Direct Enrollment and the Resident Director
One of education abroad’s more enduring assumptions is that directly enrolling in courses at host universities is “the best way” for students to study abroad—that direct enrollment allows for better “immersion” than other program options. I’ve long been a devotee of direct enrollment, and my visits these past two years to a number of CIEE Study Centers, especially those that provide direct enrollment, have renewed my faith. But it’s a faith that now comes with a proviso. After observing and talking with students, I’m convinced that many of them do learn effectively through direct enrollment—especially if they can work with someone onsite who helps them meet the challenges of adjusting, academically and otherwise, to a new and different culture.
I’m not alone in asserting that most students need proactive support for their learning while abroad. As I noted several months ago in “Interventions,” the number of study abroad professionals who have come to believe this—the “interventionists”— continues to grow. However, judging from some lively conversations I’ve recently had at conferences and meetings, it isn’t difficult to find colleagues—I affectionately called them “isolationists” in that piece—who maintain that students don’t need anybody to help them learn while abroad. This disagreement—whether programs do or don’t need Resident Directors for direct enrollment programs—is arguably the one that most thoroughly divides study abroad professionals today.
Colleagues who argue that their students do fine when they direct enroll in host university courses abroad—through, for example, reciprocal exchanges—maintain that they get all of the support they need from host university international offices. However, my visits to CIEE Study Center programs these past two years have convinced me that the sine qua non for assuring student learning abroad is a well-trained Resident Director. Universities in other countries simply don’t provide the kinds of support for student learning that allow them to adjust effectively to the new and different. As students move from the familiar and comfortable culture of home to the new and challenging culture abroad, most of them need to work with a Resident Director who can serve as a mentor, guide, supporter, and bridge between these two very different cultural landscapes.
U.S. Colleges and Universities: Some Weighty Cultural Baggage
U.S. consumer culture increasingly informs life, including academic life, at colleges and universities. For those of us who like to think there was a time when students chose institutions based on the strength of academic reputation, faculty, curricula, and libraries, it’s instructive to look at the sorts of criteria that students and their parents are asked to consider today when selecting a school. A glance at the most recent Princeton Review rankings of U.S. colleges and universities underlines the extent to which consumer values are now solidly in play. While schools are ranked according to “Academics,” they are also evaluated through seven other criteria: “Politics,” “Demographics,” “Quality of Life,” “Parties,” “Extracurricular,” “Social,” and “Schools by Type” (whose sub-lists provide information about “Greek Life,” “Jock Schools,” and “Intercollegiate and Intramural Sports”).
Conditioned by such consumer values, students expect a full range of support services—academic, psychological, social, and more—at virtually any school they attend. The academic marketplace is filled with choices. Schools work hard to attract students, and to keep their customers satisfied once they’re enrolled. There’s of course no reason to believe that students change their values when they make choices about studying abroad, or that their expectations about what they need change dramatically once they’re abroad. When there’s no one there to help them reflect on and identify the sources of their displeasure, most students are bewildered, frustrated, or worse when they perceive that their needs aren’t being met.
Students’ needs are also informed by the increasingly learner-centered nature of U.S. higher education. While there are still plenty of U.S. undergraduate courses that feature professors who deliver lectures, more and more institutions are evolving toward learner-centered teaching models. “Centers of Teaching” and “Centers for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning” now proliferate on U.S. campuses. Their workshops encourage faculty to make classrooms more dynamic and engaging, to identify learning goals for their courses, to offer students frequent feedback about their learning, and to help them make connections between what they already know, the new knowledge that’s introduced in class, and their lives beyond the classroom. Students are increasingly accustomed to learning in interactive classrooms, and through field work outside. Encouraged to identify their own learning goals and to regard collaborative and cooperative learning as the norm, they are challenged when they find themselves in host universities abroad that focus on more traditional teaching methods. In these institutions, faculty are expected to do little more than conduct research, publish the results, lecture to students, and evaluate end-of-term papers or exams.
Direct Enrollment Abroad: Recurring Challenges
A strong case can, I think, be made that U.S. higher education is rapidly evolving in ways that distance it from universities almost everywhere else in the world. University and college structures, policies, and practices are informed more and more by the curiously American combination of consumer-based and learner-centered values. These values are increasingly shaping U.S. students in ways that make it difficult for them to adapt to courses at most universities abroad. Each host university, of course, presents U.S. students with its own particular challenges. However, what I’ve observed indicates that most students find it difficult to adapt to some recurring features of academic life abroad. First, students whose programs don’t provide Resident Directors have real difficulty understanding how to learn in traditional systems. Faculty lecture without asking students to comment, or they provide what, from a U.S. student perspective, look to be a few perfunctory minutes for questions at the end of the class. Student comments I’ve heard run the gamut: from laughing at dry and boring lectures, to leaving the lecture hall unsure about what’s supposed to happen next, to scorning the professor, to panicking after hearing a few lectures since “nobody can learn under these conditions,” to simply dismissing lectures and lecturers as hopeless.
Student problems with traditional approaches to teaching don’t end with the classroom. It’s not unusual when no one at the host university abroad is responsible for monitoring student academic performance—and all too often students are surprised, at the end of the term, to discover that they’ve performed poorly. Students complain that their professors don’t have scheduled office hours, that they don’t have time to talk after lectures, and that when they don’t show up for lectures, they don’t inform anybody in advance. Even when universities do ask faculty to base their course grades on more than a single final paper or exam, students complain that they don’t receive the feedback they need. Back home, students are accustomed to having somebody tell them what to do and why. In the absence of feedback about their performance and clear signals about what’s expected of them, U.S. students often judge their courses abroad according to whether they’re perceived as easier, or more difficult, than courses at home.
At one extreme of the “difficulty scale,” students enroll in universities whose courses, they perceive, are far less challenging than courses at their home institution—and they decide to skate through the experience. When they return home, they report that the courses were ridiculously easy, that the list of readings corresponded little or not at all to the topics that the professor delivered through dry and boring lectures, and that he or she seemed more interested in having students memorize material than in engaging them to think creatively and independently. The irony is that universities that expect faculty to do little more than research, lecture, and grade also typically assume that students will work independently. Faculty expect students to take the suggested list of readings to heart, to read the works thoroughly, and to pull together the disparate threads, creatively and persuasively organizing these in final papers and exams. U.S. students who can’t see beyond the “boring lectures,” and who perceive that host university courses are easy, may do just enough to get relatively good grades. However, without a Resident Director who can help them realize the full potential of their academic experience, they aren’t likely to learn anything that even approaches the depth or breadth of what their host culture peers are learning.
At the other extreme of the “difficulty scale,” students enroll in universities whose coursework is far more rigorous and challenging than what they’re accustomed to at home—particularly when they’re unable to ask questions in class or find their professors outside of class. Unlike the U.S. system, which has students focus on general education courses during their first two years, nearly all other systems assume that students who reach university level will have already completed the equivalent of “general education” in secondary school. Students in traditional systems take specialized courses much earlier than in the U.S., even in their first year. By their third or fourth year, the level of the material can be beyond the ability of many U.S. undergraduates. Students who believe that their proficiency in the host university’s language of instruction is higher than it is, or who believe that their prior coursework in a given subject has adequately prepared them, can find themselves in real trouble when they enroll in courses that are simply beyond their abilities. The situation is aggravated when an academic advisor on the home campus has, prior to the student’s departure, identified a course whose title or catalog description suggests it will transfer easily, without understanding that the course selected may be beyond the student’s abilities.
The challenges don’t end for all students once the academic term is over. Faculty who teach in the U.S. often complain about students who argue about their grades, and many students do believe they can influence their final grades. Meeting with home school faculty when, and as often, as they like, students perceive that negotiating grades is a normal part of the process. When they don’t get the grade they think they deserve, they can turn to an appeal process that requires faculty members to explain the final grades. Students who appeal grades received abroad frequently come up against a very different reality. Institutions abroad often do have a grade appeal process—but it’s typically not as student-friendly as those in the U.S., to say the least. Some allow students to appeal a grade only within a narrow window of opportunity—perhaps as little as a few days after final grades are posted. At other institutions, students need to petition a committee before they are allowed to appeal. Still others don’t require faculty to keep copies of student work after assigning final grades. Under these circumstances, students who are unable to work with a Resident Director whose responsibilities include informing them of important university policies and deadlines can easily find that they have no recourse when they want to appeal a grade.
Helping Meet the Cultural Challenges
In describing the consumer-based and learner-centered values that strongly inform U.S. student learning abroad, I don’t mean to suggest that a Resident Director should work to satisfy all or even most of the students’ perceived needs. I don’t know any study abroad professionals who believe that somebody abroad ought to hold students’ hands—most of us agree that one of the goals we want our students to achieve is to learn to negotiate the new culture on their own. The important word here is “learn.” Students typically don’t arrive with the knowledge and skills to function effectively and appropriately in the new university. They have much to learn, about themselves and about the new culture—and, especially for those who will spend no more than a semester abroad, limited time in which to learn it. I’ve especially come to appreciate those Resident Directors who work to “create a space” within which students can learn about the new culture, academic and otherwise, and how to function within it. A well-trained Resident Director can, in that space, provide students with intellectual and emotional support as they begin to interact with new and challenging courses, professors, and ways of learning. Meeting with students on a regular basis to discuss and de-brief their cultural challenges, Resident Directors are able to help them learn to function well within the new culture.
I’ve come to think of well-trained Resident Directors as talented swimming coaches. They understand that students need to learn to swim in the deep end of the pool, and to do so on their own. They also understand that throwing students into the deep end when they arrive doesn’t work for most of them—they’ve seen some who’ve drowned outright, and too many others who have desperately dogpaddled to the shallow end. There, in safe waters, these frightened swimmers congregate with others who’ve had trouble in deep water, frequently reminding each other how unpleasant it is out there. For the reminder of their time in the pool, they stay close together in the shallows, doing all they can to avoid the deep end. Accomplished Resident Directors have learned to introduce most students into shallower parts of the pool. They work with the students throughout the program, helping them learn new ways to swim, and throwing them a life line or swimming out to them when they’re getting into real trouble. As students become more aware and reflective, and start to swim with skill and ease, they move into the deeper parts of the pool. The great majority of the students I’ve met abroad do want to swim into these deep cultural waters. They simply need an effective Resident Director to help them get there.