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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/112034 |
| Date | 07 April 2021 |
| Creators | Boggs-Parker, Carmen Elana |
| Contributors | Public Administration/Public Affairs, Stephenson, Max O. Jr., Sanderlin, Nicole Paulette, Wimberley, Dale W., Zhang, Yang |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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