Education and Culture

Introduction

The perceived importance of a global experience in higher education is hard to underestimate. University presidents are known to boast of their “percentage,” or the proportion of undergraduates who study abroad. At least part of the rationale is a cosmopolitan one: an essential part of being acknowledged as educated derives in part from an appreciation of different cultures and development of worldliness. The expectation is that a global experience will stand out as an enduring memorial of an encounter with others. These experiences are edified in resumes and narrated with veneration, further illuminating their cultural importance as coming-of-age rituals, particularly among a striding upper middle class.

The percentage of postsecondary students in the U.S. who study abroad is growing, yet the number is remarkably small as a proportion of all who attend university. In 2008, nearly 240,000 students from over 1,000 U.S. universities earned college credit through study abroad programs (“Meeting America’s Global Education Challenge”).¹ The percentage of U.S. postsecondary students who study abroad, however, is only ~1% of all those who enroll in higher education institutions (HEI) (8). Universities generally seek to increase student participation in study abroad options. A recent study shows that 83% of administrators surveyed from 290 HEIs have this priority, but those surveyed also indicate a lack of resources to support these efforts and thereby envision a negligible increase in the number of those studying abroad in the future (9). A bright note in this study, however, suggests that there is substantial interest in studying abroad among university students and staff, which they might (or would) pursue if more resources were available.

Study abroad programs, including long-term programs that extend over an academic year to short-term programs of only a few weeks, take substantial resources for planning and execution. Curriculum design, or the development of a formal course of study coupled with informal opportunities for learning about the place visited, requires significant planning and logistical support. Typically, students are exposed to what is most distinctive about the study location: important landmarks, historic monuments, museums, ceremonies, and artistic performances, all suggesting an essential character of the other. Efforts to immerse students in the culture are increasingly common such that visitors might take classes with local students, participate in homestays, or partake in festivals and holidays.

The homogeneity, however, of those who go abroad and where they go reveals about the orientation of these experiences, as nearly 83% identify as white, 66% are women, and 60% of traveling students go to European countries (Obst, Bhandari, and Witherell 2007, [End Page 13] Current Trends in U.S. Study Abroad).² One way of reading this data suggests that college students in the U.S. are seeking an experience of otherness that is not altogether different from their current lives. This intention, coupled with the fact that these are expensive learning opportunities, puts study abroad coordinators in a difficult position. They are compelled to balance providing a customer-oriented program with concomitantly seeking to disrupt normative ways of thinking. The customer service dynamic coupled with the changing demographic profile of study abroad presents an even greater challenge. Following the global economic downturn of 2009, scholarships for study abroad became even scarcer, exacerbating the desire to serve the client in providing certain global experiences as compared to others (Goulah 2010, “Resisting Abstraction in the Dialogic Space Abroad”).³

Universities enthusiastically embrace activities associated with global learning, typically without introducing a new order of conceptions to support them. Too often, the conceptions of what is global and what is an experience are not sufficiently sorted out. This results in a confused and incoherent global experience that prohibits meaningful experiences with cultural difference and may deteriorate into a shopping-abroad fling. Placed within a particular culture, students observe it from afar, putting their own lives on hold while engaging an artifice presumably curated for them. This can have the undesired effect of reifying separation and difference rather than ameliorating them. Furthermore, as study abroad increases among U.S. universities, popularization can ironically lead to isolation within...