Educational Benefits of
Sending
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By Seymour Eskow |
| Vagantes, the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages, are sometimes called Goliards; Goliardic verse celebrates the nonscholarly pleasures of gaming, tippling, and worse. In her The Wandering Scholars Helen Waddell noted "...the medieval church had never much approved of wandering. 'Sit in thy cell,' said the Blessed Antony, 'and thy cell shall teach thee all things.' " (The Blessed Antony might say now: Sit in thy carrell, and the media shall bring thee all things.) The editor of Rashdall's great study of the medieval university points out that he did not deal with the wandering scholars, since "....masters in the schools had no use for the vagrants...with the roving spirit which de-moralizes monks and scholars." On the other hand, "Wandering, it is needless to add, was not confined to the irresponsible Goliards. Masters and scholars often passed from university to university, especially in Italy and later in Germany...Wandering from one university to another became more frequent...Erasmus himself was a wandering scholar."
Then, as now, they go for adventure and for learning. They go because the roving spirit moves them; to write their verse; and to learn what can be learned better there, because it is in the mind of a teacher who lives there, in the landscape, the architecture, and the ways of the people. Call to Travel "Americans have a special call to travel," editorialized the North American Review in 1865. "It is the peculiar privilege of their birth in the New World, that the Old World is left for them to visit." The critics of the practice of sending American youth to Europe were the best minds of the nation. Thomas Jefferson warned that the tastes and lusts cultivated in the fleshpots of Europe could not be satisfied in the decent homes of America, but his attack did little to slow down the migrations. (Jefferson himself traveled widely in Europe, often on foot so that he could visit homes, make precise measurements and observations, and keep careful notes of his findings.) Emerson wanted The American Scholar and deplored the wandering scholar and the roving spirit:
And, of course, Emerson's own intellect was vagabond and he knew that "... for some men travel may be useful."
As many languages and cultures, so many times a man; we go to Europe to be Americanized. Emerson's summary is the heart of the case for study abroad to this day. Perhaps the most interesting campaign against study abroad was conducted in 1873 by Birdsey Northrop, secretary of the Connecticut State Board of Education, who published his own attack and the endorsements and press reviews it generated in a volume called Education Abroad. One such endorsement came from Mark Hopkins, the teacher celebrated by President James Garfield and the former President of Williams College. "Of course there will be exceptions," wrote Hopkins, "but in my opinion a higher tone of character, greater usefulness, and more happiness will generally...be secured by an education till fixed principles shall be formed, under the inspiration and formative power of our history, and institutions, and hopes." If we want "American scholars," then, we should educate them at home, where our accents and countryside and institutions are the teachers. And yet, new languages and landscapes multiply the man and liberate his powers, and we go to Europe to be Americanized. Americans have a special call and peculiar privilege to travel; and they are warned that if they heed the call and exercise the privilege they may be, as Malcolm Cowley puts it, deracinated:
The community colleges, then, must chart their course in the light of the conflicting claims of community and the world. Or, perhaps they might find a way to resolve these claims so that their students might carry with them a love of community as they move through the world. Education for the World In the struggle between "locals" and "cosmopolitans," to use Merton's terminology, for the shaping of our colleges, it would appear that the subordination of the junior college, with its universalistic lower division curriculum in the arts and sciences, and the emergence of the community college, with its total rhetoric of community, signals the victory of the locals. None of the classic statements of the two-year college movement discuss study abroad, or any aspect of international education. According to Raymond Schultz, an early pioneer in community college international education, little of significance was done before 1970, and much of what he describes as taking place since then is technical assistance to other countries interested in adapting the community college to their own needs for vocationalizing and extending tertiary education. The ideologues of the community college movement, the trustees and presidents chosen to lead them, tend overwhelmingly to be locals, committed to serving local students in programs colored by local traditions and employment needs, designed to keep the students living and working in and serving the local community. The legislation creating and shaping community colleges in many of our states does not encourage non-local students to attend or permit the use of college funds to support local students who want to study abroad. State directors of community colleges have, on the whole, not seen international education as an important or appropriate mission. The university professors teaching and writing about the community colleges, and the graduate centers concerned with in-service education for the college have, with few exceptions, done little to recognize and confront the issue until recently. Our literature and our science document the forces in our society that deracinate, that uproot and alienate. If it is necessary to choose between community and the world, it can be argued that the community colleges have chosen well, and that they are one of the agencies standing against the pressures that have loosened the ties of family, neighborhood, and face-to-face community. As the agenda of America evolves it would appear that the renewal of the local community will loom even larger, and that the community college therefore will have a larger stake in the search for pedagogues that connect learning with the strengthening of the small, the shared, and the local. Why, then, the groundswell of interest and activity in international education? A growing number of community college practitioners have come to believe that the local agenda is shaped by the global agenda, and that the language of interdependence and the metaphors of Spaceship Earth and the Global Village point to tasks for education from which the community college cannot claim exemption. "The need for Americans to appreciate the web of international interdependence has increased dramatically in recent years," writes Stephen Bailey. "As Dean George Gerbner has written, we are wired together so tightly that a short-circuit can fry us all." The worldwide transformations in communication, transportation, and political and social organization, he points out, have in turn touched and altered every aspect of American life, including the purity of our air, the sound of our music, the jobs we have or don't have, and the security of our children.
Our communities, then, are moved by winds from the other communities of the world, and education that does not help the citizens of our communities to read these winds and to tack with them is an anachronism. An education for community must be an education for the world, for they have become inextricably tied to each other by the web of interdependencies that are reshaping work and leisure and culture. The community colleges are internationalizing because their communities need to know about the world and how to cope with the world community that is emerging. They are sending their students around the world in much the same spirit and for the same reasons they send them to hospitals, factories, and government agencies in the local community: to find the experiences and develop the skills they need in the places that offer them the best chance to learn. What We Need We have turned the corner. Each day's mail brings word from another community college that is about to send students abroad for the first time, or wants help in organizing to do so, or wants to join one of the community college consortia on international education that are spawning so rapidly. Yet we are not there yet. Some of our largest colleges are uninvolved and resistant; some of the leaders of our community college world are uneasy or apathetic; and some of the new programs are educationally suspect or downright shoddy. The momentum is there; we have to push all the harder and change direction just a bit. We need, first of all, legitimization. Those who influence the community colleges-federal, state, and local legislators and public authorities; trustees and community influentials; the graduate professors who prepare community college practitioners; and community college administrators, faculty, and students-must have opportunities to consider the issue of international education if we are to have their endorsement and support. The strong and unequivocal advocacy of community college international education by Ernest Boyer and John Reinhardt at Atlanta were turning points; Edmund Gleazer's recent statements and his personal excursions bring his prestige to bear on the cause. The Wingspread conferences, the major conferences we have organized in New York, California, Florida, and New Jersey, and the many smaller ones we have held in a number of states have involved hundreds of faculty members and administrators in discussion of the potentials and the methods of international education. There has been writing on the subject, and a forthcoming volume of the New Directions series will be devoted to the international agenda for community colleges. We need more speeches by major figures who have access to platforms and publicity; we have to be on the agenda of the Association of Community College Trustees and the council of state directors of community college education; we have to take the case to the discipline and professional associations of faculty and administrators; we have to get to governors, state legislatures, and organizations of county officials; we have to write and speak more, and to move international education onto all the agendas. Secondly, we need organization for mutual support and assistance. Study abroad programs are difficult to mount well, and a professor or administrator who can negotiate appropriate programs into being is a scarce resource; program development, involving as it does international travel and phoning and correspondence, is expensive. For these reasons, some of the community colleges have chosen to turn over program development and supervision, as well as the logistics of travel and housing, to commercial agencies and private entrepreneurs in the U.S. and abroad. Clearly private practitioners can contribute much to international education, as they have in such areas as cooperative work experience, but there are obvious risks here that have not always been avoided. If our programs are to be study abroad they have to be designed with study ends in mind, with learning obligations structured into the experience, with credit awarded after suitable evidence of learning. These obligations require that we develop a cadre of academics knowledgeable in the theory and practice of international education, and that we develop organizational forms that allow us to share these academics and the programs they develop. Perhaps the most promising organizational mode for improving the quality and reducing the cost of study abroad programs in the community college is the consortium. The largest and oldest of these, The College Consortium for International Studies (for most of its existence The Tri-State Consortium) now includes more than thirty colleges from seven states and Canada; the short and long term programs offered in thirty or more countries each year are open to all consortium members on a cost sharing basis. An obvious possibility is the statewide consortium that would serve all of the community colleges of a single state; part or full-time staff for a state consortium might be part of the official statewide apparatus supervising and serving community colleges, or employed directly by the consortium. A somewhat elaborate proposal for consortia on international education of this kind has been made recently to the community colleges of New York. The AACJC's International/Intercultural Consortium has not yet undertaken to provide direct services to member colleges interested in study abroad program sharing. There is no reason why vision and persistence might not allow us to transcend the vagaries of state formulas and philosophies so that we might create The World Campus Programs of the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges, a national consortium that would help us inventory and pool all of our study abroad programs--and invent new ones--so that community college students anywhere, regardless of the size of their college or the worldliness of its staff, might have study opportunities anywhere in the world. Finally, and most urgently, we need a populist theory and practice of study abroad. The texture of most writing and advocacy of cultural exchange, with its emphasis on moving elites around the world, the image of the junior year abroad, the emphasis in the literature and in practice on students from prestige institutions in one country attending similar institutions abroad--little of this seems to come out of our experience, to speak to our students and our mandates. Our domestic educational practices- open admissions, for example -reflect our philosophic commitments to democratic egalitarianism; to universalizing postsecondary education; to harnessing learning to community development; to recurrent and lifelong learning. We now need to find the international equivalents of our domestic educational practice, a populist pedagogy of international education that answers such questions as: Who is to study abroad? Where? In what kinds of institutions? In what kinds of formal and nonformal learning arrangements? Studying what? What Has Happened? All of these have happened: Twenty community college secretarial students go to England for the summer. They live with English families; work as secretaries in English offices; and study typing, shorthand, and business practice at an English college. Seventy-five criminal justice students from a number of community colleges spend intercession in London and Paris studying comparative criminal justice systems at Scotland Yard and the Surete. They travel with 200 other students who will study theatre arts, nursing, art history, antiques, marriage and the family, human services, merchandising, and assorted arts and sciences in the British Isles. A Seminar on Child Welfare takes students to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Another group of students stays in Denmark studying "Kierkegaard and the Existential Tradition." During one intercession the community college students of one consortium study art and art history in Egypt, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, and Spain. The liberal arts-- language, culture, and the basic disciplines-- are offered in Denmark, Germany, England, Israel, Spain, Greece, Italy, Latin America, Venezuela, Bahamas, France. More than 100 students are placed in work-study programs in Western Europe, where they are paid for their services; they take intensive instruction in language and culture as well as in the business and industrial disciplines of their interest. They go to Moscow, Leningrad, and Talinn for Russian history; Mexico for Yucatan anthropology; Heidelberg for German history; and Dublin for Irish studies. Three hundred students study in Israel: in Hebrew University, Tel Aviv, Bar Ilan, Haifa, and the other "big seven" universities; in regional and community colleges; in religious institutions; in programs that mix classroom instruction with measured amounts of observation, travel and experience; in kibbutz programs, where they live, work, and study; and throughout the country, using "learning contracts" and programs of study cut to the measure of the individual student. A U.S. community college helps a community of 24,000 "oriental" Jews start a community college, and a group of students from that college live in homes in the community, teach English and do other socially useful work for their room and board, do independent study and take classes; a group of Israelis from the community, many of them community leaders, enroll in the U.S.-sponsored and supported community college. The community colleges are moving. If too many of their students are moving to Western Europe to do cathedrals and landscape and too few to Asia and Africa to work and to learn through service, that can change. If too many of the programs are intercession and summer programs, too brief to have serious impact, that can change. What is important is that the community colleges are beginning to move their students into the world. New Pedagogues Study abroad and cultural exchange may indeed increase understanding among the peoples of the world, contribute to a new economic order by furthering the transfer of technology, and in these ways serve the causes of peace and prosperity; if these things happen, they justify our claims that our programs deserve the moral and financial support of those concerned with world order and the place of the United States among the nations, but they do not justify the energy and time and money students and faculty spend away from campus. Our case for study abroad must ultimately be educational: it is that something of importance to the learning of students happens in these places that is not likely to happen at home. If the community colleges are indeed enrolling "new students"--youth and adults without the superior literacy and linguistic skills that populate selective colleges--it would seem to follow that they would need to be taught by new pedagogues, that appropriate educational strategies for them would differ sharply from those devised for those whose talents and learning styles are different. It is clear that the community colleges are responding with nontraditional pedagogues, although the literature of innovation may exaggerate the amount and significance of the change that is occurring. The growing use of instructional systems and television courses, the creation of learning and skill "centers," the vocabulary of instruction that includes such terms as "learning manager," "behavioral objectives," and "accountability," represent perhaps the most widespread pattern of responses to date to the call for a new instruction. The study abroad movement would appear to be part of the "experiential" wing of academic reform, that body of opinion that argues that the formal school environment is an insufficient environment for our students and the learning tasks required by our society. James S. Coleman, perhaps the best known exponent of the point of view, has argued that our schooling is "knowledge rich and action poor," and proposed that students spend more of their time in work and other nonschool environments as part of their maturation, in what he has called "the action curriculum." The most complete exposition of the position is found in the 1974 report of a Federal panel which Coleman chaired, published as Youth: Transition to Adulthood:
What must be underscored here is that these "capabilities" are not objectives for inclusion in the curriculum of the school, goals that can be approached through content, lectures, and recitation. The thesis of Coleman and his associates is that schools and colleges are one kind of environment, and the school environment itself, however manipulated, is "an incomplete context" for the achievement of these developmental goals. In the language of McLuhan, the college itself and the patterns of life connected with it are the medium, and the medium does not elicit from many of our students the capabilities and the maturation they and society need. The research of Alexander Astin and Arthur Chickering is part of a growing body of work explicitly or indirectly critical of the impact of community colleges on students for reasons that are inherent in the very essence of our commitment: our students, living as they usually do at home, continuing on with high school friendship circles, do not experience the liberating culture shock that hits the student who leaves home; they do not experience the pressures toward independence and the enlargement of vision that come from dormitory encounters or making do without mother; continuing on in accustomed ways, they do not search out the possibilities of a new environment, new friends and interests, new relations with professors and ideas. The community college, state Coleman and his colleagues,
The argument goes to the heart of our work, and we have paid too little attention to this most profound criticism. The most obvious and promising non-school environment available to us in every community is the work environment, and work experience is that form of the "action curriculum" that Coleman deals with most extensively. Community service, of the kind represented by VISTA, is clearly another kind of action that immerses students in a non-school environment that may evoke the capabilities and the qualities with which we are concerned. As we look at the service and study possibilities inherent in our ethnic, religious, and cultural subcommunities, an active form of "intercultural education" begins to take shape, one that would surround students with the stuff of other ways of life, with other accents and songs and values. "Service learning" creates the possibility of the action curriculum and the international experience for all students. In many of our states, there are community colleges in rural, urban, and suburban areas, each with its own unique set of environments. A big city student might change his mind after a semester in a rural community...And if our national complex of community colleges includes Hostos in New York serving a Spanish-speaking community, and Navajo Community College, and colleges in primarily Black and Chicano communities, and Cape Cod and Bunker Hill Community Colleges, and community colleges in Maui and Anchorage, a "Community College of the States," a federation of colleges that extends the principle of open admissions to all students in the United States, opens up new vistas of experience and learning, and challenges the pinched vision of those of us who see mobility as inimical to community. And, finally, Gondwana Community College (from a publication of the United Nations Development Programme):
If, in Harold Taylor's trenchant phrase, the world is teacher, we look for those places in the world that will help our students learn what they want to learn, and what they must learn. We need a pedagogy of experience. It will be as demanding and as rigorous as the pedagogy of the classroom, but it will be different. We will not send students into the world insisting that they learn there exactly what they might have learned at home, that they study English 101 in Brazil or History of Western Civilization in Kenya. It will be a pedagogy of environment. Part of the pedagogy will be like the work of the good college or transfer counselor who knows that the small college or the large college, the intellectualist or the activist college is not right for all students, but each kind of college environment is right for some students. The teacher who uses the world will not begin with a priori and fixed assumptions about whether formal or nonformal learning environments abroad are best for all students; he will not insist that the "best" colleges in the other country are the best places to house programs, any more than he will insist that the "best" colleges are best for all students in the United States. And, in similar fashion the teacher will be aware of the range of possible living arrangements--the foreign dormitory, the homestay, the apartment shared with U.S. or indigenous roommates, the U.S. "enclave"--and will use these environments differently for different students. And the foreign community and country, the people and the institutions and the culture, and how to help each student encounter them will be part of the plan the teacher makes for each student, with each student. Ideally, then, the teacher has available a range of formal study opportunities in the other country in which he may place students; has access to nonformal work and service learning opportunities; can place students in different living arrangements; and can help students experience the people and places of the country. The learning plan for each student tries to organize these elements uniquely for each student in a way that recognizes the learning goals of the student, the commitments of the college, and possibilities for learning afforded by the environment. Being Participant and Observer Woody Allen once remarked that whenever he walks along a shady path or a sunny beach, he feels at two with nature. The function of the teacher in the pedagogy of experience is to intervene, to spoil the purity and the flow of the experience, to help the student feel at two with the experience: to be both participant and observer. Credits and degrees may indeed clutter up experience; that is their purpose, and to certify that the experience has yielded learning. Bacon's "Of Travel" testifies to the educative value of travel ("Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience") and is a manual for teachers and students:
(To this day those advising the studious traveler stress the diary, the journal, the log. "I never travel without my diary," Oscar Wilde had one of his characters say. "One should always have something sensational to read in the train.") "Buy beforehand the map of the country you are going into," Thomas Jefferson advised John Rutledge, Jr., in 1788. "On arriving at a town, the first thing is to buy the plan of the town, and the book noting its curiosities. Walk round the ramparts when there are any. Go to the top of a steeple to have a. view of the town and its environs. Bacon and Jefferson advise the traveler to prepare himself with language, to rehearse the geography of the country, to record his findings carefully, and to consider beforehand what he wants to observe, to learn, and how to get the information or evidence he wants. To investigate the influence of politics on everyday life, Jefferson makes these suggestions:
In many ways, the most remarkable treatise on the subject is Harriet Martineau's 1838 volume How to Observe, which deals at length with what to observe as well as how to observe, and means to organize the prospective traveler's field of vision so that he knows what he will be looking and listening for before he sets off, and equips him with canons of judgment and techniques of recording and organizing his findings. A small extract from her section on cemeteries will reveal how she points her reader to cultural phenomena, provides them with general notions of their meaning, and illustrates the principles with examples from her own experience and reading:
It is clear that such prescriptions are in the spirit of the modern ethnographer and ethnologist, albeit their texture and angle of vision is literary rather than scientific. In The Cultural Experience, two American ethnographers, James P. Spradley and David W. McCurdy, describe their use of ethnographic semantics in an undergraduate course that has lower division students learning the vocabulary and approach of the ethnographer, choosing what the authors call a "cultural scene," finding "cultural informants," and using the perspective and the tools of the ethnographer to describe the meaning of the scene in the language and through the eyes and value system of the informants. The examples of student fieldwork included suggest that the approach might well be useful to community colleges exploring ways of teaching students "how to observe" before they leave for the other country. At Rockland Community College in New York, a group of faculty is designing "International College," an administrative unit of professors and students interested in international education. One area of concern is how the study abroad experience is stitched into the two-year program of studies. Students at International College can now organize a two-year curriculum around a country or region of the world or an ethnic or religious subculture; the program allows for at least one semester on campus-studying, say, Irish literature, history, and language; a semester in the community doing field work in some aspect of the Irish-American experience and community; and a semester or a year in Ireland. Programs in Irish Studies, Judaic Studies, and Christian Studies based on this schema are now available, and others are in various stages of development. Seymour Fersh has warned that if the teacher teaches, or teaches too much, the world will not yield its surprising revelations to the student, that he will see what he has been taught to see rather than what is there. That is the risk we run when we teach our students what to look for in a poem, or picture, or country. It would appear that the greater risk would lie in our sending our students around the world without maps, or language, without questions to ask and orderly ways of getting them answered. Rockland in Israel From The Jerusalem Post, (November 8, 1976: "Contract Education," by Lea Levavi):
Some Proposals Even those who question the meaning and the value of the Peace Corps to the countries of the world that accept volunteers will testify to the powerful and transforming impact of the experience on the volunteers themselves. Can we harness such experience to ends of formal education? We might create a new degree in International Service to symbolize our commitment and intention, and use the degree to experiment with forms of incorporating foreign service learning into the community college curriculum. Students might take a first semester of language, culture, and skill training; spend one or two years in the other culture in working and serving in agriculture, teaching English or intermediate technology, in allied health or one of the human services; and return to campus for a semester of reconstruction and synthesis. There might be established in Washington, independently or in conjunction with the Peace Corps or other international agency, a World Community College Service Corps that would place our students in study-service programs throughout the world, hopefully alongside their counterparts from other countries. If UNESCO and/or UNDP could become interested, their projects in literacy, population, housing and environment throughout the world might become the infrastructure of a worldwide service learning college without walls-or borders. A Resolution
"All of the nations of the world share a concern for renewing their educational systems so that they may contribute more effectively to their citizens, their communities, their countries, and the world community. As part of this worldwide effort toward the reform of education, countries are developing new community-based, short-cycle institutions devoted to education for development and community renewal: community colleges, village polytechnics, technicums, institutes, colleges of further education, open universities. Experiments in the use of instructional technology hold promise of making learning available in areas that cannot be reached by schools and teachers, and offer assistance to the teacher in schools interested in enriching classroom instruction. Nonformal learning agencies are serving students in needs that formal institutions have not or cannot serve. "Increasingly, it becomes clear that local community-serving institutions have an opportunity and obligation to serve the world community as well, since the fate of each community in the world is bound up with all of the others. Our community colleges, then, must also become world colleges if they are to prepare students for the interdependent world in which they will live. "We believe that worldwide movement toward educational transformation can be strengthened and accelerated if each country and each institution can have access to the experiences of the others engaged in a similar quest. The delegates to this International Assembly, therefore, propose that an effort be made to create an ongoing mechanism for international collaboration on community-based, short-cycle education.
"The undersigned now resolve that: "1. We endorse the principle of World Community College, a college of colleges throughout the world working together to share information, resources, and inspiration, looking toward the possibility that students on any campus might be welcome to visit and study on the campuses of any constituent college...." (Signed by educators from Guyana, Bahamas, Iceland, Libya, Canada, Pakistan, U.S.A., Swaziland, Mauritius, Kenya, Republic of China, Mexico, South Africa, India.) |