Building a Better World

What are our duties towards communities of strangers who, living across town or across the world, host our students’ living and learning? And how might the decisions we make in program design operationalize those duties?

Dr. Richard Slimbach, Professor of Global Studies at Azusa Pacific University, addressed these questions in “Program Design for the Common Good,” which he originally shared as part of a session at the forum on Education Abroad. Dr. Slimbach has been kind enough to share the document on this website and in the blogpost below. It begins with a realistic scenario - and ends with a thoughtful planning rubric for considering dimensions of programs that affect students, communities, and the public good. Enjoy:

Scenario

You represent a fairly typical international educator. Married or not, with or without children, you enjoy professional status and a middle-class income. You work upwards of 50 hours each week, not only because student development is your life mission, but also for the more subtle rewards. Travels abroad never fail to keep our minds mobile and our imaginations awake.

Your programs mostly run in European or Australian cities—London and Dublin, Paris and Prague, Seville and Sydney—places of high culture and high student demand. After completing a long-haul jet flight that carries them to their destination, our students typically adopt an on-the-ground lifestyle that is both segregated and sumptuous. They live with cultural similars in Wi-Fi enabled housing, sample culinary delights Anthony Bourdain-style, soak up the city’s elegant museums and art galleries, play the flirt at pubs, shop at upscale stores, and otherwise gaze into the “good face” of modern culture.

For purported health and safety reasons, you protect students from the “other” London (or Istanbul or Buenos Aires). That is, the city’s “back regions”—pockets of deprivation and struggle inhabited by the perpetual (and growing) underclass. Worldwide, this socio-economic underbelly is “home” to about two-thirds of humanity. They signify highly asymmetrical “contact zones” in which affluent foreigners and struggling natives rarely, if ever, make contact.*

All of this travel adventure comes at a fairly high cost—financially it’s about $14,000/semester to program providers; socially, the high life of students tends to reinforce the income and social divisions already in place; and environmentally, each American student traveling to Europe will add approximately two tons of CO2 to their already 20ton/person/year carbon footprint.** In short, ethical dilemmas surround each of these program-related costs. The $14,000+ could certainly be used to relieve great human suffering and promote greater social equity if it were taxed by some global authority and then channeled to distressed areas of the world. In the right hands, it could fund everything from mosquito bed nets and emergency obstetrical care to basic school services and landmine eradication—all without heating the planet and further depleting natural resources.

Considering these things, what do we owe to human and earth others? What ought we to do?*** (Choose one)

[ ] Nothing. “We should maintain a personal perspective—affirming the value and dignity of every person equally, including my own. Because everyone’s life matters in exactly the same way, all women and men have an equal right to live their lives in accordance with their own values. Resources have already been distributed unequally. Those of us with more should not be expected to surrender part of what we have to those with less. To the contrary, we should each pursue our own self-interest by maximizing the satisfaction of our own ambitions or desires. [Personal partiality]

[ ] Everything. “We should step back from our personal position in the world and assume an impersonal perspective—affirming the value and dignity of all humans, as well as sentient nonhumans, but without partiality. Because everyone matters (including me), and nobody matters more than anyone else, it follows that we should distribute resources sufficiently as to make for equal, or roughly equal, life chances.” [Impersonal impartiality]

[ ] Something. “We should attempt to achieve some form of reasonable integration between the moral claims for equality (neighbor-caring) and the equally moral rights of partiality (self-caring). Realistically, we cannot expect the US, or any other major western power, to cede their economic sovereignty to a central authority like the UN. But that does not absolve us from any moral responsibility. Our duty is to balance the equal importance of others with the special responsibility we have for our own.”

The choice of “something” entails an obligation, not just to do no harm, but also to do good. The question is, how? How do we best fulfill our “fair share” of responsibility to distant others? There are at least two ways: (1) make personal lifestyle choices to mitigate social and environmental damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, and (2) manage global learning programs that enrich disciplinary knowledge and skills in ways that are economically viable (affordable), socially just (reduce inequities, improve lives), and environmentally bearable (protect ecosystems).

Basic Dimensions of Sustainability

Source: Wikipedia - Sustainable Development

Specifically, what are our duties towards communities of strangers who, living across town or across the world, host our students’ living and learning? And how might the decisions we make in program design operationalize those duties?

Central assumptions

1. Student outcomes and community outcomes belong together. Privileged education abroad students carry a responsibility to not use the lives of others—and particularly those within low power contexts—as objects of their own knowledge production and skills development. There must be reciprocity, mutuality, “give back.”

2. Student and community outcomes flow out of particular hopes for the world, types of participating students, program designs, and partner organizations. Outcomes are fairly predictable, as they are a product of various inputs—some in our control and others not. We are responsible for the decisions (“conditions”) we make in each of these areas.

• Hopes for the world. Before we can answer the “what” question (What do we owe to host strangers?), we need to first settle the “why” question (Why are we running education abroad programs in the first place?). What purpose compels us? Is ours primarily an educational mission: to deepen academic learning, broaden student horizons (liberal learning), and foster some sense of global responsibility? If so, does the student learning goal attach to any community development mission that delivers social and economic benefits to host communities? How do these aims position themselves vis-à-vis prevailing market imperatives (e.g. enhance institutional reputation and student marketability)? Which purposes will drive the enterprise, and which will ‘ride shotgun’?

Figure 1. Global learning purposes: from private benefit to public good

• Types of participating students. Global learning outcomes depend as much (or more) on factors internal to participants as on factors external to the program design. Students are not blank slates as they enroll in our programs; they bring their own motivations, expectations, and agendas that either enable or sabotage program potential. What we know intuitively is confirmed empirically: the time and effort students devote to intercultural learning activities link to desired outcomes (Kuh, 2009). Students are also at different levels of moral, psychosocial, and intercultural development. Consequently, they need programs that meet them where they are and take them to the next level of development. All to say we cannot expect a single program to enable students to achieve either a high level of “intercultural competence” or community contribution.

• Program designs. There are fundamental differences in the academic, intercultural, and community development potential of programs (Engle & Engle, 2003). Considering these distinctions, component-by-component, we come to see that all design decisions carry a trajectory: they “intervene” in the lives of students and communities toward one set of outcomes, and away from others. For example, a full semester program that incorporates pre-field training, family stays, voluntary service placements, community-based language learning, and participatory research experiences will likely produce very different outcomes from a three-week program that isolates students from the daily life of the host community.

• Partner organizations. Positive student and community outcomes depend on joining a certain kind of student to a certain kind of program in partnership with various grassroots organizations (GROs)—host families, service agencies, faith communities, etc.—that work directly within communities on issues specific to them. Ideally, all parties would negotiate their respective rights and obligations in ways that are respectful, equitable, and mutually beneficial. This usually entails a relational power shift in the favor of those (like southern NGOs) who are frequently least able to negotiate from a position of adequate capacity and relative strength.

Figure 2. Process model for re-balancing student and community benefits

Exercise

The following 17 program features suggest a framework for global learning that serves the common good—that is, balances student and community outcomes. First, bring to mind a global learning program with which you are familiar. Then, as each component is discussed, rate how well that program satisfies the stated criteria: high, medium, low, or absent.

Program design components and the common good

Components & Criteria	High 3	Medium 2	Low 1	Absent 0
1. Primary purpose. The program instills an ethical vision of human flourishing that encompasses personal decisions about where to live, how to live and learn, whom to befriend, why to learn language, what to eat and buy, and where to volunteer and conduct research.
2. Destination. The program inserts learners into community settings—domestic and international—that significantly contrast “home” in terms of language, cultural patterns, racial character, and economic conditions.
3. Duration. Assuming a high degree of social and cultural immersion (see below), the program is long enough for learners to (a) acquire basic language and culture skills, (b) build sustaining relationships with local residents, (c) unsettle some core assumptions and values of their home culture, and (d) begin internalizing new perspectives.
4. Size of group. The program guards against creating a separate and self-sustaining social structure (mobile ghetto) by distributing group members within the local community (e.g. limiting each host family and service placement to only one student).
5. Diversity of group. The program attracts a diverse student population (gender, race, social class, and academic major) to enable contrasting interpretations of common field experience.
6. Learner preparation: The program offers pre- or-in-field training that equips learners with the basis conceptual and experiential ‘tools’ to optimize field learning. The program expects students to acquire a working knowledge of global political economy, the host country’s political history, current events, group customs and household patterns, ethnographic skills, service ethics, and research methods.
7. “Footprint” reduction. The program provides opportunities for participants to travel to and from their program site “carbon neutral” (e.g. by purchasing “passes” or “green tags”).
8. Local sourcing. The program maximizes the economic benefits to local residents by having housing, food, transportation, and touring needs provided through indigenous sources (e.g. host families, local eateries and vendors, public forms of transportation, local guides and national staff).
9. Housing. The program places learners in living situations (like local families) where they can cultivate empathetic bonds with host nationals of the majority ethno-class, and reduce water and power consumption toward the local standard.
10. Language learning. The program equips learners to communicate in and outside the classroom in the local language with appropriate body language and etiquette.
11. Community immersion. The program seeks breadth from depth by embedding learners in local social structures (e.g. host families, service organizations, universities) where they burst the foreigner “bubble” and create a basic social support structure with host nationals.
12. Content, contexts & process. The program moves beyond the classroom in arranging relevant content, contexts, and pedagogical process for investigating significant local problems—ill health, failing schools, human rights abuses, etc.—related to students’ major fields.
13. Instruction & mentoring. The program provides the necessary external facilitation and supervision to keep students focused, active, and reflective in their learning. The field support system includes “mentor-advisors” drawn from the host community (e.g. host family heads, service supervisors, language coaches, and research guides).
14. Self-direction. The program encourages learners to experiment, improvise, and actively build up knowledge by adopting new social roles (e.g. guests of local families, volunteers in grassroots organizations), and sharing responsibility for deciding where they will learn and serve, with whom, and how (selection of academic materials and methods).
15. Organization building. The program “gives back” to the community by involving students as service-learners, interns, and researchers in locally accountable organizations. Students learn from, contribute skills or knowledge to, and otherwise support “native capability” through community improvement actions over a continuous period of time.
16. Sociocultural & disciplinary analysis. The program creates spaces for students to systematically process (make sense of) their primary experiences in two areas: (a) sociocultural differences (home culture-host culture contrasts in habits, values, institutions, and systems), and (b) discipline-specific issues (i.e. how and why various social, economic, political, and environmental problems manifest).
17. Return & response. The program facilitates a return process whereby learners disengage from their former mental state and lifestyle in order to explore new possible selves as a basis for re-constructing alternative responses to the world beyond, both on campus and in the local community.

 

By Eric Hartman

The 2013 Forum on Education Abroad proved to be a fertile ground for learning about and sharing new resources related to global service-learning and Fair Trade Learning.

We presented pedagogy and community partnership content related to our book, Building a Better World: The Pedagogy and Practice of Global Service-Learning. That presentation is here. Slide number ten features the use of Clatyon’s DEAL Model of reflection to advance intercultural learning before, during, and after an abroad program.

I also had the opportunity to hear an excellent presentation on community impact, community development, and partnership from Mark Ritchie of the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute. He called the audience’s attention to Eldis.org, an open-source space for research, resources and tools that support international development.

In another session focused on pedagogy, The University of Kentucky’s Anthony Ogden shared his helpful and especially well-organized online faculty toolkit for international education. The toolkit supports faculty members’ efforts to foster meaningful intellectual and intercultural experiences for their students. Dr. Ogden, also the author of “The View from the Veranda: Understanding Today’s Colonial Student,” is offering an online education session on Wednesday, April 24th at 3 pm. Developed in collaboration with Melibee Global, it’s titled: The Decolonization of Education Abroad.

Finally, a broad array of faculty, administrators, and nonprofit partners collaborated to advance ideas and suggest best practices relating to community impact in global service-learning. Click the link to view a PDF of the session: Advancing Best Practices in Global Service-Learning. Slides 11 - 21 detail Amizade’s articulation of Fair Trade Learning.

We’re excited to continue to work with the Forum to further discuss standards development for community impact in international education, particularly when it includes service-learning and other forms of university-community engagement.

If you’re interested in more resources, movement-building, work-shopping, and dialogue on global service-learning and university-community partnership, join us next month at the 6th Annual Cornell Global Service-Learning Institute, from May 29 - 31 in beautiful Ithaca, NY. I’m looking forward to the dialogue!

We’re looking forward to excellent dialogue, exchange, and movement-building, with current registrants representing states from the mid-Atlantic and throughout the Northeast. The intimate size of this gathering ensures opportunities to engage in deep, purposeful dialogue about the work of conscientious global service-learning. We hope you can join us!

The GSLI:

The 6th annual Global Service-Learning Institute will build upon established institute strengths in global service-learning pedagogy and program development, while also integrating more explicit attention to best practices in community-based planning, community development, and movement-building within global service-learning. Previous institutes have highlighted encouragement of institutional teams and the opportunity to workshop global service-learning programs during the institute, along with deep collaboration, communication with, and learning from like-minded peers. This year’s institute will provide participants with the opportunity to further develop their global service-learning programs – whether they are novice or advanced – and it will also employ structured consideration of the concept of Fair Trade Learning and its associated commitments to community partners and program transparency.

MORE INFO — OR — REGISTER NOW

Seven years ago, as I studied for my doctorate, a former student asked me to write an introduction to a photo book on international service and engagement. The questions he wanted the introduction to address were: What is all of this work about? Why are we doing it? What does it hold in common?

The book never came to fruition, but the essay found a home with Community Works Journal (they have graciously allowed a reprint here). I post it now because at the recent Forum on Education Abroad one of the sessions I co-presented concluded with an audience member asking that enduring question: Do you believe that global citizenship exists? Part of my response to that question is below.

Additional resources from the Forum will be posted in the days and weeks to come, including content related to presentations on pedagogy and community impact as well as several new guest bloggers. There was a great deal of excitement at the conference about Fair Trade Learning, an idea advanced by Amizade Global Service-Learning and its Executive Director, Brandon Blache-Cohen. Brandon was the former student, seven years ago, who got me rolling on this essay.

Becoming More Human, Building a Better World

By ERIC HARTMAN

What is it all about? Why engage in service-learning and place-based education—if not to improve ourselves and to improve the world around us? This question—how do individuals fit within and contribute to broader community?—has been driving liberal education, community education, and philosophy for quite literally hundreds of years. As many of the most interesting community development solutions and educational methodologies that exist today are profoundly place-based and culturally and temporally-specific, is there anything that unites us?

The question presses harder as travel and communication become more affordable. We have the opportunity to engage in cooperative and community-based development efforts that span countries, civil societies, and citizenships. Locally, our cities and now towns are increasingly diverse. We may walk through several ways of being and knowing just on the way to the store. In our contemporary moment, conscious of the many harms done by universalizing logics and civilizing mandates throughout history, we must be able to imagine at least a tentative answer. We must be able to point, albeit loosely, the direction we’re headed.

If we have not gotten better at a precise answer to how we improve ourselves and the world around us, we have certainly complicated the answer(s). We do not lack for passion in pursuit of the question. In my role teaching and facilitating learning in university-community engagements in the US and around the world, I’ve seen the full range of tears, concerns, and fundamental life changes following from anger and outrage at our everyday, omnipresent injustices.

A student broke down in tears in a US shopping mall following her return from a service-learning experience in a Bolivian orphanage, where she everyday cared for babies whose lives would be fundamentally altered with just a fraction of the resources traded in that mall on a given day. A colleague left conventional study abroad—absolutely resigned from her staff position at a strong, established university—after her first experience with global service-learning. She saw how our conventional patterns of learning, exchange, and politics continuously perpetuated a world of injustice. So she walked away.

We don’t all need to walk away. We do all need to do our part. A community organizer who runs an all-encompassing human services agency up the street from my office shared it with me this way, “When we get new interns, I ask them if they’re interested in becoming more human. If they’re interested in growing as people, in better connecting as people, in being better people, then we can work with them – because they’ll develop relationships with people in our community. If they just want technical skills, they’re not for us.”

We do wish to become more human—or to be better citizens, or cosmopolitans, or global justice advocates, or, or, or… but our age is also marked by a ubiquitous uncertainty born of centuries of good intentions gone awry. This essay is about acting in the context of that broad awareness. It’s about understanding the legacy of racism, sexism, colonialism, and hundreds of years of other inequities and horrors, and nonetheless figuring out how – today – we can still manage to cooperate and continue building a better world together.

That better world includes US communities as much as it does communities elsewhere; in fact that world will not be built until we can think of others as brothers and sisters first and as nationalities second. It will also not be built until people from positions of power and privilege can cooperate with their economically devastated neighbors five miles away as much as they may cooperate with international charities and global justice efforts.

This generation IS acting to address injustice. There is ample empirical evidence: young people seek out and engage in service-learning; increasing numbers of students are daring to explore nontraditional study abroad destinations; young people have founded NGOs to work with refugees in Africa or internally displaced people in Colombia; it was young people who played a major role in getting funding to fight AIDS in Africa on the US agenda. We are pushing harder on global social issues than ever before. It is our responsibility to realize greater global justice. We can no longer pretend the world ends at the shore. Nor, of course, can we pretend that injustice only begins at the shore. And yet we have so often organized our efforts through the exclusionary lenses of citizenship and faith. We are not merely citizens, we are not merely Christians. We are human.

Our efforts are making a broad difference. Yet these efforts are hard to name precisely. That is both good and bad. It’s hard to raise money for a movement that refuses to fit into a bumper sticker. It’s also hard to raise an army. And that’s part of the reason this generation’s movement is itself deliberately pluralistic. It recognizes the long history of misguided attempts to promote the good. Yet continuing to build a better world binds us together.

We explicitly recognize the great danger in supposing to solve others’ problems, in attempting to do justice, or simply in interacting with other cultures disrespectfully. That recognition and challenge requires that each person who works toward some sense of global community thinks about the impacts their actions have in travel, in service, and in their daily lived lives. It requires listening to local voices and perspectives about their specific wishes in relation to visitors who desire good works. And it requires thorough thinking that attempts to consider the nearly incomprehensible series of effects that our actions can have in this world of unprecedented interconnectedness.

In many ways these things are not new. People have always sought the world, have always explored. The Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes declared, “I am a citizen of the world,” and sought with other cosmopolitans to discern ethical actions for a citizen conscious of what lay beyond the walls, conscious – to do this is still an intellectual problem and paradox for us today – of the unknown, unexplored, or misunderstood. Gandhi advocated for a new social-economic-religious order based on the unity of humanity and the opportunity to be of service. Various traditions speak of right, wrong, fairness, and justice. Today we have the opportunity to see the overlap and differences among these paths. And our communication technologies give us the knowledge that – by nearly any of the measures – justice would involve a radical departure from the world as we know it.

This is our position, inspired by the human impulse to connect and to serve, informed by our actions and testing our ethics in the context of a continuous and dizzying flow of information that at once liberates from stock thinking and plunges into uncertainty. Not one, two, three, or four ways of knowing but countless. Aware of the unintended impacts of past efforts to improve societies—cultures undone by the insertion of Christianity, millions killed in the name of proletarian revolution, warfare and genocide perpetrated due to conjured ethnic identities and the employment of religious or national identity for enhanced senses of belonging – we still wish to build a better world. We know we must therefore do so humbly, through humble service and a humble approach to knowledge.

This is where the impulse and action returns to us as ideas. Ideas we may receive from and develop with others, share, reject and reformulate based on our core concern of valuing all human life equally, and living a life that reflects that equal value. This is the fundamental uniting concept—some call it global citizenship, others say it is simply becoming more human. The duty is clear. We must continuously return to the question: Do our actions, efforts, and outlooks reflect concern for each human being’s individual dignity?

This is powerful and persuasive on its own – or so it should be, but many people are inspired to access and to live through this reality based on their understanding of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and many other less popular understandings of the divine, the unknowable. It is that serious. It is about how we understand the miracles around us, the complexity of the world, the human experience and purpose. For many, a secular reconciliation of races will never ring as truly or strongly as Martin Luther King’s vision of the peaceable kingdom he shared the night before his assassination, “mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

But we do not know if King’s Peaceable Kingdom is truer than Pope Benedict’s understanding of Love, nor whether we must understand Abraham in the context of Christian, Islamic, or Jewish teachings. We know only that many teachings have understood the supremacy of Love. In villages around the world, without phones and without human rights traditions as articulated by the United Nations, human life matters. And even our best secular articulations of the need for justice, fairness, equity, and basic rights can’t get started without an initial assumption of the worth of human life.

We therefore may hold to this as a fundamental truth, while we embrace the humility that allows us to value and appreciate the many different – sometimes the strangeness astounds even the most culturally sensitive—paths to achieving this final outcome: valuing human life, helping more than hurting. That is how we become more human. That is how we build a better world.

This humility means not only that we must be willing and able to distance ourselves from our cultural backgrounds and assumptions about ways of being and knowing, but also that we must recognize the need to be profoundly humble in terms of our ability to even know. Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash (1997) have warned us of the inherent folly in ‘global thinking.’ There is arrogance, they argue, in pretending to God-like powers of cognition and analysis in ostensible service of a global society, the contours of which we are fundamentally incapable of truly comprehending. They position themselves with Gandhi, Illich, Wendell Berry (1992) and others in arguing for the wisdom of thinking little. Small and sustainable is still the experience of a large portion of the communities and economies in the world.

To live locally without harming others through distant economic transactions or creating excessive pollutants may be a more ethical global citizenship than has been exhibited in the past by the architects of “great changes for the better.” Belgian colonists’ efforts to civilize Hutus and Tutsis, Maoist reforms, the effects of Manifest Destiny on Native Americans, and various versions of conversion at the end of a gun are among the most widely known disasters of doing good, but many effects are much more subtle.

People in the Sacred Valley of Peru are currently battling non-native and invasive eucalyptus trees that the Peace Corps planted in the 1960s. Throughout the development era, many developing countries have become net importers of food (Escobar 1994); their citizens are less able to choose to live local, sustainable lifestyles. Doing good gone bad is not merely a phenomenon in developing countries; nearly every major US city has a strong example of a neighborhood or set of neighborhoods marginalized and destroyed due to reckless, top-down urban planning (Jacobs 1961).

Change has costs and benefits. Humility means being very (extraordinarily!) careful. And this is our position, to be conscious of these objections, warnings, and concerns, to be aware of different ways of being and knowing, and to choose the most ethical path we can, based upon what lies behind us and before us, based not only on what is but also on what is still possible. Because for all the folly and error – make no mistake implicit in those terms is death and destruction—there has been substantial beauty and realization of possibility. Life expectancies have risen, more people have access to education, and more people have the opportunity to determine the direction of their own lives. Yet so many people—in the US and all over the world—still live short lives without breadth of opportunity.

That is it. We must realize the potential and possibility, the interrelated and overlapping ethical streams, the value of different ways of being and knowing, the profound skepticism we should give our own efforts, and the chance to bring people together peaceably, equitably, respectfully. To do so would revolutionize our current experience. The possibility is better felt and understood than painted precisely. Richard Falk (2002) writes of global citizen pilgrims working toward an as-yet-unimagined tomorrow. Our efforts must be rooted in the reality we have, but visionary in terms of imagining then creating a better tomorrow that more robustly recognizes all people equally.

We are on the way. Different people will serve different ways. As engineers developing sustainable buildings, as editors allowing pluralistic voices, as revolutionaries and pragmatists, as business people developing and succeeding with fair trade products, as teachers making sure peace, justice, and diverse cultures are part of the curriculum, as writers, philosophers, poets, and small, local, sustainable farmers, as people who value their children and families and care to live in ethical communities.

We will work toward it. We will address specific problems. We will end global poverty. We will reconsider poverty. We will stop calling healthy sustainable farmers poor just because they live differently than many of us. We will recognize human flourishing in its many forms. We will be skeptical, but we will work and hope in service of the central ethic that all of our sisters and brothers must be recognized as such and valued equally. We will continue this work, creating, allowing, and engaging possibilities. We will make our own best efforts to help realize the rhythm recognized by the great Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney:

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

Berry, W. 1992. Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community. New York: Pantheon Books.

Escobar, A. 1994. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Esteva, G. and Prakash, M.S. 1997. From Global Thinking to Local Thinking. In
Rahnema, M. and Bawtree, V. eds. The Post-Development Reader. New York: Zed Books.

Falk, R. 2002. “An Emergent Matrix of Citizenship: Complex, Uneven, and Fluid” in Dowers, N. and Williams, J. Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.

 

By Julia Lang

The second week I was volunteering at a foundation for street children in Guayaquil, Ecuador, during my semester abroad in college, a volunteer doctor asked if I would sit in on his check-ups with the young women (age 6-14). Once their clothes were removed, child after child showed scars, bruises, hidden shame and pain. I began to realize that these children, who sold soda on the street for 5 cents and went days before collecting enough money to return home, were survivors and pawns in an oppressive, patriarchal society over which they had no control.

The world I had known was stripped bare, exposing the harsh realities and structural inequities of decades of oppression. The lives of these children and their families were so radically different from my white, middle-class life in upstate New York. The more I learned, the more I realized just how much I did not know, a mental shift that continues to drive my curiosity, behavior and interaction with students and with myself today.

As my semester in Ecuador unfolded, I became painfully aware of our unjust world and the need to work for positive change. This experience, compounded by my service experiences in the Dominican Republic (in high school), Nicaragua (in college), and leading service trips in Costa Rica (post-college), prompted me to explore the following questions for my Master’s thesis at Oregon State University (degree to be conferred this May):

• What differences in global citizenship, if any, are there among students who did international service in college vs. those who attended traditional study-abroad programs or did not go abroad at all?
• Does studying abroad foster significant changes in global citizenship and challenge and expand students’ worldviews? If so, to what extent, compared with students who engaged in international service-learning?
• How do various factors impact students’ levels of global citizenship – is global citizenship a result of maturity alone, or do any of the following factors have a significant impact: race/ethnicity, gender, year in school, age, length of time abroad, host family experience, community service abroad and more than 40 hours of community service?

First, I explored what educators call “global citizenship” and best practices for service-learning via the following:

• I researched the historical context of civic education and service-learning (Astin & Sax, 1998; Bacon, 1997; Dewey, 1951; Hartman, 2008; National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, 2008; Rocheleau, 2004).
• I compiled results from studies demonstrating the positive impact of service-learning on students’ growth, ambition, engagement and critical thinking abilities (Berson & Younkin, 1998; Bryan, Schonermann & Karpa, 2011; Colsby, Bercaw, Clark & Galiardi, 2009; Eyler & Giles 1997; Kielsmeier, 2011; Markus, Howard, & King, 1993; Myers-Lipton 1998).
• I examined the academic, personal and social benefits of service-learning, particularly international service-learning (Gray, Murdock, & Stebbins, 2002), such as higher levels of critical thinking skills (Opper, Teichler, & Carlson, 1990), cross-cultural effectiveness (Coryell, 2009), self-reliance, and self-confidence (Batchelder & Root, 1994).
• I explored the “shadow side” of service-learning, focusing on international service-learning—how these experiences can not only exacerbate power differences and reinforce inequities between those who serve and those being served (Brown, 2011; Davis, 2006; Green, 2001; Kahn, 2011; Nieto, 2000; Pompa, 2002; Madsen-Camacho, 2004), but also lead to academic difficulties, cultural identity crises, anxiety, depression, social isolation, helplessness, interpersonal conflict, confusion, and anger (Hartman, 2008; Kiely, 2005; Kittredge, 1998; Martin, 1984; Sahin, 1990; Tonkin and Quiroga, 2004; Zapf, 1991).
• I demonstrated the need for critical service-learning, where students grapple with the intersections of power, privilege, and oppression on a personal level at the service site and at a global level by learning about the historical, political, and social systems that created and reinforce systems of oppression (Green, 2001; Kahn, 2011; Levinson, 1990; Madsen-Camacho, 2004; Mitchell, 2008; O’Grady, 2000; Pompa, 2002; Walker, 2000). For instance, students either learn how to serve a hot meal to the homeless, or they learn about why homelessness exists in the first place and what they can do as active citizens to help address this social phenomenon.
• I discovered that the literature suggests that certain program elements can have a dramatic impact on students’ levels of global citizenship. These elements include:
  • Reflection (Lutterman-Aguliar & Gingerich, 2002; Peterson, 2002),
  • Orientations and re-emersion workshops (Gaw, 2000; Hartman, 2008; Kiely, 2005; Kittredge, 1998; Martin, 1984; Sahin, 1990; Zapf, 1991; Tonkin & Quiroga, 2004),
  • Critical service and an examination of root causes of global issues (Chesler, 1995; Chesler & Vasques Scalera, 2000; Groski, 2006; Mitchell, 2008; Pompa, 2002; Robinson, 2002),
  • Overt examination of power and privilege (Kahn, 2011; Kendall, 2006; Madsen-Camacho, 2004; McKeown, 2009; Tatum, 1992),
  • An analysis of power and privilege for all students (Nieto, 2000; Rosenberger, 2000), and:
  • For white students, continual reflection and analysis of their own white identity and white privilege (hooks, 1989; Endres & Gould, 2009; Green, 2001; McIntosh, 1998; Mitchell, 2008; Nieto 2000; Tatum, 1992; Simons, Fehr, Hogerwerff, Georganas & Russel, 2011).
  • I reviewed various measures of global citizenship, deciding to use a scale put forth by Morais & Ogden (2010), where global citizenship is defined as the presence of social responsibility, global competence and global civic engagement, categorized by not only an awareness of the world around you, but also an awareness of the self.

Methods:

318 students filled out questionnaires; they were grouped as those who (a) had engaged in experiential study abroad experiences (differing in length, ratio of classroom to service-learning time and host family versus dormitory or apartment living), (b) had participated in traditional study abroad programs (attending a university to take classes and living in a dorm, with no service component), or (c) did not study abroad at all.

Findings:

The results were striking. I found no significant differences in scores based on race/ethnicity, gender, year in school, age, or length of time abroad. However, students who had stayed with a host family or did community service – especially 40+ hours of community service –scored much higher on the global citizenship scale (the best scores of any group tested). Furthermore I found no significant difference between the traditional study abroad students and those who did not go abroad.

These dramatic findings suggest that studying abroad is not enough, a fact that is often ignored as educators push for students to study abroad, but might not be concerned whether the program has any cultural or service immersion components.

My findings indicate that intensive cultural immersion and service, particularly extensive service abroad, is a crucial component to promote global citizenship. Even after accounting for individual background and characteristics, as well as a study abroad experience, students who stayed with host families and engaged in service experienced significant gains in measures of global citizenship. These findings suggest that we must look beyond the checkbox of whether students study abroad or not, and create meaningful and reciprocal experiences in which students can engage, serve, and become culturally immersed in their host communities.

In an age categorized by “interdependence, rather than insularity” (Liberal Education & America’s Promise, 2009, p. 15), today’s graduates must be more globally informed, aware, and engaged than ever before as international markets merge and the world becomes exponentially more interconnected (Plater, 2011) and “flat” (Freidman, 2005). The need to develop global citizens on campuses nationwide is immediate as more students than ever are studying abroad.

But this isn’t enough.

Study abroad programs might be falling short by failing to engage students in issues of social justice and/or empowering them to achieve real social change and develop as global citizens.

By deliberately incorporating immersion, structured reflection, and reciprocity into cultural and community immersion experiences, institutions of higher education can produce graduates who are more globally competent, engaged, and committed to multicultural and global issues and to making their local and global community more just.

References

 

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Green, A.E. (2001). “But you aren’t White”: Racial perceptions and service-learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 8, 18-26.

Groski, P. C. (2006). Complicity with conservatism: The de-politicizing of multicultural and intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 17(2), 163-177.

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Kahn, H. E. (2011). Overcoming the challenges of international service learning: A visual approach to sharing authority, community development, and global learning. In R. G. Bringle, J. A., Hatcher & S. J. Jones (Eds.), International Service Learning (pp. 113-125). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

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Madsen-Camacho, M. (2004). Power and privilege: Community service learning in Tijuana. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 19 (3), 31-42.

Markus, G.B., Howard, J.P.F., & King, D.C. (1993). Integrating community service and classroom instruction enhances learning: Results from an experiment. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 15(4), 410-419.

Martin, J. N. (1984). The intercultural reentry: Conceptualization and directions for future research. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 8, 115-134.

McIntosh, P. (1998). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In Re-visioning family therapy: Race, culture, and gender in clinical practice, ed. Monica McGoldrick,147-152. New York: Guilford Press.

McKeown, J.S. (2009). The first time effect: The impact of study abroad on college student intellectual development. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Mitchell, T.D. (2008). Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 12(2), 50-65.

Morais, D., & Ogden, A. (2010). Initial development and validation of the global citizenship scale. Journal of Studies in International Education, 15(5), 445-466.

Myers-Lipton, S. J. (1996). Effect of service-learning on college students’ attitudes toward international understanding. Journal of College Student Development, 37(6), 659-667.

National Service-Learning Clearinghouse. (2008). What is service-learning? Retrieved from www.servicelearningorg/what_is_service-learning/index.php

Nieto, S. (2000). Foreword. In C.R. O’Grady (Ed.), Integrating service learning and multicultural education in colleges and universities (pp1-19). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

O’Grady, C. (2009). Integrating service learning and multicultural education: An overview. In C.R. O’Grady (Ed.), Learning and multicultural education in colleges and universities (pp. 1-21). Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Opper, S., Teichier, U., & Carlson, J. (1990). Impact of study abroad programs on students and graduates. London, U.K.: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Peterson, C.F. (2002). Preparing engaged citizens: Three models of experiential education for social justice. Frontiers, 8, 165-206.

Plater, W. M. (2011). The context for international service learning: An invisible revolution is underway. In R. G. Bringle, J. A. Hatcher, & S. G. Jones (Eds.), International service learning: Conceptual frameworks and research (pp. 29-56). Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Pompa, L. (2002). Service-learning as crucible: Reflections on immersion, context, power, and transformation. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 9(1), 67-76.

Robinson, T. (2000a). Service learning as justice advocacy: Can political scientists do politics? PS: Political Science and Politics, 33(3), 605-612

Rocheleau, J. (2004). Theoretical roots of service-learning: Progressive education and the development of citizenship. In B.W. Speck (Ed.), Service-learning: History, theories and issues (pp 3-27). Westport, CT: Praeger.

Rosenberger, C. (2000). Beyond empathy: Developing critical consciousness through service learning. In C. R. O’Grady (Ed.), Integrating service learning and multicultural education in colleges and universities (pp 23-43). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Sahin, N.H. (1990). Re-entry and the academic and psychological problems of the second generation. Psychology and Developing Societies, 2 (2) (1990), 165–182.

Simons L., Fehr, L., Black, N., Hogerwerff, F., Georganas, D., & Russel, B. (2011). The application of racial identity development in academic-based service learning. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 23(1), 72-83.

Tatum, B. D. (1992). Talking about race, learning about racism: The application of racial identity development theory in the classroom. Harvard Educational Review, 62(1), 1-24

Tonkin, Humphrey & Diego Quiroga. (2004). A qualitative approach to the assessment of international service-learning. Frontiers 10, Fall: 163-182.

Walker, T. (2000). A feminist challenge to community service: A call to politicize service-learning. In B. J. Balliet & K. Heffernan (Eds.), The practice of change: Concepts and models for service-learning in women’s studies (pp. 25-45). Washington DC: American Association for Higher Education.

Zapf, D. (1991). Cross-cultural transitions and wellness: Dealing with culture shock. International Journal for the Advancement of Counseling, 14, 105–119.

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Julia Lang completed her B.S. at Cornell University, where she spent a service-learning semester in New York City studying Multiculturalism, a semester in Guayaquil, Ecuador working at a foundation for street children, and led service trips throughout Nicaragua over winter breaks. Upon graduation, Julia led high school students on community service trips throughout Costa Rica, worked as a study abroad adviser for AFS, and spent the summer of 2012 in Sri Lanka learning how to lead international service trips. Julia is currently a Master’s Candidate in the College Student Services Administration program at Oregon State University and works at the Center for Civic Engagement. She previously wrote a related blog entry for this site: Transformation Experience: Service-Learning Student to Scholar.

 

 

By Eric Hartman

The biggest problem with the global service sector is not reinforcing historic patterns of power, privilege, and paternalism. The biggest problem with the sector is not that voluntourists may inadvertently undermine the development of local industry or unwittingly interfere with local cultural practices and assumptions. It is not that global do-gooders become self-congratulatory after making little tangible impact. These are all real problems, but they do not exist across all programs. Good programs are educative for all involved, capacity-building for community partners, and self-critical and humble. The biggest problem with the sector is this:

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of potential consumers, who see themselves as good people, who know relatively little about community and international development - are interested in purchasing a global service experience. One of the easiest things to sell is the perception of having done good - to a person who sees herself as good and is unfamiliar with the place she visits.

This dynamic presents an opportunity for unscrupulous study abroad and voluntourism companies. Too often, these organizations have no commitments to the communities where they work - and may even lack development experience. Bright photos filled with an exotic background, the appearance of diversity, and smiling children will recruit participants and fill the coffers. This is a problem. And it leads to the reasonable criticisms of shoddy voluntourism like an article featured in The Guardian last week. But too often critiques like this seem to dismiss the whole sector.

That’s short-sighted. Better to look at the research: to see that there is growing work on community impact and responsible partnership and evaluation models; to appreciate that international education scholars are getting better and better at isolating the program factors that support the development of intercultural learning and global citizenship; to see that some organizations are led by Southern partners as much as they are by Northern representatives.

Some of that literature is relevant to the wishes espoused by Ossob Mohamud, the author of last week’s Guardian article. Mohamud suggested:

Time and energy would be better spent building real solidarity between disparate societies based on mutual respect and understanding. Instead of focusing on surface symptoms of poverty, volunteers and the organisations that recruit them should focus on the causes that often stem from an unjust global economic order. Why not advocate and campaign for IMF and World Bank reforms?

“Real solidarity,” the data suggests, results more frequently and to a deeper level of commitment from community-engaged courses than from conventional courses on campus. That initial human connection - which shoddy programs neither deepen nor translate into intercultural understanding and exploration of political connections - is the key toward building a globally conscious person.

If we did not try to responsibly cross cultural and physical borders to better lift and understand one another’s humanity, the world would be poorer for it.

Some faculty have been engaged in this work for many years, are deeply critical of the worst within it, and are willing to work with community partners and researchers to advance the best possible outcomes for communities and participants. We draw on best practices from the field and from related research to ensure the most robust programming possible. Many of us are gathering again soon at the 6th Annual Cornell Institute for Global Service-Learning in Ithaca, NY, from May 29 - May 31. If you’re interested in responsible cross-cultural learning and partnership, I hope to see you there.

“Most students do not meaningfully develop either through simple exposure to the environment or through having educators take steps to increase the amount of exposure through ‘immersing’ them. Instead, students learn and develop effectively and appropriately when educators intervene more intentionally through well-designed training programs that continue throughout the study abroad experience…. Put differently, the data show that students learn and develop considerably more when educators prepare them to become more self-reflective, culturally self-aware, and aware of ‘how they know what they know’” (p. 21).

By Eric Hartman

I began reading Student Learning Abroad: What Our Students Are Learning, What They’re Not, and What We Can Do About It (Vande Berg, Paige, & Hemming Lou, 2012) with two hefty doses of skepticism. The first stemmed from my earliest introductions to the study abroad field, a process facilitated by mentors in political science and service-learning who, to be frank, didn’t see the same quality of research in international education. This bias about the field stuck with me, and influenced my reading before I even cracked the book. The authors’ statuses as the leading researchers in the field arguably only deepened my concern.

As soon as I actually opened it, I turned the doubt up one more notch, when I realized the authors were going to draw on Thomas Kuhn’s work in philosophy of science to suggest, “during the nearly 100 years of its existence, study abroad has evolved through three significantly different accounts of the nature of knowing and learning – from ‘positivism’ to ‘relativism’ and then to ‘experiential/constructivism.’” (p. 10). This second bit of skepticism stems from fatigue with social scientists who window-dress their work with Kuhnian allusions in apparent efforts to increase rigor. This is often done sloppily; in a manner that does not enhance understanding.

And then I read. The quality of the authors’ arguments, the analytic precision, and the careful empirical methods overthrew my assumptions. Student Learning Abroad is an excellent book. It is essential reading for any international education administrator, practitioner, or researcher. Cumulatively speaking, decades of research and numerous programs, with scores of student cohorts, are critically examined and evaluated. Taken together, this research points to the authors’ clear assertion that “Most students learn to learn effectively abroad only when an educator intervenes, strategically and intentionally.” This conclusion is buttressed by data from programs around the world, connected to or administered by universities large and small. It is an insight that is as relevant for incoming students as it is for Americans leaving the country (Chapter 14 demonstrates this nicely, including discussion of data demonstrating the differential impact of peer-facilitated or faculty-facilitated online intercultural learning modules during international experiences).

Engle and Engle bring nearly two decades of systematic program design, experimentation, and iterative improvements to their chapter on lessons learned at the American University Center of Provence (AUCP). Their specific insights are numerous and their attention to detail is impressive. They include in their approach to holistic program design, for example, avoidance of a group flight opportunity, which they have found can have an excessively strong effect on students as an in-group challenged to turn outward and connect with individuals in Provence, at homestays, etc. They distill this and many other observations into “practical advice in the eight domains that we have found to have the most impact on the quality of student learning abroad” (p. 303). I would go one step further, in keeping with the spirit of this website, and call Engle and Engle’s insights The Eight Essential Elements in High Quality Study Abroad. They are:

1. Clarity of purpose: Identify your institution’s pedagogical and developmental mission in relation to the program.
2. Clarity of learning goals: Identify the specific skills you imagine students developing during their time abroad.
3. Cultural immersion: Identify the level of immersion most appropriate to learning goals. Recognize immersion as a foundation on which to build, instead of as an end in itself.
4. Holistic design: Identify what each program component or administrative policy is intended to do in terms of fostering student learning, and examine each one for pedagogical coherence.
5. Challenge and support: Keep the learning on the cusp between challenge and support, risk and reassurance.
6. Reflection and analysis: Address both the cognitive and emotional aspects of the study abroad experience using a developmental approach grounded in intercultural theory.
7. Student accountability: Guide students to see that the quality of their experience will ultimately result from the choices they make every day.
8. Assessment: Identify valid and reliable testing instruments and commit to the regular pre- and post- term assessment of targeted learning outcomes, both quantitative and qualitative. (pp. 303 – 305, This is an abridged version).

In addition to those listed above, transferable insights are shared from several other programs. The University of the Pacific offers several decades of research and innovation stemming from requiring all study abroad students to take a pre-departure intercultural communication course since 1977, as well as a separate requirement that has ensured since 1986 that all international studies students take a re-entry course. In both cases, these are full-fledged academic courses taught by tenure-stream faculty and wholly integrated with the students’ educational and developmental trajectories.

I am pasting the table of contents below. Each program chapter offers specific insights, relevant for different institutions with varying student populations and funding models. In addition to the program-specific chapters, this book also capitalizes on the incredibly transdisciplinary space that is intercultural education. One section is comprised of chapters that share discipline-specific understanding relevant to international education, from anthropology, experiential education, psychology, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and more.

The section that offers disciplinary insights also includes Bennett’s contribution, “Paradigmatic Assumptions and a Developmental Approach to Intercultural Learning.” The chapter is refreshingly self-reflexive and thoughtful. Bennett suggests:

For a praxis of intercultural relations, the minimum conceptual requirement is a self-reflexive definition of culture. There are two reasons for this. One is the obvious observation that how we define culture is itself a product of culture. Any definition of culture needs to take into account that it is defining the human activity of defining. When we realize this, we can spend less time arguing over the ‘best’ definition of culture and more time assessing any definition for its usefulness to our purposes.

The second reason for using a self-reflexive definition of culture relates directly to our purpose. When we encourage intercultural learning, we are asking people to engage in a self-reflexive act. Specifically, we are asking them to use the process of defining culture (which is their culture) to redefine culture in a way that is not their culture (p. 101).

The book is excellent at what it sets out to do. It will come as no surprise that I would like to see more emphasis on global citizenship development as a learning goal. Its lack of inclusion highlights the extent to which it is a term that has experienced relatively recent reification in higher ed. I also suspect it does not fit neatly with the paradigmatic assumptions of the intercultural learning field. Global citizenship, in most formulations, involves some commitment (albeit tentative, contingent, fallabilistic) to common human dignity and - often - human rights. While much of the intercultural education research base has its roots in European experiences, growing numbers of US students are involved in developing country experiences, often with community development and rights-advocacy organizations. The literature seems ripe for exploration of this tension between a well-developed capacity for judgment and a deep respect for other cultures and worldviews.

Table of Contents:

PREFACE
PART ONE: SETTING THE SCENE
1) Student Learning Abroad: Paradigms and Assumptions—Michael Vande Berg, R. Michael Paige, and Kris Hemming Lou
2) Intervening in Student Learning Abroad: Recent Research—R. Michael Paige and Michael Vande Berg

PART TWO: FOUNDATIONS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
3) Using Experiential Theory to Promote Learning and Development in Programs of Education Abroad—Angela Passarelli and David Kolb
4) The Brain, Learning, and Study Abroad—James Zull
5) Paradigmatic Assumptions of Intercultural Learning—Milton Bennett
6) The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI): A New Frontier in Assessment and Development of Intercultural Competence—Mitchell Hammer
7) What Happens When We Take Stage Development Theory Seriously?—Douglas Stuart
8) Anthropology, Intercultural Communication, and Study Abroad—Bruce La Brack and Laura Bathurst
9) The Psychology of Student Learning Abroad—Victor Savicki
10) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Support of Student-Centered Learning Abroad—Jennifer Meta Robinson

PART THREE: PROGRAM APPLICATIONS: INTERVENING IN STUDENT LEARNING

11) Shifting the Locus of Intercultural Learning: Intervening Prior to and After Student Learning Abroad—Laura Bathurst and Bruce La Brack
12) Maximizing Study Abroad—R. Michael Paige
13) Facilitating Intercultural Learning Abroad—Kris Lou and Gabriele Bosley
14) Developing a Global Learning and Living Community: A Case Study of Intercultural Experiences on The Scholar Ship—Adriana Medina-López-Portillo and Riikka Salonen
15) An Experiment in Developing Teaching and Learning: CIEE’s Seminar on Living and Learning Abroad—Michael Vande Berg, Meghan Quinn, and Catherine Menyhart
16) Beyond Immersion: The AUCP Experiment in Holistic Intervention—Lilli Engle and John Engle

CONCLUSION
17) Intervening for Student Learning Abroad: Key Insights—Kris Hemming Lou, R. Michael Paige, and Michael Vande Berg

By Eric Hartman

As we settle into spring semesters in the United States, we’re launching a number of new resources and preparing to feature some exciting guest writers. We’re also thrilled to announce a few very compelling upcoming conferences that are part of the national dialogue on the development of best practices in global service-learning.

New Resources: Please take a moment to visit and peruse our Global Service-Learning Research Wiki. As you’ll see there, with some extremely helpful student support from Cornell University and Providence College, we have begun organizing peer-reviewed and open-source GSL research around several themes, including intercultural competency development, global civic engagement, and reflective practice. Thus far, we have added relevant articles from The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, and The Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. We have also included several other specific articles from other journals, books, and related research available in other forms. The research wiki and a related Global Service-Learning Tools and Syllabi Wiki (currently available, but in an earlier stage of development) are both editable by readers. Please contribute relevant research links or tools, using the guidelines provided.

If any students, staff, or faculty are interested in developing a course project around further articulating global civil society opportunities to Make a Difference from home, please contact Eric Hartman at buildingbetterworld(at)gmail(dot)com. While our current Make a Difference page features many excellent opportunities, we would love to further develop this global civic engagement set using our new wiki platform.

New Guests: Contributors this term will include graduate students at the cutting edge of GSL research, practical tips for GSL programs, and 10 entries by students and faculty participating in The Social Change Semester in Qatar and India through Carnegie Mellon University, Amizade, and Visions.

National Dialogue: Efforts to develop best practices in global service-learning continue to move forward. The Forum on Education Abroad accepted a session specific to community impact and global service-learning at its upcoming Standards of Good Practice Institute in Chicago (April 3). The session is:

Community Impact, Transparency, Sound Pedagogy: Advancing Best Practices in Global Service-Learning
Eric Hartman (Providence College), Richard Kiely (Cornell University Center for Community Engaged Learning and Research), Eusau Laguerre (Manna International), Brandon Blache-Cohen (Amizade Global Service-Learning), Katherine Conway-Turner (Hood College), Madeline Yates (Maryland-DC Campus Compact), Brian Hanson (Northwestern University)

Global service-learning takes place within a university-third party partnership environment so rife with perverse incentives that New York’s Attorney General investigated several institutional relationships. Additionally, the global voluntourism industry is growing at an extraordinary rate. This presentation represents growing nongovernmental and community development organizations’ effort to articulate fair trade learning as a way to model best practices and evaluation in university-community global partnership. It will build upon insights of existing community organizations’ successes and concerns, as well as the existing research literature in service-learning, to move forward dialogue about partnership and community impact best practices.

Best practice events and dialogue continue later in the spring as well. Several Prescott College doctoral students have proposed a forum on Fair Trade Learning and Global Service-Learning in Prescott, AZ, in mid-May (decision pending). Finally, Cornell University, New York Campus Compact, and Amizade have come together to announce the 6th Annual Global Service-Learning Institute. The institute will take place May 29 - May 31 in beautiful Ithaca, New York immediately before the annual, exciting, zany, and fun Ithaca Festival. Faculty, staff, and institutional teams that are developing or improving upon global service-learning offerings typically enjoy the interactive and outcomes-oriented approach to the institute. Take a look at the agenda and register online.