A Rose by Any Other Name
This is the sixteenth in a series of "food for thought" pieces from CIEE. The themes vary but all deal with study abroad for U.S. undergraduates. We present our ideas not as the only viable ones but rather to stimulate discourse in furtherance of the study abroad enterprise. Previous topics include:
- How Are We Doing?
- Standards
- A CIEE Eye for the Study Abroad Guy...or Girl
- Parents, Pills, & Pandering
- A Research Agenda for Study Abroad
- What’s It All About?
- Numbers
- Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
- Down With America: Anti-Americanism and Study Abroad
- Beware the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
- Leadership, Management, & Study Abroad
- Be Careful What You Wish For!
- Moving Beyond the Gap
- A Good Time
- Quality Management and Study Abroad
We welcome your comments and requests. For additional copies, contact editor@ciee.org.
"A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet!" The words we use to describe objects, phenomena, and events are very important. They conjure images, arouse our senses, and impact our perceptions. They often challenge or define our expectations. In study abroad circles we talk about programming using certain descriptive terms; for example, “this service-learning program…” or “students have a variety of opportunities for community engagement,” or “the program offers multiple internships consistent with student interests and backgrounds,” and many other similar statements. In many cases, these highlighted terms are used interchangeably. We believe this is a real problem; while people are using the same term, they are describing fundamentally different activities.
If we’re going to talk about community engagement, internships, service–learning, and a wide variety of other programming options, it’s important that we’re all talking about the same thing. In the absence of a common set of definitions and/or glossary of terms, there can be negative consequences—from misleading advising to unhappy students to poor program outcomes. The Forum on Education Abroad recently published a very fine Education Abroad Glossary in which some of the issues addressed here are referenced briefly under “Field Studies.” This Our View deals with this area in greater depth, by trying to flesh out the important and fundamental differences in various types of “field-based” learning.
It is useful to remember that the drive for a field-based curriculum is probably as old as formal education itself. The idea that some practical experience in the field will enrich and better prepare a participant for the future is certainly logical. After all, who wants to go to a doctor who has only studied using books and never seen a patient? What kind of plumber learns to install and fix your boiler only in the classroom? The answer to both questions is lousy ones. In virtually every kind of education, for almost any purpose, some level of hands-on, in-the-field engagement is a sensible and beneficial idea.
This notion of practical experience in the field has very much worked its way into undergraduate education. Whether the drive for this activity was pushed down into programs by administration, derived from faculty-driven impetus, and/or created by student demand for more exposure to the real world, or some combination of these factors, is not important. The simple fact is that over the last three or four decades—and with increasing speed and growing interest—there has been a strong push by all stakeholders in the educational process to provide experiential learning opportunities to college undergraduates. These activities outside the classroom are highly varied. Generally speaking, they fall into two types.
First, there are activities that are designed to “serve the community” and its institutions. These include putting a roof on a house for Habitat for Humanity, working in an orphanage, volunteering to be a Big Brother or Big Sister, tutoring, or the thousands of other possible activities we could list. The basic idea behind all of these activities is that by doing something for someone else, for the community, and for those who need help and support, the student not only serves the community but also learns about the community, and very often about themselves.
Second, there are activities that are more career-oriented: teachers-to-be serving as student teachers or tutors; business students working in companies; archaeology students working on a dig and/or cataloging materials. Very often, the work in this area varies little from the work described previously. However, the basic purpose is different—career training versus community service, although some activities certainly serve both purposes.
Field activities are not flat and one-dimensional based on purpose, but rather three-dimensional. In addition to the “purpose-of-the-activity” dimension, there are two other dimensions: timing and engagement. Timing refers to the level of activity in terms of hours/weeks, and engagement refers to the nature of the work and the extent to which the work involves active participation versus passive observation. Purpose x Time x Engagement = Learning Outcome. Each of these bears discussion.
Field experiences vary widely in length. There is a huge difference between spending five hours per week for three weeks working as a candy striper at the local hospital, and spending 30-40 hours a week or more for a year as a volunteer in an emergency room, or for Habitat, or in any other organization. We do not mean to suggest that longer is better and/or one activity is better than another, but, so often, people talk about community engagement with little discussion of the time commitment required. Our experience is that as the time involved increases, the level of potential learning increases.
There is no simple answer to the question of how much experience is enough to garner maximum educational benefit. There is clearly some level of time spent which is too little to be much more than window dressing. There is also a ceiling at which the maximum benefit is obtained from the experience. We believe there is a continuum of time commitment that needs to be explored for each placement and situation to determine appropriate length to maximize learning.
The other very important dimension in field learning is engagement. Is being the teaching assistant in a classroom, with a full-fledged teacher in charge, the same as being the primary teacher in the classroom without a support teacher? Of course it isn’t. Is shadowing a physician for a week the same as working in a public health clinic, assisting in intake, the same learning experience? No way. Is doing support work in an office the same as developing and executing a particular business project? We think not.
In our experience, the closer the work is to the objective of the participant, the greater the value of the learning experience. For example, when students who want to be teachers get to teach, and business students work on a ‘real’ business project, learning increases. Doing things that allow participants to practice the skills they desire to acquire, and/or fulfill their higher-level goals of community-based learning, creates more meaningful experiences in the field. Too often, the nature of the work performed—the things that participants do each day—is too mundane or removed from career and/or personal development goals to facilitate much learning. In fact, very often the possible disconnect that occurs between work content and participant expectations mitigates any potential positive learning outcome. Different levels of engagement in the work lead to different levels of learning.
Many schools have set clear standards for providing credit for field-based learning. For example, to earn three semester hours, a student might be required to complete 120 hours of academically focused work; read three books related to the experience; be supervised by an academically qualified individual on a regular basis to discuss what’s being learned; keep a journal; and/or write a report on the experience and its importance. This type of structured field experience for credit is designed to ensure a more uniform and richer learning experience than simply spending 120 hours as a volunteer or intern working at a particular site, with a particular group, in a particular job.
It is hard given all these variables involved to come up with a simple set of terms for field experiences that truly describe the wide range of activities, the various levels of commitment and involvement, and the level of structure and academic learning that takes place in these activities. Parsing experiential learning by thinking about purpose, time, and engagement as the enablers of learning outcomes provides a useful structure for thinking about this area of activity.
Let’s look for a moment at various types of field experiences as we describe them, and apply the purpose, time, and engagement model to these activities.
Service-Learning
Service-learning describes a program in which the field experience is tied to an academic program of learning. Volunteering, interning, and/or working at a site are not in and of themselves service-learning. The academically focused approach to service-learning often includes instruction in research methods and content education related to the field work. It often also includes individual or group projects in which participants put together their newly acquired knowledge of research methods and/or topical knowhow by applying it to a research project. Usually these projects have been identified through close collaboration with the community organization and the outcomes of said projects benefit the community members.
Programs of this type are labor intensive and require careful oversight and supervision by academically and field-qualified personnel. While lots of people talk about service-learning, true service-learning as described here is rare and there are very few substantive options of this type available. The many variables required to organize a program that serves this academic purpose, for ample duration and with such substantive engagement, is very difficult to achieve. When people talk about service-learning, what they’re normally talking about is the two types of experiences described below, internships and volunteerism.
Internships
This term describes work experiences that are related to a field of study—working in a battered women’s shelter or orphanage for social workers, a company for business majors, a hospital for premed students, a restaurant or hotel for travel and tourism majors, and so forth. These internships can involve various levels of engagement and duration. Institutions can and do differ a lot where awarding academic credit for internships is concerned. Some don’t provide credit under any circumstances. A lot of others—and our sense is that this number is growing—do provide credit. They do this, however, only when the internship experience has well-defined academic components, including readings, academic goals, faculty and worksite supervision, and writing assignments, along with clear standards for hours worked and work performed. The purpose of the internship is experience itself—gaining some—and the duration and engagement is highly variable. Often, internships are pursued at the same time as related but unconnected academic studies and/or as the core of a shorter term summer or midterm experience.
Volunteerism and Community Service
These terms describe someone giving their time, effort, energy, money, and/or any other asset they possess to work for some organization, cause, and/or event. It is not service-learning; is usually not the same as an internship; and is very unlikely to be a for-credit experience unless there is an academic methodology component that complements the practical service hours. Its purpose often is to give people exposure to organizations that serve the community and a chance to be in touch with activities, people, and events they might otherwise not have contact with. Obviously, the duration and level of engagement are highly variable.
A summary chart of the three types of experiences and their purposes, timing, and engagement is below.
We believe the clearer the purpose, the more substantial the time commitment, and the greater the level of engagement in field learning experiences, the greater the likelihood of positive learning outcomes. We also believe that engagement is enhanced when the field activity meets the expectations of participants. When these expectations are not met, engagement tends to decline, time commitments often falter, and learning declines. In fact, in the worst cases, the experience can turn out to be a total bust.
Parsing field studies by type, and then evaluating them by purpose, time, and engagement can be tedious work. But, it’s work with a high payoff in designing programs, advising students, and thinking about how to make field experience an important contributor to learning in study abroad.