According to the 2018-19 annual report, a total of 2505 UIUC students left Urbana-Champaign to study abroad. With a plethora of program choices available across the globe, students may study internationally for a few weeks as part of a short term program or even a full year overseas. Thanks to the University’s decentralized model, students are offered the opportunity to study abroad along with other students from their specific college or as part of the more general office of Illinois Abroad and Global Exchange (IAGE). What are these international travelers after? What do they hope to achieve from the experience? The answer to this question is subjective, pluralistic, and fundamentally complicated. Regardless of what these students are individually after, the majority of student experiences recorded in the IAGE annual report recall the benefits of cultural exposure, new experiences, and newly founded international friendships. However, in this decentralized system, each program attempts to answer the standard question of “why study abroad?”—and each site seems to answer differently.
The Grainger College of Engineering implores students to “open your world” and boasts the professional benefits of study abroad, claiming that “having a global perspective is imperative to being a well-rounded engineer.” The College of Education takes a similar approach, emphasizing how “education abroad is a powerful step towards building your own familiarity with other cultures, improving your own teaching practice, and developing your own global network of colleagues that can support you as a teacher.” Conversely, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences focuses on elements of travel and self-discovery, as “a wonderful opportunity to not only see the world, but also advance the ways you learn about your major, yourself, and your opportunities in an increasingly interconnected world.”
Whatever the particular strategy each college at UIUC employs to entice future study abroad students, IAGE’s responsibility to serve the “entire campus community,” distills their most salient selling points into three criteria—”earn credit toward your degree; advance your professional goals; and enrich your global perspective”—in that specific order. Despite the minute peculiarities and semantics, each college’s response for “why study abroad?” shares the common goal of global interconnection and intercultural competence. How then does studying abroad enhance this overwhelmingly desirable capability?
In her chapter, “Falling In/Out of Love with the Place: Affective Investment, Perceptions of Difference, and Learning in Study Abroad,” Cultural anthropologist Neriko Musha Doerr has emphasized the importance of affect—an often overlooked element—when considering a student’s motivation and preparedness for studying abroad. Affect, in this case, should be understood as the influence of a student’s emotional motivation or desire to study abroad. Doerr wishes to “urge awareness of the power of affect and understand as researchers, practitioners, and study abroad students how it influences students’ actions, perceptions, and learning” (2017 161).
Could focusing on the affect among some students and, conversely the lack of affect in others, help to address the problems of initial or sustained orientalism? Doerr’s research reflected a sharp distinction between student experiences abroad depending on whether or not they demonstrated strong affective investment prior to their departure from campus. According to her findings, strong affect led to “highlighting difference, acquiring prior knowledge, detailed observation during the stay, and critical reflection about the experience” (ibid). Alternatively, “weaker affective investment...led to blurred boundaries among people, an emphasis on connections, and open-ended learning from various sources, but little critical reflection on the experience” (ibid).
IAGE’s approach to prepare students for their time abroad takes the form of a mandatory, one-credit hour class LAS 291/292 whereby they are tasked with preparation, engagement, and reflection over the course of their time enrolled. As part of their pre-departure preparations, students are required to attend a day-long launch event focusing on logistics and cultural preparation. How important is this preparatory work in terms of Doerr’s affect?
According to diplomat and educator Eric Terzuolo, the preparation efforts of study abroad programs in his experience show little correlation to the outcome of said programs and their students’ resulting intercultural competence. Terzuolo writes, “it appears that changes in the ways that study-abroad participants understand and address cultural differences are more a function of their preexisting personal characteristics than of their experiences abroad” (163).
Is the current strategy of IAGE too heavily reliant on the student independently motivated by high affective investment, as described by Doerr? Or is the cultural preparation achieved pre-departure meant to bridge a sort of gap between these opposing categories of students? After all, as part of LAS 291/292 students are required to critically reflect on their experiences upon reentry. However, the majority of these reflections, as shown by the sampling of quotations in the office’s annual report, highlight more interpersonal connections aligned with Doerr’s determination of weaker affective student investment.
During the aforementioned launch event, a portion of the day is dedicated to country-specific cultural presentations, typically featuring individuals originally from the regions in question and returning study abroad participants from previous years. While these presentations are meant to offer students a chance to speak candidly with more or less experts on the upcoming changes in lifestyle awaiting them, are these meetings enough exposure?
One presenter from the fall 2019 event reflected negatively on the day’s success: “I felt like these people were making fun of my culture.” Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism—that distinctions between the “Orient” and the “West” are fundamental to understanding and treatment of the Other—must be addressed before intercultural competence emerges and is achieved. Drawing a direct link to the Orientalist attitudes study abroad programs are meant to directly confront, this presenter expressed feelings of shame, “seeing my country reduced to stereotypes by students that had experienced the americanized version of the city and were clearly from upper middle class backgrounds and thought that the only way of doing study-abroad is spending a lot of money.”
In demonstrating a general disinterest to learn more about their impending destination for study, the native language there, or the political atmosphere of the country, the students involved in this particular presentation appeared to take a lack of affect to an extreme. Students' fixation on funds was particularly distressing to this presenter:
“There is a difference between being upper-middle class in other countries and being upper-middle class in the US. Upper-middle class people in Spain, for example, cannot in any way afford to spend 2000 euros per month while on a study abroad program. I think it's an example of the inequalities of study abroad programs.”
While these students expressing low levels of affect may be more open to interpersonal connection and the benefits of travel, is the benefit of this experience worth the costs and effort of study abroad? Does a lack of affect only reinforce this detached reality of what it takes to study abroad and who these programs serve? Moreover, is this the kind of representative ambassadors UIUC is comfortable with sending overseas?
In their article, “Every Student Should Study Abroad,” authors Allan E. Goodman and Stacie Nevadomski Berdan argue for a mandatory international study experience for all students. According to Goodman and Nevadomski Berdan, study abroad forces students outside of their comfort zone, enabling new cultural, linguistic, and educational experiences. Moreover, studying abroad “teaches students to appreciate difference and diversity firsthand, and enables them to recognize—and then dismiss—stereotypes they may have held about people they had never met.” But do students need to be an ocean away to fully understand this critical approach to stereotypes and harmful preconceived notions?
At the beginning of the 2018 academic year, UIUC’s total enrollment was at 49,339, factoring the percentage of students studying abroad at approximately .05% of the total class. Far from an essential, holistic university experience, are those that are fortunate enough to study abroad really prepared to appreciate difference or to dismiss stereotypes? How can our university strive to better prepare students for their time abroad? Does individual affect provide the key to the critical reflection that courses like LAS 291/292 aim for?
According to Terzuolo, study abroad may not be the only answer, citing “a recent [this article was published in 2016] large-scale study by education researchers at Augustana College and the University of Iowa suggests that on-campus experiences with diversity may be the single most important factor in determining whether students increase their intercultural competence during their undergraduate years” (163). If a student has no substantial connection to the mission of their program or the destination itself, will the experience really be worth the effort? Or is our incredibly diverse campus, when harnessed appropriately, training towards intercultural competency enough?
Resources:
Doerr, Neriko Musha, and Hannah Davis Taïeb. “Affect and Romance in Study and Volunteer Abroad: Introducing Our Project.” The Romance of Crossing Borders: Studying and Volunteering Abroad, edited by Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb, 1st ed., Berghahn Books, NEW YORK, OXFORD, 2017, pp. 3–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvw048r2.6. Accessed 27 Apr. 2020.
Goodman, Allan E, and Stacie Nevadomski Berdan. “A Year Abroad vs. a Year Wasted.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 May 2014, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/10/17/should-more-americans-study-abroad/every-student-should-study-abroad.
Terzulo, Eric R., and Sanford J. Ungar. “Worth the Trip? Debating the Value of Study Abroad.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 95, no. 5, 2016, pp. 162–163., www.jstor.org/stable/43946968. Accessed 27 Apr. 2020.
All images taken from the IAGE 2018-19 Annual Report, located on their website: https://issuu.com/illinoisabroad/docs/iage_annualreport19_web.
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