FEA Studying Safety incidents

The Forum on Education Abroad says it's looking for institutions to help with a pilot study of health, safety and security incidents that threaten the welfare of students outside the United States.

FEA hopes to develop a database that will track various types of incidents that occur on study abroad programs.

“By documenting and learning what incidents occur in study abroad, the field will be better prepared to refine protocols for health, safety, security, and risk management, and continue to develop and disseminate effective best practices,” the organization says at its Web site. “Moreover, the field will be better able to understand factors that contribute to incidents, and thereby be prepared to mitigate and plan for risk, as well as utilize resources more strategically.”

Only Forum member schools may participate, and the organization says it hopes that as many members as possible will take part. Applications for schools interested in participating can be found at the study site and are due by Aug. 7.

FEA Dues Will Stay Same in 2009-2010

The Forum on Education Abroad will be keeping membership dues at current levels when the the new academic year begins in the fall. Membership invoices will be sent out in the two couple of weeks.

In a statement published at the Forum’s Web site, President Brian Whalen said that, despite the financial crisis, membership in the organization has risen 30 percent in the year.

“Forum membership will remain an outstanding value and an important indication of institutional commitment to Standards of Good Practice,” he said.

The Slowdown Hits UConn

The economy was the big focus at last month’s Forum for Study Abroad conference in Portland, and while some schools contended they still were seeing growth in student participation there was still fear that the economic meltdown will lead students to pull back from going overseas.

New evidence of that comes from the University of Connecticut, where The Daily Campus reports that numbers are down 5 percent from a year ago. UConn Study Abroad Director Ross Lewin says the university is emphasizing that many study-abroad locations cost the same amount as studying on campus for a term, but students are balking.

“I’ve been planning on studying abroad for so long,” Lindsay Washbond, a fourth-semester art history major told the newspaper. “I felt like it was really going to happen, but now my family is really struggling because my dad owns his own small business, and now the chances of me being able to go are pretty slim.”

How Much Do They Study, Abroad?

The last time I took students abroad, in 2007 to study the media in France and Italy, I was blessed with a generally well-behaved, earnest group of young people who took the academic goals of the travel course seriously. 

But while we visited Florence’s Accademia on a beautiful and warm May morning, one young woman from our group excused herself from the tour, took a seat on the curb outside, tucked her head between her knees and threw up.

She was (and still is) a good kid — always in class on campus, taking her studies and her relationships with faculty seriously. But she missed a once-in-her-lifetime to chance to see Michaelangelo’s David becaused she'd drank too much the night before. 

Students who put more emphasis on “abroad” than on “study” aren’t a new problem in the field. At last week’s Forum for Education Abroad conference in Portland, several faculty and providers offered advice on how to get students to take their learning more intentionally while abroad.

The challenge, according to Hillary Lieberman Link, dean for international programs at Barnard College, is that many students consider study abroad the same way that the Russian author Mikhail Bakhtin considered carnival: “While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.”

“I think of students who come back from study abroad, and they say it changed their life and they’ve become entirely new persons,” said Link. “But while they were abroad they were in their own world, completely separate in many ways from the academic life that they live on their home campus.”

Efforts to get students to take the “study” in study abroad as seriously as they should are hindered by institutional constraints that keep schools from dedicating as much time to study-abroad preparation as they'd like. And then there is the culture of U.S. undergraduate life, in which some — but certainly not all — students want to go abroad partly because they hope there won’t be much study involved at all.

Even for those students who don’t overdo drinking and other less-than-academic pursuits abroad, there are problems related to culture, education philosophies and more than can hinder learning abroad.

Stephen Ferst of the Education Abroad Network, which offers long-term programs in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, said his organization helps students go abroad with reasonable expectations of what they’ll encounter when taking courses at universities in other nations.

Ferst said the indicators of academic success in study abroad include the extent to which students take a deep approach to learning and whether they’ll make use of peer support groups among American and host-nation resources. Another factor is the level of diligence students apply to meeting task requirements at host universities.

Also, academic success abroad depends on whether students have realistic expectations of how learning and instruction happen outside the United States, which puts a heavy emphasis on student satisfaction with the educational process. In many other nations, the focus is less on student learning and more on faculty research productivity.

Lilli Engle, president of the American University Center of Provence, said that her organization takes students who have had at least four semesters of French before wanting to study in France. Still, the American students show tendencies to not immerse in the culture and to view French culture through an American lens.

“Despite all the work we do, they seem to be less and less prepared for the kind of cultural engagement that they’re going to have,” she said.

To compensate, Engle says her group has American students take an ongoing orientation course throughout the abroad experience that helps bridge the differences between U.S. learning and European teaching styles, as well as linking students with cultural resources to ease their transition into French life.

The AUCP program has helped students make a better transition and improve their learning. And that’s helped along by what Engle calls her students’ “romantic” nature.

“They can seem themselves as part of an adventure,” she said. “They are inspirable, meaning that they can set standards high and they will rise to the occasion.”

Haba na Haba: Part 8

Part 8 of 8 parts to Reynold Whalen’s "Haba na Haba," an award-winning student document produced while he was studying abroad at Washington University in St. Louis. The film was one of the undergraduate research award winners at the Forum for Education Abroad conference this week in Portland:

FEA Conference in Portland

The fifth Forum on Education Abroad conference is now underway at the Portland Hilton Hotel. About 730 faculty, administrators and programmers are in sessions through Friday at the hotel, and the state of the economy seems to be the No. 1 topic of discussion.

Economy Hovers Over Abroad Forum

PORTLAND — The hallways and sessions at this week’s Forum on Education Abroad conference here are taking on the air of the ’92 Clinton campaign. One issue seems to overshadow most all conversations.

It’s the economy, colleagues.

One panel, moderated by Robert Guitierrez of the Institute for International Education, tried to convince dozens of attendees to discuss the many challenges facing study abroad programs in the coming years. But almost all talk turned to the impact the sinking economy is having and will continue to have in coming years.

Even with the dollar continuing to improve against foreign currencies, making study abroad less expensive for Americans, institutions are facing new economic challenges in mounting and maintaining program.

“The economic shift has moved from the students,” says Cornell’s Richard Gaulter, “because the dollar is doing better, to the institutions, which are now having to deal with budget cuts to programs across the board.”

Institutional cuts already are in evidence at FEA, where Brian Whalen, the organization’s president said that record attendance of 730 administrators, faculty and professionals would likely have been at 1,000 or more if institutions hadn't already cut travel funds to make the budget crisis many are navigating.

Some institutions have already seen significant dropoffs in study-abroad enrollments, as parents and students retrench in light of significant debt loads being taken on by many students simply to finish their degrees on campus. But several schools represented at FEA report increases in enrollment for overseas study programs, sometimes substantially so.

Regardless of whether their numbers are up or down, nearly everyone at FEA is looking with trepidation at the coming year as the recession deepens and the students and institutions face difficult choices.

Kim Tunnicliff, director of the international office at Augustana College in Illinois, says his school is seeing a small uptick in enrollments for its summer travel programs. It’s just a matter of more effectively selling the benefits.

“It's not a hard sell, particularly since we see more and more students who studied abroad in their experience,” Tunnicliff said. “So it’s easier to tell the high school senior and his parents that study abroad isn’t a peripheral luxury. It’s something that’s absolutely essential.”

While students and parents are still interested in study abroad, the challenge is in presented programs that create the greatest economic value. Many Forum conferees say their institutions are looking for to faculty-organized and -led programs in an effort to cut costs even further than the improving dollar would otherwise permit.

“It's time for us to be bold in stating the value of study abroad and to draw on the research that’s clearly demonstrated the impact of our programs,” Whalen said. 

Forum Conference Getting Underway

The annual conference sponsored by the Forum on Education Abroad gets started Wednesday, with more than 700 international-education faculty, administrators and professionals descending on Portland, Ore., to meet on the theme of "Being There: Teaching and Learning Abroad".

Keynoters this year include Peter Chilson of Washington State University who will read from his nonfiction on travels between the border between the Ivory Coast and Mali, and Mike Reddin, a retired London School of Economics faculty member who will challenge conference participants to examine their assumptions about study abroad experiences.

Smart Study Abroad will be at the conference through its end on Friday, so check back frequently in the coming days for updates and multimedia.

Improving Short-Term Programs

Short-term internationl programs are increasing in popularity nationwide, the Forum for Education Abroad says, and now the organization has come up with standards of good practice in those programs.

FEA considers short-term programs to be those of eight weeks or less and says they represent the greatest single kind of study-abroad experience for American students. They're attractive to a variety of students who can't or won't consider full-semester programs for economic, personal or social reasons.

(Our three-week May Term program at Simpson remains the most popular option for students who wish to take their studies abroad, but we have invested considerable funding and effort to build semester programs in England, Spain, Germany, French Polynesia and Thailand.)

The FEA standards will be an item of discussion at the FEA "Being There: Teaching and Learning Abroad" conference in Portland, Ore., in February. (We'll be providing coverage of the conference at Smart Study Abroad.)

For now, the new FEA standards are that short-terms study abroad programs should:

• Be related to the education abroad mission of the organization and has well-defined academic and/or experiential objectives.
• Be reviewed in the light of its stated educational purpose for fostering student learning and development.
• Be maintained by organizations with clearly stated and publicly available policies on academic and non-academic matters.
• Provide pre-travel orientation and support for students that is consistent with the institution's mission.
• Maintain, and make publicly accessible, a commitment to fair and appropriate policies regarding student selection and conduct.
• Have adequate personnel and financial resources.
• Establish and maintain effective health, safety, security and risk management policies, procedures and faculty/staff training.
• Be organized with standards set out in FEA's Code of Ethics for Education Abroad, especially with regards to operations, staffing, cultural sensitivity, avoidance of conflicts of interest, law and marketing.

A full copy of the new FEA standards report is available here.

Top Health and Safety Concerns

As the opportunities for study abroad have grown in recent years, so have the opportunities for trouble for student health and safety.

The Forum for Education Abroad's annual State of the Field study for 2008 reflects the concerns of faculty members and administrators. The top worries for 2008 are:

• Student mental health.
• Alcohol consumption and substance abuse.
• Risky student behavior.
• Need for risk management and emergency protocols.
• Personal safety.
• Sexual harassment and sexual assault.
• Crime.
• Access to appropriate medical care.
• Travel-related saftey.
• Terrorism.
• Political uncertainty.
• Pandemics.

While the top two concerns in 2008 are the same as they were at the time of the Forum's last study in 2006, terrorism and pandemics have slid far down the list during the past two years. Those were the third and fourth leading concerns then.

Growing Abroad Interest in US — For Now

The Forum on Education Abroad is out today with its State of the Field Survey for 2008, and it's a good-and-bad news release.

As we've reported here earlier, the ballooning worldwide economic crisis could wipe out many of the gains we've seen in study abroad over the past decade. But U.S. colleges and universities appear to not be willing to let their programs wither without a fight.

Despite the worsening financial picture, 75 percent of the institutions in the FEA study say they're actively pushing for more students to go abroad. The push had at least limited impact on study abroad, with 53 percent of institutions saying their study-abroad numbers are up at least 11 percent over the past five years, and 87 percent say they've had at least a 1 percent increase in numbers of students studying abroad.

The economic pressure on study abroad will no doubt increase in 2009, and — as reported earlier here — we're already seeing some significant reluctance on the part of our students at Simpson to go abroad. As one of my students told me a few weeks ago: "My parents wouldn't support me going across the street for an off-campus program right now."

The full FEA report is online here.