Out of class activities and studying abroad

January 14, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized |

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 studying abroad. The emphasis throughout is on the students’ perceptions–that is, an ethnographic view of the role of out-of-class experiences studying 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 studying abroad enterprise.

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."  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’".  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 studying 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 studying 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 studying abroad of communicative styles in the United States and Japan.