If we are to justify funding and curricular inclusion of
study abroad programs, we must be able to do this. In their study The Added Value of Study Abroad: Fostering a Global Citizenry,
Michael Tarrant, Donald Rubin, and Lee Stoner attempt to make this
justification by studying the effect on global citizenship learning outcomes of
study abroad versus domestically and by subject matter (sustainability versus
non-sustainability). As the authors
point out, there have been very few previous studies that investigate the value
addition of study abroad programs. In
particular, they wanted to see the effect on learning outcomes of global
citizenship education, given the increasing globalization we see in today’s
world. In this study they looked at
global citizenship through the lens of global environmental responsibility,
comparing the learning outcomes between students enrolled in sustainability
classes to those in classes with no sustainability component, both abroad and
domestically. Pre- and post-program
surveys concerning global environmental citizenship were administered to all
students. The survey results showed that
studying abroad in itself is not the strongest factor for nurturing global
citizenship, rather, the combination of studying abroad on a program with an
academic focus on sustainability has the greatest effect. They concluded that studying abroad doesn’t
necessarily guarantee that a student will gain intercultural competence, but
that “…international education objectives are likely optimized when students
receive deliberate instruction in those objectives in the context of
field-based, experiential study abroad.”
So, it’s not enough just to send our students abroad, for them to gain
global competence or a sense of global citizenship, they must also be provided
the proper curriculum. However, given
the proper curriculum, studying abroad does positively affect the learning
outcomes, as compared to studying the curriculum domestically.
In Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, Nel
Noddings also stresses the importance of curriculum in teaching global
citizenship. She even spends part of her
introduction concentrating on the idea of “protecting the earth” as a form of
global citizenship, much as how the course used in this study was on
sustainability. Noddings suggests that to
properly teach this form of global citizenship, “Secondary school teachers of
the social studies and related subjects should survey available texts with a
critical eye” in order to make sure they contain the necessary knowledge to
cultivate global citizens. She also
supports “Place-Based Education” for this topic, I think that this study would
have provided her some appreciated support, in that it shows that the
combination of study abroad and appropriate curriculum is the most effective
for teaching global citizenship. For a
topic like global citizenship that seems so abstract to most Americans, studies
like this one are essential to help explain it and how best it can be taught.
References:
Noddings, Nel.
2005. Global Citizenship:
Promises and Problems. In N. Noddings
(Ed.), Educating Citizens for Global Awareness (pp. 1-21). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Tarrant, M. A., Rubin, D. L., & Stoner, L. (2014). The
Added Value of Study Abroad Fostering a Global Citizenry. Journal of studies in
international education, 18(2), 141-161.
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