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Eyes on NAFSA Conference for Regions X & XI November 6, 2009

Posted by Bettina Hansel in Intercultural Education.
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NAFSA in SpringfieldSpringfield, Massachusetts. My last visit here was 33 years ago when I came here to apply for a job that I didn’t get. I would certainly have led a much different life had I lived here. But I’m not going to have time to wander the streets here — in any case, the hotel staff warn me not to. As a New Yorker, I wonder about this. Downtown where the conference is held empties out around 5 pm, like many cities in the USA, but not like New York.

This is my first NAFSA regional conference, though I’ve been to many of the annual conferences. (These are deliberately not called “national” conferences because NAFSA wants an international presence, and sometimes the conferences takes place in Canada. Instead of nearly 10,000 people, which Springfield could never manage, this bi-regional conference is hosting over 750: a great showing for New England, New York and New Jersey. Few people had to drive more than 3 hours to get here. Some took the train. It’s been good to connect with people who live and work within a half day’s drive from me, and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to have long conversations with a good number of people, rather than the brief cocktail party chats with people rushing someplace else.

I’m discovering that there’s something about the one-person international office, or the study abroad trip led by just one faculty member. The first focus must always be on the well-being of the students, then on the complicated logistics and and legal requirements. At the same time the programs and students must fit within the requirements and expecations of the school officials, which seldom have international education as the primary focus. Faculty leading study abroad trips or organizing orientation programs are often doing this as something extra, perhaps receiving only an honorarium and expenses, if even that. The responsibilities and challenges they take on and the work they do with the students may interfere with the research work they need to do to advance in their career. Budgets are being cut, but international students are continuing to arrive in large numbers, and students are continuing to study abroad in large numbers, though more often for shorter programs.

So in this context it’s not surprising that practical information and skills dominate the conference. I found myself alone in the room designated for teaching, learning, and scholarship, so moved to the one focusing on education abroad. Much as I love to learn about new research in the field, I also need the practical stuff, and at every session people were freely sharing their best ideas and resources. One of these “give-aways” is a full web-based evaluation service called “abroad101” created by a young team of former study abroad students. For college and university study abroad offices, currently the service is free and customizeable. It operates something like travel opinion and recommendation sites like trip advisor or virtual tourist except that the comments registered are part of an online satisfaction survey for study abroad offices and open to be read by prospective study abroad students at participating schools as well as program administrators. Early adapters represented at the session included Providence College and the University of Hartford.

Another conference highlight immediately followed from presenters from Green Mountain College in Vermont. Students from Green Mountain participated online with students from a small Methodist college in Sao Paulo on team research projects comparing sustainability practices in Brazil and Vermont, then spent two weeks together finalizing their collaboration by producing a publishable research paper and giving a PowerPoint presentation of the findings. Differences in academic style and protocols were quicly apparent. In particular, students and faculty discovered that there are very different approaches to PowerPoint in academic circles in the US and Brazil and all struggled with their sense that their own use was “right.”  Not surprisingly, the US students worked hard to produce visually appealing slides with limited text, which struck the Brazilian professors as unacceptably childish and not representative of serious academic work, while the US students were equally appalled at the text-dense slides produced by their Brazilian counterparts. Students also struggled with the language — Green Mountain doesn’t teach Portuguese, so all work was done in English at various degrees of fluency and some Spanish. Though the presenters at the NAFSA session agreed that there was much they would do differently, the model for developing such programs is stimulating and intellectually and emotionally challenging for students and faculty alike.

The last session I attended was run by two people I have known for many years. In a reprise from the conference in Los Angeles, they presented some thoughts and a lively discussion on how fiction about intercultural relationships can be used to launch reflection on cultural differences and provide a safe and effective way to raise intercutlural awareness.  You can join the fun on the blog, ThinkingOutsideTheBook.org

Related Post: Eyes on NAFSA

Issue 84. Over-Prepared and Hyper-Aware October 28, 2009

Posted by Bettina Hansel in Culture and Place.
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GREEN_BOOKLast week my husband and I spent a few days camping in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, a surprisingly large and remote area in the midst of the great urban corridor between Boston and Washington. We planned this trip for several weeks, making shopping lists for meals we could cook on the propane stove, food that could be frozen solid and used as it thawed, and food that didn’t require refrigeration. We bought a tent, camping chairs, rope, and tarps. My husband sharpened several pocket knives to take along and made a small cooking table out of plywood. We bought a camping stove, a propane heater and a lantern. We found books on the Pine Barrens, researched the locations and reserved our spot. We took the car to the garage to have the tires balanced for the trips over dirt roads we knew we’d face. We checked the weather forecast — we were lucky! — and downloaded maps of the area from the internet. We brought along two GPS devices: one for the car, one for hiking. We tested the inflatable mattress, found the heavy blankets and quilts, the long underwear and the many layers of clothes we’d need. We bought a solar shower since the camp site had only a pump and an outhouse. We brought books, music, our recorders, and a solar-powered emergency radio. I made up a first aid kit. All of this barely fit in the car. I had to leave behind the yoga mat at the last minute.

Many times, exchange students or anyone else planning a trip to a new and different place goes through this kind of planning process and everyone tends to agree that it is important to prepare well before departure on such an experience. But we can sometimes over-prepare, especially when we are going to a very different place. In fact we over anticipated what we’d need to bring, and it was a burden. A good part of each activity involved searching through various boxes and bags and small corners of the car trying to find something we wanted to use, while much of what we brought wasn’t needed.

Part of our over-preparation also involved creating fantasies about what our experience would be like. We supposed we would spend our evenings after dinner sitting on the camping chairs huddled near the heater and lantern, reading. As it was, when I did open a book, it was more because I had planned to do this than because I truly wanted to read. Watching the campfire was much more appealing. 

And of course we brought along our cultural baggage as well, which included expectations about camping behavior and the value of being quietly immersed in the woods, watching birds, looking for deer and other animals and generally communing with nature. Part of my baggage held the assumption that people are foreigners in this environment and must behave carefully lest we destroy this place through our carelessness. But another group of campers — about 8-10 men in their mid 20s — seemed to have different assumptions.

We are city people. At home on a weekend night, we’re used to hearing loud parties in houses, rented spaces, and the few night clubs in the area. After the party noise quiets, we often hear the sound of a couple arguing in the street, or the laughter of two people who can’t end their conversation and go home. Occasionally there is trouble — fights or even gunshots – and we are likely to sleep through it. But on our first night camping, the shouted jokes and the increasingly loud conversation of our neighbors along with their oversized bonfire raised my suspicions more than was warranted. Inside our dark tent, I focused intently on the group across the way, trying to decipher what was going on. I asked myself questions such as: How much have they had to drink? What are they doing now? Do they have hunting rifles with them? Will more of them arrive? Will they wonder over this way? Could I call the park ranger on my cell phone (and where had we put that piece of paper with the phone number on it)?

I became hyper aware of the rustling of leaves and pine needles, of each movement in the underbrush and each shift in the light.  I filled in my sensory gaps with my imagination. Was it a person or a deer who walked behind the tent? Is someone shining a flashlight this way, or is it only the movement of clouds uncovering the moon?

We tend to assume our senses are accurate, but research has shown time and again that what we believe that we see, hear, taste, touch or smell can easily be primed by what we expect to experience. See Rachel Herz: The Scent of Desire. Much of what we sense seems to be what we imagine we sense. At the same time, we often ignore or dismiss as ordinary the sounds and sights we see every day, and we don’t seem capable of perceiving most odors once we’ve been around them for a while.

Our imagination is ours, and under our control. We can interpret our sensory experience in different ways when we imagine different meanings to it. I found the party of young men a little threatening until I was able to reimagine it from another perspective. In that other perspective, the forest is commonplace, and part of the public space people have available for their use. In that other perspective, a party out in the forest is safe: people can enjoy themselves freely and then camp overnight rather than trying to drive home.

Issue 83. Respect October 19, 2009

Posted by Bettina Hansel in Intercultural Education.
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ORANGE_BOOKOne of my current projects involves looking at language use in the context of describing a school’s goals related to intercultural education. This started with a small case study I was inventing for a workshop, but blossomed into a fledgling research project. “Respect” is a word that comes up frequently as a value to cultivate in the students in both the US and French cases I selected, and it becomes particularly relevant in dealing with differences: cultural, social, economic, intellectual, or physical. Some type of respect can be commanded through fear, and we also say that someone “earns” respect. If we want to improve the way we deal with differences, we are talking more about giving respect, about respecting as an action. It’s absolutely necessary and sometimes surprisingly difficult.

I recently received a message from someone in reaction to a comment I made on another blog. It was a breezy comment, not terribly well considered, in which I was dismissing the importance of another person’s point of view — a person I didn’t even know. But that was the person who chose to write me to complain about my comment. After offering him an apology and exchanging some emails back and forth, we still do not agree, though now on friendly terms, and we have done some work on respecting each other by connecting with stories of our parents. But respect is still difficult.

Respect isn’t a skill or a body of knowledge; it’s an attitude, an approach, and an action that describes a connection to someone or something. Respect is recognizing and believing in the importance and value of another being, or even of ourselves, and communicating that recognition through our behavior. The absence of respect may be more noted by others than its presence because respect is often quiet. English uses the convention of nouns and verbs, but like many words in the English language, respect is both a noun and a verb, and it always takes an object. I thought of the exercises that I was taught in school so many years ago, in which we diagrammed sentences to give a visual structure showing the relationship of each word to the whole. But words themselves are complex things and contain many concepts and relationships.
respect
I often feel overly academic when I draw a model of a concept like this. Am I taking something simple and making it way too complex? That’s possible. But here’s what I discovered in putting this together: For me, believing is the sticking point. It’s the gut reaction. Intellectually or philosophically, it’s straight forward. Of course every person is valuable and necessary and important!

What happens, though, when I believe my way of doing things is more efficient? Or that my opinions are supported better by the facts? How can I respect when I really believe I have the better idea?

Years ago, my daughter came to me crying because a friend told her that she had given a stupid name to her doll. ”Why did you say that and hurt her feelings?” I asked the friend, who answered, ”Because I really believe that Kimie is a stupid name for a doll.” Honest, perhaps, but certainly lacking in respect.

I found an interesting discussion of the difficulty of teaching respect in The Journal of General Internal Medicine in an article by Doctors Carla L. Spagnoletti and Robert M. Arnold. Doctors also may find it hard to “feel” respect at times for their patients, but it may be helpful, the authors argue, to start with learning the behaviors, the language, and the symbols of respect that are culturally appropriate, and to practice them even when the feeling of respect isn’t there yet.

I believe this can also be approached from the intention to respect: to suspend your beliefs, to decide to assume that another way may be better than yours, and just to explore what that might mean. This is also an intention to develop your relationship with another person.