Ubuntu: Towards a Socially Responsible Study Abroad Program
On my two-week summer intensive trip to South Africa, my professor reiterated the course mission statement: ubuntu. A philosophy used in southern Africa, ubuntu emphasizes a universal bond among humanity:“I am what I am because of who we all are.” Recognizing the humanness and kindness among individuals, ubuntu speaks to a level of interconnectedness. It asks us to enrich ourselves by enabling the community around us, the crucial blocks for building global engagement.
While we visited the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and in our travels around Johannesburg, I made a conscious effort to incorporate ubuntu into my framework of thinking. Throwing myself into a completely different culture, even for a short amount of time, I found the concept of ubuntu to be both demonstrative and healing.
Thanks to my professor and my globally conscious classmates, our trip to South Africa generated serious discussions about social justice, race, class and gender politics, history, memory, and arts as both mirror and shaper of society. Somewhere between travelers and tourists, our awareness of empathy and analysis enriched our experience abroad. As we cried collectively after the production of Ubuze Bam, a story of four ex-offenders using performance as a healing process in prisons, I was reminded of the prison education/abolition movements of the United States. As we toured Constitution Hill/ №4 prison, we forced ourselves to think of the implications of power and space. In our volunteer afternoon at Thembelenkosini Caregivers, we thought both of the creative enhancement of the lives of disadvantaged children in Soweto as well as the damages of voluntourism that we were perpetuating. Going above and beyond the syllabus for the course, my professor’s framework for ubuntu allowed us to consider our ethics as well as appreciate the culture in which we participated.
I like to think of ubuntu in more concrete terms, which I attribute more generally to social responsibility. In this case, I’m defining social responsibility in two forms: the first involving acting ethically, with sensitivity toward cultural, social, economic, and environmental issues; the second being using those ethical sensitivities to incorporate your experience into future educational and professional work.
Most universities will use a different definition of social responsibility, one that looks towards social justice and community service to contribute to a larger community. And certainly, that’s an important aspect of social responsibility, one that shouldn’t be negated. But I think in terms of foreign and international contexts, it’s really a personal concern. In order to get to a point at which students can effectively participate in the larger community, we need to be able to a) take other perspectives seriously and b) develop ethical/moral consciences to engage in this type of work. And it’s the combination of these two forms in educational opportunities that makes social responsibility a valuable trait.
So universities can fairly easily incorporate the concept of social responsibility into current study abroad preparation. Pre-briefings and debriefings for study abroad programs can consider social responsibility more broadly. We’re prepared for culture shock and language, behavior and accommodations, but we are not always challenged to critically evaluate national and global issues. While we’re aware there are ethical issues in crossing cultural boundaries, the details or honest conversations around this are missing.
But there’s a broader thought on personal identity and globalization that this first form of social responsibility doesn’t address as well. Study abroad programs started as forms of language-intensives, allowing promising young adults the opportunity to explore culture and national understanding.But in an increasingly global world, students and universities should think about using study abroad programs for more than “getting to know” other cultures. Instead, we should encourage students to use these spaces as a place to not only build content knowledge, but to develop awareness of the challenges that exist in an increasingly interconnected world. Global thinking is a part of everyday life now, and we should ask of ourselves and of universities to think of study abroad as a chance to test out those international experiences.
And here is where current study abroad programs are failing to make use of student experiences. In reading through memorable study abroad experiences, two ideas are repeated: that students use study abroad to construct personal and national identities, and that we become aware of promises and problems of globalization. So how do we bring these issues to the forefront of future study abroad programs? In the efforts by colleges and universities to make their students global citizens, I think a link is missing. Students and universities want to encourage international engagement, critical intellectual insight, and to work towards employable opportunities. It’s not enough to foster immersive experiences — we need universities to make immersive study-abroad programs connect to the historic, political, or cultural contexts of the places and communities we engage in. And as students, we need to start advocating for these types of programs — developing them with faculty, participating in programs that support these methods, and making public scholarship (of any form) that appreciate and interrogate our experiences abroad.
Together, students and universities can develop a framework for globally engaged education that supports these ideas. We should be asking ourselves questions by engaging with local communities — respecting the existing boundaries while still seeking out the changes that exist.
Until we start thinking about study abroad with this sort of preparation and framework in mind, we’re not reshaping the goals of a modern study abroad education. If we’re not encouraging ourselves to use study abroad as a form of social responsibility, are we making strides towards global engagement?
