IntroductionWhile international experience teaches us about a new cultural environment, mostly it informs us of the ways we interact with that environment. The actual cultural experience, compared with studying about a culture from a remote classroom, helps us see and understand our privilege, our assumptions, the comforting familiarity of our "normal" life, and the everyday details of living to which we feel entitled. In its most successful form, the international sojourn provides us with an opportunity to question this entitlement, to ask ourselves if perhaps we should see past our expectations and interact with the new environment on its own terms.Performance Studies and Intercultural Studies both place a premium on detail.1 It is the small stuff that most profoundly constructs who we are and where we find ourselves. In the many reports on the World Trade Center attacks, we have heard over and over about items left behind--a woman's resume, a pair of glasses, a picture frame among the debris. When we are out of our element, the details become poetic reflections through which there is potential to see our frailty, our naivete, our expectations, our blindness. Likewise the critical moments of the intercultural experience revolve around details which hold instructive potential. We are out of our element (albeit in a privileged way), and it is in the process of experiencing the details of other cultures that we learn about who we are in the world.Responding to September 11, a newspaper columnist in Austin, Texas wrote, "The most familiar things felt foreign" 2 : suddenly we experienced Brecht's alienation or "verfremdungseffekt" in the performance of our everyday lives. (With the V-Effekt,
This article discusses lessons learned from the development and execution of F&M in Shanghai, a hybrid residential-remote program created for Franklin and Marshall College’s first-year Chinese students in Fall 2020. The F&M Office of International Programs worked with the Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) to develop the residential portion of the program, and coordinated the curriculum and remote engagement framework. F&M in Shanghai represented an opportunity to craft a constructive environment for first-year Chinese students by intentionally considering and meeting their specific needs. Utilizing creative, well-designed pedagogy, thoughtful programming, and a multipronged approach to student support, we were able to operate the program with great success. Assessments of F&M in Shanghai resulted in a great deal of data, and some results we observed run counter to received wisdom. This article discusses how these results suggest avenues for future research.
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