Category: Study Abroad Ideologies
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New Article: Reimagining Study Abroad
I’m excited to announce that I have a new article out with Tracy Quan and Wenhao Diao, “Returning to Normal?: Reimagining Study Abroad and Langauae Learning for a Sustainable and Equitable Future”. It is in a special issue of the L2 Journal, “Study Abroad During COVID and Beyond”. The L2 Journal is open access, so you should be able to read the entire issue online!
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Ideologies of Study Abroad: Professional Preparation
Last Spring, I started a series on ideologies of study abroad (my current research project!)and you can read previous posts on study abroad as tourism, language immersion, and personal transformation. In this post, I’ll be tackling another common ideology, that of study abroad as professional preparation. Under this ideology, study abroad results in specific skills that translate to advantages in the modern workplace. Examples of this ideology are common in promotional materials for study abroad, such as the image below taken from the U.S. Department of State’s study abroad website (note also the highgrounded and foregrounded students, as in images for the ideology of personal transformation).
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Ideologies of Study Abroad: Personal Transformation
It’s time for a new post on ideologies of study abroad! This series started last Spring, with a post on study abroad as tourism, and continued in September with one on study abroad as language immersion. In this post, I’ll be taking on study abroad as personal transformation, another commonly perceived outcome of study abroad.
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Ideologies of Study Abroad: Tourism
I’ve written a lot on this blog about language ideologies, including different types of language ideologies, and why I think they’re important for the classroom. However, I haven’t written much about study abroad ideologies, another set that I think all too often is unquestioned. If language ideologies are beliefs about language, study abroad ideologies are beliefs about study abroad. In both cases, you can’t have a neutral perspective, or no ideology. So, the goal is not to get rid of ideologies, but to increase our awareness of our ideologies and their implications for our practice. This is the first in a series of posts on ideologies of study abroad, starting with one of the longest-standing and most prominent: Study Abroad as Tourism.
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The Whiteness of U.S. Study Abroad
This post is a summary of part of my talk where I used photos on a program website to demonstrate how even when we take real steps (such as financial support) to promote and support including underrepresented groups in study abroad, we often still do it in a way that doesn’t really challenge what I called the “default whiteness” of study abroad. That is, we focus on trying to increase the numbers of students of color studying abroad, but don’t really think about some of the problematic ways in which we represent study abroad. To explain what I mean, I’ll look at two pages of a program website.
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Does study abroad lead to intercultural learning?
For U.S. students, study abroad has never been more popular—according to the Open Doors data from the U.S. State Department, the number of students studying abroad has more than doubled since the turn of the 21st century, and about 10% of U.S. students will study abroad during their undergraduate career. As a study abroad researcher, this is both exciting (because more students are getting this opportunity) and disheartening (because there seems to be little attention paid to what happens after students cross that national border and gain the status of a study abroad student).