Associate Professor DePaul University Chicago, Illinois, United States
At the conference in 2025, I want to present the same cases from the study abroad field that I presented at the Forum Conference in 2013 and at the Forum on Education Abroad Institute on Ethics and Integrity in 2015. While the cases remain the same, the world in which they exist has changed. In what ways have social changes in the ensuing years impacted the cases differently? I want to look at ways the Forum's Standards of Good Practice anticipated and then reacted to changes in the field.
Learning Objectives:
Participants will be able to understand changes in the construction, delivery, and expected outcomes of service learning components of study abroad programs over the past seven years and to adapt their own practice in light of those changes, as needed.
Service learning was one of the cases I presented with colleagues ad the 2018 Forum conference just after the first iteration of the Standards of Good Practice were drafted. There is much to say about the evolution of Service Learning (or Community-based Learning) from 2017 to the most recent revision of the Standards in 2021.
By engaging in a role play activity similar to the one colleagues and I asked participants in the 2018 Forum conference to engage in, the entire group, along with the presenters, will compare and analyze the implications of changes, if any, in the collective experience of culture-infused approaches to the case of conflict and conflict resolution that was presented at the 2018 conference. In 2024, as in 2018, the most current iteration of the Standards of Good Practice available at the time would be used to guide participants in each role play triad team.
Upon completion, participants will learn from the collective experience of the group and be able to exchange strategies for identifying opportunities ("teachable moments") to address issues of privilege and the identify issues that can come up when study abroad students encounter "otherness." Guided by the Forum's Standards, they will gain a toolbox of strategies from the group to apply themselves. They will have time to discuss the changes in perception and practice in this area that have taken place in the past seven years. Participants will also be exposed to a model of intercultural fluency development from field-based work published by the presenters.
Participants will understand upon completion that there are many systems of applied ethics available for their consideration. As members of the Forum on Education Abroad community, if they choose to apply the Forum's Standards of Good Practice to challenges they face in their own practice, they will be prepared to do so. Participants will be familiar enough with the current iteration of the Forum's Standards to see that it is a living document that they may adapt to particular circumstances in their own setting, and that there is even an official process for petitioning the Forum to make a change to the document, This training will empower the participants to either design and lead or to manage study abroad programs in accordance to general ethical guidelines in the field. The cumulative effect of this learning session will be to gain a deeper understanding of changes in the study abroad field by reflecting on changes made to the Standards document from its inception until today.
