Below is a three part mini-series on the equity and potential of virtual exchange programming, written by the Director of AMIDEAST Education Abroad, Dr. Elena D. Corbett.
I.
When I was still a professor of Middle East history and area studies, the best defense of the Humanities (because we were always having to sing defense for our neoliberal overlords) that I ever heard came from a dear colleague in Psychology. “We study the Humanities," she said, “because it makes us better people.” Her meaning was not to suggest that it makes us better than others, but that it makes us better selves. And better selves should make for better everything.
Idealistic? Absolutely. And certainly had my own experience as a professional academic been characterized by more humanity, life would have worked out quite differently.
Like education, and particularly higher education in the U.S., education abroad is a business. And because it’s often part of the business of higher education in particular, it’s incredibly problematic in a lot of ways that are intimately linked to the critical lack of equity and social justice that have featured centrally in our professional discourses over the past year and more. What I have always appreciated about education abroad since undertaking it as a profession is that, more than the rest of higher education, it is usually more honest about being a business, although it suffers from the worst of what higher ed as a business has wrought, particularly in terms of inequity.
But education abroad can also be, of course, what higher ed can be at its best. What I fundamentally like about education abroad is that, much like the humanities, it ideally serves to make us better people. What I like about where I am engaged in ed abroad now—at AMIDEAST—is that AMIDEAST is foremost not a provider of education abroad programming, it’s rooted in and committed to a Global South context, and it struggles to keep up in a world where “making us better people” through education abroad has been mass-produced as an ironic widget, packaged and offered with a free iPad and free airline tickets at the study abroad fair on the campus where a year of school costs almost $80K. And yet even that mass-produced thing—and the very real chance every program participant has to make it unironic again—has never been intended for the majority of US higher education.
In keeping with its vision, mission, and goals, AMIDEAST Education Abroad has committed to a kind of sliding-scale pricing structure in an attempt to use its Virtual Learning & Cultural Exchange Program to help affect some small positive change in the way of equity in US higher education. Sliding scale pricing would ideally be applicable to in-person programming as well... until the day that equity is manifest by fully recognizing higher education as a public good.
II.
As a participant in a recent webinar on MENA region/U.S. exchange, I was asked to comment on the future of existing modalities of exchange—in-person and virtual—in the COVID aftertimes.
I can’t render comment on that without acknowledging that my thoughts on the matter are rooted primarily in my perspective as an academic area specialist and from the perspective of a study abroad provider organization that specializes in sending U.S. participants to the MENA region. This impacts our positionality in two fundamental ways. First—and anyone familiar with U.S. education abroad knows the statistics—the MENA region generally receives the fewest number of U.S. study abroad students…and the reasons for that deserve the same blunt critiques and redress that we’ve leveled at every other aspect of systemic racism. Secondly—we in our role must develop and implement programming most often to client or donor specifications…and sometimes that’s great and other times it’s frankly not. And because our fate is very much tied to the things that drive decision-making on U.S. university campuses, we’ve been enduring 15 months or so of taking “not great” to new extremes. At this moment, in fact, the denizens of risk management in U.S. higher education are using the fact of global vaccine inequity and its acute impact on the Global South as a basis to write off a return of U.S. students—who can all enjoy the privilege of being vaccinated with highly effective vaccines—to what was already their meager participation in Global South programming. As a field we should be doing the exact opposite—using our privilege and safety to support communities that, unlike the Global North destinations that host the majority of U.S. study abroad programming, can least afford the continued COVID-related hits to their communities. But that’s perhaps the subject of another post...
To the specific issue of the future of in-person and virtual exchange beyond COVID, if we’ve learned anything over the past year, it should be that all the modalities we have available have great value in their ability to affect, in part, the various outcomes we as a field generally articulate for our programming. What I hope for the COVID aftertimes is that, as we continue to articulate those outcomes, or we recommit to our mission statements or we undertake strategic planning, we think about how these modalities work together. Virtual programming is now normative, and rather than look at virtual programming and onsite face-to-face programming abroad as two different things that we might make hybrid sometimes, we should look at them as things that can be used most effectively together.
Until COVID, we in the education abroad part of U.S. international education existed primarily in a silo of onsite face-to-face programming—usually far from our colleagues engaged in COIL or Virtual Cultural Exchange. What I hope is that, moving forward, we on the education abroad side of international education can work intentionally with both onsite and virtual programming. As pedagogues, we know that, to honor the continuum of learning embedded in education abroad opportunities, it is a best practice—whatever outcomes we’ve articulated for our programming—to be holistic in our engagement of students before the program, during the program, and after the program. In education abroad, we generally tend to talk about this in terms of engaging participants on a continuum including pre-departure work, the onsite program, and ongoing engagement after return from the program. We know empirically, after all, that a great deal of participants’ learning and growth happens in the weeks, months, and years after the program itself. Reality, as we currently practice it, however, is another story. Speaking from the provider side, we can only hope that participants engage what we offer before and after their program, and we have no control over what university clients do or require of their students pre- or post-program. Imagine what we could do together to best enable participant growth and learning if we collaborated beyond the limited duration of onsite programs using the virtual capabilities we have all now developed. Intentional, ongoing engagement…imagine how powerful that could be.
III.
As we work toward what feels like something beyond the COVID times, we have dedicated a couple very simple blogs this week to some thoughts about higher education and education abroad and virtual and in-person education abroad programming. The previous post encapsulated my hope for intentional programming that draws on the tandem power of virtual and in-person learning opportunities. In this third and final post, I’ll conclude with what I fear will happen.
I fear that we stay in our little silos—onsite programming abroad in its silo, virtual learning and cultural exchange in its silo; you find some hybridity of them here and there but they largely remain separate domains.
Yes, everyone has been very keen, ourselves included, on the potential of virtual programming to increase access to exchange opportunities, whether in the US or in the MENA region. And yes, it is wonderful that we can inexpensively get X number of young people connected on whatever platform and have them interact in a facilitated program. It’s important, but much like in-person exchange, it’s only one tool and one step. It lays a brick on the bridge to skills development and mutual understanding, but it’s not the bridge itself. It’s access, but it’s not equity. And access is vitally important, but it is not an end unto itself.
As I noted in my first post, in our own case at AMIDEAST Education Abroad, we’ve worked very deliberately to make credit-bearing, interactive, virtual opportunities out of our semester face-to-face programs on a kind of sliding-scale pricing system. We have tried to acknowledge the lack of equity in higher education and the widening gaps between “elite” institutions and the rest…and the fact that most higher education institutions are part of “the rest.”
Again that’s a step, but it’s not an end. Yes, virtual modalities for international exchange give us in our particular case an opportunity to engage more U.S. Americans more inclusively with host communities of the MENA region, but if we’re truly going to maximize the power of the range of virtual and in-person modalities to work effectively together and do so in tandem with a real recommitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the COVID aftertimes, we absolutely cannot reproduce inequity by generating realms of programming such that onsite programming continues to be for the few, and virtual is for “the rest.” We cannot accept such inequity either between or among U.S. American and MENA region youth.
In the COVID aftertimes, we deserve to be judged by whether we both do the work of intentionality, and whether in doing so we bridge both digital and mobility divides.
Dr. Elena D. Corbett is the Director of Education Abroad at AMIDEAST.
