Cross-cultural knowledge and intercultural competence are highly valued qualities for 21st-century American college and university graduates, as these institutions endeavor to prepare students to live and work in an increasingly multicultural society. This task offers both a challenge and an opportunity for educators to design mechanisms to increase the global awareness and intercultural development of their student participants. The challenge is to create intentional learning experiences that avoid the pitfalls of perpetuating stereotypes and reproducing inequitable social relations. Faculty-led international travel courses provide an opportunity for program leaders to develop intercultural development curricula that are ethical, engaging, economically and environmentally sustainable, and pedagogically sound. This study examined how participants in a faculty-led short-term global service-learning course to Belize experienced and perceived cultural difference and how that professor attended to and sought to address cultural difference and issues of power, positionality, and privilege during that program. This study followed a convergent parallel mixed method design in which I collected and analyzed qualitative and quantitative data concurrently. This combination of methods yielded a more complete understanding of the learning process and intercultural learning outcomes of the student participants, as well as the pedagogical and programmatic features that encouraged the growth of intercultural competencies in each. The quantitative findings of this study indicated little change in the competency levels of the program's participants, whereas the qualitative data suggested that the Belize travel course students had experienced notable gains in cultural self-awareness and were better able to identify relevant cultural differences. Participants singled-out the immersive quality of the experience, the variety and multiple points of intercultural contact the program offered, relationships with the faculty leader, peers, and host community members, and the compassionate leadership of the faculty leader as critical factors in their intercultural growth. I found that emotions, cognitive dissonance, and critical reflection play key roles in the intercultural learning process. / Doctor of Philosophy / American society is becoming more diverse and ever more integrated with nations across the world. College graduates need to have the knowledge and skills to live and work with people from different backgrounds. Universities can prepare students better for this reality by helping them learn how to communicate and behave appropriately with people who are culturally different. One way to encourage this capacity, called intercultural competence, is for students to participate in courses that occur outside of the United States. To secure the possibility for personal and intellectual growth, it is important that professors who take students abroad carefully plan their courses. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether a group of students who went to Belize with a professor for a short service-oriented course returned with more knowledge about that country's culture and improved intercultural competence. I tested program participants before they left and after they returned to see if their intercultural competence improved. I also interviewed the students about what their experience was like and how their professor had prepared them and helped them to learn. I also talked with the program's faculty leader to determine why she had designed the course in the way that she did and whether she perceived that participating students had improved their intercultural competence. I learned several things from this research. First, the tests that students completed showed that there was not much difference in their before and after intercultural competence scores. Second, however, when I talked with participants, they did seem to have changed from going on this travel course even if the test did not show that they had experienced much growth. The students indicated they had learned a lot about themselves and about the people of the town in Belize they visited. Participants suggested that they spent a lot of time with local residents and that doing so had helped them to understand them better. Third, those experiences helped them to think about their own culture and what it means to be an American. Fourth, students bonded with each other and with their professor. As individuals and as a group, they reported experiencing a variety of emotions in reaction to the things they observed and experienced. All of these, difficult or not, helped participants to grow personally and to develop a more robust awareness of how residents of another culture view and navigate their everyday lives.

As calls for institutions of higher education to educate globally competent citizens have intensified over the last two decades, the field of international service learning (ISL) has responded resoundingly. ISL programs have been implemented at many institutions and there have been countless studies that demonstrate the great power for student learning and growth inherent in this exciting educational tool. In more recent years, experts have moved away from studying the student experience and have, instead, questioned the power relationships inherent in service learning programs abroad; related studies have made use of newer critical theories and community development philosophies, which have advanced the field tremendously. However, to date, the re-entry period has still been largely overlooked, and there has been a noticeable lack of studies that apply student development theories to the ISL experience. This study explores how a diverse group of students from a large, public, four-year institution on the West Coast experience transformational learning during an ISL program in Thailand and how they make sense of their experience upon their return to the U.S. and in the months afterwards. By utilizing a case study design and implementing qualitative methods, this study provides significant evidence that well-designed ISL programs can trigger transformational learning in a variety of ways and that the re-entry period is a significant time of learning and growth for students. Further, the findings importantly show that by creating strategic opportunities for students to learn and connect with others on the program, both during and after the ISL experience, students are better able to navigate the changes in themselves after returning home. Finally, the experiences of the students indicate that the processes associated with transformational learning continue well on after the in-country experience, highlighting the significant need to provide support and guidance for students during this time. / Educational Leadership

Given the tormented history of development projects around the globe and the fact that global service learning and engineering-for-development often engages students in development interventions, it is critically important to explore the impact of global service learning projects and partnerships not only on student learning, which has received ample attention, but also on the international host communities. Although there is increasing research on student outcomes of participation in service-learning, there is a lack of research focusing on the outcomes related to the community where the service takes place. Research focused on the impact on communities should include the wide range of perspectives that compose the community- participants, organization leaders, residents, and others. This study responds to this need by exploring the community participants’ perspectives in Waslala, Nicaragua about the projects and partnership with Villanova University’s College of Engineering. The two research questions explore the community participants’ perspectives about: (1) outcomes of the projects or partnership, and (2) educational goals. Community participants’ perspectives call for a broader conceptualization of what counts as outcomes and highlight the importance of participation in all phases of the research process. Supporting existing scholarship about host community motivations to serve as co-educators, my findings describe what the community participants want to teach university students. Community participants’ perspectives describe a desired shift in students and a move towards critical global citizenship education. This study highlights the utility of Fraser’s (2009) theory of social justice and Andreotti’s (2006) framework for critical global citizenship education as useful tools to analyze and understand GSL partnerships. / Urban Education

An increasingly popular way for global citizens to contribute to communities around the world is through international volunteering. In tandem with this growing trend, academic research in the field has increased to explore the goals, motivations, and impacts of international service on volunteers, host communities, and volunteer-sending organizations. One of the larger gaps in our understanding of global civic engagement though is the specifics of how and why, as well as the overall impact of international service on, host organizations that seek and/or accept international volunteers. Using an exploratory research design to collect and analyze survey data and open-ended email inquiry responses from almost 250 organizational representatives in 50+ countries, this dissertation expands the breadth and depth of knowledge on the relationship between host organizations and international volunteers. Findings include a broad and varied range of potential motivations for hosting international volunteers, from direct benefits to the host organization like leveraging organizational capacity to benefits extended to the broader community and volunteers themselves such as providing opportunities for cross-cultural interaction. In addition, host organization characteristics and opinions were compared between two global regions - Africa and Asia - and statistically significant relationships identified between characteristics and opinions of host organizations and their reported satisfaction with international volunteers. This study contributes new data on and from organizations that host international volunteers. Research findings also support and expand the field's understanding of international volunteer engagement as it relates specifically to organizational capacity and social capital theory.

The thesis approaches the issue of IS support for service work, understood as distributed knowledge work taking place as a negotiation between diverse interests. It is based on an ethnographically inspired, longitudinal case study of certification auditing according to a formal generic standard. A handful of certification auditors are followed closely, periodically and comprehensively over three years. Observations are combined with interviews of subjects and colleagues, added by exploration of other material. The practices of company ‘W’ is placed within a larger historical and institutional context. Research literature and theory is explored in four chapters from Social studies of science (STS), Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), Information systems (IS), Information infrastructures (II) and Management literature. The aim is to identify basic characteristics of service work, its opportunities and challenges, from both the company’s and workers’ perspective. Main topics are Decision Making as negotiated sensemaking, contextual rationality and judgement; Sharing of understanding and meaning as ongoing practiced articulation work aiming for trust and an equifinal level of accord that will ‘find and allow common action’; Perseverance in a capable role that will allow calibration of distributed knowledge is vital for auditors. Common Information Spaces (CIS) is used as a framework to explore the heterogeneous circumstances of identity work in work practices; Predictability in production is sought through various strategies of standardization. Approaches to avoid and counter the inherent side-effects of standardization are described. The empirical results of the research project are presented and analysed in four chapters that look at the issue of i) being an accomplished service worker and ii) practicing service work. Both issues are addressed from a local, individual perspective, and from an organizational perspective in terms of the continuation of quality production. The thesis closes with a Conclusion of organized and standardized service work as displaying Practical drift, in response to the research question RQ0. How is IS supported distributed service work negotiated?, followed by implications for IS research and practice. The empirical case displays the role of information systems (IS) support in distributed service work - as part of a larger assembly of standardization measures, a broad-spectrum approach, displaying practical drift in its effect. The service work of certification auditing is characterized by ongoing negotiation of partly contradictory interests. It is heterogeneously standardized through material, rational/immaterial and social/organizational measures, many in place long before the advent of advanced IS. Traditionally, there are release mechanisms that, on the auditors’ discretion, alleviate the inappropriate effects of standardization. With new harmonising efforts the scope of this personal latitude needs to change, but when first implemented the IS along with new procedures start off as too tight. However, over time adaptations are made, making the overall process self regulatory with feedback mechanisms. On the whole, the thesis aims to contribute to the literature on information infrastructures, on knowledge work in general, and CSCW by drawing on insights from this specific collaborative work in controversial settings. The case provides practical insights for resilient systemizing of knowledge based global service work practices.