Part 2 Overseas Voices: Redefining and Reinforcing Community Partnerships in Education Abroad
We are very grateful to have been invited into this conversation between U.S. and onsite education abroad stakeholders. It is an excellent way to utilize the changes brought forward by the global pandemic to start redefining those key terminologies underlined by our American colleagues, Samantha Brandauer and Lou Berends, in Part 1 of this blog series as well as regulate the volume of our voices: we, onsite, should perhaps communicate better and “louder” to be heard and trusted, whether we are working on the provider side of education abroad, or representing a U.S. based college or university.
The two following “voices”, Julia Carnine, Resident Director for the Dickinson in France program and Monica Francioso, Academic Director at CEA Florence, are expressing our true life experiences as we lived them. We hope to illustrate how we are part of both our local communities in Toulouse and Florence and our education abroad community in the U.S. Our goal is to highlight what we have learned to strengthen and connect both communities moving forward, ultimately leading to more equity and inclusion.
Also, Part 3 will be a live moderated online discussion and is scheduled for Thursday, September 17, 2020 11:00 am EDT (more information and register here).
On Feb 24th our U.S. students returned from weekend travel back to Toulouse, France, their immersion education abroad program site. Indeed, to be immersed locally means to live with local families, take local transportation to the university, shop the markets all reinforcing the central goal of French language and cultural socialization. Yet lately, we have worked at odds with the increasing weekend student travel trend. Due to accessible low-cost air flights, and despite the programs’ commitment to relationship building with host families, students often spend much time discovering European capitals, rapidly checking destinations off their bucket list. This February was no different. Several students returned to Toulouse to their hosts’ homes from Italy and regions experiencing what we now know is the COVID-19 outbreak. Then rather surreptitiously, Monday morning, the French government laid out self-quarantine recommendations for those returning from specific Italian regions. In our program, this meant that six students having made it back from Italy at the last possible minute Sunday night, should not attend courses at their local University campus the next day, nor for 14 days ahead… and had potentially brought ‘home’ more than Instragrammed souvenirs of their Italian travels, rather had they unknowingly returned with a dubious, infectious health condition?
Calling the students out of classes, informing hosts of the precarious safety situation, sourcing appropriate lodging became urgent preoccupations. The decision was made to remove students from the homes of their hosts. Once students were moved into hotel rooms, we feared that many levels of damage had been done to an already fragile ‘homestay’ social experiment. Hosts are integral members of our community, opening their doors, their bedrooms and bathrooms, refrigerators and wacky family dynamics to student adventurers. Now students were forced to be alone in a foreign environment, left without their cultural guides— students and hosts were scared and frustrated. Research and many personal anecdotes show that a highly functioning homestay can be the source of a lifetime of learning and deep cultural understanding, and whereas this is not always possible, we know after 30 odd years of experience, that by actively cultivating community, listening deeply, engaging hosts as partners/learners on the voyage of intercultural understanding, all parties benefit immeasurably. Our choice to quarantine students (fortunately, none of which succumbed to COVID symptoms) was as much as protecting students as it was for valuing and preserving the healthy family life of their hosts. Given our long history here in Toulouse, we know our hosts intimately, watch their children grow and leave the home, undergo job changes, lose grandparents while growing old themselves. These shared life markers not only represent cultural attitudes and symbolize French values that can be harnessed for student learning; more so, such lived experiences are integral parts of our extended team, enlivening empathy and celebrating our interdependence across borders.
Operating as an immersion study program means careful investment locally, developing trust, honest dialogue and good humor around sometimes tense cultural exchange. In addition, it means clear ethical considerations whereby ‘authentic’ local experiences, (some of which also benefit from being incredibly photogenic and highly memorable!), are understood first as actual moments in the daily lives of local people. Contrary to education abroad mythology, local hosts are not simply screensavers nor extras in the background of a whirlwind travel itinerary. When several hosts dropped off cooked meals and special treats to their frightened, isolated, quarantined host students; when they texted and called every day, this reinforced their investment in these students as members of a community. This scary experience brought them closer to their student(s) and opened many channels of communication and we saw the overall value of our labor-intensive, chosen approach and how it will guide us through COVID and beyond.
Among lessons learned during COVID-19 is to embrace the deep contributions of local people, in this case, our hosts in our intentionally-formed Toulouse community. During this short but intense crisis, our hosts reinforced student’s coping mechanisms through concrete examples, remaining informed, taking care of their family (including their student) and thereby assuaging bigger fears running so rampantly about.
As U.S. centered education abroad moves forward, it needs to reinforce and develop student learning objectives around this kind of community building. Putting local relationships at the center, directing students toward this rich component and guiding them to increased soft skills around interdependence, cultural humility and empathy.
February 25th, 2020. Florence, Italy had its first official COVID-19 case and everything started spinning. A large U.S. university that operates in town decided out of the blue to suspend classes and, on our part, decisions needed to be made fast. We were at a loss with no examples to follow since we were at the forefront of what then became, in just a few weeks, the “new normal”: Spring 2020 moved online and all students were sent back to the States. At first, though, we made the decision to suspend classes (a Spring break was never so welcomed) and while we were trying to decide what to do when the suspension was over, students started to receive emails from their home campuses asking them to return to the U.S. immediately, with no explanation on how this was going to work for them. We, onsite, were as confused as students were; we had no idea that students were going to receive these communications, we had no conversations with their home campuses during this compelling time. As a result, we had no answers for our students and we, onsite and at headquarters, had to find the best solution while navigating many different U.S. college and university responses to the rapidly changing situation.
One question has become, since then, the classic elephant in the room: are we, onsite staff, part of a community? What type of community? Our focus has always been our headquarters and the local communities - university partners onsite, vendors, guides, faculty members, local students, host families - and these partnerships have, over the years, become solid and are based on trust. This helps us, onsite, push the boundaries of what can be offered and how it can be offered to our students; it helps us to be more inclusive and learn new ways to accommodate various requests. What still requires work and commitment, is creating a broader sense of community that includes us, providers onsite, and the various American colleges and universities that send students abroad. The example given at the beginning should be seen as our first lesson learned from COVID-19: Headquarters does an excellent job in creating, building, and fostering partnerships with U.S. universities; however, there must be a way to make us, onsite, more visible and to have a stronger voice in the conversation with our partners. Doing so will strengthen those partnerships even more and it will allow us all to push boundaries, create and innovate courses, programs, and cultural activities that will work better for our students, their degrees and their experiences abroad as well as for us and the wellbeing of our communities.