Assets-Based Learning Abroad: First-Generation Latinx College Students Leveraging and Increasing Community Cultural Wealth in Costa Rica

Abstract

This qualitative study counters deficit narratives about first generation Latinx students by exploring multi ple forms of community cultural wealth (CCW; Yosso, 2005) that 25 students leveraged and increased during service activities and homestays in Costa Rica. Through longitudinal data and with CCW as a conceptual framework, three key themes emerged First, s tudents were able to leverage their linguistic and familial capital to connect quickly and meaningfully with locals. Additionally, students drew upon their linguistic, familial, aspirational, and resistant capital while abroad to deepen their engagement. Finally, student interaction with their forms of CCW appeared to deepen their bicultural identities, strengthen their resistance to injustice, and instill a strong desire to inspire other Latinx students to pursue international education. Implications fo r practice include an integrated approach to recognizing and rewarding students’ CCW related capital in the advising, application and preparation processes. Implications underscore the importance of using strengths based pedagogies in the design of educat ion abroad programs.

Listening to the Voices of Students Who Studied Abroad

“…For study abroad, identified barriers explain why students chose not to study abroad and include family resistance, fear to travel, inability to take time off of work or wfamily, lack of knowledge to successfully navigate institutional bureaucracies, and personal deficits in social capital (Simon & Ainsworth, 2012). The counterbarrier construct shows that the current generation of nontraditional students are not constrained by identified barriers (Wick et al, 2019) because they use a range of social and cultural capitals to participate in college activities (Robertson, 2019).…”

Coloniality-Decoloniality and Critical Global Citizenship: Identity, Belonging, and Education Abroad

“…(pp. 15-16) Wick et al (2019) also documented tensions at the intersection of felt belonging or diasporic solidarity and economic inequity.…”

“…But it is a concept that grew from Critical Race Theory (CRT) as situated in the specific histories of the United States. The field of education abroad has seen some applications of CRT (Chang, 2017;Wick et al, 2019), but in large part the field has situated itself within a discourse around intercultural competence that suggests it is "the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one's intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes" (Deardorff, 2006, p. 249). More recently, Bennett defined intercultural learning as "the acquisition of generalizable (transferrable) intercultural competence; that is, competence that can be applied to dealing with cross-cultural contact in general, not just skills useful for dealing with a particular other culture" (2012, p. 91).…”

“…these are the common experiences that we have, helped me to come to terms with the fact that identities are complex and you don't have to find one space or one box to fit yourself in. (p. 70) In a study examining first-generation Latinx students' experiences as part of an education abroad program in Costa Rica, Wick et al (2019) also documented increasingly nuanced conceptions of identity:…”

“…The Wick et al (2019), Lee and Green (2016), and Chang (2017, discussed below) studies all explore a gap in the education abroad literature (Contrearas, López-McGee, Wick, & Willis, 2019) by detailing the experiences of minoritized students, and by doing so from an explicitly asset-based orientation. In each case and in others (Padrón, 2018;Sweeney, 2013), we see increasingly textured and rich self-understandings and narratives conveyed to the education abroad community.…”