Transcript Cross-Cultural Immersion Impact on Faculty and Staff

Impacts of A Cross-Cultural Experience on
Faculty/Staff Development Relevant to
Education for Personal and Social
Responsibility
Joseph Orlando, Ed.D.
Seattle University
•Context for This Research Study
•Program of Interest
•Research Focus
•Findings Relevant to Educating for
Personal & Social Responsibility
Context for This Research Study
•My role with faculty/staff development at Seattle University
• Jesuit educational mission that resonates with education for personal and
social responsibility
Seattle University mission statement:
“Seattle University is dedicated to educating the whole person, to
professional formation, and to empowering leaders for a just and humane
world.”
•Range of programs that serve faculty, staff and administrators
•An experiential education program of interest
Nicaragua Immersion Experience (annually since 2001)
Program of Interest
•Nicaragua Immersion Experience - program goals
• 1. To provide an international experience that explores global justice
issues in the context of a developing nation.
• 2. To encourage the application of the international experience into a
participant’s curricular and program responsibilities.
• 3. To further participants’ understanding of the mission of Jesuit
higher education with its emphasis on education for justice.
•Setting, Partners, Group Size/Distribution, Duration
Program of Interest (cont.)
•Program elements
- learning about the Nicaraguan context (especially in terms of
development challenges) through presentations/meetings with leaders
of various sectors and through educational encounters with Nicaraguans
facing economic hardship and organizing to address those hardships
(cooperatives, rural health organizations, faith communities, etc.)
- learning about the Jesuit university mission expressed in Nicaragua
through educational meetings with UCA colleagues, and through
presentation/field visits to outreach programs connecting the university
with the needs of the community/countryside ( law clinic, microlending
initiative, etc.)
- learning through collegial, small group experience through
facilitated reflection sessions, common itinerary, emphasis on group
participation
Research Focus
•2007 study:
“Impact of a brief international immersion experience on faculty and staff
development for Jesuit university mission”
•Qualitative study with a representative sample of faculty and staff seeking
to learn about whether and how this experience carried impact for them.
•Research findings grouped according to:
•whether/how participants grew in their understanding of the Jesuit
educational mission and its emphasis on education for justice and
education for global engagement
•key components of the Nicaragua Immersion Experience that carried
impact for participants
•expression of impact through both behaviors and attitudes as selfreported by participants
Findings Relevant to Educating for Personal &
Social Responsibility
•Impact of the People and Context of Nicaragua
- the reality of poverty
- poverty in contrast
- “intimate and humanizing encounters with poor
persons”
•Impact Expressed in Teaching
-enhancing course curricula
-development of new initiatives
-strengthening of “voice”
Impact of the People and Context of Nicaragua
- the most significant component of NIE *
The reality of poverty:
“seeing the extreme poverty was shocking, it was enlightening,
it was emotionally devastating”
“I think it is important for those of us in North America to go
and see for ourselves. It doesn’t guarantee that, if you see that
is the world, your life will change; you have some kind of
epiphany. But unless one puts oneself in situations where you
understand or at least have some exposure to…this poverty,
this disparity in the distribution of resources, you will never
understand fully.”
•Seeing in general, seeing together, seeing through a
disciplinary lens
Poverty in contrast (within Nicaragua; between us & Nicaragua):
“I just remembered again the stark contrast, because of course
the hotel itself was just wonderful, just beautiful, and then I just
remember throwing open the curtains and stepping out onto the
balcony, and…across were all of the poor homes along the
ridge…it was just being unable to avoid the stark contrast
between rich and poor”
“Nicaragua provided some of those kinds of moments for me, to
experience people who were radically different from me, had
very different lives, very unprivileged lives compared to my own,
but also (to) encounter them with their full humanity…and
identify with them as a fellow human being, to be welcomed by
them, to see commonalities with them, as much as my
differences…And so that for me is why global education,
particularly to developing nations, is so important for us to be
engaged in.”
Intimate and humanizing encounters with poor persons:
*the quality of interactions
“And in particular I think on this trip to have the opportunity
to interact with people whose lives were so different from my
own, and in many cases were so less, in most cases, were so
less privileged than my own—you have to walk away from
those conversations again and again inspired by their sense of
hope, their sense of happiness, their sense of passion, despite
what seems to me like great difficulties, many times. That was
part of that sense of being privileged…privileged not as a
North American, but privileged to be able for these seven or
eight days to share little bits of these other lives and be
motivated and inspired by those other lives. But mostly even
just have my own sense of who I am and what the world is like
broadened.” (cont.)
(continued)
“If I had traveled to Nicaragua on my own as a tourist, I would
have talked to a few people, but I wouldn’t have had those
kinds of conversations. I wouldn’t have met these kinds of
people. I wouldn’t have been in the kind of context where
they were so willing to open up to me and tell me about
themselves and their experience in their life. And that was
really rich for me.”
Impact Expressed in Teaching
-enhancing course curricula
examples for class content:
(re: coffee cooperative progressing to fair trade status)
“I actually use it in teaching, their willingness to work together
for the good of the whole…I actually use it as an example of
what we mean by this connectivity to the other”
Speakers in class:
“Because of…experiences there I am on the list here locally
(regarding) what’s going on in Nicaragua, so when people come
through from the…underground labor movement, I have them
in and talk to the class, and those people really touch students
in ways that I could not, because they tell their life story.”
Reshaping an approach to teaching:
“I can envision a change in the way I teach some of those
classes, where I try to prepare students to be voices for
positive change. I can see myself…pushing students much
harder to pick issues that really matter…I could see myself
focusing much more on the emotional dimension of doing
advocacy work and dealing with issues of social justice….If
they are working on that issue of poverty, they need to go
research poverty. They need to go find the statistics, they
need to talk to people, they need to understand what the laws
are, they need to understand what the institutional structures
are that perpetuate poverty. Now it seems to me they also
need to know what poverty feels like…It is not enough to go
talk to some experts about poverty—they need to go talk to
some poor people as well. They need to understand what it is
like for people who are poor, if that’s what they are working
on.”
Impact Expressed in Teaching
-Developing new initiatives
“I really started putting together more of an international dimension to it,
the graduate program that I direct. I started becoming more involved with
looking for…ways of involving the graduate students in Latin America…So I
definitely started moving more in the direction of internationalizing the
curriculum.”
“I have tried to push…harder for social justice to be incorporated in a
variety of classes, and in part that has been inspired by the program in
Nicaragua. I mean, it was something that I was trying to do; I had visions of
doing before. I came back from Nicaragua with a stronger sense of this can
make a difference.”
Impact Expressed in Teaching
-Strengthening of “voice” internally & externally
“I am much less reticent…when I think about these issues related to
poverty or our foreign policy as it impacts other countries…I am not
overbearing about this, but I will just simply say what I think. I am much
more able to do that in the classroom than I have been in the past.”
“It (NIE) has given me the opportunity to tell other people about Nicaragua and
talk about the problems in Latin America and in developing nations as a whole.
For instance, I gave a presentation…to my (science) colleagues…here in
Seattle…It gave me a chance to provide some background and show them
some pictures of the country and to at least briefly describe the coffee crisis,
the level of poverty, to some extent the historic role the U.S. has played…and to
let them know that addressing social and economic justice issues was a big part
of the reason I was down there, in addition to the science.”
Conclusion
•Educating Students for Personal & Social Responsibility includes
developing faculty who are motivated and prepared to deliver
values-based education
•This research suggests that faculty development programs of the
kind studied here can support the advancement of PSR education,
and cultivate a commitment and awareness in faculty:
“I do think about the Organized Women of Yasica Sur now when I
am reading or preparing for certain classes…This might sound
really idealistic, but because of the connectedness, they have a
stake in what I teach and what my students learn, they really do.
And so yes, I do think about them.”