was pretty much the end of you and the telephone. If your French family even had one, and many didn’t, it certainly was not for the likes of you. Calling home required a trip to the post office, where you made an appointment to make an international call. And your appointment might be several days from today. So you waited for the mailman to arrive, hoping that there was a wad of airmail paper for you. Most of the students here today have never even seen airmail paper. Sure, you traveled, but not huge distances. You couldn’t jet off to Stockholm for the weekend. And you certainly didn’t fly home for the December holidays. Times have changed. We now have jets and cell phones and cyber cafes. And thus study abroad is different from what it was when we did it. International programs directors often don’t realize just how different, or that differences may require action. I am not at all suggesting here that international programs directors are a bunch of old fogeys living in the past, but that we tend to remember things as they were when we did them. I work at a college, so I know that college is very different from when I was there. My classmates in the business world or in law are clueless. And it’s probably just as well. Yes, they visited their own children on parents weekend, but we all know how well those occasions represent daily life on campus. It’s the same thing for me when I go on a site visit to a particular program. It’s very short, I spend a lot of time with the people running the program, and I see the students only fairly briefly and probably in a formal situation. I guess that my conclusion is that all of us international programs directors need to pay more attention to what is going on in student life so that we know what adjustments to our programs may be necessary. Frankly, I think that at least some international programs directors are so hopelessly naïve about students today that you do have to wonder about the quality of their programs. There was an article in the New York Times last year entitled “Colleges Tell Students the Party’s Over” (August 23, 2004). Certain colleges have just discovered that students don’t behave perfectly when they study abroad and that there are some unfortunately ugly incidents. These colleges are now scrambling to put procedures into place that will cut down on bad behavior. Sorry, guys, but misbehavior abroad didn’t begin yesterday. We have had most of these procedures in place for over 25 years. About half an hour after I finished the article, Union’s lawyer, with whom I work very closely on study abroad procedures, called and said, “Bill, what world are these people living in?” Good question. I do have to say that our lawyer is a Union graduate who is very protective of the College, but his greatest usefulness to me is that he went on our program to Seville when he was a student and thus is more than well aware of what can happen. The more we know about student behavior, the more we can do to improve study abroad. I want to return to this theme later. Misbehavior isn’t involved, just behavior. History of Union’s International Programs I want to give you just enough history of study abroad at Union so that you can see that while study abroad may be an integral part of the curriculum, as a system it works in a totally different way from that of the curriculum. Curricula are planned, often down to the smallest detail, and if the plan isn’t working, they are re-planned. In a study abroad system, each individual program may be carefully planned—and indeed it had better be or it won’t last long—but the system itself, even though it may have started with a plan, probably quite quickly devolved into randomness. It is the inability to explain why the system is what it is that confuses or irritates more rational souls than me. Like it or not, most international programs just grew like Topsey. It has often been said that terms abroad at Union began one evening in the late 60’s when Fred Klemm, professor of German, and his wife Eleanor were visiting Vienna. They went to an organ concert at Stefansdom, and afterward, Fred said to Eleanor, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to bring students here.” Frankly, I don’t believe this one for a minute. Fred had enough trouble traveling with his own children, so why would he want to do so with someone else’s? What I do know with more certainty was that terms abroad were a contribution to the General Education (Gen Ed) system in place at the time – I’ll explain how later – and that they responded to an expressed student need. Back then, Union was perceived, and quite correctly, as a college dominated by science and engineering. There was a language requirement, fairly light for science and engineering majors, much heavier for humanities and social sciences majors. And the latter began to complain that the scientists and engineers got lots of hands on experience in lab and on projects, while they sat in the classroom conjugating verbs. Terms abroad would provide them with the same sort of hands on experience. And so the planning began, and given Fred’s Germanic heritage, it was meticulous. I have seen the file folders for the first programs, and they are easily three inches thick. There would be three programs—France in the fall, Bogotá in the winter, and Vienna in the spring—and there would be thirty students in each program. I have never known why thirty, but I suspect that it had something to do with the number needed for the cheapest charter air fares. Thirty more students would be added to the College so that there was no loss of anticipated revenue. In the spring of 1969 the Vienna program was run to test the system and to iron out all of the kinks. And in the fall, the programs began in earnest. But even all this planning and symmetry contained an aberration that was a harbinger of things to come. My senior colleague in French thought that driving a car was a wonderfully macho activity, and thus he decided that the French program would not be in one city, but three—Besancon in the east, Caen on the English Channel, and Angers in the Loire Valley. He spent the entire term driving around checking up on the students. The following year he decided that three was a little much, so the program was divided between Angers and Rennes. And the following year, I decided that one city was quite sufficient, so I went off to Rennes with thirty students, and we have been there ever since. Although I have never discussed the question with him, I strongly suspect that Fred thought that these three programs would constitute forever and ever Union terms abroad. Period. Well, if that was what he did think, he was quite wrong. The three terms abroad were immediately very popular with all students, not just the humanities and social sciences students for whom they were designed. Faculty are never slow to climb aboard a popular curricular bandwagon. If France, Colombia, and Austria, why not Israel, England, and Greece? And by the time of his retirement in 1979, Fred was presiding over eight programs, not three. And today, we have 25 programs in 26 countries. And fear not, I’m not going to tell you how we got there. I do want to mention two fairly recent developments. Of late, foundations have developed something of a mania for study abroad consortia, for some, the more complicated the better. The institutions must be 1000 miles away from each other. There must be five institutions, one from each category. No thank you. But about five years ago, the Mellon Foundation decided to encourage consortia that by working together would save money. And so Union and Hobart William Smith Colleges in Geneva NY, three hours to the west of Union, proposed ourselves as a consortium. It made sense as both institutions were on trimesters. Of course, by the time we got the grant, HWS had voted to go to semesters, we had voted not to, and ever since we have been trying to accommodate this difference in calendars. The consortium gave Union three new programs when we were able to help HWS revive three of its programs that were flagging from lack of faculty to run them: Australia, a science/ecology program, Galway, and Vietnam. We have begun one new program, Central Europe, a comparative social sciences program that sends students to two sites in Germany, as well as to Romania and Hungary. The consortium is more than just programs. Each institution has three student cultural assistants who help prepare student to go abroad and to face reentry programs when they return home. We publish an annual literary/artistic magazine to encourage students to think about their experience by writing about it or by producing art and photographs of it. The major non-programmatic goal is to make study abroad a very visible part of campus life. I’m not sure just how much money has been saved by working together, but enough so that Mellon recently renewed the grant. Another initiative begun six years ago was a series of three week miniterms that run in our December break or in the summer just after graduation. Union tends to fascinate some foundations because of our unique—some might say appalling—combination of the liberal arts and engineering, and the head of the Christian Johnson Endeavor told our president that he would give us some money if we could come up with some interesting programs that combined the liberal arts and engineering. So we proposed developing a series of miniterms on engineering related subjects where half the students would be engineers and the other half liberal arts students. It is a double cross-cultural experience. Obviously, the students must adapt to the host culture, but also, they are paired—one engineer, one liberal arts student—and must do a joint project. So they have to adapt to each other, and let me assure you, this is often more difficult than adapting to the host culture. You can study dirty water in Sao Paulo, clean water in Australia, electricity in NZ, and using computers to map the development of a city in Cordoba. The goal of this program, although we never say so out loud, is to teach engineers that in the real world, they are going to have to deal with people who don’t quite speak their language. I have talked a lot about how study abroad grows like Topsey, randomly, without a whole lot of planning. But once a study abroad program is up and running, and especially as it gets quite big, it becomes a system. And a system has rules and regulations and ways of doing things that take on a life of their own. Parts of the system can fairly easily be tweaked if necessary. Something isn’t working right in Japan. Fine, you tweak the system until the problem is corrected. But tweaking the entire system becomes a challenge when the system is confronted by another challenge. And I think that all of our systems are facing an important challenge at the moment, since we are suddenly dealing with a different clientele from what we are used to and with very different circumstances. Millenials The challenge or challenges are the millennial generation, cell phones, and e-mail, and I use the plural because the use of cell phones and e-mail is not limited to the millennial generation. If four years ago you had started talking to me about the millennial generation, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. But it was at this time that I began to sense that the students I was dealing with were different from those in the past. In the winter term of 2002 I was teaching First-Year Preceptorial, our required reading, writing, thinking, talking course. There were sixteen students. Two guys talked up a storm. Fourteen had nothing to say, even if questioned directly. What was I doing wrong? Why this passivity? But maybe I wasn’t doing too much wrong, since they were actively passive, if you will. Not “I’m bored” passivity, not “I haven’t read the book so please don’t bother me” passivity. They paid attention, followed what I was saying, and took notes. I began to get a clue as to what was going on when I was talking about when I was young and noted that you came home from school, put on your play clothes, and went out to play until it was time for dinner. The only two students who knew what I was talking about were the two talkative guys. Everyone else looked at me as if I had two heads. Finally, some brave soul said, “Didn’t your Mom drive you to some after school activity?” I can just imagine what the response would have been if I had asked my mother to drive me somewhere. Walk, take your bike, take the bus. Okay, so now I was dealing with the driven generation. I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the idea. The family across the street has four children ages about 12 to 6, and the SUV is in constant motion. So now I was Dad, piloting the kids through the various works I had chosen to have them read. This was a long way from what I considered my best precept class ever about six years before. We were reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved. At the beginning of class I asked a question, and I didn’t speak again for sixty-five minutes. Times had definitely changed. After the course ended, I talked more with colleagues about their experiences along these lines, finally heard about the millenials, and did some reading about them. From a study abroad point of view, I didn’t always like what I was reading. There are two problems about discussing generations. If you aren’t of the generation, it sounds as if you are being critical. I’m not. It’s really a matter of different strokes for different folks. And, not all students today are as millennial as others. You can’t adjust how we do study abroad on a worst case basis. The millennial generation can be dated very precisely. It begins with people born in 1982, the year that the first baby on board sign appeared in a car window. Millenials are the children of baby boomers, and we know that a characteristic of that generation is an obsession with getting a task done correctly. Here the task is raising the perfect child, and Mom and Dad spend every waking moment for many years figuring out the best way to raise this child. And what is the result? Well, here is one definition of the millenials, not mine, but one I have appropriated. Howe and Strauss identify seven distinguishing characteristics for the Millennial Generation:
They sound like good kids, and they are. But as we will see, not all of these characteristics work well in a study abroad situation. Before we can discuss that, we have to think a little bit about their parents, and especially about some of their incessant use of cell phones, e-mail, and Instant Messaging (IM-ing). I was completely appalled to learn last winter that of my 16 Preceptorial students, fully half received at least one phone call every day from their parents, and a few got as many as five or six—and they didn’t necessarily like it, but felt that there was nothing else to do except answer the phone. After all, their parents were paying for college. So their life here is directed from there. When students announce that they are going on a term abroad, life continues as normal. Getting students ready to go is just another part of parental obligation. Some students welcome this, while others don’t. They view the term abroad, and getting ready for it, as a way to cut the knot. This can cause problems for me, since the first part of cutting the knot is withholding information from parents. So it’s all my fault if the parents don’t know something about a program. The worst instance ever of the effect of parental interference into a process that students want to accomplish themselves occurred about five year’s ago. John’s mother had called in the morning with some questions, and I answered them. In the afternoon, John appeared. He was a big guy, 6’2, obviously strong. He said that he needed to ask some questions for his mother, and when I said that I had already answered them earlier, he burst into tears. Can’t I do anything all by myself? Parental involvement with the term abroad ends, at least in theory, when the student goes through security, and Mom and Dad can’t follow. I think that what is particularly hard for parents in a study abroad situation is not the distance involved, but that they can’t visualize where the student is. They may be at a distance when the child is at college, but they have seen the college. They may have been to Paris, but they haven’t been to Rennes, and thus when Bob says that he is at the place de la Mairie, they have no idea what he is talking about. What I dislike about e-mail is that it disrupts the cross-cultural experience. Students who are in constant communication with their friends at Union are wasting time, but at least they are pretty much discussing trivia, and trivia passes from their mind fairly quickly. At least some parents don’t understand that some of what they are telling their children would be better left unsaid. Telling Steve that they had a big storm last night is fine. Telling Steve that the big oak where he had his first tree house no longer exists is not fine. Steve may think about this for the next several days, and that is cross-cultural time lost. Every once in a while, I will get a call from a parent saying that the child hasn’t sent and e-mail in three or four days. Is everything all right? Yes, since if it weren’t, the faculty member would have called. But the strangest phenomenon, and I can’t begin to explain how it occurs, is when the student suddenly senses that a parent is being left out of things and needs a task to perform in order to feel useful again. And I know when this occurs because I get a phone call from the parent asking the question. The millennial characteristic that I think is going to present our greatest challenge in the near future—it already has on some of our programs—is team orientation. Five years ago, when students would look at the list of students going on their program and say, “Gee, I know very few of these people,” I used to say, “Great, it will be easier for you to interact with the host culture.” I don’t other saying that any more, since I know perfectly well that the end of the first orientation meeting, the team will have started to form. Now teams have always existed in study abroad. If you had a group of thirty students, there would be four or five or six small groups that did things together. And there would always be some independent thinkers who went off on their own. Today, faculty report, the entire group becomes the team, which in a way is quite amusing, because the team includes people who wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room back on campus. Now, I have to admit that on a term abroad, team spirit can be useful on occasion. When you’re on an excursion, when the team gets on the bus together, you’re happy. But when the team sees only itself, and not the host culture, then something is missing in the study abroad experience. Breaking down the team, if not into individuals but at least small groups of students, will be the major challenge in study abroad in the next few years. In a way, this sounds trivial, but it really isn’t. More and more faculty members at Union, particularly those who have done a term abroad in the past, report that many more students simply are not involved in the host culture and thus are not learning much about it. But how do you break down the team, especially when you don’t want it known that this is what you are trying to do? Millenials – Pre-Departure I had been giving some thought to activities abroad that would help break down the team and get students to do things as individuals. A certain part of my focus shifted to things we can do before the program to break down the team and to make students more observant. More and more of our students are being made aware of different cultures in first year Preceptorial through the selection of non-Western, non-canon books that demonstrate the different, the other. At the very least, the student emerges from the course knowing that these things exist. We all worry that Union isn’t diverse enough, probably true, but we are using a very traditional definition of diversity, putting an African-American student in the same room with a student from the Main Line. But what about the student from suburban anywhere in the same room with a student from the high peaks in the Adirondacks who has never met a Jew, an African-American, an Asian-American. That is diversity too, and I want to try to figure out ways to use this situation. I have asked our anthropologists if observation can be taught in a pre-program situation, and while they admitted that it probably can, they didn’t know quite how. Then I remembered that two years ago, the students going on our joint program with HWS to Central Europe spent a week at Union before the program began in Europe, and that one of the exercises they did had something to do with their own hometowns. So I asked the person at HWS what exactly it had been. Something called the Experiential Community Analysis Project. “The idea is that by better understanding your own environment and social, political, and economic context, you will be better equipped to understand and analyze your surroundings abroad.” We are currently adapting one section of beginning anthropology as a preparation for study abroad for engineers, and this hometown exercise will be part of it, since the Central Europe students enjoyed it. They learned a lot about their hometown that they had never thought about before. Engineers themselves are something of a challenge, since they are very used to working in groups. Until about five years ago, engineers did not have to satisfy our Gen Ed “other cultures” requirement, but the engineering faculty then voted to make them complete the requirement. Engineers on a term abroad are an interesting phenomenon. They see things that go right past liberal arts students—technology, methods of construction, and so forth—but they have trouble drawing conclusions from what they see. If you say to them, “Did you notice that the Prague airport is smaller than Albany airport?” they’ll say, “Yes,” but if you go on to ask them what conclusion they draw from that, in all likelihood you won’t get an answer. Since we send 20 students to Czech Technical University in Prague, but no faculty member goes with them, we want to prepare them better to get as much out of the experience as possible. There is something we do with the engineers that I wonder about doing with more liberal arts students. I mentioned before our December miniterms. During the fall term, there is a series of seminars—usually five two hours long—that introduce the entire group to the country, the language, what the group as a whole will be doing. But, midway through the term, pairs are formed and at least part of the two hours is spent with the partners discussing their project and how they will carry it out. So the students start to grasp the big team small team concept. I’m wondering if at least part of this process could be adapted for the regular terms abroad, and I have to confess that I am not totally sure that it could. In the first place, the minute you ask Union students to do something extra, they want credit for it. (The miniterm students do the seminars not for course credit, but because they allow the students to complete a Gen Ed requirement.) So maybe two shorter sessions, one something general about the program or about cross-culturalism, the other where the students form teams and pick a topic for their first on site project would work. I think that the topics would have to be pretty basic, perhaps some aspect of daily life in the host country that could be investigated easily while on site. And, something that will help the other students figure out life in the host country. Millenials – Post-Departure Okay. We’re now on site. How does the faculty member keep the team working together while encouraging small team or even individual activities? Carefully. I do have a solution for the interfering parents syndrome? Strangulation? No, grin and bear it is about all you can do. And I do have something of a solution to the e-mail problem, which I gleaned from a NAFSA session in Baltimore last year. Certainly we are never going to stop students from using e-mail in a fairly frivolous way. But they can also be trained to use it in a serious way. If a student and a parent or friend can agree on the format, then the student can use e-mail daily or weekly or whatever to present activities and then an analysis of what the student learned from these activities. The parent or friend can comment, ask further questions, but the essential is that the parent or friend save the e-mail so that it forms part of a journal to be given to the student on return home. I am trying this out with two students this fall. I happened to know the parent well enough to be sure that they would take the whole thing seriously. One, where the student is writing to both parents, is going very well. The parents provide excellent feedback that inspires the student to reflect yet more on his experience. The other was going less well. The student is writing to his mother, and her responses were sort of in the Yes dear category. He was getting pretty frustrated. So I told him to resend the messages to me. I have been giving him a fair amount of feedback, and his analyses have become much more detailed and in depth. This technique won’t work with every student, but for a fair number it will allow them to break away from the group and personalize their experience. The housing situation is key, but very difficult to control. Homestays are great, but not easy to come by these days. And more students are starting to ask, “Do I have to live with a family?” which rather puzzles me, given their strong family orientation. At York St. John College, one Union student is housed with three or four British roommates. But if our student goes off with Union friends, there is nothing our faculty member can do about it. Probably our best living situation is at Czech Technical University in Prague, where we send 20 engineers every fall. The students are housed in a very nice international dormitory, but Czech students are included in the international mix. A very active international student club provides lot of activities. And, because this is an exchange, our students have met the 10 Czech students at Union the previous year, so at least they know a few Czechs. And I must say that the Czech students are very good about inviting our students home, taking them out to the country to meet their grandparents, and so forth. But the bottom line is that if students choose not to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them, there is really very little we can do. Internships and service learning are the big buzz words these days. I am cautiously enthusiastic about them, but I certainly believe that they are not for every student. In certain countries they are very difficult to arrange—the students can be regarded as taking a citizen’s job—and unless they are very carefully managed, they can become disorganized make-work. When successful, however, the student can learn a great deal and make some friends for life. I don’t know a lot about service learning, and probably never will, since I don’t see it in Union’s future on any large scale. Certainly I can see students volunteering at local charities, but even in this small area, there are potential problems, notably ethical issues. Unless American students are very carefully trained, they will simply impose American values in any situation, potentially causing damage. Although I applaud volunteerism, it is very hard to do well, and certainly not something for every student. Conclusion I want to end by returning briefly to the project concept, and before you accuse me of being obsessed with projects, I will readily admit that I am, at least to a limited extent. Here’s why. When we began the three language programs in 1969, students took two classroom courses and did, under the supervision of the Union faculty member, a full term independent project on a subject of their choice. Some of them were perfectly predictable—political parties, for example—but others were very unusual. One student’s family owned a very small café downtown—room for about a dozen people, as I remember—so the student did of analysis of how such a place was able to stay in business. Another did a photographic essay on Rennes life, and is today a free lance photographer. Whether predictable or unusual, the projects gave students a sense of personal accomplishment, which is why I liked them. After about ten years, we dropped them, for a couple of reasons. Too many local people had seen too many Union students and began to say “no” when asked to cooperate. And, faculty didn’t always feel comfortable about supervising the projects but especially about grading them. I felt perfectly competent to judge a project on the Socialist party, but certainly not a photographic essay. I’m not for a moment proposing going back to a full term independent project, but I think that a series of limited projects done by a team of two or three people who then report back to the entire group would both break down the large group and give students a sense of accomplishment in terms of merging, even if for a limited time, with the host culture. Subjects? I suppose the sky’s the limit, but local issues—political, economic, social, educational—make the most sense in terms of getting out and talking to people. And if the experiential community analysis project works, perhaps an on site version could occur at the end of the program. How serious is the problem? Serious enough, I think. When faculty on a term abroad complain that at least some of the students simply want to hang out together, you know you have a problem. My colleague Tom D’Agostino, who runs our joint programs with HWS, was in Galway last fall and interviewed some of the students. He asked one woman why she was enjoying the experience. Because she was meeting lots of new people. Who? Nine Union students whom I didn’t know very well before, and ten HWS students. And she was deadly serious. Houston, we have a problem.
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