Age and Experience

I'm often asked, "What is the best age to study abroad?" AFS students are typically 16-18. CISV (Children's International Summer Villages) organizes programs for 11-year-olds. University-level study abroad is rapidly growing. Interesting opportunities exist for older adults to study or research abroad as well. I see no reason NOT to take advantage of as many of these opportunities as you can!

How do you view human development? Do prejudices become more firmly fixed as we age? Are some ages riper for learning than others? Certainly one of the arguments for sending younger students is the idea that they are somehow not yet formed and there is still a chance to leave an imprint. Yet the longer I live the more I realize I am still learning, and now I am learning things I was much less open to when I was younger. I'm also less easily impressed or shocked.

A First Experience

Many years ago I took my then 7-year-old daughter on a road trip of French-speaking Canada. One episode stands out in my mind: we were walking along a trail in a park and encountered a French-speaking family with a similar-aged daughter. The two girls started speaking to each other excitedly, and then both of them suddenly stopped and stared at each other. For both of them it was the first time they had tried to talk to someone their own age who spoke another language, and they were unsure how to manage this. They moved to grunts, noises, and gestures but managed to discover that they both were interested in the music of Michael Jackson, who had then recently released the "Thriller" album. We, the adults, walked alongside, speaking a mixture of French and English while our girls seemed to move to their own language over the next hour or so as we hiked together.

Early experiences like this one often lead a young person in interesting directions later on. In the 15-country AFS "Long Term Impact Study" (available at http://www.afs.org/research) we found that AFS students were more likely to have parents who encouraged them to meet people from other cultures, who took them traveling to other places when they were younger, and who encouraged them to study abroad. These students were also more likely to study abroad at the university level, to seek jobs that involved working with people from other cultures, and to live abroad for a year or more while working or while following a spouse with an overseas job assignment. A social network community for such ex-patriots, InterNations, is an official supporter of AFS because of the numerous AFS returnees in its network.

These multiple intercultural experiences lead to greater intercultural sensitivity, lower anxiety around other cultures, and friendship networks that are culturally diverse. There are some differences in the kind of outcomes related to a high school program and a university program, as they Long Term Impact Study has shown, but the real pattern that emerges is the lifelong interest in other cultures.

Access to Opportunities 

This week I attended a special awards luncheon at the Asia Society, honoring the winners of the Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for International Excellence in International Education. It was a wonderful event highlighting many excellent programs and initiatives that try to bring an international perspective into the classroom and educational systems in the United States. I was particularly impressed with the Pulitzer Center's Global Gateway that links journalists with classrooms, and the efforts of individual schools like Independence Charter School in Philadelphia.

As I think of our mission to create a more just and peaceful world, I recognize that a big part of this is to ensure that the skills and insights that a student gains abroad will be applied when they get home to enable them to deal in a positive way with the diversity, stereotypes, and prejudices they find on their home turf. I'm sure this is true of many of the international exchange programs offered at various ages.

But from what I heard from Lynette Clemetson, Managing Editor of The Root, a Washington Post web publication, international education may often have its own blinders on. When she went to the University of Pittsburgh as an English major, Ms. Clemetson never heard about study abroad from her academic advisors. As an African American, she supposes that she probably did not look like the kind of student who would want to study abroad student, at least to her academic advisors. Only by accident did she learn of Semester at Sea, a program that was then sponsored by her own university. One of her friends, a woman who had been encouraged to go abroad, was applying for a scholarship for this program. So Ms. Clemetson decided to apply for one as well, received it, and saw China for the first time. This led her to graduate school at University of Pittsburgh, when she finally was able to begin studying Mandarin as part of her East Asian studies, with intense immersion experiences in Taiwan that helped her become fluent.

While Ms. Clemetson's story is one of a nearly missed opportunity, it's also a message that it's never too late for someone who is curious about other cultures and motivated to learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Colors and Cultures

I'm just back from a short vacation in a small cabin in El Yunque tropical rainforest in Puerto Rico and I'm filled with memories of wet green leaves, clouds, emerald-colored humming birds and very tiny, very loud, coquí frogs. Though we had really just a few days to enjoy ourselves, my strongest impressions are those of deep vivid colors and the white clouds that obscured the mountain top, and the contrast of sound and silence that we found as we listed to the birds and frogs, the leaves in the wind, the car horns coming up the road, and then the sound that is silence.

Back in New York yesterday, I missed the green, and I missed the silence, but today I wear the customary green for St. Patrick's Day. My email left untended for a few days brought the announcement of the winning videos in the US Government-sponsored "ExchangesConnect" video contest. I especially enjoyed this winning video from José Vinícius Reis Gouveia, a 16-year old Brazilian high school student from Recife, a city close to my heart because of dear friends who live there.

This next prize-winning video, from 23-year old Bijoy Thangaraj of Bangalore featuring his own original music, was simply pure fun.

José, Bijoy, and two others have won a two-week exchange experience. Perhaps, as I did after my short time in Puerto Rico, they will return home with mostly sensory impressions: colors, tastes, smells, sounds. This is how they express themselves now in these videos. But even a short experience may be enough to raise their curiosity to the next level, to make them attached to the place and to people they meet, to make them want to return and to want to welcome people from elsewhere into their homes.

And it's inspiring to see all these beautifully crafted videos from people as young as 14 years old.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Reset Button

A recent news article in the New York Times caught my attention. It described the cultural miscommunication occasioned by Hillary Clinton's gift to Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov: A red "reset button" as a symbol of the intentions of the USA's new government to start fresh in building its relationship with Russia. If you watch the video below, you might suppose that the miscommunication is just a matter of a somewhat unfortunate typo, easy to overlook and forget.

But of course there is more to read between the lines than the smiles on the faces. In the U.S. we often say of a gift "It's the thought that counts." And I certainly believe that the "thought" was well intentioned. Hillary Clinton sought a way to symbolize a new beginning, to connect to a remark by the U.S. Vice President Biden, a way to use laughter to break tension.

Humor doesn't always translate well, as I pointed out in a blog post from January 2008, even had the correct Russian word been used on the button (which, it should be noted, was printed in the English or Roman alphabet instead of the Russian alphabet). That is why it struck me as a risky gesture for important high-level diplomacy. But part of diplomacy is also being able to recover from a few cross-cultural faux pas and to look beyond the style to read and communicate the intent.

The reset button is of course a metaphor, stemming from the reset of electric circuit breakers when there has been an overload or a short in the system. Video games and other electronic devices also have a reset feature that lets you essentially start over after you've made a terrible mess of whatever it was you were doing. So I would imagine that in giving the reset button, Hillary Clinton was thinking about wanting to undo a terrible mess in the relationship between the USA and Russia and start over from some default point.* But I'm not sure that everyone would think it a good idea to have it so clearly pointed out that our relationship has problems, especially on video tape in front of dozens of clicking cameras to catch every moment.

But back to the gift of a large red button, however labeled. As someone who grew up in a Cold War environment in the USA, a big red button in the context of the USA and Russia evokes images of the button that would be pushed to start a nuclear war. As the two of them pushed the button together, wouldn't this context also go through their minds? The message of the reset button starts to become confusing.

On top of that, is a joke an appropriate way to begin a new relationship? In the USA we often do use humor to remove tension, which is why it is so common for public speakers to begin their speeches with a joke. Jokes are used in board rooms and churches, and humor may even find its way into a funeral; but on the other hand, very few people in the USA would think to begin an interview with a perspective employer with a joke. Weddings also seem to be serious matters, and while there may be jokes at weddings, they may not always be well received.

What about joke gifts? In how many cultures is it common to give humorous gifts? Certainly this happens in the USA, and there are lots of humorous birthday cards and "gag" gifts that tease people about getting older. My husband gave me a joke hat on my 50th birthday, for instance, but he also gave me a couple of very nice, serious gifts. Otherwise I would not have been happy. It's not that I expected anything lavish or expensive from him: just something thoughtful, something that showed that he cares. Joke gifts are also given among friends in New Zealand, according to my sources. But in Russia? It wouldn't be common, my colleagues tell me. Nor in France, where a colleague tells me that a plastic throw-away toy like this would be quickly dismissed. "It's not really a relationship-building item."

One has the sense that Clinton and Lavrov made the best of an awkward situation, and the world is not going to fall apart because of it. And perhaps that's what intercultural learning is about. Like any bridge, the bridges we build across cultures require constant repair.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

______________________________________

*I suppose it's somewhat natural that this button analogy has moved on to the economy, where we are dismayed to learn: There is no reset button.

Vetted and Launched

Last week I joined Gary Rhodes in a workshop at the CSIET Schools Conference in Hartford. It was our change to vet our soon to be launched online intercultural learning programs. Gary's site is part of a larger project of the Center for Global Education of the University of Southern California. AFS's online program is part of the resources we create for our own participants.

Even with 2 1/2 hours, the program seemed a little rushed as we wanted to understand our audience and create time for interaction, give them a taste of our two different sites, have some discussion and create time for feedback.

It was really the first time I tried to lead people through our site, now officially launched in its pilot test mode. Since we couldn't depend on having "live" access to the internet at the workshop, Gary and I both decided to paste selected pages on Powerpoint. This was a serious challenge. Our site has several components working together, and right now, forums and blogs for exchange students from 2 countries. They have a "passport" of text, exercises, surveys, photos,
videos, links to other websites, and open-ended questions to answer. Some questions are for their private reflection, and for these they work in a portfolio -- a kind of electronic scrap book. Others are linked to discussion threads in a forum. Still others suggest that they create a blog entry.

I was grateful for the input we got on one section in particular: the one on stereotypes and generalizations. At AFS we have been using a variety of activities to talk about stereotypes and generalizations since... well, forever, but certainly even long before I arrive there in 1980. So we took an old chestnut of an orientation activity -- the one that makes you recognize the stereotypes and prejudices you have when you select someone as a renter for the apartment you have in your own house -- and put it into a web format. Typically some very specific groups of people are mentioned, with characteristics that could be seen as problematic. The benefit of the activity typically would come from the dilemma of choosing and, of course, the debriefing. Typically in all these old training manuals, the debriefing instructions are fairly minimal: maybe just a few discussion questions.

Put in the web activity as a survey that could be compared with peers, coupled with appropriate text, was clearly inadequate to the task, I realized, as the workshop participants discussed the online activity. So on Monday we reworked the activity, choosing very minimal descriptions of the potential renters and letting the students fill in
the blanks with their own stereotypes based on age, sex, and family situation. We also repositioned the survey exercise within the topic so that it was more explicitly framed to be an activity to raise awareness of one's own stereotypes. It definitely seems to us to be a better activity.

 

And soon we will find out. The first students in the pilot test logged onto the site today. Within a couple of hours we already had two who set up their blogs and one who joined the Malaysia forum and posted a new thread, and a recent AFS exchange student working with us on the design who posted a comment on one of our discussion questions -- and who also posted the first "abusive post" report as a joke because we had deleted something he had put in a test version.

We also discovered that there is a bug with posting to the USA forum. I'm sure this won't be the last one we'll discover. But it has been an exciting day, and I can't wait to see what else goes up. I'm sure I'm about to learn as much from this as they do.

I also can't help feeling as if I have stepped into a new and somewhat chaotic world. Although we based our work on very specific learning goals and theory, and a careful outline, the creative process involved dozens of people's input to the ideas, photos, videos and writing plus dozens of unexpected features and constraints of the DotNetNuke platform we are using. But now the current and soon-to-be exchange students are adding to the mix, creating their own content. Right now what seems to interest our first two bloggers is the social politics of their host communities. They DO seem to be having fun with it. We'll find out later how well it helps them learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International