Encounters with Difference: Student Perceptions of the Role of Out-of-Class Experiences in Education Abroad

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ENCOUNTERS WITH DIFFERENCE

Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of Education Physicians in the Academic Marketplace Dolores L. Burke Student Outcomes Assessment: A Historical Review and Guide to Program Development Serbrenia J. Sims The Vision of the Public Junior College, 1900–1940: Professional Goals and Popular Aspirations John H. Frye Adult Education for Community Development Edwin Hamilton Archetypal Forms in Teaching William A. Reinsmith Labor Relations in Education: An International Perspective Bruce S. Cooper, editor The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University Parker Rossman A New History of Educational Philosophy James S. Kaminsky Does College Make a Difference?: Long-Term Changes in Activities and Attitudes William E. Knox, Paul Lindsay, and Mary N. Kolb Assessing What Professors Do: An Introduction to Academic Performance Appraisal in Higher Education David A. Dilts, Lawrence J. Haber, and Donna Bialik

ENCOUNTERS WITH DIFFERENCE Student Perceptions of the Role of Out-of-Class Experiences in Education Abroad

Michael R. Laubscher

Contributions to the Study of Education, Number 105 Paul Pedersen, Series Adviser

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Laubscher, Michael R. Encounters with difference : student perceptions of the role of out-of-class experiences in education abroad / Michael R. Laubscher. p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of education, ISSN 0196–707X ; no. 105) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–28977–8 (alk. paper) 1. American students—Foreign countries. 2. Foreign study. 3. Experiential learning. 4. Student exchange programs. I. Title. II. Title: Student perceptions of the role of out-of-class experiences in education abroad. III. Series. LB2376.L3 1994 370.19′6—dc20 93–37505 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1994 by Michael R. Laubscher All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93–37505 ISBN: 0–313–28977–8 ISSN: 0196–707X First published in 1994 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface Introduction

vii xi

1.

The Theoretical Context

1

2.

The Student Informants

13

3.

Participant Observation as a Way of Learning about Cultural Differences

23

Personal Interaction as a Way of Learning about Cultural Differences

47

5.

Travel as a Way of Learning about Cultural Differences

65

6.

Student Perceptions of Primary Outcomes

77

7.

Conclusions

95

8.

Recommendations

4.

109

Bibliography

119

Index

125

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

Preface

On one thing all three of them could agree: When viewed in retrospect, it was definitely an interesting, if baffling, experience. Jennifer, Luke, and Sandra—Penn State students who were spending the fall semester of their junior year at the National Taiwan University—were on one of their customary weekend outings, crunched into a packed train en route from Taipei to Kaohsiung. Darkness had already settled over the landscape, obscuring all except the occasional twinkle of lights in the distance. They all felt excitement building as they approached this strange city in what was still a strange culture—an excitement heightened by an element of anxiety as the reality of their situation began to sink in: It was approaching 10 P.M., they still had twenty to thirty kilometers to go, and they had neglected to make advance accommodation arrangements. As Luke and Sandra later related, the two of them were sitting quietly together, each privately contemplating what to expect in the hours ahead, when Jennifer came rushing back from where she had been sitting with a young Chinese man just a few rows ahead. According to Jennifer, she was attempting to engage her fellow passenger in idle conversation, during which she informed him that she and her American friends were on their way to Kaohsiung for the weekend. What exactly happened next in the conversation is still not totally clear: Unable to recall specific details, Jennifer could only recollect that at some point she conveyed to him the fact that they were arriving without hotel reservations. She then understood him to say that it would be impossible to find a hotel room in Kaohsiung at such an hour and that he would be happy to take them in for the night. Luke and Sandra were naturally skeptical. As Sandra observed when recounting the incident, “ Jenny thought she understood more Chinese

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than she really did, and we weren’t sure she understood what this fellow had actually said to her.” Moreover, there was the danger that she had not only misunderstood the language but also the intent, as reflected in an observation Luke made about what happened that night: Maybe she didn’t quite understand what was going on. According to Chinese culture, whenever anyone offers you anything, you always refuse it at least once— maybe two or three times. We were afraid that he had offered to let us stay over out of sheer courtesy, and she had just said, “Okay, sure.” And that may not have been his intention at all.

Their skepticism was later reinforced when Sandra learned that “he had never talked to a foreigner before. He told Jenny that.” Sandra speculated in retrospect that it was only by accident that he found himself sitting next to this young American who “was friendly enough and outgoing enough and curious enough” to draw him into a conversation and that “on a whim she told him about our plans and without really thinking he invited us to his house. I really have no idea why.” In any case, the three of them accepted his invitation without the benefit of the foregoing analysis gained from hindsight, and in a matter of moments they were hustled off the train, thinking that they had arrived in Kaohsiung ahead of schedule. Only after leaping from the train and glancing around the station did they realize that they were virtually in the middle of nowhere. They had simply assumed that their host-to-be, whose name they had now learned was Huang, lived in Kaohsiung. This was now quite obviously not the case. In Sandra’s words, “We were walking across this deserted railroad station. It was twelve o’clock at night. And we realized we weren’t in Kaohsiung and had no idea where we were going to end up.” The surprise of disembarking in a remote area was only slightly softened by the surprise of finding that the deserted train station was not so deserted after all. As they walked from the main platform toward the exit, they saw an elderly Chinese couple approaching; this produced a subtle but evident change in the gait of their new companion—a change that they later attributed to embarrassment. It was soon apparent that the couple had been expecting the young man, who proved to be their son, and while Sandra, Luke, and Jennifer were certainly far from fluent in reading Chinese facial expressions, they could tell that the parents were confused and puzzled by the presence of three Americans. In Sandra’s words, “His parents were shocked to see him walking with three foreigners. And then to find out that he had invited those foreigners to stay in their home!” Whatever possessed the young man to make such an impulsive gesture is still a mystery to the three students. Sandra learned during the course of the night that “he hadn’t seen his parents in three months. He had been at a cram school in Taipei preparing to get into the university.” The parents were obviously picking him up at the station for a home visit that had now

PREFACE

ix

been disrupted by guests who were not only unexpected but also foreign. By this time, Sandra, Jennifer, and Luke were becoming embarrassed themselves, but there was no way of rolling back the film and starting over. The adventure became more intriguing when they discovered that the sole mode of transportation was an old truck with limited passenger space. “All they had was a vegetable truck,” according to Sandra. “They were farmers. So we climbed into the back of this vegetable truck and drove through the countryside to their farm.” None of the students was privy to the conversation between Huang and his parents in the cab of the truck, but they all agreed, looking back, that the parents had to have been disconcerted and embarrassed. Luke consulted with one of his Chinese professors upon returning to Taipei and concluded that “we had caused his parents to lose a great deal of face by just showing up when they hadn’t prepared anything. That made them look bad.” Sandra independently agreed that “his parents were embarrassed because they had nothing prepared for us. He had put us in the most ‘losing face’ position and his parents, too. We were all mortified.” Soon after arriving at the farm, the three adventurers found themselves being whisked away by their newly acquired friend for a midnight snack. Since the parents had nothing to offer in the way of a home-cooked meal, the young man apparently had no other choice than to treat them to a commercially prepared one. Given the confusion and the stress of the evening’s events, together with the limited linguistic proficiency of the American students, it is not surprising that there was little in the way of conversation for the rest of the night—although their Chinese host did use this occasion to confess that his parents were deeply embarrassed by what had happened. They never saw the parents again, and early the next morning Huang returned them to the secluded train station, where they were able to continue to their original destination. While Luke at least discussed the incident with a faculty member, none of the students can fully explain what happened that night. It is an adventure that all three of them have now catalogued in their mental diary of fascinating but puzzling experiences. In alluding to their one-night acquaintance and host, Sandra summed up the experience in the following reflection: “His last name was Huang, which means yellow. So we stayed at this guy’s place for one night in the middle of nowhere, he was our age, and all we knew was that his name was Yellow.”


Introduction

I think it is the best thing I’ve done in college and I would recommend it to anyone. It was the best experience in my life. More people should do it. It was one of the best experiences of my life! I wish I could do it again. Deciding to travel and study abroad was one of the best decisions I’ll ever make. I wish everyone could try it.

These quotations represent student reactions after having participated in education abroad programs administered by the Pennsylvania State University during fall 1990 in Nice, Rome, Chichester, and Leeds, respectively. Drawn from written program evaluations submitted after the programs’ conclusions, they typify students’ general assessments of their experiences while on a study abroad program. Even when they criticize particular aspects of their programs, they still speak highly of the overall experience: One student, for example, subjected her Taiwan program to a scathing attack, only to conclude, “I would do it again in a second. I loved it and I learned more than can ever be expressed in such a short space.” What is it about study abroad that leads to these kinds of conclusions? The students obviously believe that something significant has happened to them, even though they may have difficulty articulating just what that is. In spite of such difficulties, their perceptions of the experience will help educators gain valuable insights into what happens to students while enrolled in an education abroad program. Armed with such insights, educators can then make more informed policy decisions about how to

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INTRODUCTION

maximize the overall educational benefits of undergraduate programs abroad.

CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND Education abroad is becoming widely recognized as an important component of undergraduate education. The number and variety of education abroad programs, as well as the number of participants, have been growing at a rapid pace. According to a program survey conducted by the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) in 1984, “the number of formal programs abroad has shown an increase each year since 1951” (Bowman 1987, 45); and 75 percent of the institutions responding to a CIEE opinion survey that year reported that student interest and enrollment in such programs have been increasing (Bowman 1987, 45). Based on a recent survey of American colleges and universities, the Institute of International Education (IIE) reported that 70,727 students received academic credit for studying abroad in 1989–90—an increase of 13.4 percent over the 62,341 students who received credit for work done abroad in 1987–88 (Zikopoulos 1991, 85). At Penn State, where the present study was conducted, the growth in education abroad has been equally dynamic. The number of programs administered by the university’s Office of Education Abroad Programs has increased from twelve semester/academic-year programs and one summer program in 1979–80 to twenty-nine semester/academic-year programs in 1991–92, eleven summer or intersession programs, and nineteen programs offered through consortia administered by the CIEE. The number of students participating in those programs has increased from 244 in 1979–80 to 555 in the 1991–92 academic year—444 in semester/academic-year programs and 111 in summer or intersession programs, including seventeen in consortial programs. Although the increase in both interest and participation has been encouraging, the relatively small number of undergraduates studying abroad each year is still cause for concern among professional educators. For example, in drawing attention to the fact that over 350,000 foreign students enroll in American colleges and universities each year, the Advisory Council for International Educational Exchange noted that “citizens of other nations are learning more about us than we are about them and each year are doing so in increasing numbers” (1988, 3). More important than the disparity in numbers between foreign students in the United States and U.S. students abroad are the demands that will be placed on future generations by the level of national and cultural interdependence inherent in the contemporary world: The higher education community recognizes that the educated person of the future will need a basic understanding of other nations and cultures in order to function effectively.

INTRODUCTION

xiii

Former Senator J. William Fulbright made this point eloquently in The Price of Empire (1989, 199–200): The vital mortar to seal the bricks of world order is education across international boundaries, not with the expectation that knowledge would make us love each other, but in the hope that it would encourage empathy between nations, and foster the emergence of leaders whose sense of other nations and cultures would enable them to shape specific policies based on tolerance and rational restraint.

In recognition of this growing need, a national movement has emerged in support of enhancing international education throughout the American higher education system. A number of educational organizations have begun to focus on education abroad in particular by promoting the idea of a 10 percent undergraduate enrollment objective—similar to what is already being pursued by the European Community through its ERASMUS program (i.e., the European Regional Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students). The Advisory Council for International Educational Exchange spearheaded this movement in 1988 when it issued its report on Educating for Global Competence and called for just such an objective. The National Task Force on Undergraduate Education Abroad and the Liaison Group for International Educational Exchange have both echoed this recommendation by suggesting that within the next five to ten years, provisions should be made to ensure that at least 10 percent of all students who receive baccalaureate degrees in this country will have had “a significant educational experience abroad during their undergraduate years” (National Task Force on Undergraduate Education Abroad 1990, 4). At Penn State the need to foster an understanding of differences among various human groups prompted the University Faculty Senate to conduct an extensive curriculum review and ultimately to adopt a cultural diversity requirement as part of the general education program that all students must complete in order to receive either a baccalaureate or an associate degree. Motivated initially by the Faculty Senate’s perception of a need to promote appreciation for ethnic differences among domestic groups, the requirement in its final form included the option of studying differences among the world’s diverse cultures. In recognition of the extent to which study abroad can support the latter, the senate legislation allows students to fulfill the requirement by enrolling for a semester of study abroad on an officially sponsored Penn State education abroad program. The value of education abroad has also led Penn State’s College of Business Administration to require a semester of study abroad as an integral part of its new international business major. And the International Council, Penn State’s advisory body to the provost, has recommended that the university seek to ensure that 20 percent of those who ultimately receive a baccalaureate degree from the institution will have studied abroad at some point during their undergraduate careers.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

PURPOSE OF STUDY Participants in education abroad programs have the opportunity to immerse themselves in a “living laboratory” that forces them to become actively involved in the learning process on every level—intellectual, psychological, and emotional. This holistic dimension is what makes education abroad uniquely suited to promoting an appreciation for cultural differences in today’s interdependent global community. With some notable exceptions, however, few institutions have attempted systematically to integrate that out-of-class component into the overall education abroad enterprise. Although the on-site staff might provide occasional field trips and social events, students are left pretty much to their own devices when it comes to activities and experiences not directly related to the academic program. Given the increased emphasis that is being placed on undergraduate education abroad, it is incumbent on the academic community to develop a better understanding of the nature of this type of learning experience. To enhance the effectiveness of study abroad programs, we must acquire a greater appreciation of how students go about learning what they do while enrolled in such programs. In particular, we need to have a better understanding of that learning component over which educators have traditionally exercised the least control but that gives education abroad its unique ability to foster cross-cultural understanding; that is, out-ofclass experiences that bring the student into direct contact with the host culture. The purpose of this study is to lay the groundwork for developing a more systematic approach to helping students take maximum advantage of this feature, which makes education abroad unique. To do that, it is necessary first to acquire some sense of how to organize and exploit the learning activities that abound in the nonacademic environment. As suggested in the discussion of the ethnographic discovery model of learning another culture in chapter 1, it is assumed that students are already attempting to engage in activities that will enhance their education. Without the guidance of professional educators, they are probably approaching the task in a haphazard way. Their experience nevertheless makes them a valuable source of information about how to categorize, organize, and exploit out-of-class opportunities to facilitate learning about cultural differences. The basic objective is therefore to find out how students on their own have used out-of-class experiences to enhance their learning. Professional educators can then use that data to guide their efforts in developing ways to help future students approach those opportunities in a more systematic fashion.

INTRODUCTION

xv

DESIGN OF STUDY Using a case study approach, I interviewed a number of students who had just returned from a semester or year of study abroad in one of the programs administered by Penn State in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, or the Far East. For purposes of manageability, the study focused specifically on the programs offered by Penn State during the fall semester of 1990. The university’s Office of Education Abroad Programs administers a number of individual programs at various locations around the world: In the fall of 1990 these included thirteen programs at twelve locations in eight countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, and Australia. To enhance its external validity, the investigation followed what Yin classifies as an “embedded case study design” (1984, 44); that is, an examination of several units (individual study abroad programs at various foreign locations) that comprise the overarching case under investigation (the 1990 fall semester education abroad program at Penn State). The basic issue addressed by this embedded case study went beyond the general question of what students did during unsupervised periods of time to the more specific question of what activities actually contributed to the crosscultural learning process. It was therefore necessary to include an interpretive dimension to the catalog of data about out-of-class experiences: A simple survey could not get to the heart of the issue. The students’ own judgments about the role of their experiences therefore became an essential ingredient of the research design. Personal interviews using open-ended questions are a direct way of obtaining this kind of insider’s point of view. By listening to the students describe and discuss their out-of-class activities, international educators can learn from the students’ first-hand experiences and use the insights gained to generalize about what constitute the most salient categories of activity for complementing the educational process abroad. The emphasis throughout is on the students’ perceptions—that is, an ethnographic view of the role of out-of-class experiences abroad through the eyes of the student participants. And since the objective is to identify the categories of activity that will form the basis of an experiential component, the focus is on what the students did rather than on what they learned (i.e., process as opposed to outcomes). By listening to the students and learning from them, we can identify those broad categories of activity on which to focus in developing a systematic pedagogical approach to integrating the experiential, out-of-class component into the overall education abroad enterprise.

OVERVIEW Chapter 1 reviews the basic premises of cross-cultural difference and introduces a number of learning theories that are relevant to education

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INTRODUCTION

abroad. Special emphasis is given to Milton Bennett’s developmental model for acquiring intercultural sensitivity, James Spradley’s concept of the learning stages inherent in the enculturation process, Jacquetta Burnett’s ethnographic discovery model of cross-cultural learning, and David Kolb’s experiential learning model. This chapter also provides a brief survey of some of the relevant literature that bears on the subject. In chapter 2 the reader will learn more about the thirty students who participated in the study. Six of these informants studied in Osaka, five each in Nice and Rome, three each in Leeds, Taiwan, and Tel Aviv, two in Cairo, and one each in Nairobi, Canberra, and Melbourne. The next four chapters present and discuss the data collected during the student interviews. Since the focus is on the students’ subjective perceptions of their experiences, these chapters are replete with information that the students shared during the interview process. Through the medium of thick description (i.e., relating the students’ experiences in extensive detail), we are able to acquire a greater appreciation for the students’ perspectives on what happens outside the classroom and how that complements the learning process. Chapters 3 through 5 represent the taxonomy of learning activities that emerged from the students’ discussions. Based on Spradley’s “means-end” domain of semantic relationships (1979), three basic categories of learning activity encompassed the informants’ detailed catalog of experiences: participant observation, personal interaction, and travel. Chapter 3 deals with the first of those categories: the students’ perspectives on how direct interaction with the host culture enhanced their learning experience. In chapter 4 the students discuss the role of personal relationships in learning not only about the host culture but also about the relationship between stereotypes and individual identities. Chapter 5 then takes a look at the role of travel as an out-of-class learning activity in its own right. In the final chapter dealing with the data (chapter 6), the students reflect on the impact their semester abroad had upon them personally. While this is not intended and does not purport to be an impact study, the students’ discussions of their experiences abroad inevitably led to observations about how those experiences affected them. No attempt has been made objectively to validate or to measure those impacts; as with the previous three chapters, the primary objective of this chapter is to present the students’ perceptions and thus to see the results through their eyes. Drawing on the discussions in chapters 3 through 6, the next chapter presents a number of conclusions about the role of out-of-class experiences in education abroad programs. Based on those conclusions, a number of recommendations are offered as to how educators can more effectively integrate the out-of-class dimension into the overall learning activity in study abroad programs.

INTRODUCTION

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In summary, colleges and universities throughout the nation have recognized the need to promote a greater appreciation for cultural diversity in the modern world. Education abroad by its very nature has a unique capacity to fulfill this objective. Given the level of regard now being accorded education abroad, it has become increasingly important for professional educators to have available the kind of data that will enable them to make sound decisions about the operation of such programs. By learning more about what students do outside the classroom, and by finding out if they perceive those activities as supportive of the overall educational effort, we will be able to make more informed judgments about how to integrate that experiential domain more fully into the education abroad enterprise.




1

The Theoretical Context

In some parts of India there is no verbal expression for the concept of “thank you,” not even for use upon receipt of a gift from another individual (Stewart 1972, 49). In the Arab world it is not unusual to see individuals of the same sex walking down the street hand-in-hand while engaging in conversation (Nydell 1987, 44). In Japan it is rare to witness open and direct disagreement among individuals engaged in group discussion (Barnlund 1975, 27). In the Philippines, an American visitor might be dismayed to find his or her personal possessions being freely handled and perhaps even shared by the hosts (Condon & Yousef 1975, 90). Examples abound of differences in behavior and customs among the various human groups that populate the world.

THE CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXT Different behavior patterns among different human groups represent these groups’ varied attempts to adapt to their physical environment, which is overwhelmingly complex in the range of physical stimuli that human beings must interpret and to which they must respond. Over time, different groups have developed a widely divergent array of cognitive filters through which they interpret the world around them and through which they “create order out of what appears to them to be utter chaos” (Tyler 1969, 6). This wide array of cognitive filters that mediate between the external world of the physical environment and the internal world of the human psyche has led to an equally wide range of behavior patterns among human groups.

2


Cognitive anthropologists have made significant advances in understanding how different human groups respond to this barrage of sensory stimuli generated by the external environment. Eugene d’Aquili has even gone so far as to suggest the existence of an inherent human need to impose meaning on the world around us—a need that he characterizes as a “cognitive imperative” that is every bit as basic and essential to human survival as the sex drive, the hunger drive, and the drive to be part of a social group (Plog 1976, 116). By exercising this cognitive imperative, each human group can reduce the overwhelming complexity of the external world to manageable proportions. The behavior patterns that characterize a particular group are the product of that group’s unique perception of the world. The cognitive filter employed by a particular group affects not only the way its members apprehend the world but also the way the members of that group think. A study done by Robert Kaplan (1966) illustrates how people from different cultures not only categorize phenomena differently but even think differently from each other. In his analysis of approximately 600 compositions by foreign students in an American institution of higher education, he provides an interesting example of how different thought processes can manifest themselves. Among the three language groups included in his study, those from a Semitic background submitted compositions whose paragraph development consisted of a complex series of parallel constructions. Those from an Oriental background developed their paragraphs through indirection, using ever-widening circles of development rather than through parallelisms or logical sequences. Digressions and apparent irrelevancies appeared consistently in the paragraphs of those who spoke Romance languages. Having adopted different cognitive filters, behavior patterns, and thinking styles in their efforts to adapt to the physical environment, these widely varying human groups have also attempted to ensure their continued survival as distinct entities by passing along their adaptive mechanisms to subsequent generations through the enculturation process. Each individual member of a social group is the product of that group’s particular enculturation process, which provides each member of the group with a shared cognitive frame of reference for interpreting sensory input. In the words of Judith Hansen, “Between what our bodies tell us and what we have to know in order to cope effectively with our environment, there is a vacuum we must fill ourselves, and we fill it with information provided largely by the culture of the group into which we are born and in which we grew up” (Hansen 1979, 3). This enculturation process determines the way each member of a particular group will perceive the world as well as the way each member of that group will think and behave in adapting to that world. As the product of such an enculturation process, the student abroad possesses a cognitive filter that is probably quite different from the filter that members of the host

THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT

3

culture have acquired. The magnitude of that difference will naturally depend on the degree of difference between the two cultures.

LEARNING ANOTHER CULTURE Learning about other cultures can occur on one of several levels. As noted by Judith Hansen, James Spradley has distinguished five levels of learning through which an individual progresses in any enculturation process (Spradley 1972, 22). “These range from learning about, through understanding, believing, and using the belief to organize or account for behavior, to the ultimate level of ‘internalizing the belief so thoroughly that it is a part of [one’s] tacit knowledge and a violation would be unthinkable’ ” (Hansen 1979, 7–8). The final stage is the end product of an effective enculturation process; it provides the individual with the cognitive frame of reference that is unique to the cultural milieu within which that individual was raised. The student going abroad and the members of the host culture will have undoubtedly reached that stage in terms of their respective but different cultural backgrounds. Depending on the level of experience with the host culture, the student will probably be at Spradley’s first stage of learning in terms of the new culture. As one of their objectives in designing and implementing study abroad programs, educators will naturally want to find ways in which to supplement what students may have already “learned about” the host culture. Another objective will be to find ways in which to promote movement from the “learning about” stage to the “understanding” stage. Understanding implies some degree of insight into the behavior patterns that characterize the host culture, which is a first step toward an awareness of the cognitive differences that are responsible for generating different behavior patterns. Ultimately, the learning objective is for the student to gain insight into the nature of those cognitive differences. Barnlund summed up the task effectively and succinctly in the introduction to his study of communicative styles in the United States and Japan (1975, 6): What seems most critical is to find ways of gaining entrance into the assumptive world of another culture, to identify the norms that govern face-to-face relations, and to equip people to function within a social system that is foreign but no longer incomprehensible. Without this kind of insight, people are condemned to remain outsiders no matter how long they live in another culture. Social institutions and customs will be interpreted inevitably from the premises and through the medium of their own culture. Whether they notice something or overlook it, respect it or ridicule it, express or conceal their reaction will be dictated by the logic of their own rather than the alien culture.

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By adapting various learning theories and models to the education abroad activity, educators seek to facilitate students’ efforts to learn about another culture’s distinctive behavior patterns and to understand the cognitive bases of those behavioral differences.

Developmental Theories of Learning Among the learning theories that are especially relevant to education abroad are some of the recent developmental approaches. Progression through life cycle phases (Chickering & Havighurst 1981), ego development (Weathersby 1981), moral development (Gilligan 1981), and intellectual development (Perry 1981) all interact as integral components of the higher education process. Each of these developmental processes will be operational during a student’s period of study abroad, just as they are during the years spent on campus in the United States. Of special interest to the international educator, however, is a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity suggested by Milton Bennett. According to the Bennett model, students progress from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism through a sequence of six hierarchical states, each with at least two developmental stages (1986, 32). The first three states fall under the rubric of ethnocentrism: 1. An initial denial of cultural differences, which includes isolation and separation stages 2. A defensive state consisting of denigration, superiority, and reversal stages in which the reality of cultural differences is finally acknowledged but an attempt is made to maintain hegemony of one culture over another 3. A state in which cultural differences are minimized in an attempt to deal with the recognition that it is no longer tenable to maintain the superiority of one culture over another (a state consisting of stages that Bennett characterizes as physical universalism and transcendent universalism)

Bennett postulates that once an individual has progressed through the three states of ethnocentrism, the next three states in the development of intercultural sensitivity fall in the category of ethnorelativism: 1. A state characterized by stages of behavior and value relativism in which the individual accepts the relative viability of differences among cultures in adapting to the material environment 2. Adaptation to the host culture, in which empathy and a sense of pluralism emerge 3. A transcendent state in which “difference in general becomes integral to identity” (1986, 58)


5

Bennett hypothesizes that “constructive marginality” is the ultimate stage in the development of intercultural sensitivity. At this stage the individual is “outside all cultural frames of reference” (1986, 61) where “there are no unquestioned assumptions, no intrinsically right behaviors, nor any necessary reference group” (1986, 62). This model of cultural development assumes that relativism is an essential penultimate stage: Only after the individual is able to see cultural phenomena in relative terms can that individual make judgments that transcend narrowly prescribed boundaries. One of the conceptual premises of this study is that education abroad introduces a necessary transitional step in the progression from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism.

Experiential Learning Theory The experiential learning model has become one of the more widely accepted approaches to learning a new culture. From John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead through such contemporary theorists as Paolo Freire, educators have assumed that certain kinds of learning are most effectively achieved if the learner is actively engaged on more than just an abstract intellectual level with the material to be learned. With empirical data now accumulating in support of that assumption, the Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, sponsored by the National Institute of Education reported that “there is now a good deal of research evidence to suggest that the more time and effort students invest in the learning process and the more intensely they engage in their own education, the greater will be their growth and achievement” (1984, 17). The study group advised that we must involve students more fully in research projects, in field classes, in internships, and in “other forms of carefully monitored experiential learning” (1984, 27). Professionals in the field of international education have applied the experiential learning principle in varying degrees for a number of years; internships and service projects abroad, field work in a foreign setting, and homestay experiences are all examples of experiential techniques that various study abroad programs routinely employ. The objective is to get the student beyond Spradley’s “learning about” stage, which can be purely intellectual, and on to the more relativistic stages of Bennett’s intercultural sensitivity development model. The experiential learning model is cyclical, with four distinct phases. The learner begins with concrete experience, progresses to the level of reflective observation about the nature of those experiences, formulates abstract concepts and generalizations based on those reflective observations, and then tests the validity and viability of those concepts in real-life situations, thus leading back to concrete experience once again (Kolb 1981, 235).

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A basic premise of this study is that during those periods of time when they are not engaged in the formal academic part of their program, students abroad by necessity become engaged in this experiential learning cycle. They begin with an entirely new kind of concrete experience upon which they must reflect in order to infer general patterns and concepts about the host culture. To be effective learners in such a context, they “must be able to involve themselves fully, openly, and without bias” in the new cultural milieu and they “must be able to observe and reflect on those experiences from many perspectives” (Kolb 1981, 236). As James Coleman has pointed out in his comparison of experiential learning to classroom learning, “the experiential learning process proceeds in almost a reverse sequence” (1976, 51). While an instructor in the classroom generally begins with abstract principles about which information must be transmitted in order for the student ultimately to understand and apply those principles in particular situations, the experiential learner begins with the particular and proceeds to the general, inferring abstract principles from those particular events. Participants in education abroad programs find themselves exposed to both processes—one in the more formal academic setting and the other while engaged in out-of-class activities.

Ethnographic Discovery Model When applied to education abroad, the developmental model and the experiential learning model both assume that the student begins with observed differences in behavior and customs when interacting with the host culture. Before the student can make any developmental progress or attempt to make any general inferences about the host culture, the student must first be aware of the differences that exist. Inferences can be made only when there are particular events or concrete phenomena on which to base those inferences. The next basic premise of this study relates directly to this sine qua non of cross-cultural learning: Students must first become aware of the differences that characterize the new cultural setting. To draw a parallel with the field of anthropology, where learning about other cultures is at the heart of the discipline, cognitive anthropologists need the empirical data collected by ethnographers before they can begin to make inferences about the cognitive bases of behavior. To begin their venture toward understanding the host culture, students abroad must collect data about observable differences in behavior. In effect, they must become amateur ethnographers as a first step in the experiential and developmental learning processes. The ethnographic discovery model for learning about another culture provides an especially apposite theoretical framework within which to see their fledgling efforts.


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As is apparent from its name, this model of cross-cultural learning draws heavily on ethnographic methodology. Jacquetta Burnett suggested the model when she drew her analogy between the ethnographic method and second-culture acquisition. She suggested that the experience of the ethnographer is similar to that of an adult undergoing socialization into a new role (1974, 27). The important parallel with study abroad is that the ethnographer is in effect learning a new culture, just as we expect of the student abroad. Burnett asserts that by conscientiously analyzing the process by which an ethnographer discovers the inner workings of a second culture, educational anthropologists can gain “some insight into how a child is enculturated, more insight into how a youth or adult is socialized, and a great deal of insight into how an adult is acculturated into a second culture” (1974, 28). While students abroad are obviously not trained ethnographers, Burnett’s analogy suggests that students are in fact making use of ethnographic methods, regardless of how unsophisticated or elementary, in acquiring information that helps them gain insight into the nature of the host culture. A basic assumption of this study is that all three learning models discussed above (developmental, experiential, and ethnographic discovery) are indeed operative in the out-of-class setting of education abroad programs. As a first step in the overall process, however, students must become aware of the concrete differences upon which to base their cognitive inferences and affective development. The ethnographic discovery model is therefore basic to the entire enterprise.

LITERATURE REVIEW A rather extensive body of literature on study abroad has begun to develop. Henry Weaver (1989) recently compiled a bibliography that included over 250 entries of published reports and unpublished papers that had become available through 1987. It is evident from his categorization of bibliographical entries that the vast majority of those reports are guides, evaluations, general overviews, theoretical presentations, and general discussions of cross-cultural issues. Many of the entries listed under the rubric of “research” are actually something other than the presentation of research findings—discussions about the general nature of research on education abroad, summaries of research completed or in progress, appeals for more research, general discussions about the kinds of topics and issues that researchers should address, and so forth. There is still a limited amount of literature dealing with substantive research in this field of higher education. The paucity of such literature reflects the fact that research on education abroad is still in its infancy. Most of the research to date has been quantita-

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tive in nature, dealing with the impacts and outcomes of participation in education abroad generally. There has been little in the way of qualitative research dealing specifically with out-of-class learning as a separate and distinct component of the education abroad experience. Furthermore, until now research has focused on outcomes with little attention to the processes that produce those outcomes.

Impact Studies Efforts to study the impact of education abroad have focused primarily on the measurement of attitude change. Among many such efforts are studies done by Eric Kafka (1968), Oliver Tenant Rose (1969), Edward Morgan, Jr. (1972, 1975), Thomas Bower (1973), William Duffy (1976), Dennison Nash (1976), Thomas Hensley and Deborah Sell (1979), Edward Pizzini (1979), Paul Marion (1980), Margaret Gwynne (1981), Richard Pyle (1981), and Jerry Carlson and Keith Widaman (1988). For the most part, these researchers based their conclusions on statistical analysis of before-and-after test results using various assessment instruments. As might be expected, the results of these studies are mixed and inconclusive with respect to both the nature and direction of attitude change. Rose, Nash, Gwynne, and Pyle found evidence to suggest that participants became more worldminded, developed a greater sense of autonomy and self-esteem, and became more sympathetic toward different ethnic groups. The results obtained by Hensley and Sell tend to support the conclusion that participants experienced an increase in self-esteem; however, they found no statistically significant difference between their experimental group and their control group in terms of changes in worldmindedness or tolerance of ambiguity. Kafka, Morgan, Bower, Nash, Marion, and Gwynne also were inconclusive as to whether study abroad has any significant impact in generating attitude changes. Bower, for example, did not find any significant increase in flexibility or sensitivity among the twelve students he tested before and after spending fourteen weeks at Tarkio College’s center in Alexandria, Egypt. In comparing a study abroad experimental group with a control group among students at Rockland Community College, Gwynne concluded that while there appeared to be a significantly greater increase in worldmindedness among those in the experimental group, there was no significant difference between the two groups in the nature of change that took place in tolerance for “out groups.” Like Hensley and Sell, Kafka did not find any significant relationship between study abroad and changes in worldmindedness. However, his data did suggest that exposure to a foreign culture reinforces appreciation for the homeland at the expense of the culture visited—except in the case


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of those who achieved total cross-cultural immersion, in which case the rating of the host country improved at the expense of the United States. In general, Kafka concluded, as did many others, that there was no evidence to associate cross-cultural interaction with fundamental attitude change. Marion actually found evidence to suggest that, rather than generating change, study abroad might reinforce existing attitudes. Based on beforeand-after testing of ninety students from the University of Colorado who enrolled for programs in Western Europe, he found that those who were more nationalistic and conservative before going abroad demonstrated an even greater degree of nationalism and conservatism upon returning. Morgan’s study of adaptation and change among forty-four American students in Basel, Switzerland, raised the possibility that any change that does occur during study abroad may in fact be more the product of a student’s personal proclivity than of the study abroad program. Using computer groupings based on twenty-two personal variables rated on a five-point scale, he was able to categorize the participants, before they left the United States, into five distinct types. Those types ranged from what he called “cultural relativists” at one end of the continuum to “culture opposites” at the other end. Based on an analysis of his test data before and after participation, he concluded that the cultural relativists were better able to cope, adapt, and empathize with the host population, while the culture opposites tended to seek closer ties with their American peers, developed intense nostalgia for home, and demonstrated a heightened degree of nationalism upon returning from the program. Carlson and Widaman’s study of changes in attitude and perception utilized data obtained from a self-assessment questionnaire. By comparing responses from students who spent their junior year abroad with responses from a control group that remained on the home campus during the junior year, they concluded that there was a greater increase in international political concern, cross-cultural interest, and cultural cosmopolitanism among those who had studied abroad for the year. These impact studies are primarily attempts to assess educational outcomes of study abroad, with little attention to the processes that generated those outcomes. Several other researchers have attempted through similar impact studies to make indirect connections between outcomes and on-site activities.

Linking Outcomes to Processes As noted earlier, Hensley and Sell concluded from an analysis of their data that there was a significant increase in the level of self-esteem among the participants in Kent State University’s 1977 spring semester program at the United Nations European Headquarters in Geneva. They also discovered that there was an apparent correlation between that attitude

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change and the closeness of contact with non-Americans. By doing multiple regression analysis of two independent variables (enjoyment of the experience and closeness of contact with non-Americans), they found reason to believe that the closer the contact with non-Americans, the greater the increase in self-esteem. This aspect of their research thus established a link between a particular outcome and a concrete characteristic of the program. Among other studies that allude to the educational contribution of specific on-site activities and experiences are those by Charles Smith, Jr. (1971), Frank Hull IV and Walter Lemke, Jr. (1978), Irwin Abrams (1979), and Norman Kauffman (1983). While their primary concern is with outcomes, their research data provide indirect insight into the link between those outcomes and what was going on as an integral part of the education abroad program. Smith made the most direct effort to establish a link between attitude changes and specific programmatic factors. Based on self-perceived changes among Kalamazoo College students who went to Africa, France, Germany, and Spain during the 1966–67, 1967–68, and 1968–69 academic years, he found that the factors that seemed most directly related to changes in attitude, values, and interests were: the extent of exposure to non-Americans, the presence of an American subculture, overall course differences, program satisfaction, helpfulness of hosts, and the relevance of courses to the students’ majors. Of special significance was the discovery that students who lived with host families felt that they had undergone the greatest degree of change. The work of Hull and Lemke focused on the affective development of students. Their report drew on data collected from an Individual Opinion Inventory that they administered to a broad range of students from a wide variety of higher education institutions between May 1974 and September 1975. Study abroad did not appear to have a significantly greater impact than off-campus domestic study in terms of the participants’ perception of change. For purposes of this study, their most important finding was that participants in off-campus programs generally, whether domestic or foreign, tended to attribute greater significance to the noncurricular or experiential component of their programs than to the academic component. In his analysis of the long-term effects of participation in an Antioch program abroad, Abrams found that 53 percent of the respondents to his self-assessment questionnaire considered work abroad to be one of the most important experiences of their lives. An equally high percentage felt that they had gained a significant degree of cross-cultural understanding from participation in a work program abroad. By cross-referencing the responses to the duration of the participants’ programs and whether they participated in the work component, Abrams concluded that both a longer stay and engagement in a work assignment tended to generate greater perceptions of significant impact.


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The Study Abroad Evaluation Project The most comprehensive study to date on the impact of education abroad has been the Study Abroad Evaluation Project (SAEP), the results of which were published in two volumes by the European Cultural Foundation in 1990 (Burn, Cerych, & Smith; Opper, Teichler, & Carlson) and in a separate single volume dealing specifically with American undergraduates (Carlson, Burn, Useem, & Yachimowicz 1990). Initiated in 1982 as a follow-up to the report issued by the President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies (1980), the SAEP focused on “what difference, if any, study abroad makes to students as undergraduates and in their later lives,” with special attention to effects on “(1) students’ proficiency in foreign languages; (2) their knowledge of and concern about other countries and cultures and international issues; (3) their knowledge of and attitudes toward their home country; and (4) their career objectives and accomplishments” (Carlson, Burn, Useem & Yachimowicz 1991, vii). The research team used a variety of questionnaires and test instruments to obtain data from over 400 participants in study abroad programs sponsored by four American institutions (University of California, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Kalamazoo College) and thirty institutions in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden. The basic research questions were: “(1) Who chooses to study abroad? Or, how do the students who study abroad differ from those who remain on their home campuses? (2) What changes occur in the two groups of students over the time span of the junior year? (3) What aspects of the individual and/or the sojourn abroad contribute to variation in the changes observed? (4) What are the long-term effects of the study abroad experience?” (Carlson et al. 1990, 1). In addressing the third question, the project made an indirect attempt to identify a link between outcomes and program characteristics, thus providing some degree of insight into the nature of the process that generated the outcomes. As in the case of prior studies, however, the focus was primarily on outcomes. The SAEP concluded, among other things, that language proficiency appeared to increase substantially, especially in the area of speaking skills; that those who studied abroad demonstrated a greater increase in interest in international affairs over the course of the junior year than those who remained at home; that those who studied abroad showed a dramatic increase in their level of knowledge about the host country, especially in the areas of cultural life, customs and traditions, social structure, and social issues; that “the expectation that the study abroad experience would result in increased levels of self-confidence and sociability was not supported” (Carlson et al. 1990, 69); and that both the study abroad group and the domestic comparison group exhibited a decline in “domestic orientation.” The latter is difficult to interpret, since the study abroad group was already

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less “domestically oriented than the comparison group prior to the study abroad year” (Carlson et al. 1990, 63). It is impossible to provide an exhaustive summary of such a comprehensive research project. However, the few conclusions summarized above are the most directly relevant to the current study. While their statistical analysis of the data enabled the SAEP research team to make some correlations between various personal and programmatic factors and the students’ perceptions of change and program satisfaction, there was no direct assessment of what specific activities produced the changes that took place. Based on feedback to open-ended questions on the written survey, however, the research team made the observation that “the most important medium for personal experience in the host country was conversation with host nationals” (Carlson et al. 1991, 15). This observation is supported by the returning Penn State students, who also identified conversation with host nationals as one of the activities that most directly complemented their education abroad. (Chapter 4 addresses that specific component from the perspective of Penn State students who studied abroad during fall 1990.) While the SAEP has contributed significantly to the growing body of research literature on education abroad, a great deal remains to be done. Its greatest strengths are in the comprehensive nature of its approach and in the breadth of its sample population, but there are still areas in which the results have been inconclusive. The nature of the process that generates the outcomes continues to be an indirect rather than a direct object of the research agenda.

2

The Student Informants

The following is a profile of the thirty students interviewed for this project. (I have used pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of the informants.) These profiles set the stage for the chapters that follow; by learning something about the informants the reader will be able to view the data in chapters 3 through 6 from a more critical and informed perspective. By drawing on the students’ own statements on their applications for admission, this section also begins the ethnographic process of viewing the programs through the students’ eyes: Their preconceptions, objectives, expectations, and prior experiences all affect how they ultimately interpret their experiences abroad. DEMOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND Eleven of the informants were male and the remaining nineteen were female. This is consistent with the general enrollment trend for education abroad programs at Penn State: the majority of participants in programs abroad have been and continue to be female. The informants ranged in age from twenty to twenty-three, with the majority being either twenty (twelve of them) or twenty-one (fifteen of them) at the time of their enrollment. The eldest of the informants was an art history major who spent the 1990 fall semester in Rome. With one exception, they were all in either their junior (ten of them) or senior year (nineteen of them) during the semester abroad. The one exception was a sophomore biology major who spent the 1990 fall semester in Tel Aviv. While this particular student was younger and not as academically advanced as the other informants, she proved to be one of the more inde-

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pendent students and exploited the opportunity to adapt her semester abroad to her academic interests: During her semester in Tel Aviv, she took the initiative to set up an internship with Tel Aviv University’s medical school for the second semester of what was to have been a full year program in Israel; unfortunately, the outbreak of the Persian Gulf conflict forced her to return to the United States before the beginning of the second semester. Twenty-five of the informants were Pennsylvania residents; of the remaining five, two were from Maryland, two were from New Jersey, and one was from Puerto Rico. Three were from cities (two from Philadelphia and one from Pittsburgh); the rest were from small to moderately sized communities. Three of the informants were from minority backgrounds—two AfricanAmerican women from Philadelphia and a female Hispanic student from Puerto Rico. All three were actively involved in extracurricular activities relating to their minority groups on campus: The woman from Puerto Rico was a member of the Puerto Rican Student Association and the two African-Americans were members of the Student Minority Advisory and Recruitment Team (SMART). One of the African-Americans, Sharon, became an especially valuable informant in assessing the role of personal interaction as a way of learning about cultural differences (see chapter 4). On her application for education abroad, she referred eloquently to her minority background when speaking about her accomplishments at Penn State and her motivation to study abroad: Being a minority, brought up in a Philadelphia ghetto, I had no idea where my future might lead. Instead of ending up on the streets in turmoil like so many others before me, I enrolled at Penn State University. I am trying to make the best of my future, and now I seek to better educate myself by studying abroad. Although I was once unfortunate and ignorant of the world, that person no longer exists. Since I have been at Penn State University, my horizons have increased tremendously. I can remember vividly the first time I attended classes at Penn State: I thought to myself, “I’ll never make it with my tenth grade knowledge.” However, my doubts were proven wrong. Through the encouragement and positive influence of friends and faculty, I am able to say today that I can do anything with the help of God and hard work.

Sharon had also participated in a Penn State summer program abroad before going to Nice in fall 1990, and subsequent to the semester in Nice she enrolled for Penn State’s new language and business program in Paris in spring 1992. A number of the other informants also participated in a variety of extracurricular activities, some of which were related in some way to their desire to study abroad. The sophomore biology major, for example, went to Israel not only to study its flora and fauna but also to become more familiar with contemporary social problems in Israel; her interest in the

THE STUDENT INFORMANTS

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relationship between science and society was already apparent at Penn State, where she had joined the Science, Technology and Society Interest House; had become an active member of Results, a national organization concerned with world hunger; and had begun working with Eco-Action, a university environmentalist organization. One student, Barry, who later became a key informant on the role of participant observation as a way of enhancing both language and cross-cultural skills (see chapter 3), began acquiring an appreciation for the value of that kind of activity when he joined Penn State’s Conversant Program. By getting together with students from abroad and interacting with them on an informal basis, Barry was able to help them improve their English language skills while at the same time introducing them to American traditions. As will be seen later, his immersion in the Japanese linguistic environment, especially as a waiter at the Cellar Bar Kent, helped him pattern his own activities abroad after this initial form of involvement with representatives of another linguistic and cultural tradition. These are just a few examples of extracurricular involvement on the part of the informants prior to enrollment in education abroad. Virtually every informant was actively involved in some kind of extracurricular activity, either as a hobby or as part of a formally organized university activity.

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND The largest number of the informants (fourteen) were from the College of the Liberal Arts. Four came from the College of Engineering, three each from the colleges of Science, Business Administration, and Arts and Architecture, and one each from the colleges of Agriculture and Health and Human Development as well as the School of Communications. Their cumulative grade point averages (GPA) ranged from a low of 2.15 for an art history major who went to Rome to a high of 3.70 for a chemistry major who went to the Kansai University of Foreign Studies in Osaka. The mean for the group was 3.10. This compares to a mean of 3.13 for all 116 students who enrolled in Penn State’s 1990 fall semester education abroad programs. While the informants had all completed the formal prerequisites for their respective programs, only seven of them (less than 24 percent) had taken any formal academic introduction to cultural anthropology—three of those who went to Osaka, two who went to Taipei, the student who went to Melbourne, and the student who spent a full year in Nairobi. Four of the six Osaka informants had taken a course on the history of modern East Asia; all three who went to Taiwan had completed the same course, and one of those Taiwan students had also taken a course on the history of traditional East Asia. The full-year Nairobi student had taken a comparative literature course on the masters of African literature. The informant who spent the

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semester in Canberra had taken a course on the Australian political system prior to departure. The Melbourne informant, in addition to her introductory course in cultural anthropology, had also completed a humanities course on the cultural perspectives of Australia and New Zealand. In terms of formal course work dealing with other cultures, it is apparent that the informants in the East Asian programs (Osaka and Taipei) were the most adequately prepared for their sojourn abroad. The level of language preparation varied considerably. Not surprisingly, those who went to England and Australia had the least amount of formal language study before enrolling in their respective education abroad programs. The student who went to Melbourne had taken twelve credits of German at Penn State during her sophomore and junior years. None of the other four informants who went to England and Australia had taken any language as a part of their undergraduate education. While all the other programs included language instruction as a part of the curriculum abroad, none of them employed the language of the host country in providing instruction for courses other than language courses. English was the standard language of instruction at the host institutions in Nairobi, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. In Taipei and Nice, the host institutions provided special courses in English specifically designed for the Penn State groups. In Osaka, the Kansai University of Foreign Studies was the official sponsor of an English-language program (the Asian Studies Program) designed to introduce non-Japanese to the Japanese and Asian cultures. With the exception of Nairobi, each of these programs had a foreign language prerequisite, but the students did not have to be concerned about a language barrier in the formal curriculum. As for actual advance language preparation, the informants who went to East Asia once again appeared to have the most extensive backgrounds. Two of the six Osaka informants (the two who spent a full academic year in Japan) had each taken fifteen credits of Japanese before departure, and the other four had each taken a total of eight Japanese language credits at Penn State. All three of those who went to Taipei had taken at least eight credits of Chinese prior to enrollment; one of them had taken fifteen credits and another had taken eighteen credits. Linguistic preparation for the semester in Nice varied considerably: One student had completed the equivalent of sixteen credits of French prior to the program, two others had reached the twelve-credit level, and one had taken a six-credit elementary course a full year before going to Nice. The fifth student had not taken any French language at all in preparation for the program. As with the students who went to Nice, those who went to Nairobi, Rome, Cairo, and Tel Aviv had language backgrounds that ranged from none to quite advanced. Three of those who went to Rome took their first Italian course as a part of their education abroad curriculum; one of those


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who went to Tel Aviv did the same thing with Hebrew; and the Nairobi informant had no formal language training either before or during her program in Africa. At the other extreme was Kimberly, a student whom we will get to know better later in this chapter and chapter 3. She had an extensive linguistic background, having completed sixteen credits of French, twelve credits of Italian, twelve credits of Russian, eight credits of Japanese, and three credits of advanced Spanish (having placed out of the elementary and intermediate levels in Spanish), with nothing lower than a B grade in any of those courses. Kimberly also had one of the most interesting and varied backgrounds in terms of prior experience abroad. PRIOR EXPERIENCE ABROAD Kimberly brought with her an extensive background of cross-cultural contact. She is only one of two informants to have been born outside the continental United States; as noted earlier, one of the students who went to Nice was from Puerto Rico; Kimberly was born in Seoul, South Korea. She had traveled widely, having spent summer 1979 in Peru and summer 1980 in England, as well as having made brief visits to Israel and Italy in 1985, a follow-up visit to Peru in 1986, and a visit to France in July 1988. She was also one of only four students among the thirty interviewed who had already participated in an earlier education abroad program: She spent summer 1988 on the university’s program in Todi, Italy. Of the other four students who spent the 1990 fall semester in the Middle East, only two (the other two Tel Aviv participants) had been abroad before that semester, and they had traveled abroad only briefly on family vacation trips. Neither of the two students who went to Cairo had ever been out of the United States. Except for Kimberly, only three of the thirty informants had studied abroad before fall 1990. Sharon, the African-American student we met earlier and who will appear again in chapter 4, spent summer 1989 on Penn State’s archaeological excavation in Sardinia. She credited that earlier experience with stimulating her interest in study abroad generally: My first realization of how vital language is occurred on May 20, 1989. I had the opportunity to study archaeology in Sardinia, Italy. During my time in Italy, I learned how to adapt to a different culture, including communicating and exchanging ideas with these people and in the process I adopted a new family that I thought of as my own. Because of my personal experience in Italy, I acquired more knowledge about the world, which in turn gave me a new perspective. I believe by going to France, my foreign communication skills will improve even further and perhaps the trip will enable me to see more diversity in the global world.

One of those who went to Taiwan had participated in a six-week program in Israel sponsored by B’nai B’rith during summer 1987. In her words,

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that program “taught me how to better adjust to foreign people and customs and to appreciate others’ lifestyles as not better or worse than my own, but only as being different than mine.” The only other informant to have studied abroad before fall 1990 was also a participant in the Taiwan program. She spent the full year after graduating from high school (1986–87) in Caracas, Venezuela, on a Rotary exchange scholarship. Several of the students reported that they had made brief vacation trips abroad, but few of them had benefitted from extensive contact with other cultures before enrolling in Penn State’s programs. Except for the two who were born overseas, the only other student to have had an extensive nonacademic period of involvement with a foreign culture was Melanie, whom we will meet again in chapters 3 and 4 when she discusses the roles of participant observation and personal interaction as ways of learning about cultural differences while enrolled at the University of Nairobi. In Melanie’s case, her overseas experience grew out of her interest in volunteer work with developing countries: In the summer of 1986, I was a volunteer team member of a Teen Missions International team to a small village on Sumatra, Indonesia. We built a three-room school building using only manual tools—from layout to foundation and floors to walls, trusses, and roof. We lived in tents, cooked our food on an open fire, bathed and laundered our clothes in the nearby river with the villagers. . . . The following summer I went on another team with this organization as an assistant team leader. Our project was to build a garage, driveway, and road for a children’s home in Kathmandu, Nepal.

In summary, only four of the thirty informants had enjoyed the benefit of an earlier education abroad program, and three of those were short-term summer experiences. Only three of the informants had extensive non-academic interaction with another culture—Kimberly, the Hispanic-American from Puerto Rico, and Melanie. OBJECTIVES AND EXPECTATIONS Students’ preconceptions will necessarily influence the way they approach their programs abroad as well as the effect that those programs ultimately have upon them. A review of the informants’ objectives and expectations at the time of selection will provide insight into those preconceptions and begin the ethnographic process of viewing the programs through the eyes of the student informants. The motivation for enrolling in some programs is fairly self-evident. The Leeds program is a professionally oriented program that Penn State established specifically for its architectural engineering majors. It is therefore not surprising that the three informants who went to England did so primarily


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to acquire specific expertise related to their professional ambitions. While they all expressed tangential interests in seeing England and in learning something about the British, they were chiefly interested in gaining a different professional and academic perspective on the practice of architectural engineering. The Nice program also had a distinct professional orientation, having been developed for those interested in pursuing careers in international business. Three of the five Nice informants clearly stated that they wanted to use this program to help prepare them for careers in international marketing. In speaking of the language and business courses that comprised the Nice curriculum, one of them declared that “languages are of the utmost importance in my field of study and essential to a career in foreign marketing and international trade. And realizing that the global market is in need of competent and assertive workers, I believe that learning more about the 1992 European market will be to my advantage.” Another of the Nice students echoed this pragmatic view of the program when she said that “it will be to my benefit to learn about the political, economic, and social structure of another country, as I wish to focus on international business.” Nor is it unusual to find that students with an interest in art gravitated toward the Rome program. Those majoring in art and art history were naturally interested in seeing some of the artistic treasures for which Rome is famous. Two of the students also made reference to the notion that Rome would be a source of inspiration to stimulate their own artistic talents. One of the Rome informants who was not among the art and art history majors but who had been interested in art for a number of years made the comment on her application for admission that “Rome would be a rejuvenation of my artistic interest. I would dust off my equipment box and sketch pad and gladly begin to draw again! It would be an incredible inspiration to study art in the very country that it was created.” With few exceptions, the thirty informants all had rather clearly defined goals and objectives in mind when they sought enrollment in education abroad, and many of those objectives related to their academic and/or professional ambitions. One of those who went to Osaka, for example, was an East Asian Studies major whose professional goal was a career in international law. Another of the Osaka informants saw himself as a future industrial engineer who could serve as the Japanese liaison for an American firm doing business in the international arena. One of the Cairo participants was specializing in Middle Eastern history and found that program to be an opportunity “for a direct experience of an Islamic society.” The biology major who went to Canberra was quite specific in terms of his academic expectations of the program: With his interest in ecology, he was impressed by the fact that “the Australian continent has a tremendous amount of diverse and complex ecosystems. These include the outback, the

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tropical rain forests of the north, and the Great Barrier Reef areas. Visiting these areas and doing research would really help me to better understand the abiotic and biotic relationships of ecology.” He was also interested in gaining a “first-hand experience of watching conservation and political groups colliding on the question of the proper management of exploitable natural resources. This experience would be invaluable to me, for it is in an area such as this that I would like to get into as a career.” The informants’ objectives were not all as pragmatic as those of the engineering and business students nor as directly related to specific academic interests as those of the art and art history majors and the biology major who was enamored of Australian ecosystems. In many cases the students felt that the experience abroad would enable them to develop less pragmatic but equally essential cognitive skills that would serve them throughout their later lives. One of them suggested that “study abroad is an excellent way to develop adaptation, communication, understanding, and other important skills.” Another speculated that “the experience of spending a semester in a foreign country will surely help me develop assertiveness, responsibility, and adaptivity—skills which will undoubtedly help me throughout my life.” A third expressed the desire “to learn what it is like to function in a society as a foreigner and a racial minority, for I do not know what it is like to look out over a city street and realize that I am not one of the group.” And while those who specifically listed a cross-cultural experience as one of their primary objectives were in the minority, several did articulate a variety of expectations vis-à-vis cross-cultural understanding and awareness. One student who was interested in becoming a physician made the observation that “by learning and experiencing a culture vastly different from my own for an extended period of time, I will be able to understand, communicate with, and help others, many of whom may be quite different from myself.” Another student who was pursuing a career in the health professions expected the experience to make him a better health care professional because “with a broad cultural understanding, I will have a more diversified background and be able to draw from many resources to make my decision-making processes and adaptation skills more effective.” The journalism major who had spent her entire life in central Pennsylvania was especially succinct in pointing out on her application that she wanted to go to Cairo for a semester because “I want to enhance my global perspectives and raise my horizons. I want to live in a culture other than my own, which will teach me an appreciation for the diversity of life.” In two cases, the students’ interest in learning about other cultures was part of a more general idealistic desire to become personally involved in serving those from less-developed parts of the world. One of the Taiwan informants indicated on her application for enrollment that “with knowledge of a foreign language and the desire to understand and serve people


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from other nations, I hope to enter the Peace Corps after graduation from Penn State. Then, after two years, my goal is to work for an overseas aid organization such as CARE, Save the Children, or UNICEF.” In applying for her year in Nairobi, Melanie indicated that her “life goal is to be a missionary. I desire to contribute something conducive to the progress and development of the so-called ‘third world.’ ” Melanie’s two summers of voluntary service in Indonesia and Nepal were clearly consistent with this general ambition to serve the less advantaged. While many of the students were clearly motivated by pragmatic and/or curricular considerations, it is equally clear from some of the foregoing comments, taken directly from applications submitted almost a year in advance of actual program enrollment, that the students’ expectations extended into areas not directly supported by the formal curriculum. Cross-cultural understanding, an appreciation for diversity, and cognitiveskill development were among the objectives that students cited as reasons for applying to study abroad. Well before departure the students were already looking beyond the curriculum and the classroom in assessing the ways in which an education abroad program could contribute to their maturation and development.

SUMMARY The thirty informants who participated in this study came from twenty different academic majors representing eight of Penn State’s ten undergraduate colleges and schools. The students’ academic and personal backgrounds varied considerably. One student went to France with no language background, no prior coursework dealing with other cultures, and no prior experience abroad. At the opposite extreme, one of the students who went to Tel Aviv was born in South Korea, had completed extensive formal training in five languages, and had traveled and lived abroad on numerous occasions for varying periods of time. Four of the informants had studied abroad on other programs—one for a full year in Caracas, Venezuela, and three on short-term summer programs. Those with the most substantive prior experience abroad enrolled in non-European programs. Melanie, who had engaged in extensive volunteer work in Indonesia and Nepal, enrolled in the full-year program at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. The student who had spent a full year in Caracas enrolled for the 1990 fall semester at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. Kimberly, the Korean student with the most extensive linguistic and experiential background of all thirty informants, spent the fall semester in Tel Aviv.


3

Participant Observation as a Way of Learning about Cultural Differences

Based on the conceptual premises about cross-cultural learning models, I approached the student interviews with the hypothesis that, as a first step toward understanding another culture, students abroad employ an ethnographic discovery model of learning to acquire the basic empirical information they need as a foundation for the experiential and developmental processes. Simply put, the working hypothesis of this study is that students abroad learn about the host culture by engaging in activities similar to those employed by an ethnographer abroad. In effect, students become unwitting amateur ethnographers during their sojourn and unconsciously employ learning procedures comparable to the data collection procedures of an ethnographer. One procedure that is distinctively ethnographic is participant observation. As the phrase implies, the ethnographer (or the student abroad) is both an observer of the activities under investigation and a participant in those activities. This dual role enables the ethnographer or student to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the culture under investigation. In discussing the role of participant observation in ethnographic field work, James Spradley points out that “ethnographers do not merely make observations, they also participate. Participation allows you to experience activities directly, to get the feel of what events are like, and to record your own perceptions” (1980, 51). After listening to the informants talk at length about their out-of-class activities and experiences, it became apparent that participant observation is one of three distinct categories under which the students’ most salient activities can be subsumed. (Chapters 4 and 5 will present data dealing with the other two.) To paraphrase Spradley’s “means-end” domain of semantic

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relationships, participant observation is a way of learning about another culture and is thus one of the categories that emerges in the development of a taxonomy of out-of-class learning activities. In this chapter the informants discuss their perceptions of how they used participant observation as a form of learning activity outside the classroom. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first explores the students’ participation in their hosts’ private lives, and the second presents the students’ active involvement in the public life of their host country. PRIVATE LIFE Six of the thirty students who acted as informants for this study participated in the Penn State program in Osaka. This program is offered on an exchange basis with the Kansai University of Foreign Studies (Kansai Gaikokugo Daigaku, more commonly referred to as Kansai Gaidai). Along with its standard programs for Japanese students, Kansai Gaidai offers an Asian Studies Program taught in English for undergraduate students from abroad, primarily from the United States. Penn State participants in this program may enroll for either a single semester or a full academic year and must take a five-credit course in spoken Japanese as well as at least three additional three-credit courses per semester selected from Kansai Gaidai’s Asian Studies curriculum. Among Penn State’s education abroad offerings, the Osaka program is unique in the nature of its accommodation arrangements: All participants in the program live with a Japanese family for at least one semester. Although students remaining for a full year may apply for admission to Kansai Gaidai’s student dormitory in the second semester, neither of the two full-year informants interviewed for this study had done so; both elected a homestay for their second as well as their first semester. All six of the Osaka informants considered the homestay to be the highlight of the nonacademic program. While other forms of participant observation appear later in the section on Public Life, homestay deserves special attention as a way of gaining insight into the private lives of the host nationals. The remainder of this section on Private Life presents the data provided by those informants who enjoyed the benefit of such a living arrangement. Since the Osaka program is the only 1990 fall semester program that made homestay available as an integral part of its arrangements, those who spent the semester in Japan necessarily monopolize the discussions of this form of participant observation. Family Integration Families participating in the homestay program in Osaka received payment for their services, which were to include not only room and board but

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION

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also incorporation into family activities as much as possible. The latter varied considerably, depending upon both circumstances and family temperament. This naturally affected the experiences and the resultant perceptions of the students. Richard, for example, mentioned how fortunate he was to have had a family that included him in virtually all their activities. He cited the fact that “once a month, the family would get together with people in the community and do things. The first time was a sports day, where we got together and it was basically linked to the school so it was like a student sports day almost.” He later mentioned that “another time we had, I guess it was just a school festival, where they basically met the teachers and went around to different games arranged by their equivalent of the PTA.” And “another time we took a trip in a bunch of different buses to a movie set—a Japanese movie set where they produced a popular TV show.” By contrast, Owen felt that there was very little in the way of family life in the environment that characterized his Japanese homestay. There were three children in his family: two boys aged fifteen and sixteen and a girl aged thirteen. From Owen’s perspective, they never seemed to associate with each other, let alone with him: The siblings each seemed to have a single close personal friend with whom they spent most of their time outside the family rather than with each other. The mother and father each had full-time jobs and were therefore seldom at home. The American student felt that he was left pretty much to himself and ended up feeling like a boarder rather than like a part of the family. Derek indicated that his degree of involvement in family life lay somewhere between full integration and exclusion. Like Owen, he found that the male children in his family had their own circle of associates with whom they spent most of their time. In speaking of the younger brother in his host family, he pointed out that he “was in the tennis club. And when you join a club there, it’s a huge commitment. Most Japanese only join one club in all of high school, but they’re at it three hours a day, maybe six days a week.” The older brother was a university student who had his own circle of friends at school. While Derek’s description of his family environment suggests that there was some degree of family involvement, he nevertheless found complete integration elusive because of existing commitments on the part of the family members.

Establishing Relationships The intimacy of the students’ relationships with host family members also varied among the informants. Generally, they felt that they were able to fit in easily and establish congenial relationships. The student who ended up feeling like a boarder is the only one of the six Osaka informants to speak of an impersonal attitude in the homestay environment.

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For the most part, they spoke of their relationships with the host mother, since she was the family member most frequently available for interaction. As noted above, the children often had other commitments and friends, and the fathers generally had professional obligations that left them with little time for their own families, let alone for their American guests. One of the women talked about spending hours in conversation with the mother in her family: While they never spent time together outside the home, they spent a great deal of time together in the house conversing about various subjects—primarily about the United States, a subject with which her host mother was totally fascinated. One of the male students also had frequent conversations with and became a close friend of the mother in his host family—a fact that caused serious problems in connection with the relationship between him and a jealous nine-year-old son who was very demanding of his mother’s attention (to be discussed in more detail later). Richard had the benefit of staying with two different families during the course of his full-year program. By spending the second semester with a different family, he was able to gain two distinct perspectives on family life in Japan. He summarized his perception of that difference by alluding to the degree of congruity with his own expectations: I think the first one spoiled me. Not in the sense of giving me everything, but they spoiled me into what I thought was a Japanese family. I could do basically whatever I wanted and I got along with them very well because we had a lot in common. So they spoiled me in the sense that there’s not much to change. Like you walk in and they’re very accommodating and it’s great and they’re nice to you and you expect certain things. And then when I moved to my next family, things were different, because they were a more traditional family. And so things were different just in the way they did things.

While Richard avoided making any value judgments relative to the two families, it was obvious from his responses that he felt closer to the first family—a fact that may have been more the product of circumstances than any difference between contemporary and traditional attitudes. In the first family, for example, he and the father struck up an immediate rapport because of their shared interest in athletics. They became avid tennis partners and spent a lot of time on the tennis courts as well as on the driving range. When the family learned that he had been a wrestler in high school, they presented him with tickets to the Sumo wrestling tournament in Osaka—one of the four biggest Sumo tournaments in Japan. Richard characterized the tournament as roughly the equivalent of the World Series in the United States. It was obviously a gift that affected him deeply and that colored the entire nature of his relationship with the first family. As another example of circumstantial differences between the two families, the ages of the parents and the ages and behavior of the children differed considerably. “At the first place,” Richard explained, “I really


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enjoyed their little kids, so it was not hard for me to be a part of the family. In my second family, they were two older Japanese and they had a very young daughter. And the daughter was fun sometimes and sometimes she was a real brat.” By virtue of these circumstantial differences, he found a greater degree of personal compatibility with the first family—especially the father, with whom he became quite close. The intimacy that developed between one of the American women and her host mother led to an interesting dilemma that provided this student with an opportunity to learn from direct experience how to cope with what she characterized as a typically Japanese approach to interpersonal communication. Because of the close relationship that had developed between her and her host mother, Elizabeth decided that she wanted to extend her stay with the family through the second semester of her full-year program. However, based on her experience with the family to that point, she knew that if she simply asked to stay, they would feel obligated to say yes. She therefore began making occasional hints at what she wanted, until the host mother recognized her interest and took it upon herself to make the offer. Elizabeth was still not sure about the sincerity of the invitation, for she knew it was the result of her own hints to the effect that she wanted to stay for the additional semester. To resolve her own doubts, she went to the staff at Kansai Gaidai, who in turn contacted the family to give them an opportunity to retract the invitation without dealing directly with their guest. “You do everything in an indirect way,” the student explained, “so no one has to directly say no to anything.” The family did not retract the invitation, after which she and her host mother were able to discuss the episode as an example of cultural differences in interpersonal communication. While she may not have been as adept at handling the situation as a Japanese counterpart, Elizabeth had learned enough from direct experience during the first part of the semester to know that she had to approach the situation differently from the way in which she would have handled it in the United States. Through direct observation of personal interaction in the Japanese setting (i.e., by applying the ethnographic discovery model of collecting data about the host culture), she had learned that direct requests are uncommon and often generate responses based more on courtesy than on sincerity. By being a direct participant in the life of a host family, she had occasion to experience the significance of that fact on a personal level: Her statement that “you do everything in an indirect way” acquired special significance to her as a result of struggling with the personal dilemma of how to extend a relationship that both individuals welcomed but that ultimately had to be communicated via a third party. In making that statement she was not only summarizing the results of her observations but also articulating an inference drawn from her own concrete experience;

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she had thus begun moving tentatively toward the abstract conceptualization stage of Kolb’s experiential learning model. This particular student’s experience illustrates that by developing intimate relationships with family members and by integrating themselves into the family environments, the informants were able to maximize the opportunity to be participant observers within the frame of their homestay arrangements. The homestay setting provided them with a “living laboratory” in which to exercise and develop their ethnographic skills. It also provided them with the occasional experiential dilemma that helped promote the kind of reflective observation that ultimately links concrete experience with abstract conceptualization. In the remainder of this section on the homestay program in Osaka, the students discuss the kinds of interaction they experienced in their host families and their perception of how that interaction further contributed to the learning process. Learning about Male-Female Roles On arriving at the residence of his second host family, Richard was immediately taken aback by the introduction provided by the mother: When I met my second family, the first day they came in and my host mother pointed to my host father and said, “He is big king, you are little king.” Then she pointed at the daughter and said, “She is queen.” Then she pointed at herself and said, “I am maid.” And this was the first time I had met these people.

While none of the other informants received such a disarmingly candid definition of the roles and status of family members, they all had direct personal experiences that echoed the general sense of this introduction. As an example, two of the students described the evening bath ritual in their separate families as an illustration of typical male-female status relationships: The father always went first; then came the male children in descending order of age from the eldest son to the youngest; after they were done, the female children took their turns in the same descending order of age; and finally there was the mother.

Richard recounts another experience that helped promote an awareness of distinctive male-female roles in his Japanese family, this time with respect to the first of his two host families: I went shopping with my first family. We had the groceries, and we pulled the car in and my father got out of the car and ran up to the house. And I was like, wait, I’ll help with the groceries. And I . . . brought them up and my host mother brought


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them up and I held the door for my host mother and my host father was already in there watching TV. And he was just laughing at me for helping and he says, “This is Japan. They’re the women. They’re supposed to do this.” And it was that night or the next night that the neighbors came over and my host father told them what had happened, and they both just started laughing.

Derek made similar note of the father’s elevated status in his family, based on experiences and observations during his fifteen-week homestay: My host father was pretty much king. He would come home late after working his overtime, as was typical for a white-collar worker, and everybody would be sitting around or lying on the floor watching TV, and he would come home and everybody would, like, snap into action. My younger sister would go and get his beer for him and—I don’t know about my brothers, they were somewhat immune, but still they were a little more on edge when he was around. And it wasn’t really like a discipline type of situation: It seemed more like respect, because he wasn’t like a really strict person.

Unlike the other students’ accounts, this statement includes an interpretive judgment about what was going on. While the others simply described the situations in which they were immersed, this student embellished his description with the personal speculation that the behavior did not appear to be the result of a strict disciplinary environment—a judgment that he based on his own subjective evaluation of the host father’s character. By attributing the behavior to an abstract phenomenon like respect rather than to a conditioned reflex based on overt disciplinary practices, he was assuming that the observed behavior was the product of a more subtle enculturation process. Owen, whom we met earlier in this chapter, also attempted to provide an interpretive dimension as opposed to a simple descriptive account in relating a different kind of experience with the relationship between a host father and mother. This particular student was fascinated by the discovery that his “homestay mother had kept her name and my homestay father had adopted her name.” He also learned that his host mother’s family “were rice farmers with a rather considerable plot, and rice farmers are rather rich, are well-to-do in Japan.” Upon learning further that his host mother had no male siblings, he speculated that his host father may actually have accepted the name change on the basis of socioeconomic factors—that is, to improve his own status in exchange for preserving the rice farmer’s family name and heritage in subsequent generations: The reason probably was that my homestay mother had no brothers. She was the older of two daughters. So the Myomoto family probably hoped for a husband who was lower and who would accept their name. That’s, while not common, not unheard of in Japan: that a more powerful family will find a husband who is willing to accept their name because they have no males to carry on the name.

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In support of his final comment about a more powerful family convincing someone of inferior socioeconomic status to assume their name for the sake of posterity, the student claimed to have read about the practice in a book on anthropology. In fact, it is strikingly similar to a passage from Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which this student claimed not to have read, although the title was familiar to him: As merchants became richer in spite of all Tokugawa restrictions, they arranged for their sons’ adoption into samurai families. In Japan, one seldom adopts a son: one adopts a husband for one’s daughter. He is known as an “adopted husband.” He becomes the heir of his father-in-law. He pays a high price, for his name is stricken from his own family register and entered on his wife’s. He takes her name and goes to live with his mother-in-law. But if the price is high, the advantages are also great. For the prosperous merchant’s descendants become samurai and the impoverished samurai’s family gets an alliance with wealth. (Benedict 1946, 72)

The book that the student had read may very well have been alluding to this passage from Benedict’s study of Japan. As evident from this particular passage, Benedict was discussing a practice that developed in Japan’s medieval feudal society, when the emerging merchant class and the impoverished samurai were willing to trade their respective advantages for mutual benefit. In attempting to progress from the concrete observation of empirical data to a more reflective and interpretive level of experiential learning, Owen tried to place the observed phenomenon into an existing cognitive frame of reference—that is, a category of marital relationships based on information he had acquired from a textbook. As cognitive anthropologists will point out, “human beings tend to interpret new experience in the light of past experience unless there is decisive intervention in the interpretive process” (Spindler 1974, 450). Given the absence of any educational intervention, the only cognitive frame of reference for this student’s interpretive effort was the background he had acquired from a textbook. Participation in family life also gave the informants an opportunity to observe relationships between parents and their children. While several of them had either heard or read about Japanese child-rearing practices, this was an opportunity actually to see parents and children interacting with each other. Learning about Parent-Child Relationships In discussing contrasts between the two families who hosted him during his year in Osaka, Richard noted that the treatment of the children also differed considerably between the two families. In speaking of the second family, he was quite critical of the mother’s relationship with her daughter. From Richard’s perspective, the mother “controlled everything, which


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really upset me. She controlled how the daughter felt, how the daughter dressed, how the daughter thought.” Based on his comparison of the ways in which the parents and children interacted in the two families, Richard interpreted this as being characteristic of a more traditional mother-daughter relationship in the Japanese family. During the course of the interview, however, Richard alluded to another factor that may have contributed to the differences he observed between the two families in the treatment of children—namely, the different ages of the children. As Richard put it, “In the first family, the kids were both under five. And in Japan, the kids until they are eight or ten, you let them do whatever they want. At ten you lay down the law. And from the time you’re ten until you get into college, the parents are really, really strict.” Based on her own experiences, another of the American students, Cassandra, made a similar observation about the disciplining of children in Japanese families: Young Japanese, especially boys, but all children grow up to about age ten with no rules. They’re the king of the house. They run wild and they’re obnoxious. They do whatever they want and they have no discipline at all. And then all of a sudden at a certain age, around ten or so, it just slams down and they have so many rules. They all have to dress exactly alike in school, up to the point where they go around measuring the length of girls’ skirts so they’re all exactly the same. They have to wear the same bookbags and the same socks and the same everything.

The daughter in Richard’s second family was obviously being subjected to a much stricter disciplinary regimen. This may have been partially the product of a more traditional approach to raising a daughter, as Richard surmised, but given the fact that she was fourteen years old at the time of Richard’s homestay, it may have also been partially the product of the disciplinary practice described by both Richard and his fellow student as characteristic of all Japanese families. Whatever the reason for the differences in disciplinary approach between the two families, Richard had a distinctive learning experience by virtue of having lived with two families that offered such obvious contrasts in their overt behavior. As a participant and an observer, Richard was able to note the differences and attempt to draw some conclusions from his observations and experiences. With the benefit of those contrasting experiences, he attempted to go beyond the superficial dimension of observed behavior in an effort to find an underlying explanation for that behavior. Matthew made a similarly conscious effort to supplement observation with interpretation when he attempted to make sense of a parent-child relationship that caused him no small degree of discomfort in his homestay situation. As observed by all the Osaka informants, the father in the family was seldom home because of the professional demands placed on him by the company for which he worked. In the case of Matthew’s homestay

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parents, the distance between spouses seemed to extend beyond a mere physical one: Matthew’s assessment of the situation was that “the woman was not necessarily neglected but given a lot of time to herself, and I think the relationship wasn’t as cohesive a one as I had been exposed to. Like, my dad’s a physician and he’s gone a lot, but my parents are a lot closer.” The father’s absence in conjunction with Matthew’s obvious presence in the household led to the development of a close relationship between Matthew and his host mother. “It was a small apartment,” Matthew explained, “and we became quite intimate—intimate in just a friendly sense, you know. We just became very close friends and she revealed many things to me and I did the same, just in conversation.” They ended up spending many hours together talking about a wide variety of subjects. This in itself would not have created any difficulties, but the situation was complicated by the presence of a son named Hiro, whom Matthew judged to be both jealous and domineering. By applying values drawn from his own cultural heritage (again, the only cognitive frame of reference within which to interpret his new experiences), Matthew concluded that the son’s temperament and the mother’s doting attitude were compensatory reactions to the father’s absence. “Because the father was gone so much,” he asserted, “the son had become the focus of her attention.” Matthew further elaborated on what he considered an unusual if not abnormal relationship between the mother and her nine-year-old son by expressing his astonishment at the fact that “they would bathe together. Hiro and his mother would take baths together. The bath thing is different than in the States. When I think that when I was nine I didn’t really want any part of bathing with my mother.” Matthew’s statements reflected confusion about the nature of the relationship between Hiro and his mother. It was obviously different from the kind of mother-son relationship he considered typical of American culture, but he was not sure to what extent it reflected a cultural norm in contrast to what would be considered aberrant behavior. With only his own family background as a frame of reference and without the kind of direct educational intervention to which Spindler has alluded, he had difficulty interpreting the behavior patterns that he observed. He made an effort to draw inferential conclusions from observed empirical data (i.e., to engage in reflective observation as defined by Kolb), but with his limited frame of reference he could not be confident of the extent to which his conclusions were accurate or generalizable. Homestay obviously gave the students in the Penn State Osaka program a unique opportunity to gain insights into the private lives of their Japanese hosts. However, the informants for this study were also able to take advantage of other forms of participant observation to expand their awareness of national and cultural differences.


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PUBLIC LIFE In their effort to capitalize on the unique opportunity afforded by education abroad, a number of students became quite adventuresome in their resolve to become directly involved in the life of the host nation. Some of their adventures were purely accidental and may never be replicated by future participants. One of the more stressful but memorable events for those in the Middle East was the direct threat posed by the Persian Gulf War. As one Tel Aviv participant recalled, “When Saddam Hussein was threatening Israel, it wasn’t a third country that I was seeing and hearing about. I was in the country. And so when he was threatening Israel, even though I’m not an Israeli citizen, he was still threatening me because I was physically there.” Similarly, Melanie felt directly traumatized by the threat of physical violence when the police retaliated brutally against university students during a massive protest demonstration at the University of Nairobi: The riot police were sent out and there was tear gas and rubber bullets and we could hear gunshots all around the city and cars were overturned and buses and we could see students being beaten. Anyone who looked like a student or a Luo (because this particular political figure who was killed was a Luo)—they were grabbed and beaten.

While neither of these students planned in advance to be participant observers in life-threatening situations, the experiences had a lasting impact and were educational in terms of the exposure to risks and crises that are not at all unusual for those who live daily under the threat of politically inspired violence. While these are not the kinds of out-of-class activities that a responsible educator could or would include in planning an effective experiential complement to classroom learning, they illustrate the fact that opportunities for participant observation can often be purely fortuitous and unplanned. As educators, we must prepare students in advance to take advantage of such opportunities when they present themselves. However, the major purpose of this study is to identify those out-of-class activities in which students more typically engage as a supplement to their classroom learning. This will in turn enable international educators more systematically to exploit that out-of-class environment. In the remainder of this chapter, the informants discuss their involvement in those kinds of activities and their perceptions of how those activities enhanced the learning process. Becoming Involved in Social Activities Involvement in the social life of the host institution is an obvious experiential way of gaining insight into the public life of the students’ peers

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abroad. The informants interviewed for this study attempted with varying degrees of success to become a part of the social milieu and to learn something about their student counterparts through participation in social activities. In some cases the informants found the social life to be minimal, when judged by the standards to which they were accustomed at their home campus. With a few notable exceptions, they generally found their peers at the host institution to be more serious about their studies than most American students, thus leaving them with less time for the kinds of extracurricular and social activities that abound on U.S. campuses. As one of the students returning from Nice mentioned, “They’re a lot more focused on studying. They have a few friends, a few people that they socialize with in the dorms, and that’s all.” According to one of those who had studied in Israel, this even led to some tension between the American students at Tel Aviv University and their Israeli peers: She became quite sensitive to the fact that the Israeli students were incredulous at the number of classes the Americans missed with apparent nonchalance, leading the Israelis to the conclusion that the Americans were not at all serious about their academic commitment. Even in Osaka, the level of seriousness among the Japanese students at Kansai Gaidai was higher than one would normally expect at a Japanese university. As one of the informants from that program observed, “Once you get into a top university, assuming that you can, then you’ve sort of made the grade already and you really hang around for four years, not doing much of anything, not going to class a lot of times, because you know you’re going to get hired by one of the top companies in Japan anyway.” He went on to say that “the top companies in Japan don’t pay much attention to grades at the university. What matters is that you went to Tokyo University, for example, and that you graduated. So they don’t really do much in the way of studying or anything like that.” With regard to the students at Kansai Gaidai, however, this same informant pointed out that while “there were a lot of people who didn’t really work that hard and sat around and slept in class,” there were also “a lot of people that worked really hard because they knew they weren’t going to a top university and that the only way they would be able to get a good job coming out of a foreign language school would be working in an airport somewhere or as a flight attendant, and the only way to do that is to do really well in school and to learn the language, like English or Spanish, and really know it.” The atypical nature of Kansai Gaidai among Japanese institutions of higher education thus produced a situation in which the students tended to be much more serious about their work than the average university-level student in Japan. Only one of the informants suggested that the students at the host institution approached their studies in a more casual vein than the Ameri-


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cans. Upon returning from Canberra, Ross indicated that many of the students at the Australian National University did no studying for the first ten weeks of the semester, then spent the last three weeks cramming for exams. As a participant in one of Penn State’s two programs in Australia (the other was located at the University of Melbourne), Ross had the opportunity to enroll directly in regular university courses along with degree-seeking Australian students. It is common for Australian colleges and universities to base a student’s entire grade on a comprehensive final examination, with the entire semester spent reading and preparing for that exam. Ross’s assessment of Australian students was that they “partied” a great deal until the final exams became imminent. While the informants generally agreed that their foreign counterparts tended to spend more time studying than the average American student, there were nevertheless opportunities for socializing, although the nature of the social activity was not always what the American students might have expected. One of those who spent the semester in Nice, for example, was surprised to find that preparing and consuming a meal was a significant part of the French students’ social life; on weekend visits to his French friends’ homes, he found that an entire evening could revolve around the social interaction generated by cooking and eating. “If I were getting together with my friends here in the States,” he observed, “the last thing we’d do is cook a big meal and sit around and talk. But that’s what we did there.” The quiet intimacy of the activity contrasted with the kind of college-town bar in which he would have spent a typical weekend with his friends at home. As a matter of fact, this informant found his French friends to be particularly averse to the kind of bar-hopping that many American students see as an integral part of their social life. “The French people for the most part didn’t like the bars. Probably a little too rowdy. They would rather go on dates or just go eat or go shopping or things like that. The beer-drinking kind of a bar where we went wasn’t really the French style.” Sharon reinforced this perception in her discussion of the parties she attended with friends in Nice. While “they had beer and wine and stuff like that,” she was impressed by the fact that “they didn’t get to a point where they had to be drunk and very loud and boisterous. Like the Americans here, when they party, everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to get ten kegs,’ and you know, things like that.” Again, there was a greater emphasis on personal intimacy and interaction than that to which the American students were accustomed. Two of the students who had returned from Taiwan found the same emphasis on intimacy in the tea houses they eventually found so enticing in Taipei. “Basically, we’d go and just sit for like hours,” one of them remembered. “Just drink tea and play chess or something like that.” The notable absence of frenetic activity and the nature of the physical surroundings promoted a relaxed form of social interaction that both students miss

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now that they are back in the United States. As the second student recalled, “I loved it! It was just very relaxing. It was just to talk. Very laid back and enjoyable. I said when I was there, ‘I want to have a tea shop when I get back to America.’ ” In reflecting on her last statement, however, this same student went on to say, “The thing is, it would never work here. If there was just a room and tea and there wasn’t like any music playing or any gourmet food—like, it just wouldn’t be enough for them. Here people would need more.” Whatever the format, the informants generally found the emphasis to be on social rather than on activity when they spoke of becoming involved in social activity abroad. This is not to say that there was never any “partying” in the sense employed by the typical American undergraduate. As Ross mentioned, many of the Australian students with whom he associated enjoyed drinking heavily: He especially enjoyed “beer sculling,” a practice in which students would race to see who could guzzle beer the fastest. Even in Nairobi, where Melanie discovered that few students really had the resources to “party” very much, there was the occasional blowout when students would simply squander what meager resources they had on virtually anesthetizing themselves. “Their idea of drinking is much different from what I was used to,” Melanie said. “I just have maybe one or two and I’m finished. But they drink cases until they’re finished—until they pass out or run out of money. And if they offer to buy you drinks, they’re offering to buy you drinks until you pass out, so it’s a lot of money being spent.” But for the most part, the informants found that intimacy and personal contact were the most valued attributes of social life abroad. Because of this, the very nature of the social activities differed from those in which they would have been engaging had they remained at the home campus. In addition to becoming engaged in social activities, the informants also took advantage of other kinds of opportunities to become involved in the day-to-day life of their new environment.

Teaching English as a Second Language Those who spent their semester in the Orient had access to another opportunity for participant observation. Young people and professionals in Japan and Taiwan are extremely eager to learn English. Although American students abroad are not trained in the methods of teaching English as a second language, they provide an excellent resource as native speakers and often become involved in teaching English in some form—as tutors, as conversants, and on occasion as classroom instructors. American students often take advantage of this opportunity not only to earn a bit of extra money but also to enrich their learning through direct involvement with the host culture.


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Cassandra had the most extensive experience with this form of activity and placed it just behind homestay as the most significant out-of-class contribution to her learning about Japan and the Japanese. She taught English in three different settings: to a class of children in a public middle school; to individual businessmen on a tutorial basis in a private school; and to a group of adults for whom language training was being provided by their employer, Mitsubishi. Based on her contacts with these various groups, she was able to make observations that fostered insight into areas that would have otherwise been inaccessible to an American in Japan. As an example, she was astounded by the lack of discipline among children at the middle school. As she pointed out in connection with the children in her host family, “Children grow up to about age ten with no rules. They’re the king of the house. They run wild and they’re obnoxious. They do whatever they want and they have no discipline at all.” She was surprised to find a similar lack of discipline in the formal setting of a school classroom: That was just unbelievable! It was a middle-school age public school, and the kids were just crazy. No respect at all. Played hand-held video games while the teacher was talking. Would get up and scream at people out the window. It made an American middle school look tame. I couldn’t believe it. One kid was playing a video game, and the teacher went to get it and ended up wrestling with the kid.

And while the schoolchildren were required to wear uniforms that promoted a sense of group identity, she was able to observe occasional and sometimes subtle efforts to circumvent the group identity and maintain a semblance of individuality. She noted, for example, that “they had to wear these striped, exact uniforms, but then they would roll their sleeves all the way up or do whatever they could possibly do to vary from the norm.” In the long run, however, it seemed apparent to Cassandra, based on her personal observations, that individuality was not an objective of Japanese education: It’s not encouraged to go ahead of your class in your studies. Like in my public school, if your reading level was higher than that of the people in your class, they’d move you to the next grade for reading. There’s a proverb that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. You just don’t do that. They really try to make everyone be group oriented.

Cassandra’s experience with the Mitsubishi group was frustrating in another way. Although the members of that group were in their mid-twenties, she characterized them as acting like children. As an example, Cassandra found it disconcerting that they would laugh and giggle at each other’s mistakes. She was also frustrated by their unresponsiveness to her efforts to stimulate conversation as a way of practicing spoken English. In discuss-

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ing her observations during the interview, Cassandra offered no interpretation of their behavior, other than her own judgment that it was “childish”—an obviously American assessment of the laughter and giggles. She was also taken aback by what she considered a notable lack of proficiency: “Even after having had English all the way through school, they really could not say anything at all. I had to teach them, I mean, from how to introduce themselves.” Her contact with the businessmen for whom she provided tutorials did not leave as strong an impression upon her as the middle school and the Mitsubishi group. They were serious students intent on using their hour with Cassandra as an opportunity to practice English one on one. She occasionally made Japanese business and society the subject of conversation, which enabled her to gain some insights about contemporary Japan through the eyes of native informants. Teaching English as a second language is also popular among American students in Taiwan. Participants in Penn State’s program at the National Taiwan University enrolled during the fall semester for a total of fifteen credits—a nine-credit intensive Chinese language course and two threecredit courses in art history and literature. Regular faculty from the National Taiwan University provided instruction in English for the small group of five students who enrolled in fall 1990. Two of those who spent the fall semester at the National Taiwan University became involved in teaching children ages six to nine in private elementary-level schools. In contrast to Cassandra’s experience in Japan, both were impressed by the seriousness with which the training was taken. One of them made the comment that she “realized just how much value they place on education there. Like, these children were in school from, like, seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. Then they came to me for another hour.” She characterized the children in general as being “very attentive. They really wanted to learn.” Even the parents became involved. In describing the physical setting, the second of the two Taiwan informants explained that parents frequently visited the school to observe what was going on: “There was a central area and then all these classrooms around it with glass walls. The parents would just sit in this central area and depending on which classroom their kid was in, they could watch.” The parental observation was not simply passive interest. The Chinese teaching assistant in charge of the class would frequently approach him with comments made by the parents: I was always getting critiqued. The TA would come to me some days and say that so-and-so’s parents said that you weren’t doing this right. Some of the parents were complaining that the class was too noisy. . . . They would never come to me. Whenever I saw them, they were very polite and, you know, happy and all that.


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Through this kind of involvement with Chinese children, these two American students were able to make observations and gain insights that others in the Taiwan group missed. However, it became apparent to at least one of them early on that he would have to be careful about generalizing his observations to include Taiwanese children en masse: While conducting a classroom language exercise in which he was trying to stimulate conversation, he suddenly realized that he was dealing with a very specific socioeconomic level: One day I taught a lesson on cars. And I was writing different names of cars on the board. I’d point to every name and I’d say, “Who has a father or a mother who has this kind of car?” And, like, when I hit Mercedes, most of the hands shot up, and, like, BMW, more hands shot up. I was at this point personally curious, so I asked, “How many kids here have parents who have two cars?” About 60 percent raised their hands. There was one kid in the class whose father had five cars, and they were all, like, Mercedes and BMW.

The insights that Cassandra and the two informants from Taiwan gained from this kind of experience would not have been available in either the formal classroom or the homestay. Teaching English to non-native speakers in their own environment proved to be a unique kind of participant observation that afforded the students access to an entirely different realm of empirical data. By exercising their ethnographic skills, no matter how elementary, they were able to make observations that would not have been available in other contexts. However, they still encountered the same obstacles in progressing to the reflective stage of experiential learning: With a frame of reference conditioned by their American backgrounds and no “decisive intervention” to facilitate their reflective efforts, they were limited in the extent to which they could draw meaningful or accurate inferences. Cassandra’s frustration with the “childish” behavior of the Mitsubishi group is especially illustrative. Getting Involved in Day-to-Day Activities Except for those who enrolled in the Osaka program, homestay was not an option that all students could use as a form of participant observation. And not everyone is as eager as the Japanese and the Chinese to learn English as a second language. Nevertheless, students on virtually all the programs abroad found a way of becoming involved to some extent in the host culture. One of the more adventurous efforts in this regard was one student’s decision to accept temporary employment as a waiter in a Japanese bar and grill. Barry was determined to find some way to supplement his Osaka homestay in achieving cultural immersion. Such an opportunity presented itself after several weeks of frequenting a neighborhood bar that was

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owned and operated by two young men who had inherited it from their father. Modelled after a bar that the owners’ parents had visited on a trip to England and named the Cellar Bar Kent, it had a distinctively British decor but an exclusively Japanese clientele. Barry got to know the owners personally during the first half of the semester: He was virtually the only American to visit the bar regularly, and, while his Japanese language proficiency was limited, the owners made a point of getting to know him and interacting with him. They ultimately proved very receptive when he inquired about working as a waiter for the last couple of weeks of his stay in Osaka. By that time, his Japanese had improved sufficiently to enable him to take beer and snack orders from the Japanese customers. Unfortunately, the experience did not prove to be as instructive as Barry had hoped. He learned the routine of working as a waiter, but when pressed during the interview for examples of what he had learned about the Japanese culture, he was unable to articulate anything specific. Indirectly, it may only have served to reinforce his sense of being a Gaijin (i.e., an outsider or foreigner, a subject that will be discussed in detail in chapter 6)—the very thing he was hoping to overcome by taking a job normally held by a native Japanese. As he later related, the customers were inevitably shocked when they looked up to place their orders and found themselves confronted by this tall, blonde-haired foreigner speaking Japanese. Although he insisted that he had picked up subtle Japanese behavioral traits, the only one he could cite specifically was the habit of bowing: Upon returning to the United States, he even found himself bowing to his parents while speaking to them on the telephone. As Barry discovered in the Cellar Bar Kent, becoming involved in day-to-day activities can be complicated considerably in an environment where one’s physical features militate against identification with the group. That difficulty was certainly not confined to those who studied in the Orient: In Kenya, for example, a white American face is as much of an impediment to cultural immersion as it is in Japan. As a participant in Penn State’s exchange with the University of Nairobi, Melanie was able to enroll directly in regular courses selected from the Nairobi curriculum and to live with native Kenyan students in residential units on the Nairobi campus. During her year at the University of Nairobi, Melanie made every effort to become involved in a variety of activities, including an occasional visit to the home of Kenyan friends with whom she became acquainted at the university. However, her efforts to become actively involved in the native students’ social life proved to be problematic not only because of her white American identity but also because of what Melanie perceived to be a circumscribed social life to begin with: According to Melanie, their primary out-of-class activity after studying was simply getting together in someone’s room for conversation—an activity in which Melanie joined as often as she could.


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Even conversation proved to be a limited source of insight into what was going on in Kenya because of the omnipresent danger of informers in what proved to be an oppressive and paranoid political regime. Students at the university were extremely circumspect in their discussions of political issues. According to Melanie, “There are informers in the classrooms. And students disappear from time to time if they make political statements in class.” She discovered, however, that discussions of sensitive subjects were quite common on the matatus—the small local buses that carried passengers primarily from the lower socioeconomic class. As a form of participant observation, Melanie began to ride the matatus regularly and to absorb information from the discussions going on around her. While the discussions were often intriguing, she realized that she had to take “a lot of these things with a grain of salt. I wasn’t sure whether they were just rumors or if these people actually knew.” As an example, she recalled a discussion in which the passengers alleged that the president of the country had acquired ownership of a Nairobi casino by using his presidential power to force the owner into disposing of the property at a price far below its market value. Supposedly, the president had decreed that no foreign currency could be used in this particular casino; since its business was primarily dependent on foreign tourists, the owner was forced into bankruptcy. The president was then able to acquire ownership at a ridiculously low price. As Melanie pointed out, she could never be sure whether the information was accurate, but it did give her valuable insight into the thinking and attitudes of this particular group of people.

Shopping as a Form of Participant Observation Another frequently cited form of participant observation was shopping—which all students enjoyed doing, whether out of necessity or for pleasure. In Cairo, for example, Daniel was forced into becoming a participant observer by the very nature of the marketing system: Nothing had a set price; everything was subject to bargaining. Because of his own cultural heritage, Daniel found this intimidating and frustrating. “The first thing I really missed about home was being able to go into a Uni-Mart and buy a pack of cigarettes at a set price for $1.80, give them $2.00 and get two dimes back.” In Cairo it simply did not work that way. While he found it frustrating and he never really became good at it, Daniel’s perception of the bargaining process changed gradually as he was forced to do it on a regular basis: He began to see it more as a social event generated by a cultural inclination toward personalizing everything. In Daniel’s words, “Everything is about human contact when you are bargaining in Cairo.” This is in stark contrast to the impersonal quality of making a purchase at an American convenience store. Direct personal involvement in the bargaining

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process helped him develop an appreciation for a culturally defined behavior pattern that transcended the mere act of making a purchase. One of the informants from the Rome program cited a similar experience in which he also found shopping to be more personal and social than he had been accustomed to in the United States. Every other morning, he would go to the open-air market in Rome to purchase fresh meat and produce. He contrasted the experience to what it was like to make similar purchases at the Philadelphia fish market: The Philadelphia fish market is really fast. My Mom goes down there, and she’ll get chickens and rabbits and things like that. And they’ll have, like, two knives in each hand and they’ll just go “swoosh” and cut it right apart. They’re really fast and they’re talking to their neighbor in the next stall and just kind of pushing parts aside. And they just like throw it in a bag and wrap it in twine and give it to you. In Rome they would take their time and they would point to you and they would clean it and they would wrap it carefully and they would hand it to you. They would deal with you and not with two other people. There’s no ticket takers: You stood in line and they dealt with you expressly, and I was treated no different than the Italian woman behind me.

Like Daniel, this student was effectively forced to become a participant observer by the sheer necessity of having to buy groceries. Through that experience, he began to gain insights into the way natives of the host culture relate to other human beings. Other informants from the Rome program also cited shopping as an enlightening experience: Since they lived in apartments where they had to cook their own meals, they all had to deal with the Roman market on a regular basis. As one of them commented, “Food shopping, gift shopping, shopping for basic necessities: You had to deal with the people. You can learn a lot about the culture through that.” Joining Organized Activities Several of the informants also attempted to become involved in organized student activities as a way of immersing themselves in the student life of the host institution. The educational value of those efforts, however, is open to question. For one woman, membership on the ski team in Leeds proved to be more of a recreational and social activity than a learning experience. She found that the other members of the team “were just like typical American students.” In qualifying that remark, she went on to say that “they were very laid back, you know. They just wanted to go out, socialize, and have fun, you know. Go to school, do their learning, and go out and get a job. But they want to have fun in the process.” Diane’s experience on the basketball team in Melbourne was similar in terms of the insights gained (or lack thereof). Based on her remarks during the interview, it appeared that the most profound insight she gained from


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playing basketball with her Australian counterparts was that they actually knew how to play basketball. “At first I thought Australians and basketball didn’t really mix,” she observed. “I didn’t think they knew too much about it, and I thought I was all right. So I thought I’d play and it turned out that they were okay. They were better than I was. That sort-of surprised me.” For Richard, working out with the basketball club in Osaka was a bit more enlightening. In addition to the recreational and social benefits, he found himself participating in an activity where he could see the impact of Japanese status relationships exemplified in a concrete form. Richard illustrated his point by describing a behavior pattern that he was able to take advantage of as a member of the opposing team: There was the president of that club. Personally, I think he was really bad at basketball. But he was the leader, so they would always give him the ball. It was their responsibility as a pledge to him. They knew he wasn’t that good, but it was like an honor thing to give him the ball. And I knew he was going to shoot every time he had the ball—which was good for me (a little team strategy there).

One of the women who spent the semester in Rome also tried to become more involved with host nationals through sports and exercise. Because of the nature of its Rome program, Penn State students have limited contact with Italian students: Participants enroll on either a semester or a full-year basis in courses offered by Temple Abroad at its leased facility in the Villa Caproni, located in the heart of Rome just north of the Piazza del Popolo. Students are able to select from a broad range of courses in both the liberal and visual arts. While the program is open to anyone who meets the academic prerequisites, it is in effect an American program with students taking classes almost exclusively with other Americans. Except for courses in advanced Italian language and literature, the language of instruction is English. Students have the option of making their own accommodation arrangements or of living in an apartment building leased by Temple for the benefit of its students. The vast majority of the Penn State students elect the latter option, which provides triple-occupancy apartments with other students, primarily American. In an effort to become more actively involved with native Italians, Pauline joined an Italian gymnasium (a “Palestra,” as she called it) in the hope that she could not only maintain a physical conditioning regimen but also get to know some Italians on a more personal level. While she was successful in terms of the first objective, she encountered nothing but frustration in her pursuit of the second: “I felt very inferior going to the Italian gyms, because they just shoved us into the back. You know, in aerobics class you have people spread out all over the room, then you have one guy in front teaching. Well, they kind of shoved us Americans into the back, so I was always peering over everyone’s head and I felt like a little peon from another country.” She went on to say that “for Italians exercise

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is very social. It’s social here [in the United States], too, but for them, it’s like a bar here.” As a result, Pauline felt that she was “invading their privacy” every time she went to her workouts and was thus intimidated into dropping the second of her two objectives in joining the group. For the most part, involvement in organized activities seems to have been less beneficial as a form of participant observation than as a way of simply establishing contact with peers with whom they could interact socially. The role of personal interaction as an out-of-class activity will be dealt with in the next chapter.

SUMMARY Although the informants were not familiar with ethnographic terminology or its formal methods, their discussion of out-of-class activities made it obvious that direct participation in various kinds of activities combined with personal observation was one of the major categories of out-of-class activity that they felt contributed to the learning process. By engaging in various forms of participant observation, the informants were adopting the ethnographic discovery model of acquiring empirical data as a first step in learning about the host culture. The value of this particular ethnographic method varied by the nature of the activity as well as by the skills of the individual students. The informants generally agreed that a family homestay was one of the more valuable forms of participant observation, although shopping, teaching English as a second language, engaging in various forms of social activity, and other out-of-class activities provided opportunities for them to participate and observe. The ethnographic skills that the students brought to those activities also had a direct effect on the value of participant observation as a way of learning about the host culture: Some of the students had great difficulty citing any specific examples of cultural difference, even after immersing themselves in a totally alien environment like the Cellar Bar Kent. Geographic location also seemed to have an effect on the value of participant observation as a learning activity. Students in the programs in Osaka and Taiwan were able to articulate a broad range of observed cultural differences. In contrast, the student who joined the ski team in Leeds and the woman who joined the basketball team in Melbourne were hard pressed to identify anything truly distinctive about their host cultures. There was also a great deal of variety in the extent to which the students’ accounts were interpretive as opposed to purely descriptive. This reflects varying degrees of success in progressing from the level of concrete experience to that of reflective observation in the experiential learning model postulated by Kolb. One of the major obstacles to moving from the first to the second stage of Kolb’s model was the limited frame of reference that


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each of the students brought to the task. As pointed out by Spindler, human beings interpret new experiences in terms of the old experiences that they have stored in their long-term memories unless there is a “decisive intervention” to provide a new frame of reference (1974, 450). While participant observation gave students the opportunity to acquire empirical data about the host culture, it is apparent that some decisive intervention is necessary to move students from the empirical level to the more conceptual level in terms of Kolb’s learning model. Without that decisive intervention, the students will continue to use their own cultural background as a frame of reference, as exemplified by Matthew’s attempt to understand the relationship between his host mother and her nine-year-old son. To reiterate Barnlund’s assessment of the failure to gain insight “into the assumptive world of another culture,” “Social institutions and customs will be interpreted inevitably from the premises and through the medium of their own culture” (1975, 6). The students’ articulated perceptions of the role of participant observation as a way of learning about national and cultural differences suggest that study-abroad administrators need to explore ways in which it can be more effectively and systematically exploited as an out-of-class complement to the more formal academic aspects of education abroad programs. However, the difficulties that the students encountered in moving from the concrete level of empirical data to the conceptual level of reflective observation suggest that students need to be more fully prepared for making sense out of their experiences. With nothing on which to base an interpretation of the differences observed, they can do little more than catalog those differences for later reference. This is not to minimize the value of such a catalog as a step in the right direction: If nothing more, the concrete experience of difference at least provides the informants with a greater appreciation for the significance of differences among nations and cultures. In cataloging those differences, the informants developed a heightened appreciation not only for the host culture but also for the truth of Spradley’s caveat that a participant observer “can hardly ever become a complete participant in a social situation” (1980, 51). As Matthew lamented in summarizing what was both his biggest frustration and one of his most significant learning outcomes, “You can live in Japan for fifty years, and those little girls will still take pictures of you when you walk down the street. You will never ever become an insider.” As one of three major categories of learning activity, participant observation obviously has great potential for adaptation to any number of settings in the development of a systematic approach to exploiting the out-of-class environment as a learning medium. In the next chapter, the students discuss their perceptions of the second of those three categories: personal interaction with their foreign peers.


4

Personal Interaction as a Way of Learning about Cultural Differences

Students abroad often find it difficult to establish close relationships with their counterparts at the host institution, especially given the brevity of their stay and the web of relationships that already exists among the native students. The informants for this study nevertheless spoke extensively about ways in which personal relationships contributed to the learning process. Based on their individual experiences, personal interaction with natives of the host culture proved to be the second of three major categories into which learning activities could be placed. This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, the students discuss some key informant relationships they developed at the study abroad site. While a number of such relationships deserve attention, this section focuses on those students who provided especially thorough accounts of how those relationships affected their learning. The second section presents the students’ perspectives on some of the less-intimate relationships that characterized their interaction with native informants generally. KEY INFORMANTS In addition to participant observation, ethnographers have traditionally made use of key informants in carrying out their field work. Following the ethnographic discovery model discussed in chapter 1, this section presents interview data concerning ways in which students abroad adopted a similar approach to doing their own type of field work. All the students interviewed made some effort to establish contacts with their peers during their semester or year abroad. While most of those

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contacts remained fairly superficial, some of them blossomed into intimate personal relationships that provided the informants with data that they were able to use in a variety of ways to enhance their education. In several instances, students were able to give fairly detailed accounts of those relationships and of how they contributed to their out-of-class learning. Richard and His Host Father As noted in chapter 3, Richard developed a close relationship with the host father of his first homestay family in Osaka. The time they spent together provided opportunities not only for some interesting kinds of participant observation but also for the nurturing of a key informant relationship. By capitalizing on the rapport between them, Richard frequently made inquiries that helped him understand what were otherwise bizarre incidents. As an example, he cited the gift-wrapped trucks he occasionally saw in the streets of Osaka, which his host father explained were part of wedding ceremonies that were being celebrated at the time the trucks appeared: One time we were driving by and there was this truck with all these—with a dishwasher and a television and all these goods on it, and around the outside of it was a big ribbon on this truck. And I had seen a few of them, so I asked him what that was. So he told me it’s the dowry of the wife. When people get married, the wife gets all these gifts and then they become part of the family.

With that explanation and his own knowledge of the meaning of a dowry, Richard was then able to elaborate on the incident as an example of the local custom by which the bride’s family made its expected contribution to the newly established family. In terms of the ethnographic discovery model of learning another culture, Richard had used his relationship with a native of the host culture to nurture a key informant. Frank and His Female Companion Frank was able to take advantage of a personal friendship in Japan to learn more about the nature of interpersonal relationships in that island society. In his case the relationship was with a female student whom he met while attending class at Kansai Gaidai. After a few initial overtures, Frank was able to pique her interest sufficiently for them to begin spending time together in activities other than general conversation before and after class. Before long they were shopping together, going to lunch and dinner together, and occasionally taking in a movie. While he felt that they had become close to each other, Frank found it very difficult to communicate with her:

PERSONAL INTERACTION

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She was really hard to understand, at least from my perspective, because as is typically Japanese, she really didn’t communicate her feelings that much—at least in words. So it was hard coming from my culture where you are supposed to say what you mean and mean what you say and all that.

Frank grew increasingly frustrated with his efforts to foster a greater sense of intimacy and attributed his lack of success to his friend’s concern about the impression such a relationship would make on her family. As Frank noted during the interview, “I believe she was afraid to get involved too quickly because she had this obligation to her family. That really is a big factor with a lot of Japanese. They can’t just go off and say, ‘I’m an individual and if I want to do this then I can do this. It’s my life and everything.’ They have an obligation to their parents especially but also to the rest of their family.” Although his friend never made explicit reference to reasons for resisting the pace at which Frank wanted to move in developing their relationship, Frank concluded that it had to be attributable to her family, more specifically her father. Frank wanted desperately to talk about the situation, but as he expected, she would not engage in any detailed discussion of personal feelings or family affairs. In expressing his frustration, Frank confessed that “it really became a problem for me, especially with her father (her father was the main one who was objecting; I don’t know about her mother). I felt it was something that we needed to talk about, and she didn’t really want to involve me in the situation. She wouldn’t talk about it.” This refusal to talk was the most frustrating aspect of the dilemma for Frank. The situation finally became untenable for the Japanese student, and she terminated the relationship. As related by Frank, the way she handled the termination illustrated the kind of indirect communication he had come to associate with the Japanese behavior and with which he found it difficult to cope: When she told me, she didn’t really tell me the true problem. She sort of told me in a way that I would be able to figure it out. She called up on the phone and said, “Could you not call me for a couple of weeks.” I asked her why and she said, “My father has gotten angry with me because I haven’t been home that much the past couple of weeks and he wants me to spend more time at home, so don’t call me any more. I’ve told all my other male friends not to call me any more either.”

Given what he had learned about the Japanese style of communication and this direct experience of his own, Frank interpreted her explanation as an indirect way of telling him that her father disapproved of their relationship. And since he did not believe there were really any “other male friends,” Frank felt that the final comment was simply her way to avoid offending him—again a typically Japanese concern in interpersonal communications.

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Sharon and Her New Friends The linguistic and cultural barriers to developing key informant relationships were not quite as forbidding in some of the programs as they were in Osaka. In Nice, for example, Sharon was able to establish an unusually close relationship with three students whom she met in the dormitory. The program in Nice enabled students to enroll for a semester in courses especially designed for Penn State students and offered by the Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT) of the University of Nice. Designed primarily for students from the College of Business Administration who had only a limited background in French, the academic program consisted of a six-credit course in oral French along with three-credit courses on the European business environment, economic integration, and Mediterranean civilization. During their fall semester in Nice, students lived in the Cité Jean Medecin, an IUT dormitory that accommodated students from a wide range of nationalities. Sharon took advantage of this dormitory environment to establish contact with people her own age from different cultural backgrounds. Of the thirty students interviewed for this study, she was the most successful in developing personal relationships that went beyond the level of casual conversation. In spite of all she had been told about the difficulties in establishing contact with the French students, Sharon was determined while in Nice to make the acquaintance of as many of her peers as possible. She discussed specifically her efforts to strike up a conversation with Laurence, a female student with a room just down the hall from her in the dormitory. Every time they passed in the corridor, Sharon would smile and say hello—a typically American invitation to stop and exchange pleasantries. Laurence’s standard response was to nod and continue on her way. The routine was finally broken when Veronique, a friend of Laurence, needed help with her English; Laurence then took the initiative to approach Sharon with a request for help on behalf of her friend. Unfortunately, the approach proved to be purely instrumental, with no personal follow-up: After that, you know, I saw them again, and again it was just “hi.” They never came up and said, “How you doing?” Or whatever. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to put my foot down. I’m going to go to their room and have a conversation.” So I did. And they were really surprised.

Once the ice was broken, Sharon found both Laurence and Veronique extremely eager to learn more about Sharon personally as well as about the United States and to share information with her about their personal lives. As they became closer and more open about discussing personal matters, Sharon eventually learned that Laurence was an only child from a broken family and that her mother beat her as a child and regularly brought home


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male friends. It was the kind of personal information that no other informants claimed to have obtained from their counterparts abroad. Her relationship with Veronique proved to be no less personal but quite different in nature. Once she got to know her, she found Veronique to be disarmingly straightforward and candid in her approach to subjects that Sharon found a bit uncomfortable to discuss—specifically the sexual practices not only of American women in general but also of Sharon herself as an exemplar of the American woman. Sharon was also taken aback and embarrassed by the candor of the revelations that Veronique shared with her concerning her own sexual conduct. Sharon recounted one interchange with Veronique when, after listening to a spate of intimate sexual details concerning Veronique’s relationship with her boyfriend, Sharon burst out in embarrassment, “‘Why do you tell me these things?’ ‘Because I want you to know.’ And I just left it at that. I figured she had to talk to someone about it, so my ears were all open.” In addition to their interest in learning more about the United States and American women, Laurence and Veronique were equally interested in finding out more about how Sharon viewed the French. Sharon took that opportunity to discuss the stereotype of the French woman as aloof, cold, and distant, and how that stereotype had been reinforced by Sharon’s initial frustration of trying to strike up a friendly conversation with the two of them. Laurence and Veronique found that fascinating and attempted to address the issue by insisting from their perspective that friendships are not casual affairs but long-term relationships that must be nurtured slowly. In addition to Laurence and Veronique, Sharon developed an equally close relationship with a Corsican woman, Katrin. She found that relationship informative because she had been told by her French friends that Corsicans were very haughty and condescending. Her relationships with Laurence and Veronique had brought into question the American stereotype of the cold and distant French woman; with her new Corsican friend she was able to contrast the French stereotype of a third nationality. As with her French friends, she found that Corsicans can also be warm and personable, once she got beyond the stereotype and related to the individual on a more personal basis. Unlike the more general conversations that characterized the majority of the interactions between the informants and their student peers abroad, Sharon’s were more intimate and gave her insights into the personal lives of her newly acquired friends. She got to know them as individuals rather than as types, and in the process she found that any stereotypes she might have taken with her from the United States were more irrelevant than incorrect. With their unique backgrounds, personalities, and temperaments, her new friends were no longer representatives of a particular nationality or culture—they were simply Laurence, Veronique, and Katrin.

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Melanie and Her Tribal Acquaintances In Nairobi, Melanie’s use of informant interviews enabled her to acquire insight into the nature of tribal differences among the students. She was able to observe after some time that certain groups of students never seemed to associate with each other. It was not immediately apparent, since she had no difficulty mingling and conversing with the Kenyan students in general; however, she eventually took notice of the fact that some of the groups with whom she interacted easily did not interact with each other. Not until she began making discrete inquiries did she begin to appreciate the tribal differences that separated what at first appeared to be a homogeneous group into distinctive subgroups. Since she was a complete outsider with no membership in any of the native tribal groups, she had the luxury of relatively easy access to all subgroups. Based on conversations with members of each of the subgroups, she began to acquire more sophistication about tribal differences, to the point eventually of being able to identify an individual’s tribal affiliation by physical appearance. What at first were subtle characteristics that went unnoticed during her first few weeks in Kenya gradually became traits of which she was conscious as identifying features: I was able to tell the difference from facial characteristics, like darkness of skin. They don’t dress differently, except they might wear their hair differently. Luo women would braid their hair up on top of their head into a little ball and Kikuyus usually braid it down into long braids hanging to the sides. And Kambas would just let their hair stay in like an Afro.

In addition to Luos and Kikuyus, she also developed acquaintances from the Meru and Wakamba tribes. Through conversations with her various friends, she began to gain insights into their respective perceptions of each other. As one example, she mentioned that “Kikuyus practice female circumcision. Luos don’t even practice male circumcision. Kikuyus think of the Luos as children, no matter how old they are, since they haven’t been circumcised yet.” She also cited differences in burial customs as affecting their attitudes toward each other. According to Melanie: Luos have a lot of mourning and wailing and weeping, and they make a very big show out of burials. When a woman’s husband dies, before the husband is buried, the woman must spend one last night in bed with his dead body before they bury it. The Kikuyus detest that idea. They think it is very pagan. They don’t make much noise about funerals. It’s mostly quiet and just get the body buried.

While Melanie could have obtained objective information like tribal customs from a textbook or a classroom lecture, the real value of her interaction with the various groups in the dormitory was the insight she gained about their perceptions of each other. As she pointed out during the


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course of the interview, “There’s a lot of rivalry and hatred between tribal groups. Like Luos and Kikuyus absolutely dislike one another. They have disgust for one another’s cultures and customs.” Through her conversations with friends and acquaintances from the various tribal groups, she was able to gain a much more affective appreciation not only of the cultural characteristics peculiar to each tribe but also of the personal attitudes and perceptions they had of each other. Just as Sharon had gotten to know her friends as Laurence, Veronique, and Katrin rather than as typical French women, Melanie came to know her friends as Luos, Kikuyus, Merus, and Wakambas rather than as typical Kenyans.

Jennifer and the Chinese Woman In the dormitory at National Taiwan University, Jennifer had a totally different kind of experience in terms of interaction with student peers. While getting to know her Chinese roommates on a personal level ultimately proved frustrating, pure coincidence brought her into intimate contact with them right at the very beginning and enabled her to start forming impressions about what it is like to be a female student in Taiwan. Jennifer remembered one specific incident that occurred during the first several days, which set the stage for her perceptions of differences between herself as an American and her Chinese counterparts. While sequestered together in the dormitory because of a rampaging typhoon, her roommates asked her to demonstrate how makeup is applied: They had never worn it before. It’s not like makeup’s not there; it’s just not very common to wear it. So I made up one of my roommates, and she looked really good. But to her it was like, “No, no, no, no.” And she went and she wiped it off. It was just really funny to me.

The physical setting itself helped generate impressions and ideas about the status of female students in Taipei. As a resident in the women’s dormitory, Jennifer was immediately struck by the physical attributes of the residential environment and of what that suggested about local attitudes: Women there are, I wouldn’t say second-class, but I’d say very sheltered. Like the dormitory I lived in: If you would see it, you’d think I was living in a prison. There was a big brick wall surrounding all the women’s dormitories, and on top of that there were glass shards and then on top of that there was barbed wire. It was a fortress literally. And every night the gates would close—these big metal gates—at 11:30. And after that point you couldn’t get in—or get out. Which is a lot different, you know, coming from Penn State.

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When she asked one of her Chinese roommates about the physical environment, the response was, “Well, you know, most people are real good, but there are some dangerous people out there, and that’s why we have to be in early. It’s for our own protection.” Jennifer was astounded by what she characterized as the sheltering of her Chinese counterparts. She pointed out that they never went out to socialize: The most exciting thing they ever did outside the dormitory was go shopping. Her roommates were about twenty years old, and two of them had never been out on a date. In Jennifer’s words, “Socially, they’re probably about five or six years behind us just in dating.” Jennifer found it ironic that as a foreigner, she felt that she was seeing more of Taipei and of Taiwan than her roommates who had been born and raised there. “I went to all these places that they had never been to. I felt like I knew their country so much better—at least being able to see things.” Brenda made a similar observation about Chinese women, based on her personal interaction with a Chinese woman she was tutoring in English. After several sessions, her pupil felt close enough to divulge some of her personal frustrations, especially her sense of being totally dominated by her parents. She pointed out, for example, that she wanted desperately to be a pianist, but under pressure from her parents she was majoring in international business. The American student concluded her discussion of the tutorial relationship with a comment that clearly echoes the conclusion that Jennifer had already drawn: “I knew my way around the city on a bus a hundred times better than she did because she wasn’t allowed to ride the bus.”

Lauren and the Palestinian View Penn State’s program in Egypt is a direct exchange with the American University in Cairo (AUC). AUC is a private institution that provides instruction at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. It has a strong liberal arts curriculum that has recently been supplemented by professionally oriented programs in management, engineering, computer science, and television news. Penn State students who enroll in this program may spend either a single semester or a full year at AUC, where they take at least one three-credit Arabic language course along with three or four additional three-credit courses selected from the regular AUC curriculum. All AUC courses are taught in English, which allows the American undergraduates to select from a wide range of regular course offerings. Students are thus integrated into the regular student and academic life of AUC. Although students are free to make their own living arrangements in Cairo, AUC makes every effort to accommodate those American students who prefer to apply for residence in an AUC student hostel. With very few


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exceptions, Penn State students have traditionally applied for and received hostel assignments. About 150 students from the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Egypt live in these hostels, thus providing a milieu in which American students can interact with peers from a variety of other nations and cultures. This living arrangement provided Lauren with an opportunity to develop a relationship that resembled Sharon’s in terms of its personal quality. This relationship also had a profound effect on her own view of Middle Eastern politics and her perception of reality in general. Lauren was from a moderately sized urban setting in eastern Pennsylvania. Her only prior foray outside the United States was a family vacation to Canada. Academically, she had taken introductory courses on the history of the Middle East and on Eastern religions. Otherwise, she had no prior exposure to other cultures. She was therefore a total neophyte when it came to dealing with the kind of social milieu that she found in the women’s residence at AUC. In her description of the setting, she pointed out that most of the Egyptian women who attended AUC lived at home in Cairo with wealthy parents. The dormitory was primarily for female students from abroad. In Lauren’s words, “The women from Jordan, Sudan, Palestine—you know, of Palestinian descent—they are the ones who were living in the dorms.” Lauren enjoyed the stimulation of this cosmopolitan environment. Her most significant experiences proved to be the friendships she developed with a Sudanese student and with a Palestinian, each of whom was about the same age as she. She learned a great deal about each of them personally, much in the way that Sharon had come to know her French and Corsican friends, and the impact that these friendships had on Lauren was evident in the way she spoke about them. With her own provincial background for comparison, she could not help but be impressed by the tumultuous and broadranging nature of the personal experiences to which they had been exposed in no more years than her own: I had one good friend who was Palestinian originally. She had lived in Kuwait until they had to flee. She was only nineteen and she had already been displaced twice. In the Middle East it is a totally different mindset to grow up in where these things can happen. She [her Sudanese friend] had grown up in a really—they had so many coups, you know, in her lifetime that she had a somewhat more detached view of government. And just tragedies happening. So many tragedies had already happened in her life. She almost seemed to be like older, like a thirty-year-old woman the way she could deal with these things happening to her than like a twenty-year-old girl.

In addition to the personal insights she gained vis-à-vis her friends’ individual backgrounds, Lauren also had the opportunity to hear a completely different point of view on political and historical issues. As a result, she began to question not only her own command of the facts but also her

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very sense of what constitutes reality. This was especially apparent from one of the discussions she had with her Palestinian friend: Like, once we were talking and I said what is probably the standard thing that most Americans would say in this conversation: Look at how many Jewish people died in the Holocaust—which is sort of our gut reaction to the Israel problem. Her immediate reaction to that was that they have overestimated that by about four times and that’s a lie. Because I think that’s the Palestinian—just like how people from Israel might say they’ve exaggerated how many Palestinians have left the country. I just thought it was interesting that they’ve grown up with a certain kind of rhetoric and we’ve grown up with a certain kind of rhetoric. It made me think, does anyone really know what actually happens in any situation? Because you only ever know your side.

For an American from eastern Pennsylvania who had never had extensive contact with another culture, this sort of interaction inevitably produced a strong impression. As can be seen from this section on key informants, interaction with their foreign counterparts furnished the American students with valuable sources who could provide them not only with objective data but also with a native perspective on that data. In terms of the ethnographic discovery model of learning another culture, the students practiced a form of field work that included establishing rapport with native informants in order to obtain emic information—that is, data from an insider’s perspective. This enabled them not only to collect empirical data using ethnographic discovery techniques but also to begin developing a new cognitive frame of reference. As noted earlier, “Human beings tend to interpret new experience in the light of past experience unless there is a decisive intervention in the interpretive process” (Spindler 1974, 450). Unlike those who depended solely on participant observation as a learning tool, those who employed informant interviews had the benefit of a form of decisive intervention: Their informants provided them with an emic perspective that helped them bridge the gap between their past experience and their new experience. In addition, the relationships often resulted in levels of intimacy that had an affective impact and generated completely new ways of seeing their foreign hosts. Sharon no longer saw her roommates as typical French women but as individuals with unique personal backgrounds; Melanie no longer saw her classmates as Kenyans but as members of particular tribal groups; Lauren no longer saw Palestinians as political activists but as human victims. In all cases they had begun the experiential learning process outlined by Kolb and Coleman: They had undergone concrete experiences upon which to reflect and build new inferences about the nature of reality. To what extent they effectively used reflective observation


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as a way of generating those inferences is still unclear from the interview data available. CASUAL AND TRANSITORY ACQUAINTANCES Not all the students’ relationships with host nationals were as intimate as those described thus far. As any ethnographic field worker will attest, key informants comprise a relatively small number of their sources of emic information. More casual relationships are also sources of valuable insights into the host culture and the identity of its members. Interaction with Students The American students’ first contacts in the new culture inevitably included the students attending the host institution, and the most basic form of interaction was simple conversation. As seen earlier, conversation in the dormitories in Nairobi and Taipei yielded significant insights into the tribal relationships in Kenya and the status and lifestyle of female students in Taiwan. In Tel Aviv, the informants spoke about what they learned from conversations with fellow dormitory residents about the significance of the military experience as a maturing and socializing process for young Israelis. One of the Tel Aviv informants summarized her impression of those conversations with the suggestion that, “in Israel, most of your friends aren’t from college: Most of your friends are from the army. That’s the socialization period for Israeli kids. That’s where a lot of people meet their future husbands and wives—in the army. You make some of your best friends in the army.” One student who had participated in the Leeds program spoke of her astonishment to learn from conversations with flatmates that there are different accents in Britain. “I had four flatmates from England, and they were all from different parts of England. One was from Newcastle and one was from Bristol. I mean, total opposite sides of the country. . . . They taught me the different accents. I didn’t realize there were different accents in England. I just thought they were all one.” In Nice it was almost a social ritual for the dormitory residents to gather each evening for casual but often spirited conversation among themselves. In the words of one student, “Every evening people would just meet and congregate outside and talk and talk and talk all night.” And since that dormitory unit accommodated a broad range of nationalities, the visiting Americans found these evening get-togethers an exciting opportunity to intermingle with a varied group of young people. As another of the Nice informants pointed out, “There were French people, there were a lot of people from the Arab countries and the African countries, and Italy and Spain. So it was just a mix of people.”

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The conversations gave the students an opportunity not only to practice their French but also to get some sense of what was on the minds of their French, Arab, and African counterparts. Conversations were free-wheeling and touched on a variety of subjects, although political issues were a favorite topic, especially with the intensification of the Persian Gulf crisis at that particular time. One of the students mentioned that in conversations with some of the Arab students in the group, she was struck by what appeared to be a sympathetic attitude toward the American public in spite of their condemnation of what they perceived to be an effort by the American government to exploit the situation for economic gain. In these conversations, the American students also found themselves frequently having to defend American political and social policies as well as having to dispel stereotypes about themselves. One of the women in the group commented that “they watch the soap operas—things like ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas.’ So they have an image that everyone’s rich and everyone has airplanes or helicopters and all kinds of cars.” This student found it disconcerting to realize that her own presence in Nice reinforced that image and that the image included herself. “Because we were able to go over there and live there, they thought we were wealthy, but that isn’t necessarily true. A lot of students have scholarships or grants or things.” As a matter of fact, four of the five Nice informants interviewed for this study were recipients of financial aid averaging almost $8,000 each for the 1990–91 academic year—a fact that belies the French perception that they were typical wealthy Americans. While simple conversation was obviously a valuable source of information, Richard made a conscious effort in Osaka to go beyond the superficial level of conversation about political and social opinion in order to gain insight into the more profound level of cognitive perception. As an example, he cited the nuances of language as one of his favorite topics of conversation with his classmates. To illustrate his point, he discussed one occasion when he pressed his conversant for clarification on the difference between the Japanese equivalents of the English verbs “to like” and “to love.” He was concerned about what appeared to be a degree of ambiguity in the verbs’ usage. He noted during the interview, for example, that the Japanese equivalent of the verb “to like” was often used in personal relationships where the verb “to love” would have been more appropriate in English. While he was never able fully to grasp the ambiguities involved, Richard ultimately attributed that ambiguity to the Japanese propensity for indirect communication and to their aversion to overt displays of affection. The process followed by this student exemplifies the combination of ethnographic discovery and experiential learning models discussed in chapter 1: Based on interviews with native informants, he was able to collect empirical data about the ambiguities of Japanese language, and by reflecting on the


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deeper significance of that empirical data he was able to draw abstract inferences about the nature of interpersonal communication in Japanese society. Richard also made a conscious effort to test his data by soliciting opinions from several native informants. Others among the students abroad gradually developed an appreciation for the need to exercise this kind of precaution. In discussing her attempts to understand the Taiwanese perspective on various issues, Sandra made the following point: We’d ask someone an opinion, then we’d ask someone else an opinion, and we’d get two totally different opinions. So what I did was I just collected information. I mean, I listened to what everyone said and I never made my own judgments until—I think—I sort of did make my own judgments about who I thought was more credible. But many people told us many different things.

Sandra later discovered that one of her several informants had a biased perspective that affected her value as a source of information. “Both her parents are from mainland China,” she observed. “They refused to let their children learn Taiwanese. The Taiwanese dialect is spoken by 70 percent of the people in Taiwan, and [she] has grown up in Taiwan and can’t speak it.” While her friend was a native of Taiwan, which would lead an outsider to assume that she should be a valuable source of inside information, her value as an informant proved suspect after the American learned more about her friend’s personal background. The data she obtained from her friend may have had limited value in terms of a Taiwanese perspective, but the experience nevertheless provided her with valuable insights into the existence of individual differences within cultures and the attendant limits to which one can generalize about cultural perspectives. It also made her aware of the risks inherent in depending on a key informant as a way of learning about another culture.

Interaction with Strangers Casual interaction with strangers often produced its own kind of impressions about the host culture and its representatives. One of the male students in Japan noted with some amusement that “I was kind of treated, and not just by people that I knew—kind of like in awe, in a sense.” I was, you know, much bigger than these people—not only taller, but I’m a big guy, too. And people would move out of my way, and I saw myself changing. I have a younger brother who’s bigger than I am and, you know, he has these big person mannerisms, kind of like the way he walks and stuff. And it always kind of bothered me—like he’s big, you know, but he’s not like seven feet tall. And yet I saw myself developing these big person mannerisms—this feeling of, of,

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of being among Lilliputians and this confidence. That was something I had never really experienced before.

While a sense of awe may have been unique to the way strangers related to this particular student, it was not at all unusual for the informants to relate incidents in which they received especially positive impressions of the extent to which strangers from the host culture were prepared to assist them. Getting lost was a common occurrence that often forced the students into unexpected encounters with strangers. Jennifer told of an occasion when she was obviously going in the wrong direction on a city bus in Taipei and simply could not get herself properly oriented because of her limited command of the Chinese language. Someone on the bus noticed her anxiety, took her off the bus, asked her where she wanted to go, called the location on her behalf to let them know her predicament, then summoned a taxi and gave the driver directions on where to take her. Daniel cited similar experiences in Cairo as an illustration of how he was treated by complete strangers on the streets of that Arab city: I’d be somewhere in Cairo and I’d be completely lost and an Egyptian would come up to me and (a lot of English was spoken) he would say, “Are you lost?” And I’d say, “Yes, I am.” And he’d say, “Where do you want to go?” And I’d tell him and he would walk me there. I mean, he wouldn’t just tell me the directions; he would take me to where I wanted to go, no matter whether it was a fifteen-minute walk or half-hour walk away.

In speaking of her interactions with strangers on the matatus in Nairobi, Melanie made the comment that “people were often too nice to me, like deferring to me and very, very polite. Once I got across that I was a student visiting Kenya, that I wasn’t a tourist, that I wasn’t quite as wealthy as a tourist but that I was interested in what they had to say, they were very, very willing to talk to me.” These kinds of experiences naturally generated impressions of the host culture that affected the students’ perceptions of how people in that culture related to each other as well as to outsiders. Not all the experiences were pleasant ones, especially when circumstances required the students to interact with what often appeared to be hostile and labyrinthine bureaucracies. One of the students in Rome made the comment that “dealing with government offices, like the post office, was very, very hard. I had to mail packages home and I ended up half crying every time I went. It was very, very stressful.” This same student, however, qualified her critique of the treatment she received with an observation similar to Melanie’s concerning the difference in treatment accorded tourists as opposed to those with a more profound interest in the host culture:


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There were so many tourists, and I have to stress again that they were so rude. I would go up to buy stamps and he would consider me a tourist because I was American. And he would just treat me like a hole in the ground. And I just really hated it because I was trying—like, I told my friends, I wish we had these pins that would say “American students trying to speak Italian” you know, so they’d give us a break. Because they could be so nasty.

Although some of the unpleasant experiences with local bureaucracies could be attributed to the students’ status as foreigners, those experiences could often be quite revealing of the nature of social and professional relationships among the host nationals themselves. In dealing with a problem she had assumed she could discuss with the director of the Institut Universitaire de Technologie where she was enrolled in Nice, one student found that she “could never just walk into his office and sit down and say, ‘Hey, I have a problem.’ Some of the highest professors in that school could not even do that. This guy, he’s just like a god.” It was not that there were no channels for resolving problems; it was simply that as outsiders, the students were not sufficiently familiar with the customary ways of dealing with those problems and therefore assumed they could approach them in the same way that they would on the home campus—a realization of which this student became acutely aware through direct personal experience. Even though interaction with strangers often proved to be quite informative and enlightening, it was also frequently very impersonal in contrast to the kinds of relationships that developed between students and their key informants. This was not always the case, however, as exemplified by an experience recounted by another of the Osaka students. Like Sandra who discussed her experience with the Taiwanese friend who could not speak or understand the local dialect, Matthew was able to cite a concrete example of how interaction with the native population can impress on the learner the limits to which generalizations can be made, even after a period of participant observation. Matthew is the student who, in chapter 3, discussed the awkward relationship that developed among him, his host mother, and the family’s nine-year-old son. Like the other informants from the Osaka program, Matthew lived with a family in which the host father was a professional with an apparently unlimited commitment to his company. By interacting with the clientele of what Matthew characterized as an “out-of-the-way mom and pop” bar, he was able to nurture more casual relationships that paved the way for his realization that while extremely valuable as a form of participant observation, the homestay could also impose its own biases on the learner. During his discussion of those whom he met at the bar, he alluded specifically to one individual who made a distinct impression upon him during a drinking foray in which Matthew and his fellow students were giving their bemused Japanese audience a lesson on American college football cheers:

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There was another guy, he was kind of heavy, he was a truck driver from Tokyo. And we just started talking to this guy and teaching him different cheers. . . . It was so gratifying to be able to do things and have interaction with people who had nothing to do with education or school. . . . The guy was a truck driver. You see, the archetypal Japanese man was my host father, you know: He lives in a little apartment box and works at a huge company and doesn’t come home. And that’s the way people think of the Japanese. But there are a lot of different Japanese. There are Japanese bums. You know, I went to the city and I’d see bums. I’d take pictures of the bums because I couldn’t believe it.

As Matthew’s account exemplifies, extending the range of personal contacts provided additional data against which to test conclusions about social roles in the host culture. By taking the initiative to get involved with groups outside the context of his host family, Matthew came to recognize that he had to be careful about generalizing too much from the data acquired through participant observation in his homestay environment. There was a wide range of variation in the extent to which such casual relationships became personalized. In Rome, for example, the students enjoyed interacting with Fabrizio, the friendly old vendor in the open air market. While no one could ever really speak of him as a friend, they appreciated his attention and his patience with their attempts to practice colloquial Italian. In the words of one student, “He was very good at teaching the language. He’d really try to encourage me to speak Italian. He’d speak slowly so I could understand him, correct me if I said something wrong. He always told me I spoke very good Italian. It made me feel better when I walked out of the market and went back on the streets.” Another of the Rome students was equally complimentary regarding Fabrizio’s role as a teacher: Every time I wanted a product, he would tell me what it was in Italian and make me pronounce it until I had it almost correct and then ask what we used it for in America and tell me what they used it for there.” As with their experiences interacting with local bureaucracies, the students’ interactions with strangers were not always pleasant. As noted earlier, Daniel was impressed by the number of times that Egyptians went out of their way to assist him, and he made a special effort to mix with Arabs at the corner tea shops—the open air cafés “where they have a little Bunsen burner and they have a kettle of tea on top and they have the tea in buckets and the water so you don’t actually have to go into a shop.” He was not nearly as happy with the treatment he received from strangers when he visited Israel. The extent to which this perception was a product of his own personal bias is not clear; he stated very specifically that Israelis were not nearly as forthcoming in providing directions and assistance. He was taken aback by the Israeli attitude toward the Egyptians of whom he had become especially fond—an attitude that he encapsulated in the comment, “When I was in Israel and I told an Israeli that I was an American student studying


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at the American University in Cairo, he asked me if I had failed out of my university here in the States.” Associating with native informants on a more casual level than with key informants gave the students a different kind of input from what they received through personal friendships. The input was naturally less personal and therefore tended to have less affective impact on the students’ perceptions. But it also extended the range of input on which the students could base their judgments about the host culture, often calling into question some of the assumptions and conclusions they had begun to formulate on the basis of information obtained from key informants and participant observation. While key informants could provide an intensive perspective on the personal level, casual conversations with fellow students and interaction with strangers complemented that input with an extensive dimension, adding to the breadth as opposed to the depth of their vision. In the process, the students not only enriched their catalog of empirical data but also began the process of reflective observation by having to assess the validity and significance of data obtained from various sources.

SUMMARY In this chapter we have heard the students discuss their perceptions of how personal interaction with natives of the host culture contributed to the learning process outside the classroom. Based on the data provided by the informants during their discussions, it is possible to group those interactions into two broad categories: the use of key informants acquired through the development of close personal friendships, and the exploitation of opportunities for associating with students and other host nationals on a more casual basis. The use of key informants enabled the students to acquire unique and sometimes highly personal insights into not only the culture but also the individual informants. The singular value of data obtained from key informants is clearly illustrated by the kind of emic perspectives to which Melanie gained access vis-à-vis tribal relationships in Kenya. There are potential problems with the use of key informants as a way of learning about other cultures: As one woman learned in Taipei, reliance on a key informant can generate a biased perspective if that informant is not truly representative of the host culture. Developing close personal intimacy can also lessen the ethnographic value of key informants: Sharon was the most successful of the thirty students involved in this study in developing close personal friendships abroad; however, she ultimately became more preoccupied with the personal lives of her three associates than with their cultural backgrounds. In effect, she became more attached to them as friends than as key informants. It is noteworthy that the more detached

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relationships that Melanie and Jennifer had with their informants garnered more valuable cultural as opposed to personal insights. More casual acquaintances as well as routine interaction with strangers were also sources of information that the students tapped regularly. Conversations with fellow students introduced the American students to new vistas, ranging from the superficial (there is no single “British” accent) to the profound (language usage can give insight into native attitudes toward interpersonal relationships). As exemplified by the student who became interested in what the ambiguities of Japanese language reflected about the society in general, the value of conversation as a learning activity is directly dependent on the intellectual rigor and curiosity that are brought to bear on the process. Listening to the opinions of host nationals is enlightening to an extent; intelligent probing can open doors into entirely new chambers of thought and perception. While students like Sharon and Lauren were deeply affected by their respective relationships with newly acquired friends, the more detached approach taken by Melanie and Richard produced a richer harvest of cultural insights. In developing a taxonomy of out-of-class learning activities, it was apparent from the interview data that personal interaction with host nationals is the second of three major categories under which those activities and experiences can be subsumed. The value of the activity varied according to the students’ ability to maintain a detached investigative role, to recognize and compensate for the limits of generalizability, and to begin developing a new frame of reference by seeing empirical phenomena through the eyes of their informants. In chapter 3 the students discussed participant observation as the first of three major categories of learning activity outside the classroom; in chapter 5 they will present their views of travel as a complement to the more formal academic aspects of education abroad.

5

Travel as a Way of Learning about Cultural Differences

Students returning from education abroad programs inevitably cite travel as one of the major learning activities of which they were able to take advantage while overseas. This has been true of returning Penn State students generally (travel has traditionally been one of the frequently cited benefits on postprogram questionnaires), and the Study Abroad Evaluation Project (see chapter 1) found this to be equally true in the responses to open-ended questions on its survey instrument. In discussing their out-of-class experiences, the informants interviewed for this study did not give nearly as much attention to travel as they did to activities that fall under the categories of participant observation and personal interaction. They nevertheless followed the standard trend in insisting that travel constituted a separate though less significant category of out-of-class learning activity. In developing a taxonomy of such activities as seen through the eyes of the students, the interview data led to the conclusion that travel is a third but less consequential category under which those activities should be subsumed. The students’ travel experiences can be aggregated into two general subcategories: travel that had a specific learning objective, and travel that had no particular objective but that generated fortuitous educational benefits in the judgment of the informants. The first section of this chapter presents the students’ views of directed travel, and the second section deals with their perception of the more serendipitous aspects of travel as a learning activity.

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DIRECTED TRAVEL Field trips are obviously a form of directed travel; they enable students to make direct physical contact with the material that is being dealt with on a more abstract level in the classroom and as such constitute an academically recognized learning activity. In speaking of field trips, one of the informants from the Rome program insisted that she “learned a lot more that way by seeing things in their context”—a typical and expected assessment of the role of field trips in any course. However, field trips are course-related and are therefore an integral part of the academic program. Independent travel (i.e., travel that the students arranged for themselves that had nothing directly to do with the formal program) also contributed on occasion to the fulfillment of specific objectives, even when those objectives were tangential to the travel itself. One of the art history majors in Rome exemplifies the kind of initiative that several of the informants exercised when they engaged in travel that was meant to be more than leisurely sightseeing. As she pointed out, “I spent a lot of time at the museums and the sites on my own” in order to supplement what she was learning in her formal course work. It was not limited to the immediate vicinity of the program; she continued her discussion of travel by stating that “I traveled for a month afterwards, after the semester was over. And that’s where I started off in every city—in the museums. That was enormously helpful to my major.” By virtue of her academic major, this particular student had an obvious personal motivation to visit museums and other artistic sites. The fact remains, however, that regardless of the motivation, she felt that those visits contributed directly to the enhancement of her learning—not necessarily about contemporary aspects of the host culture or even about cultural differences in general, but certainly about the culture’s artistic heritage. Another of the art history majors spoke of Italy in general, and specifically of Rome, with almost religious awe: “Being an art history major, it was like Mecca. I mean, you go to Rome for the Renaissance studies. That’s where it all started in the 1500s, the 1600s. So it was a big deal for me.” Traveling around Rome and Italy made it possible for these students to give a concrete frame of reference to their abstract backgrounds in art history. An art major captured the significance of direct exposure to the artifacts themselves when she commented that “I’ve taken art history classes and I’ve seen these works of art on slides. But I had no idea how huge, how monstrous some of these works are.” One of the architectural engineering majors in Leeds reinforced this assessment with the observation that “it’s just different seeing it, you know, actually being there in person, than just looking at a picture.” Having now had the benefit of such direct exposure, the art major went on to lament that “I look at slides now in my art history classes and it brings tears to my eyes.”

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Another student articulated an equally enlightening but opposite kind of impression when speaking about direct exposure to original works of art. In discussing travel that took her beyond the confines of Nice where she was enrolled in the Institut Universitaire de Technologie, she mentioned that in Paris she had seen the Mona Lisa but that “it was a little, how do you say—I was not happy with it. I was a little disappointed with her. I mean, I was expecting a wall. I turned around and looked, and everybody was looking at this little—I mean, it was no bigger than this. And I’m like: ‘Leonardo, what have you done!’” She had certainly learned something about the original work of art, even though it was a deflating rather than an uplifting experience. In Cairo, Daniel made a special effort to supplement his understanding of Islamic culture by traveling around as much as possible to the various historic sites as well as the contemporary centers of Islamic culture. In his words, “I tried to go out and visit as many of the Islamic monuments that are in Cairo—the mosques, the various Islamic schools that were there.” He planned much of his travel around the specific objective of learning more about modern Islamic thought and perspectives. One of the students in Osaka spoke of a similarly directed approach to travel when he described the visit that he and several others made to the Peace Park in Hiroshima: It was like us and maybe three other foreigners and just a lot of Japanese. It was an interesting situation, because you’re sitting there and these people are like, “This happened to us!” The American viewpoint was like, “Wow, we did this to somebody!” I was very sensitive while I was going through there . . . because you stand out instantly. But there wasn’t hostility there, even though we caused this mass destruction. I was expecting someone to come up and say, “Oh, you did this. You Americans, you’re horrible and nasty.” But it didn’t happen.

By traveling to and visiting specific points of interest, both these students were using the occasion in support of their efforts to gain insight into the contemporary attitudes of the host nationals. The students’ individual interests and personal backgrounds dictated not only their choices of places to visit but also how they viewed those places. Penn State’s exchange with the University of Leeds includes a fall semester component that is specifically designed to accommodate architectural engineering majors. Participants spend the fall semester (Leeds’s first term) in courses that have been especially identified in the Leeds curriculum to help fulfill their engineering degree requirements. One of the architectural engineering majors who went to Leeds to take courses in her professional discipline introduced an interesting perspective into her discussion of the sites she visited while traveling before the commencement of her formal academic program:

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We went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower and we were looking at what it was made of, seeing whether they used rivets or bolts and things like that. We were amazed that it was supposed to be a temporary structure and that they were actually going to take it down, which they didn’t end up doing.

This sort of attention to the structural features of various monuments and historic sites provided a unique frame of reference as well as a clearly defined objective in determining what the architectural engineering students saw as they traveled about Europe. These examples of directed travel illustrate how the students occasionally tried to enhance their substantive knowledge in particular academic areas. In few cases did the students cite directed travel as a way of complementing their efforts to develop an appreciation for cultural differences. Ethnographic methodology and experiential learning appear to have had a minimal role in this kind of learning activity. While directed travel contributed to specific aspects of the students’ academic development, the informants spoke at greater length and often more eloquently about less tangible and more fortuitous contributions that travel afforded in the domain of out-of-class learning activities. As one would expect, they invariably took advantage of being abroad to satisfy an interest in sightseeing. And although many of their excursions were motivated more by a sense of wanderlust than by any clearly defined educational objective, they became convinced in retrospect that travel could be a valuable way not only to provide a concrete supplement to their academic course work but also to enhance their learning about cultural differences as well as about themselves and their native culture. SERENDIPITOUS TRAVEL As they reflected on their travel experiences, the informants began to catalog examples of how their travel contributed in unexpected ways to the enrichment of their perspectives and the broadening of their horizons. While they did not always set out with a particular objective in mind, they often found that the travel experience ultimately promoted a greater appreciation of linguistic differences, made them more palpably aware of differences among nations and cultures, and occasionally stimulated emotional reactions that made them more acutely conscious of the difficulties inherent in cross-cultural contacts. Linguistic Awareness In the United States one can travel for thousands of miles without ever hearing a different language spoken. For many of the informants the education-abroad experience was the first time they had ever been im-

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mersed in a non-English speaking environment. Having to cope with a second language was a naturally disorienting task. For individuals with such limited linguistic exposure, it was both disorienting and enlightening to discover that for many others in the world, interaction with groups speaking totally different languages is a routine occurrence. Daniel alluded to this when he discussed the American tendency toward isolation from the rest of the world because of its linguistic homogeneity within very clearly defined geographic boundaries. “While I’m here in the States and dealing with other Americans,” he observed, “you can really see the isolation we have. We don’t have to speak other languages. We can travel for days and days and days going west and still not encounter anything that’s radically different.” The preponderance of other languages, along with the informants’ own limited linguistic competence, produced occasions when the students either saw themselves as especially disadvantaged or saw their foreign counterparts as especially blessed. Upon returning to the United States, one of the students took a critical view of Americans in general when she said that for the most part they are “less, I don’t want to say less educated, but it seemed to me that there are more Europeans who spoke more than one language. I don’t know if it’s because Europe has all these little countries close together and they have more interaction with other cultures, other languages, or they just seem more tolerant of other people, other Europeans.” Another of the informants observed, “It was amazing how many other people spoke English, how many foreigners. Whereas we were stumbling with our poor Italian. I was almost embarrassed.” This heightened awareness of linguistic differences occasionally reflected a degree of naïveté on the part of individuals who seemed to believe that they could travel from one country to another without encountering difficulties with communication. After expending the effort to develop sufficient fluency to communicate with her hosts in French and thus presumably to gain an appreciation for the difficulties inherent in communicating across linguistic boundaries, one of the Nice students was nevertheless astounded to find how difficult it was to communicate during a visit to Greece. In recounting that visit she made the comment, “You couldn’t communicate, because their language is so different.” Even the Puerto Rican student, who was already fluent in two languages and competent in a third, was struck by the language barrier in Greece: In reflecting on a confrontation she had with a hotel clerk in Athens, she commented that “it was funny, because we could not communicate with her. I mean, we could not talk. She was just making signs.” Having had little or no prior contact with foreign languages except in a formal classroom setting, the students had no concrete basis for judging the significance of language in defining differences among nations and cultures. One of the benefits derived from travel abroad was the exposure to

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multiple linguistic differences in a small geographic area. The impact of those experiential encounters contributed to the students’ appreciation of linguistic diversity in a way that no statistical table of the world’s languages could possibly achieve. The encounters thus became another form of decisive intervention (Spindler 1974, 450) in helping them develop a new cognitive frame of reference from which to view cross-cultural contacts. Awareness of Differences In addition to bringing them into contact with languages other than the one spoken in their host country, travel also exposed the students to observable differences among various countries other than the one in which they were studying. Having already experienced the shock of being immersed in a social or cultural milieu different from the one in which they were raised, they were now able to observe firsthand the fact that customs, like languages, can differ considerably in a relatively small geographic area. While the differences may have been superficial in purely cultural terms, and while the bases of those differences may not have become evident to the students, the informants became acutely conscious of the fact that differences did exist. Among those who studied and traveled in Europe, for example, the informants noticed differences they interpreted as resulting from temperamental differences between those of the Germanic north and those of the Mediterranean south. In speaking of visits to Paris and Bonn, one student who had spent a semester in Rome observed: Paris was really very much like New York. I saw the most amount of street people in Paris, living in subways and stuff: It was a very urban city. Bonn was a very sophisticated city: It seemed like everything was just on track and in order. There was no chaos like there is in Italy. Everyone parked correctly. They’re just amazing in their ability to be organized.

Another of the Rome informants drew a similar contrast between the Germanic and Mediterranean temperaments: The first place I went after Italy was Austria. And everything was just so quiet and calm. We were walking to a place to get dinner one night (it was our first night there, in fact), and there were no cars on the streets or anything, and yet people were standing at the corners waiting for the signals to change just to cross the street. That just struck me as odd, especially after Italy.

She continued her line of thought by reiterating that “in the north everything seemed calm, while in the south everything seemed more hectic.” This sort of analysis of temperamental differences based on overt behavior echoes a fourth Rome student, who made the kind of observation

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that has become almost universal for anyone who has ever been to Italy: “It’s interesting to see the way Italians react as opposed to the way Americans react. Like here, you know, you hit a car and you pull out your owner’s card and your license and take down the numbers, and there they’re like screaming their heads off and hitting each other.” This penchant for comparing Italians to other European nationalities was not limited to those who had studied in Italy. To illustrate her argument that travel had the serendipitous effect of introducing students to temperamental differences among nations, one of the Nice informants, based on her visits to Italy, suggested that “the Italians in a way are just totally the opposite of the French. I mean, they’re so warm, so rambunctious. Like the kids there remind me more of American kids than the French do. They’re more into the fun aspect of life, whereas the French are more—they’re more serious people.” Not all the comparisons across national boundaries were without a judgmental element. After spending a significant portion of her semester in Rome, one student became sufficiently attached to her temporary domicile to see it almost as a second home. She characterized her return from a visit to Yugoslavia as “like going home again. It was like going from Italy to home, because I remember I was so glad to see the Italian coastline and I was so glad to go to the store and speak Italian and they were so friendly. I felt like it was my second home.” Her impressions of Yugoslavia suffered by comparison: Yugoslavia was just really dirty. I remember walking to the ferry and there was sewage pumping into the river. It was like, what’s that smell? And I looked and there was toilet paper floating in the river. People were dirty. The food was dirty. The open markets were really dirty. I really appreciated seeing Italy after that.

Awareness of difference did not necessarily lead to understanding nor did it always facilitate behavioral adaptation. As an example, one of the students who spent the semester in Israel spoke of her disorientation when traveling in other parts of the Middle East. She insisted that she never encountered a situation in Israel that left her at a loss in terms of how to respond. That was not the case in Turkey and Egypt. As a specific example, she cited her interaction with Arab shopkeepers in the Istanbul bazaar. She was puzzled by their insistence on drawing her into their shops and offering her tea. Even when she made it clear that she was not interested in buying anything, they would still serve her tea and insist on talking to her. She was naturally suspicious of their intentions, as illustrated by her comment that “it was a little hard to discern whether they were really expecting you to buy something or whether they were honestly being hospitable or just being friendly toward American tourists.” Her quandary over how to interact with the Arab shopkeepers is reminiscent of Daniel’s initial contact with the shopkeepers in Cairo. As noted

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in chapter 3, he had great difficulty adjusting to the absence of fixed prices and the constant need to bargain for his purchases. Based on a period of enforced participant observation where he simply had to learn how to cope with the vendors, he was able to conclude that making a purchase in the bazaar was as much a social event as a business transaction. As he noted, “Everything is about human contact when you are bargaining in Cairo.” In terms of Kolb’s experiential learning model, Daniel’s protracted contact with Arab vendors eventually generated a period of reflective observation after which he was able to generalize about the way Arabs relate to their fellow human beings. Without the benefit of such an extended period of interaction, the Tel Aviv participant was unable during her visit to Turkey to gain any real insight into what was going on when the shopkeepers insisted on serving her tea and conversing with her. While they may have indeed been attempting to beguile her into making a purchase, she was unable to get beyond that and fathom the more profound cultural bases of human interaction among the Arabs whom she met while traveling on her own.

Brief Encounters with Difference As suggested by the Rome informant who visited Yugoslavia, some of the chance encounters associated with travel resulted in emotional and psychological reactions that were a direct product of the students’ disorientation and lack of familiarity with either the language or the milieu. Such reactions further heightened the travelers’ awareness of significant differences between their own sociocultural background and the situations in which they found themselves. The Preface describes one such incident: None of the three students involved is able even now to explain fully what happened the evening they were invited into the home of their fellow train passenger in Taiwan. Other trips described by the informants illustrate further the kind of trauma they experienced as an emphatic lesson in differences among nations and cultures. Three of the Nice informants gave a vivid account of the affective impact a travel experience can have. Halfway through their semester abroad, these three students, while visiting Germany, decided on a whim that they wanted to see another country while they still had a few days left on their midsemester break. Their first choice was the Netherlands, but all the trains from Bonn to Amsterdam were full, so they simply took the next available train—which happened to be going to Prague. The group traveling together included Sharon, whom we met in chapter 4 when she discussed her personal relationships with two French students and a Corsican. In reminiscing about the trip to Czechoslovakia, she suggested that the experience had a surreal quality from the very beginning when they changed trains at the Czechoslovakian border:

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This train was weird. It was blue and white and it was very, very dirty on the outside. And the conductors were mean. I had at least two bags and they just threw my bags on the train. They were speaking their language and I didn’t understand what was going on, and that’s the thing that really frightened me. With the romance languages I could kind of figure out what they were saying, because I knew Italian, and I knew French, and Spanish and Italian are very close, so I could kind of decipher what was being said in those languages. But this—I couldn’t make out anything!

The linguistic difficulties created further problems when they disembarked at what apparently was the end of the line for the train they were on. Instead of emerging in downtown Prague as they had expected, they found themselves in a suburb from which it was necessary to make a connection into the city. All the signs were in Czech, of course, making it impossible for them to read directions. Sharon recounted that “we were walking around aimlessly, and there was no one there who spoke English. We walked around for what seemed like hours trying to find our way downtown.” When they finally managed to figure out the commuter system, make their way into the city, and locate a hotel for the night, they turned their attention to the city itself. Wandering through the streets of Prague left indelible impressions that only direct physical contact can create. As one of the three pointed out, “You can read about things like that, but when you’re there, it’s a different story.” As an example, he had heard about the scarcity of consumer goods, but he found that he was not really prepared for walking into a store and finding that “there’s not a whole lot on the shelves. They may have thirty watches in a store, and that’s about it. Maybe a couple of glasses on the shelf, and that’s kind-of their whole business.” Sharon was more impressionistic in her recollection of what it was like in Prague: There must have been a million people. As we would walk, we would bump into people. And they were very quiet: No one said anything. All you heard was the shuffling of feet. And I’m like, “Where am I?” I was so scared. No one smiled. I didn’t hear anyone talking. All I heard was feet. And I thought, “Where are we? Are we in the Twilight Zone?”

She continued with the observation that “the people were just very sad. They walked around like robots. Even when we went into restaurants, we hardly heard people speak. I couldn’t understand it.” Two students who visited Greece also spoke about the shock of encountering something totally unexpected. As already discussed under the section on linguistic awareness, the students were taken aback to discover how difficult it was to communicate. They seemed to think that their background and experience in a second language would have prepared them to cope more effectively with another language. A few days in Greece

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dispelled those illusions and made them more fully conscious of language diversity and of the limits to communication among the world’s peoples. The students who visited Greece were also disillusioned by their perception of the quality of life. As one of the students said in the context of her discussion about Greece but which she generalized to include other places visited, “I just didn’t expect to see everything underdeveloped. You know, I guess coming from America, I just expected everything to be as developed as we are. And that was wherever I went, basically.” This same student spoke of her surprise at the amount of poverty she discovered in places like Xylocastro, the small village in which they spent several days; she speculated that it was more like what she would have expected to see in a Third World country. Another of those who visited Greece was equally disillusioned by her experiences in Athens. She made the critical observation that, while she enjoyed seeing the Acropolis and the Parthenon, Athens itself “is filthy.” Based on a perturbing experience that she had on a train in Greece, this same student went on to say, “You know, they’re the ones who were the basis of our civilization, and I don’t see how they could have done it because they’re going backwards. I wasn’t expecting something modern, but I mean, somebody getting off a train with a flashlight to see if another train’s coming, it was totally, totally—oh, God!” The students’ psychological and emotional reactions, even when articulated from the comfortable distance of several months and thousands of miles, illustrate the intensity of the emotion generated by an encounter with the strange and the unfamiliar. While the experiences may have been unpleasant at times, they certainly impressed on the travelers the fact that significant differences do exist, even within rather limited geographical areas.

SUMMARY The informants agreed that travel constituted a distinct category of out-of-class activity that enhanced their learning while abroad. It was nevertheless obvious from the amount of attention they gave to this activity and the nature of the experiences described that it did not have as profound an impact as either participant observation or personal interaction. They spent much less time discussing their travel experiences, and while some of those experiences had an emotional impact on the travelers, the experiences were more superficial in terms of the insights they afforded. The brevity of the encounters made it impossible for the students to employ the ethnographic discovery techniques discussed in chapters 3 and 4. As a result, they were able to collect little in the way of empirical data on which to reflect in terms of experiential learning. As noted in the contrast between the Tel Aviv student’s brief interaction with Arab vendors and

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Daniel’s more protracted period of participant observation, a brief encounter can make the traveler aware of differences but fall short of providing a substantive context for reflective observation—the second step in Kolb’s experiential learning model. While a simple awareness of differences can be of value in itself, it also has the inherent risk of reinforcing the idea that national and cultural identities have stereotypical bases. Those who contrasted the Germanic north with the Mediterranean south had become aware of the fact that temperamental differences exist, but they tended on the basis of their brief encounters to generalize their perception of those differences into broad characterizations. It is not unusual to hear comments to the effect that the French are more serious than the Italians, or that life in northern Europe is more orderly and organized than in the chaotic south, or that the Arabs are more devious than the Israelis in the ways they interact with others. The students ran the same risk of overgeneralization that students in chapters 3 and 4 encountered when they had limited data from which to draw inferences. The most beneficial aspect of travel appears to have been as a form of decisive intervention in promoting the development of a new frame of reference from which to view cross-cultural contacts. The students came away from their travel encounters with a heightened awareness of concrete and often significant differences among nations and cultures. The psychological impact of direct confrontation with such differences provided a perspective that textbooks and classroom lectures could only suggest. Having had an opportunity to expound at length about their experiences abroad, the informants found it difficult at times to separate process from outcomes. They inevitably speculated at some length about what they had gained from their out-of-class activities. In the next chapter, the informants will present some of their perspectives on what they gained from the semester or year abroad.


6

Student Perceptions of Primary Outcomes

In discussing the role of out-of-class experiences as a complement to the overall learning process abroad, the informants for this study found it necessary to consider not only what they did outside the frame of the formal academic program but also what they perceived to be the educational benefits of those activities. While this study’s focus is on the learning process (i.e., what the students did to enhance their learning), no discussion of process can be totally divorced from a consideration of outcomes. Based on the interview data gleaned from the thirty informants who participated in this study, students’ perceptions of outcomes associated with out-of-class experiences can be aggregated into three general categories: personal development, perspectives on themselves and on the United States, and the experience of what it is like to be different. This chapter will present and discuss the students’ views in these three general areas.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT Impact studies of educational outcomes have traditionally focused on several specific dimensions of personal development, including autonomy, independence, self-confidence, and tolerance of ambiguity, to name just a few. The informants’ discussion of educational benefits clearly included these and other abstract qualities among the personal areas of development they associated with their out-of-class experiences.

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Independence and Self-Reliance Getting around in a strange country can be extremely intimidating and a test of one’s ability to function independently. In speaking of the educational benefits of spending a semester abroad, one of the architectural engineering students who went to Leeds said, “I learned how to deal with being away from home and being away from my friends and starting over again. I think I’ll be able to cope a lot better now because I know how to just get readjusted.” She went on to say, “I think I gained a lot of independence while I was over there. Now I’m much more apt to just get up and go, and I won’t hesitate to do something by myself.” An Osaka informant expressed a similar sentiment when she reflected, “I have more independence, just from realizing that I could pick up and live in another country for a year and travel by myself.” And after a period of postprogram travel through Europe, one of the students returning from Nice observed that “when I came back, I was really a lot more self-confident. You know, ‘I have been to Europe and I have just gotten done travelling two and a half weeks by myself—just a backpack and me and a train pass.’ And that was it. And I did it!” Much of the discussion about independence and self-reliance centered on the benefits of travel, in particular. Sharon, for example, spoke about the challenge of making her way around Europe with its diverse languages and customs, of finding hotels and train connections, of exchanging currency, and so forth. She looked upon travel as basically an exercise in self-reliance. Others echoed this perception of the personal benefits associated with travel. One of those from Rome asserted, “I learned a lot of tolerance and a lot of patience and independence and sticking up for myself.” An Osaka informant observed that “when you’re traveling, you’re sort of on your own, or just you and your friends, so you’re free to make your own decisions, but you’re also responsible for yourself.” He expanded on that observation by continuing, “When I traveled a lot of times, it would be just me and one other American student on our own—just basically taking responsibility for ourselves. So that was a big learning experience, helping me to be more assertive and more independent and responsible.” Another of the Rome students spoke at some length about the value of making her own way to London to visit a friend. As she said, “It was nice because it was like the first time I didn’t have my parents doing that for me.” She went on to point out, “Here I was in another country and I did it myself and I got to another different country. I was very proud of myself when I got back—that I did it all myself. I got myself to the airport, told the taxi driver who didn’t speak a word of English where I wanted to go. It just made me feel more confident.” This sense of having achieved something personally significant was implicit in much of the informants’ discussion about their experiences abroad. They took great pride in the sense of having dealt with formidable

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situations by themselves. For many of them, attending college was in itself a first step in the maturation process of severing their dependence on the familiar and the secure; participating in education abroad contributed even further to that process by posing an unprecedented challenge that could ultimately lead to the sentiment expressed by the Osaka student who said, “I have more independence, just from realizing that I could pick up and live in another country for a year.” As Michael Moffatt stated in his ethnographic study of student life at Rutgers University (Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, 1989), undergraduates see college as a holistic enterprise that contributes as much to their maturation as to their formal education. Like the students with whom Moffatt interacted in completing his research, the informants who participated in this study felt that independence and self-reliance were among the more significant outcomes of their educational experience. Education abroad separated the students not only from the authority figures represented by their parents but also from the very culture in which they were raised. This challenged their coping abilities to an even greater extent than simply going away to school. One of those who spent the semester in Taiwan captured the heady quality of that experience by pointing out that on return to the United States, “things just seem so boring. Like I know what to expect. Whereas there, everything was an adventure.”

Tolerance and Acceptance In addition to developing independence and self-reliance as a result of their out-of-class experiences, the informants also spoke about a heightened sense of tolerance and acceptance of others as well as for difficult and unusual situations. They generally felt that they had developed the ability to be more tolerant of differences. Mere contact with representatives of another nation or culture is no guarantee that tolerance of another weltanschauung will materialize. As Dean Barnlund pointed out in his treatise on public and private self in Japan, “A greater exchange of people between nations, needed as that may be, carries with it no guarantee of increased cultural empathy” (1975, 5). No attempt was made to measure the extent to which the informants for this study acquired empathy for their host cultures; however, the students insisted during the interviews that they had become more tolerant and accepting of the cultural differences they encountered. One of those who had returned from Nice put it succinctly when she commented, “I learned to be more accepting of different kinds of people.” In discussing how this kind of acceptance emerged, the informants gave insight into the process that carried them beyond mere contact to a more intimate relationship with the host culture. As an example, one of the Nice

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participants alluded to the frequent discussions and conversations that took place among the students in the dormitories. As pointed out in chapter 4, they often congregated to discuss a variety of topics, including political issues that involved differences between France and the United States. As this student suggested, those discussions “kind-of made me more openminded. I mean, I’m not the type of person who if somebody says something, I’m not necessarily going to believe it, but it did make me think, you know, ‘Is this true?’ or ‘Why are they saying these things?’ ” This same student went on later to say that as a general result of the semester abroad, one of the basic changes in her own temperament was “tolerance of people in general, of differences in people. I can tolerate a lot more than I could before I left.” An important corollary of studying abroad was the input received from those with whom the students interacted on a direct personal basis. That input provided them with insights that mere contact with another culture might have lacked. As a form of decisive intervention (Spindler 1974, 450), native informants reduced the risk to which Barnlund alluded by providing an insider’s perspective that helped promote tolerance and acceptance of differences. The Nice student was not alone in having developed an increased degree of appreciation for differences. One of the Rome informants expressed a similar consciousness of a basic change in her outlook on others: I’m different. It’s funny, because people ask me that, and I don’t exactly know how. People say maybe I’m more independent, but I’ve always been pretty independent. I can pretty much take care of myself and do things I want to do. I find myself more accepting of other people. I’ve always thought I was accepting of other people, but I think I’m more so now.

Kimberly was the only informant who spoke specifically about the development of anything approaching a biased perspective on another group of people. Based on the barrage of Israeli news reports about Arab assaults on Israelis, she developed, not an animosity toward Arabs, but an uneasiness approaching fear when she was around them. She did not allow this to deter her from interacting with Arabs, but she was always wary and guarded in their presence. At one point during the interview she suggested that Israelis are actually racist in their treatment and portrayal of Arabs, but recognizing that her own sense of uneasiness around Arabs may have been a product of a biased image did not eliminate the nonrational anxiety that she always felt. With this exception, the informants who addressed the issue of tolerance were in agreement that they became more tolerant of other peoples as a result of their out-of-class contacts. An Osaka participant summed it up in reflecting on one of the positive outcomes that she attributed to her year in Japan. In response to a question about the primary benefits, she unhesitat-

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ingly said, “A more open mind. I’m more aware of cultural differences. And I hope that I’m more accepting of them.” They also suggested that this sense of tolerance extended to the setting in general as well as to those who populated the setting. As an example, they generally found that the foreign environment lacked many of the conveniences to which they had become accustomed in the United States. After an extended period of interaction with this new environment, they gradually became more tolerant of the lack of conveniences. Upon returning from Rome, one student was able to look more critically on what she perceived to be an American propensity to depend on modern appliances. As she scoffed, “Look at the silly conveniences that we are used to that are no big deal. Things are just too easy for us. It was silly for people to complain because they didn’t have a washer and dryer. So you stamp on your clothing in the bathtub and you hang it out to dry. It was no big deal.” Kimberly also made note of this American dependence on superfluous conveniences when she compared her experience as a student at Tel Aviv University to student life in the United States. She noted that when it came time to prepare papers, Israeli students had limited access not only to computers but even to typewriters, which they had to share. One of the first things to which she had to become accustomed in the dormitory was the lack of telephones. Technical support devices were simply not as readily available to the typical Israeli student as they are to American students in the United States. As a result of these deprivations, the students found themselves developing both a tolerance for scarcity and a heightened sense of appreciation for what was available when they got back to their homeland. One student expressed that sensibility when she said, “I feel like I appreciate the things that we have. We are lucky. The little things that we can—we have microwaves, for example. You can go to the store and buy TV dinners and throw them in the microwave. Italy doesn’t have those kinds of conveniences.” With this tolerance for other people and for inconvenience came a degree of patience that several of the students felt they did not possess before. After interacting with the Japanese over the course of an academic semester, one of those returning from Osaka stated that “with this new, I guess, aptitude for patience, I was able to deal with my compatriots much more effectively.” An informant returning from Rome was disconcerted to find in her roommate a mirror of what she had been before the semester abroad: “My friend, my roommate, she’s very impatient, and I look at her and I can see myself the way I was before. It really annoys me.” This same student summarized her new-found tolerance and patience by describing an entirely new perspective toward the vicissitudes of life: “If you miss an appointment, so what? If you miss a train, so what? If you miss a car ride, a bus ride, whatever. I just got a very, like, laid-back attitude. And if something goes wrong, then, fine, you’ll deal with it.”

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In discussing the benefits and outcomes of their out-of-class experiences abroad, the informants generally credited those experiences with contributing to their personal development in a variety of ways. Patience, tolerance, open-mindedness, acceptance—all are words the informants used in describing personal qualities they felt had been enhanced by their experiences abroad. They also felt that the experiences provided other benefits of an equally subjective nature. CHANGING PERSPECTIVES The second of the three categories encompassing the informants’ assessment of outcomes associated with out-of-class experiences is the effect those experiences had on their perspectives with regard both to their homeland and to their own personal identities. Education is a process of change, and change is ultimately the product of critically examined assumptions. Each student selected for study abroad leaves the security of a familiar body of assumptions, beliefs, and points of view. Exposure to another way of life challenges that body of socially and culturally defined perspectives. As noted in chapter 1, this challenge leads to a transitional stage of relativism in the students’ personal development. As a necessary step toward what Bennett characterizes as constructive marginality (1986, 61), this relativism plays a significant role in the students’ personal development in a multicultural world. In the following pages the students discuss some of the impacts that they felt their experiential learning had on their perspectives, specifically in terms of their views of the United States and their perspectives on themselves and their compatriots. Perspectives on the United States For many students who enroll in programs abroad, including the majority of the informants who participated in this study, the semester at an overseas institution is their first time out of the United States. While their American way of life may have occasionally been challenged on the conceptual level, this is often their first experiential exposure to another way of life and another way of looking at life in the United States. Personal interaction and participant observation enable them to see things quite differently. In the words of one of the Nice informants, “I can see my country more clearly now. I can look at America more objectively.” With this clearer sense of objectivity, that same student went on to say, “I see more of the faults that I never realized when I lived here. But I am also more patriotic. I see what’s wrong with it, but I’m happier to be an American.” Greater objectivity often leads to this kind of critical assessment of familiar territory. Several of the informants cited awareness of America’s

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faults among the new perspectives they gained. In many cases, their awareness of those perceived faults was the result of personal interaction, primarily in the form of conversations and discussions with their fellow students at the host institution. Based on conversations with her French counterparts in the dormitory, one of the Nice students became highly critical of the social programs in her homeland: We let our people starve and stuff like that. Some people are sick and can’t get proper health care. And they knew that, the French people knew those things. Whereas it would never happen over there. I mean, they do have poverty, but it’s in no way like it is here.

This same critical attitude characterized comments made by several of the other informants who discussed what they felt was a more objective perspective on the United States as a result of their experiences abroad. Another of the Nice students spoke about the homeless and the socially disadvantaged in the United States, commenting, “I was conscious of them, I knew that they existed, but they just became more magnified. The French system tries to take care of those people more than our system. It just opens your eyes more to those situations.” This same student spoke critically about the level of violence in the United States as contrasted with what she was led to believe about violence in Europe: The murder rate in Washington, D.C. is 1.7 the last I heard—per day. Per day! They just don’t have that—people aren’t that violent in Europe. It’s just not that bad. We’re so used to hearing about people being murdered that we don’t even think about it.

This sense of having acquired a more critical perspective on the United States was not limited to those who had studied in France. The woman who spent the fall semester in Egypt took an equally critical view of her homeland from the perspective of a future journalist. Based on what she claimed to be her own direct exposure to the news media in Cairo, she came to the conclusion that much of the information was actually being controlled by the Western press: The West, and America mainly, dominate the world’s media system. There’s all this talk about starting a new world order and we want to have a global community and like one little village connected by media—electronic media and everything. It’s kind of scary to me, because it’s not an equal world order that people are even striving for. It’s a U.S.-dominated information flow. I guess it’s because we have money and we have technology.

Melanie exemplifies another kind of changed perspective on the United States, based on her interaction with students in a Third World country. In

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commenting on U.S. foreign policy she said, “Here I always thought, well we’re doing what’s best for them. But when I saw it from the other side, I realized that what we thought will work over there is not necessarily going to work and is not necessarily what the people want, even if it would work.” As an example, she cited an incident when the United States provided one of the African countries with corn to help deal with a famine—a well-intentioned and humane act. According to Melanie, however, the people in that country eat white corn; we provided them with yellow corn, which they normally feed to the animals. They were offended to think that we were sending them animal feed to cope with their human famine. Cultural context and personal background obviously affected the nature of the students’ critical assessments: Melanie’s reference to famine relief came in the context of a Third World country, and the Cairo student’s attack on Western control of the media reflected her professional interest in journalism. Individual experiences will naturally vary from one location to another. However, the general outcome of those various individual experiences was a tendency among the students to begin to question the basic assumptions they had taken along to their study abroad location, wherever that was. This helped generate the transitional stage that is an integral part of Bennett’s developmental model of cross-cultural learning. The informants frequently qualified their critical judgments of the United States by suggesting that they had not lost anything in terms of patriotism or national pride, but that they had gained something in the way of a heightened awareness and level of critical objectivity. One of the students returning from Australia made this point when he observed that while he is now more critical of his country’s basic assumptions, he is no less patriotic. And the Nice student who so roundly criticized the shortfalls of the American social welfare system nevertheless concluded by saying, “I think America’s the greatest country, but not in the same way any more. Not that America’s more efficient, America’s more this, America’s more that. It’s just—yeah, it has its faults, but I’m glad to be here; I wouldn’t want to live anyplace for the rest of my life except America.”

Perspectives on Individual Identity Education abroad challenges one’s basic assumptions not only about the extermal world around us but also about the inner world of one’s identity. Self-analysis and introspection are inevitable and desirable outcomes of any educational process. It is not unusual to hear students returning from an education abroad program make an occasional reference to such introspective products of their exposure to another way of life. As stated by one of those returning from the Middle East, “One of the most beneficial things was what I learned about myself.”

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Not all the informants were so explicit in their recognition of this effect: In many cases the sense of introspection was implicit in their discussion about various perceptions of themselves and of others. Listening to a few of the informants describe both the direct and indirect impacts of some of their experiences will highlight their perceptions of how out-of-class contacts affected their personal perspectives. As noted in chapter 3, Sharon was the most successful of the thirty informants in developing close personal relationships with her counterparts abroad. Her interaction with her French and Corsican friends provided her with opportunities not only to study their identities but also to reflect on her own. Sharon’s own personal success had given her a positive and optimistic outlook along with the kind of self-confidence that was reflected in her statement that “I can do anything with the help of God and hard work.” Her upbeat attitude often inspired both admiration and wonder on the part of those with whom she interacted. “People call me crazy,” she reflected during the interview. “In a good sense, because I’m always laughing and smiling. They could not believe that I smiled so much and that I was happy so much. They asked me, ‘Why are you so happy? We’re never as happy as that.’ ” The question did not seem to be one that Sharon had ever really confronted before: She had no ready answer, and she seemed amused by the fact that her friends perceived her that way. While she did not speculate on the roots of her geniality, she noted again later in the interview that feedback from her personal interaction with the woman from Corsica stimulated a similar bemusement. “She said that I was a very interesting person.” Sharon was obviously taken aback by what had apparently become a common observation. “I said, ‘Why is this? I find a lot of people saying this to me.’ ” Her reaction suggests that she had never thought of herself as interesting or unusually happy. Her friends’ observations about her personality and their reactions to that personality had obviously led to a period of self-examination and self-awareness. There was no indication during the interview that Sharon’s blithesome and optimistic perspectives had in any way been undermined by the self-analysis—only that she was now more fully aware of some of the qualities that made her a unique individual. Another of the Americans who spent the fall semester in Nice was equally nonplussed at having a mirror held up to her congenial and outgoing personality by her French classmates. American students returning from an education abroad program frequently observe that their counterparts abroad are more reserved and withdrawn in their interpersonal relationships. This particular Nice student contrasted what she perceived to be the typical American demeanor with her perception of the French when she said, “We’re always friendly, even when we don’t feel like being friendly. It’s just our culture. We always have to smile.” She cited a concrete

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example that had a lasting impact on her own self-perception when she noted, “I’ll never forget when this one language teacher said, ‘Gee, you must really get tired of smiling all day.’ ” In the context of her own culture, she had never been conscious of having a permanent smile implanted on her face. Interaction with faculty and students in Nice made her conscious of what the French perceived to be a uniquely American style of personal interaction. While both these Nice informants encountered bewilderment with their easygoing friendliness and cheerfulness, there was a significant difference in the impact that ultimately had on the relationships with their French contacts. As suggested in the language teacher’s remark and the initial response Sharon encountered in her overtures to the French students in her dorm, there was an element of suspicion in the reaction of their French acquaintances—a sense that such sustained good humor had to be insincere. As a result of the intimacy that eventually developed between Sharon and her friends, that suspicion gradually waned on the part of her newly acquired friends, leaving them receptive to the kinds of personal feelings that they expressed in their farewells to Sharon. Many of the informants never developed that kind of intimacy in their relationships with French contacts and thus never got beyond what the language teacher saw as a facade. Phyllis and Ruth, both of whom spent the fall semester in Tel Aviv, offered another brief case study on how their experience abroad promoted a slightly different perspective on their sense of personal identity, in this case on what it means to be Jewish. Given their own Jewish backgrounds, they were both eager to contrast the Jewish identity of those with whom they interacted in Israel with what it was like to be a Jew from the United States. While they expressed their conclusions in different words, they were both struck by the more casual Israeli sense that being a Jew is a simple matter of course. Phyllis suggested that American Jews are more preoccupied with the outer trappings of being Jewish, while in Israel everyone simply takes their Jewish identity for granted. “People have kind-of accepted the fact that they’re Jewish in Israel,” she commented, “whereas in the United States people are still trying either to prove that they’re Jewish or to hide their Jewishness.” She observed that as an example, going to synagogue is not as important in Israel because being a Jew is an everyday fact of life that does not have to be reaffirmed by a particular religious observance. Ruth also alluded to this sense of Jewishness as an everyday fact of life in Israel, but in a slightly different way: It’s very hard for American Jews to accept the nationalist aspect of Judaism, like the idea that secular Israelis are more Jewish than religious American Jews by sheer virtue of the fact that they are living in Israel. There’s that argument that by living

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in Israel, you are living the most Jewish life that you can live, regardless of whether you consider yourself religious or not. That was kind of hard to come to terms with.

She went on to express the irony that she could be accepted as a Jew in Israel, but not on the basis of her religious affiliation. As she said, “I’m a reformed Jew. And reformed Judaism isn’t even recognized in Israel as a legitimate form of Judaism. So that was kind-of strange that the Israelis themselves, most of them completely secular, they would accept that I was Jewish, but the religious institution over there would not consider me Jewish.” Living and studying in a Third World country also had an impact on personal perspectives. After arriving in Nairobi, Melanie was struck by the fact that many of those with whom she interacted seemed to harbor the conviction that Americans in general are a bunch of bullies who force themselves on the rest of the world. As an American with a profound commitment to social justice and to volunteer work in support of Third World nations, she was taken aback by the realization that, because she was an American, she was included in a cultural stereotype that was opposite her own personal sense of identity. She had gained an appreciation for how such stereotypes can emerge: As she had noted earlier, even well-intentioned projects like contributing corn to famine relief might have unforeseen consequences that further reinforce negative stereotypes. But having already demonstrated her commitment to Third World development through her volunteer work with Teen Missions International in both Indonesia and Nepal, she liked to think of herself as an exception to the stereotype that Third World nations have of Americans. It had never occurred to her to question whether building a school in Sumatra or a garage and driveway in Kathmandu might be perceived differently by the recipients of the favor, depending on the donor’s degree of sensitivity to cultural norms. The informants discussed in this section offered examples of how their experiences abroad affected their attitudes and their identities in varying degrees. They all felt that they returned to the United States with a greater sense of self-awareness as well as a sense of having changed in ways that were not always explicable. While they all felt that they had successfully adjusted to being back in the American university milieu, they and a number of the other informants were aware upon returning to the United States that something had changed. In many cases, the change was so subtle that the informants either could not articulate it or could only describe the superficial trappings of that change. The vague and uncertain nature of this awareness is illustrated by one student’s description of his state of mind upon attending a university sporting event immediately after getting back from Europe:

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When I first got back, I spent the first three days kind-of looking at everybody, because they looked different. The first day I got back, I got back in the evening, the next day I went to a Penn State basketball game. It was over Christmas time and I came up with friends. And I remember just watching all the people more than the basketball game—just watching the people in the crowd. They looked so American: They had their baseball caps on and their jeans, and everybody looked a little bit more chubby, and everybody had their sweatshirts on, kind of acting cool and that type of thing.

Two other students described similar shocks during the early period of readjustment. One said, “I went to the market and I almost had a heart attack. Everyone was talking so loud! I held on to my boyfriend in the supermarket the whole time. Like, ‘Don’t leave me!’ Everybody was so huge. Everybody was fat and they were talking so loud.” A second student was equally intimidated by her return and made the same kind of reference to physical attributes as the most immediately apparent way of accounting for the sense of difference: “When I came back, just walking through the Pittsburgh airport, it was just like, ‘My God! Everyone’s just so fat.’ I don’t mean to sound rude, but people struck me as being just totally obese.” The informants found it difficult to be more direct or specific in identifying the substantive changes that had taken place in their personal identities. One student tried to provide a more concrete example with an interesting but still vague reference to a feeling that continued to haunt her, three months after her return: When I got back here—I just feel like it takes me so much longer to get involved with things, like to be a part of what is going on. When people were talking to me, like my comprehension was just so much slower. And even now, I can still feel myself trying to adjust to things going so quickly. Things just feel like they’re getting away from me sometimes. I just feel like I’m slower than when I left.

LEARNING TO BE DIFFERENT Perhaps one of the more significant by-products of the students’ out-ofclass contacts was an emergent sensitivity to being different, to being an outsider, to being in a distinctive minority—and a realization that in many cases, no amount of effort will ever overcome the basic reality of being different. Although informants from various sites spoke of the experience, either directly or indirectly, it was naturally more pronounced in countries like Japan and Taiwan, where the students were taken aback to find upon arrival that there was actually a separate semantic category for people like themselves.

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Gaijin or Waiguoren The Osaka and Taipei informants attempted to define this rather elusive concept (gaijin in Japan, waiguoren in Taiwan) as a category that clearly identified those who were not native to the host culture without necessarily disparaging them. In the words of one of the Taiwan informants, waiguoren “means literally outside-country person” in China. According to this student, the term had no negative connotations—it was simply a neutral observation of fact, although its casual application could often make the students self-conscious and uncomfortable. This same student noted, for example, that the Americans could be walking down the street and Chinese engaged in conversation would offhandedly observe, “Oh, a waiguoren,” and continue right on with their conversation as though it were nothing more than a passing subject of interest that had momentarily captured their attention. One of those from the Osaka program defined the concept of gaijin in a similar way when he pointed out that “people who are not Japanese are called gaijin—people from a foreign land. It’s not really derogatory but it implies outsider.” He continued his definition by saying that “they [the Japanese] have this cult of uniqueness, this thing that they tell themselves that they are completely different (and in a sense they are) from anybody else and in a sense superior to any and all other peoples.” As cultural anthropologists have noted, many human groups have terms to classify outsiders, often dismissing them as uncultured, uncivilized, or barbaric. While not all contemporary human groups have terms that are as overt in their reference to outsiders as gaijin or waiguoren, most groups still tend to think of themselves as in some way special and apart from the rest of the human race. Those who are not a part of that group will find themselves identified, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly, as being an outsider. Several of the informants discussed experiences that sensitized them to what it is like to be so identified.

Being a Gaijin Physical differences and the native reactions to those differences naturally reinforced the sense of being an outsider in Japan and Taiwan. The informants from those two groups spoke most frequently and at greatest length about the experience of being a foreigner. “Everywhere you go, you always stand out,” one student observed. “You’re always causing a commotion. If you go up to someone in a department store and ask for something, even if you ask in Japanese, sometimes they’ll just laugh and walk away, because they’re so shocked to hear Japanese coming out of you.” As noted in chapter 3, Barry encountered similar experiences at the Cellar Bar Kent, where customers were invariably taken aback to hear

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themselves addressed in Japanese by a tall, blonde-haired American. In alluding to a similar reaction to his use of the language, Richard captured the Japanese sense of uniqueness vis-à-vis the American gaijin with the following characterization: When you start showing them that you can write these characters and use them and so on, they’re always so amazed. They would say, “How can you do that? How can you remember all those characters?” And I would say, “Well, how do you do it?” And they’d say, “Well, ahhh, we’re Japanese.”

Cassandra, another student in Osaka, later spoke of the uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassing experience of being intentionally avoided on the public transportation systems. As a tall, attractive, American woman, she could be sitting next to an empty seat, which would remain conspicuously empty in spite of the crush of an overcrowded bus. “It was funny: I mean, there’d be a bus with people packed in, standing up, and no one would sit next to me.” Elizabeth related the same kind of experience: “Buses are always crowded in Japan, and trains and things like that. I was always told that if you get a seat, no one is going to sit next to you. And that was true a lot of the time. If I would get a seat on a bus and there was a seat right next to me, people would stand. They would stand rather than sit next to me.” Several others who studied in the Orient also alluded to this sense of physical conspicuousness and the self-consciousness that it generated. One student from Taiwan said, “At times it made us very uncomfortable, like people would stare. I had a friend, Denise, who went on this trip the year before us and she’s black. And she said people would ask if they could touch her hair.” Another of the Osaka informants spoke of the fascination demonstrated by children who had “never even seen a foreigner before, let alone two six-foot-five, blonde-haired giants. And so we just walked down the Peace Park and we must have been in like forty pictures.” And, as discussed in chapter 4, Matthew felt as if he were among Lilliputians, which led not only to his assumption of “big person mannerisms” but also to an ironic kind of self-confidence: That was something I had never really experienced before. Confidence in that, hey, I could basically do whatever I wanted to short of really breaking the law in a serious way and not get into trouble. People wouldn’t confront me about it because, one, I was a foreigner and I wasn’t expected to know any better, and two, who was going to question me? It was so strange being a complete Goliath!

Another of the Osaka informants was notably blunt in his assessment of Japanese reactions to their physical conspicuousness when speaking of his experiences with children. “Little school kids would come up and say, ‘Gaijin, Gaijin, Gaijin!’ It’s cute to see these little kids looking at you, but it

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gets annoying after a while, because you know they’re saying, ‘Oh, look at that freak.’ You know, that’s really what it says.” While it may have been more pronounced in the Orient because of the sheer physical differences, the experience of being different was not limited to those who participated in the Osaka and Taiwan programs. An informant who had studied in Australia commented that while visiting Fiji, he felt for the first time what it was like to really stick out in a crowd. “It is a really strange feeling,” he asserted, “to be in a bus that is jam-packed as full as you can possibly get it and you’re the only white face on the bus.” Lauren found the experience of being a minority in Cairo as fascinating and enlightening as she found the entire experience of being away from her provincial background. “It was kind of neat,” she said, “to be a white minority and get used to, like, this is not an all-white world—to go there and have most people be brown and a lot of people be black and just a few people be white.” Even one of the students in Rome found herself unable to blend in with the native population because of her physical appearance. As she said, “I felt like I had a spotlight on me all the time”—a feeling very similar to that expressed by the students in Japan and Taiwan. “I wanted so much to blend in and become a part of the culture. It was easier for my friends who had dark hair and dark skin than it was for me.” The students’ attempts to become integrated into the local milieu in spite of physical, linguistic, and cultural differences met with varying degrees of success. In some cases, the effort was facilitated simply by adopting a less touristic form of behavior, which could generate a significant change in the nature of personal interaction. In spite of the obvious physical differences between herself and the native Kenyans, Melanie found that “people were often too nice to me, like deferring to me and very, very polite. Once I got across that I was a student visiting Kenya, that I wasn’t a tourist, that I wasn’t quite as wealthy as a tourist, but that I was interested in what they had to say, they were very, very willing to talk to me.” But the pursuit of integration was frequently, if not usually, an exercise in frustration. The students in England and Australia had the fewest differences to cope with. Even in Tel Aviv one of the informants was able to say, “Basically, Israel is very Westernized, so I didn’t really encounter any huge cultural differences.” But as cultural, linguistic, and physical differences increased, integration became problematic. As noted earlier, those who had spent their semester in the Orient were most acutely aware of those differences and the extent to which they prevented true integration into the host society: In spite of conscious efforts to overcome the cultural and linguistic barriers, none of them seemed able to break through the cultural mystique. Quite the contrary, Barry’s experience at the Cellar Bar Kent is more typical of the frustration attendant upon those efforts. Another student even suggested that too serious an effort could be counterproduc-

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tive because of the confusion it could generate in terms of interpersonal relations: About the third week in Taiwan, I got really fed up with being so different. I decided that I was going to make a conscious effort to drop as many, if not all, American mannerisms that I could and adopt Chinese ones. I think I was fairly successful. I got down most of the Chinese responses for situations. But it actually backfired— my plan to become integrated. Because it really confused Chinese people. I’d say something that was really Chinese or I’d do something that was really Chinese, and they’d get uncomfortable.

According to one of the Osaka informants, a typical response to their sincere but often stumbling efforts at grasping cultural subtleties was, “Oh, you’ll never understand. You’re a foreigner.” To reiterate the resignation that Matthew expressed in chapter 3, “You can live in Japan for fifty years, and those little girls will still take pictures of you when you walk down the street. You will never ever become an insider.” SUMMARY In discussing their out-of-class activities and how those activities complemented the formal academic program, the informants who participated in this study inevitably found themselves discussing the benefits and outcomes they associated with those activities. The students’ perceived outcomes can be aggregated into three distinct categories: personal development, changes in perspective, and awareness of what it is like to be different. A number of the informants indicated that their experiences abroad helped them develop a higher level of tolerance for differences, a greater degree of patience with ambiguous and difficult circumstances, and a more profound sense of independence and self-reliance. They became more confident in their ability to strike out into the unknown without the immediate availability of parents, friends, or any other direct support network. In the words of one of the Nice informants, “We’ve learned how to be risk-takers.” In the process, they learned a great deal not only about the particular circumstances in which they had immersed themselves but also about their own ability to cope with highly unusual circumstances. The informants also discussed ways in which they felt the study-abroad experience had affected their perspectives on their homeland and on themselves. While they were able to cite a wide variety of specific incidents and effects, the general benefit that subsumes all their concrete experiences is the ability to see things more objectively. Whether engaging in discussions with their foreign counterparts about injustices inherent in the American social structure, or indulging in self-analysis precipitated by interaction with those who saw them in a different light, or coping with the disorien-

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tation attendant upon the familiar having become unfamiliar after a lengthy absence—the sense of increased objectivity was implicit in the informants’ discussions about the impact of education abroad on their preconceived assumptions. They did not necessarily change their perspectives, but they felt that they had at least examined those perspectives from a more objective point of view. These perceived outcomes are consistent with the various developmental models of learning discussed in chapter 1. Like undergraduates in general, students who go abroad find themselves in a transitional stage of development where new ideas and perspectives challenge the assumptions they have acquired as a result of their own enculturation. This leads to a higher level of maturity, as measured by their enhanced degree of independence and self-reliance. The cross-cultural context introduces an additional component in the process of challenging their perspectives: They must cope not only with separation from the authority of parents and the security of familiar social norms but also with separation from the culture that has given them the fundamental world view on which to base their behavior and beliefs. Through exposure to alien points of view and through the self-analysis that followed, the students found themselves challenged to reexamine their positions and their self-images, thus introducing the basis for the cultural relativism that Bennett postulates as a necessary step toward constructive marginality. The process that generated these outcomes was dependent to a great extent on the presence of what Spindler calls a decisive intervention in the interpretive process. Observation of differences provided the empirical data on which to reflect in terms of the experiential learning model. That reflective process frequently benefitted from the stimulation and input provided by personal interaction with representatives of the host culture. In exposing the students to challenging perspectives, participant observation and personal interaction introduced the kind of interpretive intervention that was indispensable to the learning process. Perhaps one of the more striking outcomes from the perspective of these informants was a heightened appreciation of what it means to be different. While participant observation, personal interaction, and travel all contributed to their growing catalogs of how other nations and cultures differ from their own, those activities also generated a self-reflective process that made them more conscious of the fact that, in the context of the foreign culture, they were the ones who were different. For most, it was the first experience of being in a distinctive minority. Discussions in the sanitized environment of the classroom can never duplicate the concrete experience of being intentionally avoided on a public bus, or of being stared at and openly accosted on the street as a virtual freak, or of simply never quite feeling in the mainstream. In most cases, the inform-

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ants wanted to become an integral part of their new social environment. Few if any could honestly say that they achieved that objective. From the interview data, it is difficult to assess the extent to which the students acquired an increased understanding of any particular culture. While the informants were able to catalog examples of differences they observed between the host culture and their native culture in the United States, they tended to have difficulty discussing what those differences signified in terms of underlying world view within the context of the host culture. While they had become more mature and more sensitive to cultural differences in general, it is unclear to what extent they had reached the third level of the experiential learning model (abstract conceptualization).

7

Conclusions

The primary objective of this study was to identify those out-of-class activities and experiences that students believe contribute to the learning process during their enrollment in education abroad and then to classify those experiences into broad categories of learning activity that can guide our efforts more effectively in integrating the noncurricular dimension of education abroad into the overall learning enterprise. A secondary objective was to determine how those categories of activity promote learning in terms of specific theoretical models. In chapters 3 through 6 a number of students discussed their out-of-class experiences while enrolled in a Penn State education-abroad program and presented their perceptions of how those experiences contributed to the learning process. Left to their own devices in determining how to take maximum educational advantage of their out-of-class time, the thirty students interviewed for this study were able independently to engage in activities and to immerse themselves in experiences that they felt contributed significantly to their learning and development. Through the medium of thick description, the data in those four chapters provide us with a richly detailed picture of what those thirty students did outside the classroom and how they perceived those activities as complementing the more formal academic component of their programs. With that data base we can now draw a number of inferences about how these particular students used their out-of-class time as an opportunity for learning. Further research is needed to determine the extent to which those inferences can be generalized to education abroad as a whole. However, the inferences drawn from the data base encompassed by chapters 3 through 6 can be used to develop an initial set of recommendations to be

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tested as ways to integrate the nonacademic dimension of education abroad into the more general framework of cross-cultural learning. The first part of this chapter is a brief overview of the methodological approach used in analyzing the data. The next section presents and discusses the conclusions drawn from that analysis. The ethnographic discovery and experiential learning models discussed in chapter 1 constitute the theoretical framework within which those conclusions can be interpreted. Based upon the inferences presented in this part of chapter 7, the final chapter then offers several recommendations about how to exploit the out-of-class environment more effectively as a complement to the academic component of education abroad. The final chapter also offers some brief suggestions for further research into the learning process that characterizes this dimension of education abroad.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH Based on the conceptual premises about cross-cultural learning models set forth in chapter 1, I began with the hypothesis that students abroad employ an ethnographic discovery model to acquire basic empirical information about cultural differences. This hypothesis led to the primary research question of how students in fact acquire that empirical data. Are there standard categories of activity and/or experience that generally characterize students’ efforts to learn about behavior patterns that are distinctive of the culture in which they are immersed? To answer this question it was necessary to determine exactly what students do outside the classroom during unsupervised periods of time and how they perceive those activities in relation to the overall learning process. In approaching this task, I interviewed thirty students who had recently returned from a semester or full year of education abroad on one of the programs administered by Penn State University in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, and Australia. The interview data was analyzed in terms of the universal semantic relationship concept to which Spradley alludes in his discussion of domain analysis as a way of dealing with data collected from ethnographic interviews (1979, 110–11). Based on his review of ethnographic research, Spradley has suggested that there are semantic relationships “that occur in all human cultures. For example, all known languages employ the relation of strict inclusion (X is a kind of Y; a crane is a kind of bird)” (1979, 110). Spradley goes on to suggest a number of semantic relationships that appear to be universal among all cultures, one of which is a means-end relationship characterized by the formula “X is a way to do Y.” Given the purpose of this study, the interview data was used to identify the unknown X when Y is given as “to learn about cultural differences” in the above formula.

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To provide meaningful and manageable solutions, I aggregated the data into abstract categories defining general kinds of activity. As an example, “living with a host family,” “waiting tables at a neighborhood bar,” “joining the local basketball club,” and “bargaining with street vendors” can all be classified together under the rubric of participant observation. This general category then becomes one of the solutions for X: Participant observation is a way to learn about cultural differences. This provides educators with a general form of out-of-class activity that can then be adapted to any location. CONCLUSIONS As noted, the primary objective of this study was to identify and categorize the out-of-class learning activities that the informants found to be the most salient in promoting their education while abroad. The first set of conclusions addresses that objective. The next part of this section deals with the secondary objective of determining how those activities helped the students develop a greater awareness and understanding of cultural differences. General Categories of Learning Activity By applying Spradley’s principles of taxonomic analysis to the domain of cross-cultural learning, it is possible to divide education abroad into two broad categories of educational activity: academic and nonacademic. This study has focused on the non-academic component—that is, those activities in which students engage outside the formal classroom setting. Following the methodology outlined above, taxonomic analysis using Spradley’s means-end semantic relationship made it possible to divide that category into subcategories based on the formula “X is a way of learning another culture outside the classroom.” The aggregation of similar activities and experiences into discrete subcategories produced three general ways in which the thirty students interviewed for this project went about learning another culture outside the classroom: participant observation, personal interaction, and travel. Based on the ethnographic discovery model of learning another culture, the working hypothesis that guided the primary objective of this study was that students use ethnographic methods to develop an awareness of cultural differences. As noted in chapter 1, Burnett’s analogy between learning another culture and conducting ethnographic research suggests that students employ ethnographic methods as a natural approach to the learning task. Two of the subcategories identified are consistent with that hypothesis: Participant observation is a common form of ethnographic methodology, and personal interaction includes both direct and indirect approaches

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to interviewing native informants. Travel is the only major subcategory that did not directly support the hypothesis; as noted in chapter 5, however, the informants did not give travel as much significance as the other two subcategories of learning activity. Participant Observation As the label suggests, this form of learning activity casts the learner into two roles: that of a direct participant in the social life of the host culture and that of an observer of the host culture. As Spradley has pointed out in his discussion of participant observation as a form of ethnographic research, it requires the individual to be both an insider and an outsider at the same time: The participant observer must be a part of the scene while at the same time remaining outside the scene (Spradley 1980, 56–57). The informants who returned from the Osaka program were the only ones interviewed who had the benefit of an opportunity that was consciously integrated into their program as a way of promoting participant observation. The homestay arrangement brought them into direct contact with family life in Japan, although the degree of participation varied from what Spradley would characterize as passive to active—never complete (1980, 59–61). In spite of the varying degrees of family integration, the Osaka informants generally found this to be the most exciting, stimulating, and valuable out-of-class activity that contributed to their appreciation of cultural differences. Family homestay in Osaka was the only organized form of participant observation made available as an integral part of the programs in which the informants for this study participated. However, the students were able to benefit from a variety of other activities that can also be included in this category of out-of-class learning. On their own initiative, they sought out a number of ways to immerse themselves in the host culture, such as teaching English to a variety of non-English speakers, bargaining in the marketplace, joining student athletic and recreational clubs, and interacting socially with their peers. While active participation is an essential ingredient of this form of learning activity, it represents only half of the role that the learner must play. In his discussion of ethnographic methodology, Spradley makes it clear that “the participant observer comes to a social situation with two purposes: (1) to engage in activities appropriate to the situation and (2) to observe the activities, people, and physical aspects of the situation” (1980, 54). This is in contrast to the “ordinary participant” who “comes to that same situation with only one purpose: to engage in the appropriate activities” (1980, 54). This requires conscious and focused attention to what is going on in the social situation of which the participant is a part. In reviewing the students’ comments about the activities in which they participated, there is clearly a wide range of efficacy with which they

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played the second half of their roles as participant observers. Even those who engaged in the longest and most animated discussions of their participation in native activities often had difficulty when it came to providing concrete examples of the differences to which they alluded in the abstract. Barry, the Osaka student who took a job as a waiter at the Cellar Bar Kent, is illustrative: In spite of direct involvement in a form of activity where one might have expected him to become acutely aware of differences in behavior, he was unable during the interview to give concrete examples of such. Given the apparent degree of difficulty that the informants encountered in citing specific examples of behavioral differences, we can infer that, generally speaking, the students lacked the observational and analytical skills as well as the informational background needed to take maximum advantage of the opportunities for participant observation. The quality of the observations also varied by location. Those who studied in the Orient were generally able to provide more details about observed differences than those who studied elsewhere. Many of the students from the other programs, most notably those who went to Leeds, Canberra, and Melbourne, had difficulty identifying anything in the way of significant differences. This leads to the inference that the greater the degree of difference between the host culture and the students’ American culture, the easier it is for them to identify concrete differences: Those differences are simply more numerous and more apparent. In their efforts to become involved in the day-to-day lifestyle of the host culture, several of the students also became aware of how difficult it is to become part of another culture. As Spradley has pointed out in his discussion of participant observation, one “can hardly ever become a complete participant in a social situation” (1980, 51). Barry’s experience at the Cellar Bar Kent and Pauline’s frustration with the Palestra are both clear examples of this fact. The differing accounts of family life among those informants who spent their semester in Japan also drew attention to the risk of overgeneralization. Each of the students had a different experience, which means that none of them was able to make an accurate generalization about the nature of the “typical” Japanese family. And as one of the students from the Osaka program discovered upon venturing into the streets and the local bars, there are truck drivers and “bums” in Japan who have a totally different lifestyle from that to which students are exposed in a middle-class family with whom homestay arrangements are normally established. Any form of participant observation will include the risk of overgeneralizing or of drawing conclusions from what could be an atypical situation. The Taiwan student who taught English to Chinese schoolchildren recognized this when he discovered the socioeconomic background of the children in his class. Ross’s experience with Australian students in Canberra demonstrated the danger of inferring that foreign students are generally

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more serious about their studies than American students. Through her interaction with Japanese schoolchildren, Cassandra discovered that under the veneer of conformity, the children still attempt in subtle ways to maintain a degree of individuality. And Melanie learned eventually to be skeptical about generalizing from the data she obtained while riding the matatus in Nairobi. Ultimately, the value of participant observation as a learning activity will be affected by the extent to which the social situation is representative of the culture as a whole. Personal Interaction Another method ethnographers use to learn about another culture is interviewing native informants. Interviewers can concentrate their efforts on a single individual (i.e., a key informant) from whom they gain an in-depth but personal look at what is going on from an insider’s point of view (i.e., an emic perspective), or they can interview a broader range of individuals, which will ameliorate the personal bias but which will also limit the depth of the individual interviews. Ideally, of course, the ethnographic researcher will strike a balance between the two. Students abroad inevitably engage in conversations with their hosts. Conversations are by their very nature a form of interview. Whether they realize it or not, students are applying a form of ethnographic method when they engage in discussions and conversations with their new-found friends abroad. In chapter 4 the informants for this project discussed the ways in which conversations and discussions contributed to their learning about the host culture. Like participant observation, personal interaction is characterized by a wide range of intimacy in terms of degree of involvement with the host culture. For the most part, the students drew on informal conversations and discussions with a wide range of informants for the data on which they based their judgments. The casual conversation that characterized the evening hours in the courtyard of the Nice dormitory is a good example. In a few cases, however, the level of intimacy went beyond that of superficial contact—such as Frank’s relationship with the female student at Kansai Gaidai, Sharon’s friendship with the French and Corsican students, and Lauren’s contact with her Sudanese and Palestinian friends at the American University in Cairo. As with participant observation, the effectiveness of personal interaction as a learning activity depends on the student’s ability to maintain some distance and objectivity. Becoming too close to one’s informants can sometimes obscure the differences that exist or alter the context within which those differences are interpreted. Sharon’s experience with her friends is a good example of the risk inherent in close personal relationships when viewed as learning opportunities. Her friendships with Laurence, Veronique, and Katrin made it difficult for her to maintain an objective

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distance; as a result, she was able to speak more about the personal than the cultural identities of her informants. Establishing rapport is a prerequisite for effective interviewing, but Sharon’s experience suggests that becoming too closely involved in the personal lives of one’s informants can affect one’s objectivity in collecting ethnographic data. Melanie’s approach proved to be more effective as a learning technique. While she was able to establish sufficient rapport with the residents in her dormitory to encourage a free and open exchange of ideas, she did not become intimate enough with any of them to interfere with her ability objectively to study the culture. Her conversations revolved around tribal identities and relationships rather than around the personal lives of her informants. Jennifer adopted a similar approach in discussions with her roommates at the National Taiwan University. Neither Melanie nor Jennifer became sufficiently close to her informants to delve into personal matters; their discussions focused on the nature of cultural differences. The ability to ask relevant and revealing questions is also essential to an effective use of personal interaction as a form of learning activity. General conversation and undirected discussions can be revealing in their own way, but carefully considered and directed questions can focus the learner’s attention on the task at hand. Richard’s pointed questions about the giftwrapped trucks in Osaka and Melanie’s enquiries about tribal relationships in Kenya led to a more precise awareness and consciousness of differences than did the political discussions in the Nice dormitory. Richard’s curiosity about linguistic differences led him to ask precise and specific questions during his discussions with fellow students at Kansai Gaidai; the result was a greater appreciation of how Americans and Japanese differ not just in their use of vocabulary but also in their perception of human relationships. While casual conversation provided some degree of insight into national differences, those benefits were enhanced when students like Melanie and Richard asked probing and intelligent questions that focused attention on specific areas of difference. As with participant observation, the students would have benefited more from this form of learning activity if they had been better schooled in how to maintain objectivity and how to conduct an ethnographic interview. Overgeneralization from limited or biased data proved to be as much of a risk with this technique as it was with participant observation as a way of learning another culture outside the classroom. Sandra was one of the few who became fully conscious of this danger. While Sandra was struck by the variety of information she received from her numerous Chinese contacts, she was especially taken aback by her experience with the friend whose parents were from the Mainland. Had she not become cognizant of the biased frame of reference within which her friend had been raised, she would have accepted her friend’s observations as typical of the Taiwanese.

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Because of the limited circle of contacts American students will be able to develop while abroad, the social stratum that those contacts will normally represent within their own culture, and the limited amount of time within which those contacts can be nurtured, this risk of overgeneralization is significant with both participant observation and personal interaction as ways for students abroad to learn another culture. However, the risk of overgeneralization can be minimized by recognizing its existence (once Sandra became aware of her friend’s bias, she was able to protect herself from drawing unfounded inferences) and by seeking out multiple sources of input (by interviewing a number of dormitory residents, Melanie was able to obtain a much more objective view of tribal identities and relationships in Kenya). Without such protection, students may simply substitute one stereotype for another and fail to gain any meaningful insight into the nature of the host culture. Travel Travel is a third category of activity into which the students’ individual learning experiences can be aggregated. The informants’ insistence that travel contributed to their learning is consistent with feedback from study abroad alumni in general: As noted by those who carried out the Study Abroad Evaluation Project reviewed in chapter 1, “One of the most valuable activities that American students engage in while in Europe is travel” (Carlson, Burn, Useem, and Yachimowicz 1991, 14). However, the informants for this study did not give travel as much significance as either participant observation or personal interaction in discussing its role as a learning opportunity. Directed travel (i.e., travel with a specific purpose) had some advantages over travel for the sheer sake of travel. The architectural engineering students and the art and art history students often had clearly defined objectives in mind when they set out. With such objectives they were able to maximize the role of travel as a learning activity. Most students set out with no particular objectives other than simply to see as much as they could of Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Japan, or Africa. Based on the students’ observations, the value of this kind of undirected travel lay primarily in the exposure it afforded to other languages and customs, even though the brevity of that exposure made it a necessarily superficial one. If nothing else, it at least promoted a greater awareness of the range of differences that can exist within the confines of restricted geographic areas. On the linguistic level, for example, students can travel for days in the United States without ever hearing a language other English; they were often surprised to find that this is not the case in Europe and that people in other areas of the world often develop fluency in more than one language as a direct result of natural interaction rather than as an artificial product of an academic setting.

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Given the superficial nature of the exposure to cultural differences while traveling, this form of learning activity is especially vulnerable to the risk of overgeneralization. Based on travel in Israel, for example, Daniel offered the judgment that Israelis are not as warm or as hospitable as Egyptians, with whom he had been interacting on a daily basis as a result of his enrollment at the American University of Cairo. Those who visited the Eastern bloc countries in Europe returned to their study locations with a sense of revulsion at the unsanitary conditions and frigid social atmosphere, which became the basis of their entire sense of what such nations as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are like. Much of the value attributed to travel as a learning activity was in the domain of personal development. This is consistent with the premise cited in chapter 1 that during the semester or year abroad, the developmental processes described by Chickering, Havighurst, and others will continue to be operational, just as they are during the undergraduate years at the home campus. No attempt was made in the context of this study objectively to verify that premise; however, the students’ perception of benefits associated with travel suggest that those developmental learning models describe at least one dimension of the learning experience. In describing their trip to Czechoslovakia, for example, the students’ comments suggest that they may have learned more about their own coping abilities than about Czechoslovakia. A sense of independence and self-reliance followed upon those kinds of experience, as exemplified by the student who proudly proclaimed during the interview that he had spent two and a half weeks traveling by himself in Europe—“just a backpack and me and a train pass. And that was it. And I did it!” This sense of pride and accomplishment was implicit in many of the students’ comments, not only about travel but also about participation in education abroad generally. Summary While the students who participated in this project had no formal background in the application of ethnographic methods, those methods were inherent in the two categories that subsumed the out-of-class learning activities identified by the students as their most significant educational experiences. When it comes to learning how to behave in an unfamiliar social or cultural context, participant observation and informant interviewing appear to be natural learning activities that students adopt without any tutoring or prompting on the part of educational authorities. This is consistent with the stated hypothesis that students employ an ethnographic discovery model of learning, patterned after the analogy that Burnett has drawn between cross-cultural learning and ethnographic research. The students were able to achieve varying degrees of success in using those ethnographic methods to catalog differences between their own culture and that of the host country in which they were studying. The

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degree of difference between the two cultures as well as the students’ skill in using those ethnographic methods appeared to affect the degree of success in compiling such a catalog. The students’ backgrounds may also have had an effect on their ability to cite examples of cultural difference. It must be noted, however, that of the thirty informants interviewed for this project, most of those who had either studied or lived abroad or who had taken introductory courses in cultural anthropology enrolled in programs outside of Western Europe. Only seven of the thirty informants interviewed had taken any formal introduction to cultural anthropology prior to departure; three of them went to Osaka, two went to Taiwan, one went to Melbourne, and the seventh spent a full year in Nairobi. Only four had studied abroad on other occasions—three on short-term summer programs and one for a full year in Caracas on a Rotary scholarship; of these four students, two went to Taiwan (including the student who had spent a year in Venezuela), one went to Tel Aviv, and the fourth went to Nice. Only four of the thirty informants had spent an extended period of time in another culture: the Nairobi student who had done extensive volunteer work in Nepal and Indonesia, the woman who had spent a year in Caracas; the Tel Aviv student who had been born and raised in Korea; and the Nice student who was a native of Puerto Rico. It is obvious that, among those interviewed for this project, the students with the most extensive cross-cultural backgrounds gravitated toward programs in non-Western areas. Given the fact that those who participated in non-Western programs generally were more adept at citing examples of cultural difference, it is impossible from the interview data gleaned from this particular group of informants to determine to what extent prior experience and educational background affected the students’ ability to recognize such differences. As a way of collecting information, the ethnographic discovery model of cross-cultural learning gave the students access to empirical data about their host cultures. Without that data, the students could not begin the developmental process of moving from superficial awareness to conceptual understanding. As suggested in chapter 1, the ethnographic discovery model of learning provided the informants with the basic foundation upon which developmental and experiential models of learning could build. The secondary objective of this study was to determine how the students’ out-of-class activities contributed to the overall developmental process involved in moving from awareness to understanding.

Awareness vs. Understanding One of the theoretical premises cited in chapter 1 was that the standard developmental processes characteristic of the undergraduate years will continue during participation in an education abroad program. As pointed

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out in the discussion of educational benefits associated with travel, the informants felt they had made significant gains in such qualities as maturity, independence, self-reliance, and tolerance of ambiguity—all outcomes normally generated by the various developmental models of learning. Since no effort was made within the context of this study objectively to verify the students’ self-perceived outcomes, further research will be needed in this area. The testimony of the informants nevertheless suggests that the premise has some validity. The data in chapter 6 also suggest that the students made some progress in terms of Bennett’s theoretical model for the acquisition of intercultural sensitivity. The ultimate objective of Bennett’s developmental model is constructive marginality, better known simply as cultural relativism, where “there are no unquestioned assumptions, no intrinsically right behaviors, nor any necessary reference group” (1986, 62). In chapter 6 the informants alluded to occasions that did in fact challenge their values, self-images, and basic assumptions. Since this was not the focus of the interviews, the informants did not elaborate at great length on this self-perceived outcome. It is not clear to what extent the challenges produced true relativism: The informants often insisted that they had become more objective in assessing themselves and their basic assumptions as a result of those challenges, but heightened objectivity, while necessary as a precursor, does not necessarily lead to the kind of relativism that places the individual “outside all cultural frames of reference” (Bennett 1986, 61). Nor is it clear how far the informants had progressed, if at all, along Bennett’s scale of intercultural sensitivity development. Further research will be necessary to assess the effectiveness of out-of-class activities in promoting this kind of development. In addressing the secondary objective of this study, the real value of the learning activities discussed by this group of informants appears to have been in their contribution to the experiential learning process rather than in their support of any of the developmental learning models. As noted frequently by the informants, participant observation, personal interaction, and travel promoted an awareness of cultural differences on a more concrete level than a classroom lecture could achieve. The empirical data acquired by the students through the medium of these three categories of learning activity initiated the cross-cultural learning process. In Kolb’s cyclical model of experiential learning, concrete experience is the initial step toward an abstract conceptualization of reality. By engaging in the kinds of activity encompassed by the ethnographic discovery model of cross-cultural learning, the students took this first step in the process. As noted in chapter 6, however, it is not clear to what extent that awareness led to an understanding of the host culture. As a second step in the experiential learning process, reflective observation mediates between concrete experience and abstract conceptualization.

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It is at the level of reflective observation that the learner draws inferences about the nature of the reality experienced in the first stage. Those inferences then comprise the bases for abstract conceptualization about general principles. An examination of the interview data is inconclusive in assessing the students’ movement from the first to the second stage of the experiential learning cycle. As noted, the students often had difficulty citing differences, let alone discussing the nature and significance of those differences. Without the concrete data on which to base abstract inferences, experiential learning has no foundation on which to build. Acquiring the data through the use of ethnographic methods is therefore a sine qua non for cross-cultural learning. But simply having the data available is no assurance that substantive learning will take place. The students must be able to use that data for reflective observation in order to reach the level of abstract conceptualization. Very few of the students offered abstract interpretations of the differences they observed. In response to the open-ended question about what they learned, the tendency was immediately to begin citing the differences they had catalogued in their own minds. With some exceptions (e.g., Daniel’s interpretation of Arab bartering practices as a reflection of their social orientation and Owen’s speculation about why his Japanese host father had adopted his spouse’s surname), the informants tended not to volunteer any thoughts or ideas about what those differences implied with regard to the host culture: Unless pressed to go further, they limited themselves to the level of empirical observation. On those occasions when they were pressed to go further, they often seemed confused about what was being asked. This is certainly consistent with Coleman’s assertion that “the weakest link in the experiential process of learning appears to lie in the third step, in generalizing from particular experiences to a general principle applicable in other circumstances” (1976, 58). In assessing how participant observation, personal interaction, and travel contributed to the overall learning process, it is obvious that something more than ethnographic skills and concrete experience is required for students to make sense out of the barrage of input from their alien environment. The three students who accepted the invitation to spend the night with a complete stranger in Taiwan were aware of their host’s embarrassment and discomfort; only one of those students made a conscious effort to understand that embarrassment. The nature of that effort is significant—a consultation with one of the faculty members at the National Taiwan University. By seeking input from an informed authority, this student acquired more than the kind of emic input that would have been available from a standard key informant. Rather than seeking an insider’s view of what happened, he sought out someone whose expertise was the product

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of a conscious ability to separate himself from the situation and to provide an informed analysis of why it happened. To paraphrase Spindler, this student’s interpretive process benefited from the availability of a decisive intervention—in this case, analysis by an expert in the field. As Spindler pointed out in his discussion of transcultural sensitization, “Human beings tend to interpret new experience in the light of past experience unless there is a decisive intervention in the interpretive process” (1974, 450). The data in chapters 3 through 5 suggest that personal interaction came the closest of the three learning categories to providing some kind of decisive intervention: Participant observation and travel provided the informants with concrete experience and empirical data; input from the perspective of native informants helped cast that empirical data in a different light. In summary, the data support the hypothesis that the informants for this study employed an ethnographic discovery model of learning to collect empirical data about their host cultures. While that data provided the foundation for experiential learning, this group of informants appeared to have difficulty moving from the level of concrete experience to that of abstract conceptualization: Something was lacking in the way of decisive intervention in the interpretive process. By capitalizing on these general conclusions, it is now possible to offer several recommendations that should enhance the overall learning process.


8

Recommendations

Assuming that a student abroad takes a standard fifteen-credit load and invests the amount of class and study time normally associated with such a load, at least 67 percent of that student’s waking time will still be spent on nonacademic activities. The purpose of this study has been to develop a pedagogical approach that will maximize the use of this out-of-class time in support of the overall education abroad effort. A CROSS-CULTURAL LEARNING MODEL Based on the conclusions discussed in chapter 7, the following recommendations are intended to lay the foundation for a systematic approach to helping students take maximum advantage of valuable out-of-class time while enrolled in an education abroad program. Taken together, these recommendations comprise a model for cross-cultural sensitization that is similar in many respects to the learning design proposed by Sikkema and Niyekawa (1987). Beginning with the semester prior to departure, proceeding through the period of time spent abroad, and concluding with the capstone seminar during the semester immediately following return to the United States, this learning model will help students develop a greater appreciation for and sensitivity to the existence of significant cultural differences in the contemporary multicultural world. Build in Experiential Activities Left to their own devices, the students interviewed for this investigation found a number of ways to capitalize on their out-of-class time to further

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their educational objectives. Those learning activities fell into three major categories: participant observation, personal interaction, and travel. To help future program participants take advantage of the nonacademic domain more effectively, international educators need to develop programmatic ways to promote student involvement in these three kinds of activity. Programmed opportunities for such involvement can be included as an integral part of any education abroad program. At the same time, care must be taken to avoid imposing too much structure on the students’ out-of-class time: Some of the most significant learning experiences recounted by the informants for this study were the product of chance occurrences, unplanned activities, and unexpected events. While making programmatic opportunities available, those responsible for education abroad programs must also encourage and prepare students to take risks and to exploit the unexpected. Chapters 3 through 5 revealed numerous ways in which students can engage productively in participant observation, personal interaction, and travel as learning activities. The individual experiences described by the informants in those three chapters need not be prescriptive in guiding our efforts: The important point is to recognize the general categories of activity that proved to be the most beneficial from the perspective of the students who had just returned from a semester abroad. The categories of learning activity represented by those three chapters can serve as a guide in developing specific activities that are appropriate to a particular program.

Control the Quality of the Experience The value of the informants’ individual experiences varied, depending on a number of factors. For example, participant observation was more effective when the circumstances made it possible to promote both active participation and objective observation. Similarly, the value of personal interaction was dependent on the students’ ability to strike a balance between intimacy and objectivity in order most effectively to benefit from their relationships with host nationals. In all cases, the typicalness of a situation had a direct bearing on the students’ ability to draw accurate general inferences from particular events. These are examples of qualifying attributes that must be considered in planning and scheduling specific opportunities for participant observation, personal interaction, and travel. It is not enough simply to provide opportunities: The responsibility for ensuring that those opportunities are pedagogically sound rests with the educator who is planning and administering the program. The insights acquired from the data in chapters 3 through 5 provide us with the background necessary to ensure that programmed opportunities are indeed pedagogically sound. Given Sandra’s experience in Taipei, for example, it would be pedagogically irresponsible to provide

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an American student with a roommate who was obviously atypical of the host culture: The student might learn a great deal about that individual (e.g., the personal insights that Sharon acquired of Laurence) but very little about the culture in general.

Develop the Appropriate Skills in Advance Once opportunities for participant observation, personal interaction, and travel have been incorporated into the program abroad, educators must ensure that the students have the skills necessary to take advantage of those opportunities. Armed with those skills, the students will also be able to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves unexpectedly. In his books on participant observation (1980) and ethnographic interviewing (1979), Spradley provides detailed discussions of how to apply those ethnographic methods in a practical situation. Since students going abroad are not prospective ethnographers, they need not receive the kind of in-depth training represented by the approach of these two textbooks, but they must nevertheless have a rudimentary sense of how to make intelligent observations and to capitalize on conversation and personal interaction as ethnographic interviewing techniques. Some practical introduction to ethnographic methods prior to departure will enhance the students’ ability to take maximum advantage of their out-of-class opportunities. Such an introduction can be incorporated into a formal predeparture orientation program or included in a specially designed prerequisite course. As an example of the latter, an introductory course on cultural anthropology can be designed specifically for students planning to study abroad. This course will not only provide students with the theoretical context and cognitive frame of reference within which to interpret their experience abroad but also help them develop the practical skills needed to take advantage of out-of-class learning opportunities (how to observe critically and objectively, how to use personal interaction as a source of insight into the nature of both personal and cultural difference, how to record observations and insights in the form of a diary or logbook, etc.). By providing an introduction to the basic concept of difference per se, an appreciation of how to look at difference in a sociocultural context, and the practical skills to utilize the foreign environment as a living laboratory for the study of difference, such a course will begin the overall educational process of which study abroad is an integral part. Rather than being a separate and discrete event, the semester or year abroad will then become the natural continuation of a learning process begun on the home campus.

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Prepare for Reflective Observation Once students have acquired some skill in observing and interviewing, they should be able to compile a fuller inventory of empirical differences between their native culture and that of the host nation in which they are studying. They will then confront the problem of making sense out of that data—that is, of progressing from an experiential to an interpretive level of appreciation for cultural differences. As noted earlier, the most difficult part of experiential learning is the transition from concrete experience to abstract conceptualization through the medium of reflective observation. Students must be able to reflect intelligently on the data they have collected in order to make perceptive and accurate inferences. To do this, they need a cognitive frame of reference for analyzing the empirical data they acquire. In processing new information, the human brain compares that information to existing data that has been retained in long-term memory; the reflective process will be greatly facilitated if there is relevant data in long-term memory for comparison purposes. To paraphrase the Yale Report of 1828 (Levine 1979, 545–46), the students must “furnish” their minds with the knowledge they will need to facilitate reflective observation. Like the ethnographic skills discussed above, this cognitive “furniture” can be provided within the frame of a specially designed predeparture course or orientation program. Like the prefield seminar in the Sikkema and Niyekawa design for cross-cultural learning, this predeparture course will be “aimed at establishing a mental attitude that will help the students to become active rather than passive learners,” based on the premise that “some relevant theoretical knowledge of cross-cultural learning will give meaning to observations, reactions, and interactions of students in the field experience—in short, provide a framework for their affective learning” (Sikkema & Niyekawa 1987, 22).

Force Critical Thinking and Reflection Once students have been provided with the opportunities for experiential learning, the skills to take advantage of those opportunities, and the cognitive frame of reference on which to base the application of those skills, they will need a pedagogical mechanism to facilitate their efforts to bring all three components together in a productive fashion. The key to reflective observation as a step toward abstract conceptualization is the ability to think critically and to analyze the newly acquired data within the context of the preexisting “furniture” of the mind. If such a mechanism is not made an integral part of the education abroad program, students will tend not to take the time to exercise their critical skills: The avalanche of sensory stimuli and the allure of new adventures can be powerful distractions to a student attempting to make the most of a limited amount of time.

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To make this kind of critical analysis an integral part of the program, education-abroad administrators can take advantage of the concept of contract learning by introducing independent study courses into the curricula of their programs abroad. A credit-bearing, independent study course for which a student has contracted will force that student to apply critical judgment in generating the required academic product upon which credit will be based (e.g., a term paper). Periodic discussion sessions or seminars under the tutelage of a faculty member at the host institution can further enhance the effort to force critical thinking and will provide the kind of decisive intervention to which Spindler has referred. By forcing a reflective dimension upon the experiential base, such an independent study course will enhance the value of the overall effort. To add further objectivity and distance to the critical analysis, retrospective discussion sessions under the tutelage of education abroad staff and the faculty who taught the predeparture course can be scheduled to take place over the course of the semester immediately after return to the home campus. With the combined benefit of the predeparture course, the mentored independent study abroad, and the retrospect provided by a semester of postprogram discussions (i.e., a capstone seminar), the students will then be prepared to submit a final paper in fulfillment of the independent study contract. The final paper then becomes the culmination of a process begun by the predeparture course. As noted earlier, the program abroad should not be an isolated experience but part of a larger educational process. The objective of such a process is to develop a greater sensitivity to and appreciation for diversity in a multicultural world. By immersing students in a culture different from the one in which they have been raised, the semester or year abroad provides a concrete supplement to the overall process of achieving this objective. The predeparture course, the semester abroad, the postprogram semester of retrospective analysis and reflection, and the final paper together comprise this integrated sensitization process.

Develop More Programs in Nontraditional Areas The first five recommendations are pedagogical tactics that can be incorporated into any education abroad program to enhance the value of the nonacademic dimension. Whether the program is in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, or any other region, these interventionist tactics will enable students more effectively to take advantage of their out-of-class time as an educational supplement to the academic program. No pedagogical intervention, however, can alter the inherent degree of difference between any two cultures. Assuming that one of the objectives of education abroad is to develop an appreciation for the significance of cultural differences per se, educators should be aware of the greater facility

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that the informants from non-Western programs seemed to have in identifying cultural differences as a part of this particular research project. To continue the analogy of students abroad as amateur ethnographers, studying in non-Western cultural environments might be comparable to the anthropologist’s study of exotic cultures as “essentially a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us” (Geertz 1973, 14). Sikkema and Niyekawa have articulated a similar rationale for encouraging the use of non-Western cultures for the field experience in their design for cross-cultural learning (1987, 17–18): When two cultures are similar, minor differences frequently go unnoticed and assumptions of similarity are made that prevent the learning of the subtle nuances of the second culture. For this reason, a culture quite different from one’s own is more likely to shake one out of one’s cultural habits, owing to the greater emotional and intellectual shock.

Based on the input from the informants interviewed for this particular study, it would certainly appear desirable to develop more opportunities in non-Western cultures for those programs in which the primary objective is to promote an appreciation for cultural diversity in general rather than to enhance the student’s understanding of a particular culture.

FURTHER RESEARCH As noted in the Introduction and in chapter 1, there is still a limited body of research on which to make sound pedagogical judgments about education abroad. Research completed to date has focused on quantitative attempts to measure the impact of the experience as a whole on students’ academic and personal development. In attempting to measure those impacts, little effort has been made to separate the experience into its constituent components (e.g., academic and nonacademic), and until the Study Abroad Evaluation Project results appeared in 1990, the attempts were piecemeal and uncoordinated. No real effort has been made to determine what pedagogical methods should be employed to enhance the desired impacts (or conversely, to diminish the undesired ones). This is especially evident in the nonacademic domain of education abroad—that is, the two-thirds of a student’s time that is spent in activities not directly related to the academic course work of the program. This project has been an attempt to subject the nonacademic domain of education abroad to a higher level of scrutiny as a step toward integrating it more effectively into the overall effort to promote cross-cultural understanding. The following pages outline some of the additional research that still needs to be done in continued support of this effort.

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Test the Theoretical Models The input from this particular group of informants supported the hypothesis that students employ an ethnographic discovery model of learning as a way of acquiring empirical data about cultural differences. The data was inconclusive in measuring the students’ degree of development along Bennett’s intercultural sensitivity scale as well as in assessing their ability to engage in reflective observation within the frame of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. More work needs to be done in this area to enhance our understanding of what happens to students as a result of their experiences abroad. What variables have the greatest impact in promoting cultural relativism and constructive marginality? How do students abroad process data in moving from concrete experience to abstract conceptualization? Is the resulting abstract conceptualization of reality different from that of their counterparts who stayed at home? Answers to questions like these will contribute further to an understanding of education abroad as a unique learning process as well as to a clarification of the theoretical principles that underlie the models and thereby to a refinement of the models themselves.

Develop a More Extensive Data Base More qualitative research data will provide insights that can be generalized to a broader population of students abroad. The conclusions and recommendations discussed in these final two chapters are based on input from thirty students who participated in a single institution’s programs during the 1990 fall semester. A greater appreciation of what goes on outside the classroom and of how that contributes to the learning process is an essential basis for the development of sound pedagogical methods in that domain. This supplemental data should include input not only from more students representing a wider range of institutions and programs but also from a wider range of methodological perspectives. Postprogram interviews constituted the source of data for this project. Extending the interview process to include on-site discussions with students, faculty, staff, and other relevant parties would add a valuable dimension to the input. Participant observation (i.e., a semester or more observing students in action on site) would provide another perspective to enrich the overall data base. The objective of such research is to determine more precisely what out-of-class activities contribute the most to the learning process and how students can most effectively exploit those activities in support of that learning process. While the data in chapters 3 through 6 of this report have made it possible to formulate an initial body of pedagogical recommendations, additional data will enable us to refine those recommendations

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further and to assess the extent to which they can be applied to the field of education abroad generally. The data collected for this particular study also suggest additional issues on which to focus in conducting follow-up research. In chapter 4, for example, much of the data on personal interaction came from female students. In promoting activities that will enhance out-of-class learning, it would be helpful to know whether there is a gender difference in the way students approach those activities generally as learning opportunities. In the area of personal interaction specifically, it would also be helpful to know whether there is a gender difference in the way American students interact with their counterparts abroad. The data also suggest that additional attention must be given to the effect prior experience has on the way students utilize their out-of-class time. A related issue is the role of advance screening in the overall process of maximizing pedagogical benefits. What qualities and attributes should students have to ensure that they derive maximum benefit from the experience? What kinds of students benefit the most from education abroad? Are there preparatory interventions beyond those already recommended that would help students acquire the attributes that have the closest correlation to positive outcomes? Answers to these kinds of questions would provide additional guidance in the effort to enrich education abroad generally.

Test the Recommendations The recommendations outlined in this chapter need to be subjected to rigorous appraisal in terms of their effectiveness as ways to exploit the out-of-class domain of education abroad. While additional data may help us refine those recommendations and to develop new or modified ones, the recommendations set forth are concrete actions that can be implemented and tested as a part of the long-term research effort. In testing the efficacy of any pedagogical tactics that might be adopted, the ultimate measure of success is in their differential impact on the students. The purpose of this study was to acquire sufficient qualitative data about what goes on outside the classroom to propose some concrete pedagogical interventions that might enable us more effectively to exploit that learning environment. The next step is to test those recommendations through direct implementation and outcomes measurement. Do they really make any difference? If so, what is the nature and extent of that difference? Is their implementation worth the investment, given the nature and extent of the measured difference? In approaching this task, it is important to define clearly the nature of the outcomes education-abroad programs are intended to produce. It is against those outcomes that researchers must measure the impact of any

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interventionist strategies, including those outlined as recommendations in this chapter.

SUMMARY Prior research on education abroad has focused on outcomes rather than on the processes that generate those outcomes. While that research has generally suggested that programs abroad produce higher levels of worldmindedness, tolerance for ambiguity, independence, self-esteem, and empathy for other human groups, the research has been inconclusive in connecting those outcomes directly to the education abroad enterprise. Furthermore, those research efforts have failed specifically to address the question of process—that is, what students actually do, especially in the noncurricular domain, and how those activities contribute to the generation of associated outcomes. Through the medium of thick description based on informant interviews with thirty students who participated in education-abroad programs administered by Penn State University in the fall of 1990, this study examined that process through the eyes of the students who actively engaged in this unique form of undergraduate education. Based on Burnett’s contention that learning another culture is analogous to doing ethnographic research, the working hypothesis for this project was that, left to their own devices, students naturally employ ethnographic methods in their noncurricular efforts to learn about their host culture while enrolled in an education-abroad program. Taxonomic analysis of the interview data using Spradley’s means/end semantic relationship produced three categories of salient learning activity for this group of informants. The two categories that the students emphasized as having the greatest impact on their learning experience supported the hypothesis. This suggests that students abroad will gain more from the out-of-class learning domain if that domain includes specific opportunities for participant observation and personal interaction and if the students have the skills and guidance to exploit those opportunities fully. This examination of process assumed, as theoretical constructs, that the standard developmental and experiential models of learning will be operative during the semester or year abroad. Since these were premises rather than hypotheses, the interviews did not focus directly on assessing their validity. The data provided indirect evidence that supported the assumption; they also led to an unexpected but significant follow-up hypothesis that demands further exploration: While ethnographic skills and the opportunity for exercising them can provide students with empirical data about the host culture, something more is needed to promote reflective observation as a mediating step between that data and abstract conceptualization in terms of the experiential learning model. Experimenting with

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different forms of decisive intervention can help identify ways to enhance further the value of experiential learning as a form of cross-cultural sensitization and also provide insight into the function of reflective observation as an integral part of that process. The data presented in this study suggest that participant observation, personal interaction, and travel can provide students abroad with the basic ingredients for reconceptualizing the world around them. The next research objective must be to examine further the role of reflective observation as a catalyst in melding those ingredients into an overarching world view consistent with the multicultural nature of reality.

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Index

Abrams, Irwin, 10 Affective development, 10 Autonomy, 8, 77 Barnlund, Dean, 1, 3, 45, 79, 80 Benedict, Ruth, 30 Bennet, Milton, 4, 5, 82, 93, 105, 115 Bower, Thomas, 8 Burn, Barbara, 11, 102 Burnett, Jacquetta, 7, 97, 103, 117 Carlson, Jerry, 8, 9, 11, 12, 102 Cerych, Ladislav, 11 Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The, 30 Cognitive anthropology, 2, 6, 30 Cognitive frame of reference, 2, 3, 30, 32, 56 Cognitive imperative, 2 Coleman, James, 6, 56, 106 Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, 79 Condon, John C., 1 Constructive marginality, 5, 82, 93, 105, 115 Cross-cultural context, 1–3, 93 Cultural relativism, 9, 93, 105. See also Ethnorelativism

d’Aquili, Eugene, 2 Decisive intervention, 30, 39, 45, 56, 70, 80, 93, 107, 113, 117 Developmental learning models, 4–5, 82, 93, 103, 104, 105, 115, 117; Chickering, Arthur W., 4, 103; Gilligan, Carol, 4; Havighurst, Robert J., 4, 103; Perry, William G., Jr., 4; Weathersby, Rita, 4. See also Bennett, Milton Domain analysis, 96 Duffy, William, 8 Emic point of view, 56, 57, 63, 100, 106 Enculturation, 2, 3, 29, 93 Ethnocentrism, 4, 5 Ethnographic discovery model of learning, 6–7, 23, 27, 44, 47, 48, 56, 58, 59, 74, 96, 97, 103, 105, 107, 115, 117. See also Burnett, Jacquetta Ethnographic interview, 96, 101, 111 Ethnographic method, 7, 23, 44, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 106, 111, 117 Ethnorelativism, 4, 5, 93, 105 European Cultural Foundation, 11 Experiential learning model, 5–6, 28, 32, 39, 44, 56, 58, 59, 74, 75, 93, 94, 96, 104, 105, 106, 107, 112, 115, 117;

126

INDEX

abstract conceptualization, 5, 28, 94, 105, 106, 107, 112, 115, 117; concrete experience, 5, 28, 44, 56, 105, 107, 112, 115; reflective observation, 5, 28, 32, 44, 56, 75, 105, 106, 112, 115, 117. See also Coleman, James; Kolb, David

Pizzini, Edward, 8 President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, 11 Pyle, Richard, 8

Rose, Oliver Tenant, 8 Gaijin, 40, 89–92 Geertz, Clifford, 114 Gwynne, Margaret, 8 Hansen, Judith, 2, 3 Hensley, Thomas, 8, 9 Homestay, 24–32, 61, 62, 98, 99 Hull, W. Frank, IV, 10 Impact studies, 8–9 Independence, 77, 78–79, 92, 105 Intercultural sensitivity, 4, 5, 105, 115 Interpersonal communication, 27, 49, 59 Kafka, Eric, 8, 9 Kaplan, Robert, 2 Kauffman, Norman, 10 Key informant interviews, 47–56, 59, 63, 100 Kolb, David, 5, 6, 28, 32, 44, 56, 75, 105, 115 Lemke, Walter, Jr., 10 Levine, Arthur, 112 Marion, Paul, 8, 9 Moffatt, Michael, 79 Morgan, Edward, Jr., 8, 9 Nash, Dennison, 8 Niyekawa, Agnes, 109, 112, 114 Nydell, Margaret K., 1 Opper, Susan, 11 Participant observation, 15, 18, 23–45, 61, 62, 63, 72, 97, 98, 99, 100, 111, 117 Personal development, 77–82, 92, 103

Self-confidence, 11, 77 Self-esteem, 8, 9, 10 Self-reliance, 78–79, 92, 105 Sell, Deborah, 8, 9 Sikkema, Mildred, 109, 112, 114 Smith, Alan, 11 Smith, Charles, Jr., 10 Spindler, George, 30, 32, 45, 56, 70, 80, 93, 107, 113 Spradley, James, 3, 23, 45, 96, 97, 98, 99, 111, 117 Stewart, Edward C., 1 Study Abroad Evaluation Project (SAEP), 11–12, 102, 114 Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 5

Taxonomic analysis, 97, 117 Teichler, Ulrich, 11 Thick description, 95, 117 Tolerance of ambiguity, 8, 77, 105 Tolerance of difference, 79–82 Transcultural sensitization, 107 Tyler, Stephen A., 1

Universal semantic relationships, 96 Useem, John, 11, 102

Waiguoren, 89 Weaver, Henry, 7 Widaman, Keith, 8, 9 Worldmindedness, 8 Yachimowicz, David, 11, 102 Yale Report, 112 Yousef, Fathi S., 1

About the Author MICHAEL R. LAUBSCHER is Director of the Office of Education Abroad Programs at the Pennsylvania State University, where he has worked since 1971. His primary scholarly interest is in experiential learning as a way of promoting an appreciation of cultural diversity.


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