We like to use the idea of a study abroad as anything that happens outside the classroom,
any kind of experiential learning, any kind of learning that requires students to deal
with a different learning situation, a different learning environment and a different cultural
context.
At one level, perhaps the biggest level, study abroad was a full term that students would
take.
We had a term abroad in Guatemala for instances, where students went to Guatemala and studied
for a full term from January till April, lived with a family, took a variety of courses,
did a whole semester.
Other students do a study abroad through an exchange program where they go to another
university and study at a university.
But studies abroad can be as small as a three unit credit course for a two week term, there
used to be one in Cuba, in Rome and other places.
We use it in the Department of History now, we have study abroad in Rome and in South
Africa, but we also have terms or courses that are offered as ethno-history field schools
among the Sto:lo nation in BC, among different indigenous groups in BC and in Saskatchewan.
We consider these to be equally valuable and equally culturally diverse as study abroad
opportunities.
If you go back to the answer to the first question, which is the diversity, you use
study abroad in order to present students with different challenges and different ways
and for the students to learn in different ways.
Then, it doesn't make an awful lot of sense to ask the students to do the same kinds of
things --write essays, do exams-- that you would have them do in the classroom.
If you're presenting them with diversity, then you need to assess them in different
ways and understand that learning happens in different ways.
Studies abroad use all sorts of different ways of assessing students and some of them
more successful than others.
Sometimes journals, which they reflect on their experience; I don't like those particularly,
partly because I find the students are supposed to do the journal every day but they do the
journal at the end of the thing and hand it in.
For my experience a more appropriate way of assessing study abroad is to ask students
to do very reflective and thoughtful essays and assignments that are different from the
kinds of assignments that you would have them do in a classroom, but not completely divorced
from the kinds of academic requirements that we would require in the classroom: research,
evidence, all of those other kinds of things.
We use study abroad experiences for the same reason that we integrate all sorts of different
kinds of techniques to study in the classroom at the university and that's because we think
it's really good for students to have a whole bunch of diversity in terms of the way they
study, in terms of the techniques that they use to study, in terms of the environment
in which they need to study.
Particularly, study abroad is often very useful because it often exposes students to a culture
that in a way that they couldn't normally get exposed to a culture, particularly when
the study abroad is a really intense one in which students are interacting constantly
with people in the community in which they are interacting.
So for instance, in the Sto:lo Nation one --which is not a study abroad but is international
in the sense that it is with a First Nation-- the students live in a community and do the
kinds of research that the community asks them to.
In South Africa, the students stay as a group but they are constantly on field trips and
in relationships with family.
The Guatemala term, students lived with a family; individual students live with different
families and became part of the family over the course of the term.
So study abroad is used primarily, partly because it gets students integrated with a
different culture in a way they could not simply by studying it in a university.
Study abroad is also used because it forces students to think about... to think through
different challenges: challenges about the way they are living, challenges about the
way information is presented to them.
First is I would start by suggesting that people be imaginative.
It doesn't make sense to decide to do a study abroad somewhere and then try to replicate
what you do in a classroom.
It doesn't make sense to have a study abroad not to be recognized like a course in a classroom:
you should get credit units for it --students should get credit units for it-- students
should be assessed, but it shouldn't be exactly like a 200-level course or a 300-level course
in a history program, it should be different.
So you need to be imaginative, you need to recognize the... the inherent strengths there
are in a term abroad and a study abroad.
One of the things we did when we set up the Guatemala term abroad is that we set it up
in such a way that we didn't have to be --that is, the instructors-- didn't have to be with
the students all the time.
And I think that for instructors setting up terms abroad it is really important that they
set it up in such a way that they're not the go-to person all the time, for all of the
students for every minute of the day.
'Cause they're going to offer it twice and they're going to be worn out and they're never
going to want to do it again.
The other suggestion I would have is that they trust local resources as much as they
can, that is, they do reasonable assessments of who in the places they're going to can
be relied upon to manage programs, to offer academic components, to look after students
and make sure students are safe, but then having done that, that they let them become
part of the program and part of the study abroad and that they get...
some sense of ownership of study abroad as well.
My final suggestions I would make about it for ...for instructors that were thinking
about setting up a study abroad is that I think it's reasonably important to institutionalize
it, so that for instance, if you are thinking about setting up a study abroad in Greece...
think about ways in which other faculty could run this, so that you're not the person that
has to do it all the time.
That's easier to do if it's an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary kind of a study abroad
term than it's one set within a department.