Background: Methods, participants, and programs
This article explores qualitative data from students who took the Global Engagement Survey (GES) before and after participating in a global learning experience from 2021-2022. It focuses on learning about collaboration challenges and successes reported by students themselves. The GES is a mixed-methods survey grounded in global learning goals identified by the AAC&U (Hartman et al., 2015). Data was coded by three co-authors utilizing the cloud-based platform Dedoose. The themes in the “collaboration challenges” section emerged through the grounded theory coding strategy, and have been explored in past GES annual reports. The themes in the “collaboration successes” section emerged through the in vivo coding strategy (Saldaña, 2014), in which the researcher uses the participants' actual words to generate a code list that reflects the participants’ everyday lives, followed by grouping codes into themes.
The majority of survey respondents in the sample identified as female (71%), White (76%), and were born in the United States (90%). Of those who reported parent income, more than half reported a combined parental income of more than $100,000 per year. According to NCES data, the sample over-represents female and White students compared to the undergraduate populations at their institutions, which are 55% female and 57% White. Comparative data about country of birth and parent income is not available for the total data set. All students participated in a learning experience with the goal of fostering the learning outcomes of cultural humility, global citizenship, and critical reflection. These include both domestic and cross-border global learning experiences (Sobania, 2015). The majority of these programs included community-based learning.
Collaboration challenge
An emergent theme was that students in the data set described feeling uncomfortable collaborating across cultures or identities due to a fear of judgment or marginalization because of their non-dominant identity, including language, race, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
“I often find a need to adapt my language and speech patterns in classroom settings when they are predominantly White spaces as opposed to other spaces that are more predominantly Black where I'm more comfortable using AAVE, Patois, or Kreyol.”
“Being a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, my experiences and discussions when living abroad (especially in Uganda and India) often make me shield this part of my life from cultures that are not as open or respectful.”
“I find it a bit difficult to work with cultures that still have backward practices, such as suppressing women in society.”
These quotes show that students felt a need to hide aspects of their identity when they were in a group of people who might not be understanding – whether that’s not sharing aspects of their non-Western culture in a predominantly White group, code-switching, or not identifying themselves as queer in an unfamiliar place.
Collaboration successes
In addition to the challenges described, students in the data set also identified some concrete strategies that allowed them to successfully communicate and collaborate with people abroad, international students at their university, as well as those of diverse ages and abilities. Strategies applied by students included: listening and asking questions to understand, setting boundaries, and applying language skills.
“Recently in some of my classes I have worked with several international students and have tried to listen first and then ask questions afterwards.”
“When someone was getting angry, I asked questions to get to the root cause and identified how I could have influenced it as well.”
“I have a current co-worker who is Indian. She is also much older. It was hard to work together at first because the way that we processed things and went about our work was different and caused resentment. I decided to take the time to sit with her and just talk through our differences and also create boundaries and solutions for us to get our work done. We developed a good process that worked for both of us, and now we work very well together.”
“I belong to the country of India, where the type of population changes every 10 miles. While I was practicing dentistry, I communicated with the in-clinic patients mostly in English as they all belonged to the upper middle class of the society. But when I went to dental camps, especially organised for the marginalized people, I communicated in the local language as far as I could so as to make them comfortable while interacting with me.”
Students viewed these successful communication strategies as important for not only improving collaboration on a functional level but also as ways to show respect and build trust during their learning experiences.
Recommendations
The purpose of this article is to learn from diverse students’ own words about both their challenges and successful strategies in communicating and collaborating across difference during global learning experiences. While this research is preliminary, we leave readers with three recommendations for practice.
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Help students navigate identity expression, cultural adaptation, discrimination, and safety.
True inclusion means that all students, especially those who are the most marginalized, can fully participate in global learning experiences. If students fear judgment or marginalization due to expressing part of their identity, this can affect their overall health and well-being. However, it may also be unsafe for students to fully express part of their identities or views in a new place. For example, a student may choose to not identify as LGBTQ or fully express their views on human rights in a religiously conservative country. This dynamic speaks to the intersection of education abroad and civil society human rights advocacy, which has been explored elsewhere, but needs more research and intentionality overall (Hartman, et. al., 2020). Educators need to dedicate extra support before, during, and after the global learning experience to help students navigate intersections of expression of identity, cultural adaptation, discrimination, and safety. We recommend drawing on alumni experiences, university mental health counselors, and local experts in history and culture as supports.
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Draw on students’ past lived experiences of successful collaboration across difference,
The data presented here shows that students come into the global learning experience with skills and experiences of successful collaboration across differences gained from lived experiences with their own families, the classroom, and the workplace. Thus, educators can use an asset-based approach to help students connect the dots and bring these skills and experiences into the global learning experience. Norco College’s cultural wealth wheel is a practical resource that draws on the educational theory of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and guides students, particularly students of color, to reflect on their past lived experiences as assets.
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Disaggregate data by diverse student identities in future research.
By focusing data analysis on students from diverse and marginalized identities, we found that these face a fear of judgment or marginalization. There is relatively little research regarding experiences and outcomes for students of different demographic identities in global learning and community-based learning programs (Hartman et al., 2020; Valentine et al., 2021). Failing to disaggregate data results in non-inclusive universalization (Nkomo, 1992), which in turn entrenches patterns of program design and analysis that benefit dominant groups and exclude non-dominant groups. Thus, future research and assessment of global learning should look critically at data disaggregated by different student identities.
References
Hartman, E., Lough, B., Toms, C., & Reynolds, N. (2015). The beauty of global citizenship; The problem of measurement. In B. Oomen, E. Park, M. Sklad, J. Friedman (Eds.), Going Glocal: The theory, practice, evaluation, and experience of education for global citizenship. Amsterdam: Drukkerij Publishing. available on academia.edu
Hartman, E., Reynolds, N., Ferrarini, C., Messmore, N., Evans, S., Al-Ebrahim, B., & Brown, M. (2020). Coloniality-decoloniality and critical global citizenship: Identity, belonging, and education abroad. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, Special Issue on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in Education Abroad (33 – 59). The Forum on Education Abroad.
Nkomo, S. M. (1992). The emperor has no clothes: Rewriting “race in organizations.” The Academy of Management Review, 17(3), 487–513. https://doi.org/10.2307/258720
Sobania, N. (Ed.). (2015). Putting the local in global education: Models for transformative learning through domestic off-campus programs. Sterling, VA: Stylus.
Valentine, J., Price, D., & Yang, H. (2021). High impact practices and gains in student learning: Evidence from Georgia, Montana, and Wisconsin. Lumina Foundation. https://www.luminafoundation.org/resource/high-impact-practices-and-gains-in-student-learning/
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91.