"If some of the goals of education in modern times are to open up possibilities for discovery and expand learning and the chance for mutual acceptance and recognition in a wider world, it may be important to offer students a perspective on their own immediate center of the world by enabling them to participate sensitively as cross-cultural sojourners to the center of someone else's world." (Batchelder, 1993)
"...a person's world view, self-identity,...systems of thinking, acting, feeling, and communicating, are disrupted by a change from one culture to another." (Brown, 1980)
This month The Language Teacher turns to study abroad, a topic of wide-spread interest in our academic community as more and more schools in Japan facilitate programs that allow their students to earn some of their course credits overseas. Although high schools have begun to introduce group study abroad programs, too, colleges and universities have led the way so far. With this in mind, we have chosen to focus primarily on study abroad programs and situations experienced by college and university students. Our authors demonstrate how various colleges anticipate and buffer the "disruption" Brown mentions, and point out ways to ease the cultural adjustment process before, during, and after the study abroad experience, thereby assisting development of the self- and cultural awareness necessary to "participate sensitively...[in] the center of someone else's world."
Katharine Isbell offers a unique approach to program design: rather than Japan-based teachers accompanying the students abroad, the program she describes involves local facilitators and supervisors, with the students connected to their teachers at the home campus via email. Denise Drake's description of a more traditional accompanied trip focuses on the collaboration between a major private Tokyo university and two well- known southern U.S. universities and highlights ways to integrate the students into both the academic and social communities. Kathleen Geis and Chitsuko Fukushima also document a traditional program, but from the perspective of a smaller, more rural women's junior college which offers both accompanied and unaccompanied trips; the difficulty of assigning grades for work done abroad is one controversial point they touch on. Writing in Japanese, Katsuko Asai investigates the language acquired in a one-year study abroad program and suggests areas of study to facilitate learning in the pre- and post-program stages.
Like bookends for our other features, Joyce Roth's "My Share" column takes us through the steps in preparing students to embark on a study trip abroad , while Heather Jones reports on ethnographic research done to determine the effect of the re-entry process for sojourners abroad returning to Japan and entering the workforce, emphasizing that support is necessary during this critical time and planning for it should be included well before students leave their place of study.
As one of the defining characteristics of an educated person, at the end of the twentieth century, study abroad is rapidly taking its place as the successor to foreign language study itself. Together, these papers present a sampling of the possibilites open to students today and give an idea of how much investment of teachers' effort and institutional resources are necessary to create an experience that will serve the leaders of the future generation. We hope these papers are stimulating and insightful to you.
References
- Batchelder, Donald. (1993). The green banana, in Theodore Gochenour (Ed.), Beyond experience: The Experiential approach to cross-cultural education, 2nd ed. (pp. xiii-xv), Maine, U.S.A.: Intercultural Press, Inc.
- Brown, Douglas, H. (1980). Principles of language learning and teaching. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall.