Bridging the Gaps in Study Abroad
How do you get students out of their comfort zones and into their “stretch zones?”
When I was 20, I stopped out of Stanford and moved to Latin America. I was burnt out by the academic treadmill, and the dissonance of learning about international development (my chosen course of study) from polished professors in gleaming lecture halls. A friend of a friend had recently returned from Brazil and hearing her stories awakened something in me — I craved a similar adventure. So in the fall of 1999, I boarded a plane for Salvador, Brazil with a backpack, some books to teach myself Portuguese and a slip of paper with the address of an NGO that I’d heard was happy to take foreign volunteers.
My first weeks in Salvador jarred me out of any semblance of a comfort zone; I was stretched at every turn by the challenges of navigating a new language, culture and sprawling urban center. The NGO on my slip of paper had lost its funding and had closed, and I remember spending my days walking the streets and looking for work.
Looking back, I should have been suspicious when a center that was working with street children offered me a job on the spot: “Why don’t you start tomorrow,” the program director said. “You can run our classroom.” Never mind that I didn’t speak Portuguese, had no formal training as a teacher and had no common experience with the students who were poor, black, abandoned by their families, and living and working on the streets of Brazil’s third largest city.
My first few months at the center were chaotic and confusing. It was nearly impossible to get a handle on the staff (a constantly changing stream of paid and unpaid workers) and the kids who seemed to come and go at their whim. They all used the center as a home base for meals and beds at night, and as my language skills improved I discovered they referred to it as their “hotel,” and often spent the days on the streets outside hustling tourists and looking for money. The kids ranged from 2 to 20 in age, and on any given day there were 0 to 30 kids who showed up for the classes I was presumably meant to be teaching. Looking back, the scene makes me cringe: I had zero life experience that qualified to be the teacher, coach, mentor, or surrogate parent these kids needed.
And yet, I toughed it out and powered through each challenge as my own parents and teachers had taught me to do. In time I managed to forge a few touching relationships with my students, though I also knew (as anyone who has had a similar experience will say) that I was learning far more than I was teaching.
Toward the end of my stay, having built the trust of the staff and rapport with some of the students, I proposed something radical: that I take the kids on a field trip to spend the night in the Bahian countryside. I had had the chance to explore other parts of Bahia and desperately wanted these kids to see the view beyond the unforgiving streets where they had been born and raised.
With 20 kids and a few chaperones, we took a series of buses that dropped us off in a world that had no resemblance to the ocean-side, concrete bustle of Salvador. The hills were green and dotted with small houses and roaming animals. I had arranged for the students to stay the night with host families in a small, tight knit community. And while some of them spent the evening complaining about the unfamiliar food, accommodations and eerie quiet, others were tearful about leaving when, the next morning, we boarded the bus to return to the city.
I thought about this experience recently when listening to the This American Life episode, Three Miles. Like the teachers who set up the visit between students from an under-resourced public school in the Bronx and Fieldston, a private school just three miles but many worlds away, I have always had a similar instinct — that the best way to open a young person’s sense of possibility is to help them leave their comfort zone.
I had been privileged to have experiences like these as a kid while traveling with my family across Asia and Southern Africa. Meeting other kids my age who were born into unimaginably different circumstances made me viscerally aware of a birth lottery that I had, through nothing but randomness, won. These were the early seeds that began shaping my sense of social conscience and responsibility, and which eventually motivated me to create opportunities for many more — and more diverse — young people to have similar experiences.
A few days after we returned from the field trip, a pair of young, white Americans showed up at the gate, just as I had months before. They were on the final leg of their study abroad program and hoped to complete their final “research” project at the center. “Would it be OK if we spent the week observing the program?” I heard them ask the director in strained Portuguese. Once again, the answer was an unhesitating, “Why not?” For the next few days the students spent two hours with us each morning, sitting in the corner of my classroom, observing the kids, whispering between themselves in English. At the breaks, they tried to interact with the kids and staff with a mix of pantomime and halting Portuguese.
I watched them watching us with a wild range of emotions most of which were, admittedly, tinged with judgment. What were these kids doing here, I thought (even though they were probably exactly my age). What gave them the right to “study” a program they had no context for understanding? To use our students as “research?” To capture their “findings” in a “report” that would check the final box in earning their course credits?
It had taken me four long months to begin to understand how little I knew about the dynamics of the center; what could they possibly conclude after a few hours of cursory observation? And yet, I also knew that their presence was not dissimilar from my own: an idealistic gringa with good intentions using a foreign context as a “classroom” to further my own learning.
And while the parallels were clear, I was most struck by the contrast in our experiences of Brazil: while I had immersed myself in a neighborhood and routine, had spoken few words of English since arriving, and had struggled to (eventually) build a network of friends, my counterparts had spent much of their time with other Americans, in classes taught in English by imported American professors, learning to surf in the afternoon and navigating the tourist scene by night.
Drawing these contrasts was clearly a way of justifying my own choices; labeling the other students’ experiences as superficial or less authentic helped me feel like my roller coaster of trial and error had been worthwhile. But the contrast also prompted deeper reflections about empathy, cross-cultural learning and the limits — and potentially dangerous pitfalls — of traditional study abroad.
Today, while colleges are quick to boast impressive and growing numbers of students “studying abroad,” there has been far too little critical reflection on the why and how of these programs. When we dig deeper into the data, we find that most study abroad consists of a few weeks of summer study; nearly 2/3 of all study abroad takes place in Western Europe; over 80% of participants are wealthy and white; and the vast majority of programs have students living with other Americans and taking classes in English.
If we’re trying to develop global citizens, is this the right approach?
I couldn’t have known it at the time, but my time in Brazil — and the distance between my experience and that of the study abroad students I encountered — became the foundation for my life’s work: founding and leading Global Citizen Year. I had taken the road less traveled, and a very risky one at that. On the other extreme, traditional study abroad is designed to mitigate discomfort through programs that are insular and highly structured — often to the detriment of students’ learning, and their host communities’ experience.
Global Citizen Year was designed deliberately to bridge this gap. Our program emphasizes deep immersion in communities across Africa, Latin America, and Asia where our “fellows” live with host families and work as apprentices with local projects. And, unlike my own haphazard experience in Brazil, our Fellows receive extensive training — before, during and after they travel — ongoing coaching from a local Team Leader and the support of a cohort of peers who are also placed in their region. Our goal is to maximize the time our Fellows spend in a healthy “stretch zone,” since we know that productive learning can’t happen when we’re stuck in our comfort zones, or pushed into a panic zone.
The outcomes are transformative. Over 90% of our Fellows return with fluency in a new language and their gains on the Global Perspectives Inventory outperform traditional study abroad by a significant margin. They pride themselves on being able to discern between “feel good” and “real good” in creating social change and they bring a productive skepticism to the innovations hatched in college classrooms by students who have rarely lived or apprenticed with the problems they are proposing to solve (a trend so prevalent — and problematic — some have coined a new term: hero-preneurship).
And perhaps most importantly, they arrive in college with confidence, a sense of purpose, and a set of burning questions to guide their classroom study.
In an age when global skills have become indispensable, it’s time to reboot our notions of study abroad and feel-good volun-tourism. Global skills and perspectives can’t be seen as a privilege of the wealthy, nor can they be developed in a classroom or on a far-flung campus. We need to invest in models that support our students in staying longer and going deeper, so that when they come home they have fewer simplistic answers, and more nuanced questions about themselves, the world, and their role in it.
The Development Set is made possible by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We retain editorial independence.
