In The Absence of Language: Modeling a Transformative, Short-Term Abroad Experience

Barkin, Gareth

doi:10.22582/ta.v4i1.356

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…My first trip had been conducted at a college that was devoutly focused on institutional internationalization, and it was there I had first been encouraged to work with a provider of study‐abroad‐related services. This turned out to be a specialized travel agency, which framed the course/trip as a “custom tour” of the variety they had experience facilitating for groups with no connection to academia (Barkin ). It became a struggle to push back against this provider's sometimes vehement suggestions and deep limitations, but as an Indonesianist who had lived in the country for years, I felt comfortable doing so, and avoided employing such agencies thereafter.…”

Section: Methodological Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While developing a “best practices” article several years ago, I was compelled to reflect on my own move away from an institutionally‐encouraged reliance on travel agencies and other vectors of the tourism economy. I came to realize that my initial critiques of STFLSA practice and suggested remedies (Barkin , 60–61) were naïve in that they assumed other faculty would be developing their programs largely on their own or with staff colleagues, rather than collaborating with (often) for‐profit agencies. As I detail below, my interviews with these provider agencies have revealed goals largely built around the same bourgeois conceptions of travel that govern the cultural/educational tourism market, or what I term the exigencies of the tour .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I come to this study as a practitioner of STFLSA myself, having led short‐term trips to Indonesia since 2007, and having written, like many scholars (Johnson ; Kehl and Morris ; Mercer ), of STFLSA's potential and comparability to longer‐term programs, albeit with a number of caveats (Barkin ). While developing a “best practices” article several years ago, I was compelled to reflect on my own move away from an institutionally‐encouraged reliance on travel agencies and other vectors of the tourism economy.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This awareness came not only from my experience in the field, but also a long‐term involvement with my university's International Education Committee, which is itself negotiating how to manage the rise of STFLSA. Finally, in writing on study abroad pedagogy (Barkin ), I had also come to find much of the literature on short‐term programs adhered to a celebratory and self‐justifying narrative that minimized or ignored many of the practice's limitations (DeLoach et al ; Donnelly‐Smith ; Kehl and Morris ; Ritz ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Either Here or There: Short‐Term Study Abroad and the Discourse of Going

Barkin

2018

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines practices surrounding short-term study abroad, focusing on how its outsourcing to professional agencies can shape student encounters abroad. Through ethnographic work in Southeast Asia, I explore the "exposure model" of intercultural learning relied on by many programs. I argue that for-profit providers, catering to administrative and neoliberal exigencies in higher education, have fostered an uncritical "discourse of going," which subordinates consideration of pedagogical goals and outcomes to the imperative of increasing participation. [Experiential education; intercultural learning; short-term study abroad; Southeast Asia; study abroad] Over the past fifteen years, study abroad at American institutions of higher education has shifted dramatically away from semester-long programs that are commonly connected with overseas universities, and toward short-term programs (Institute of International Education and Farrugia 2018), which demonstrate much greater variability of pedagogical approach and practice (Mercer 2015; Tarrant, Rubin, and Stoner 2014; Willis and Beyene 2018). This change has been wrapped in a narrative of progress and accomplishment that originates both from scholars and practitioners (e.g. Bellamy and Weinberg 2006;Chieffo and Griffiths 2004;DeLoach et al. 2003), many of whom are themselves involved in directing short-term programs, or who have taken on the objective of "internationalization" for their campuses (Fischer 2008;Kreber 2009). This project takes as foundational the belief that getting students out of the country-as part of an academic agenda, broadly construed-should be the primary goal of internationalization advocates at American colleges and universities, and that the nature of that academic agenda is at best a secondary consideration. In this article, I argue that the rise of this "discourse of going" is best understood as another dimension of the shift toward a discursively corporate lens and the neoliberal model of higher education that Readings (1996) termed the "university in ruins." Unlike practices generally opposed by faculty, such as the market-based ranking of scholars or increasing reliance on adjunct instructors, that are commonly associated with Readings' discussion (Vora 2015), this shift depends on a less visible penetration of the market via the promotion and "provision" of short-term faculty-led study abroad (hereafter STFLSA), which is often endorsed and celebrated by faculty as part of an undifferentiated advocacy for international education. This shift toward short-term programs depends on a powerful lacuna in the oversight of pedagogy abroad (Lemmons 2013) which not only transpires in a literal and figurative "overseas" space, but trades on the unrevised conception of travel as inherently educational and conferring of status. This conflation travel with global citizenship and experiential learning (Bennett 2012;Brodsky-Porges 1981;Robalik 2006) mirrors what La Brack and Bathurst term the "contact hypothesis" (2012, 208). In this article, I f...

show abstract

Section: Methodological Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Either Here or There: Short‐Term Study Abroad and the Discourse of Going

Barkin

2018

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These trips do not necessarily help students cultivate a critical awareness of the largely hidden structure of power inequalities, which have been deeply shaped by such encounters. In another article, Barkin (2014) proposes that one of the best ways to mitigate such pitfalls is to adopt what he calls "the extended semester" approach -that is, to provide students with a semesterlong training in the classroom before sending them out for the study-abroad program the next semester. While I agree with Barkin's two-semester approach of dovetailing field study with pre-field classroom teaching, I doubted whether I could do the same.…”

Section: Course Plan Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods in the Time of COVID-19: Virtual Field Trips, a Web Symposium, and Public Engagement with Asian American Communities in Houston, Texas

Cheuk¹

2021

TLA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents a detailed description of how I adapted an undergraduate ethnographic research methods course to a fully online format during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on my recent experience designing and teaching a new course titled Ethnographic Research in/of Houston Asia in Fall 2020 at Rice University, I illustrate the virtual learning environment I maintained in this course through ongoing collaboration with members of the Zoroastrian, Sikh, and Chinese Buddhist communities in Houston, Texas. Specifically, this article describes how I incorporated virtual field trips and a web symposium -two activities that I organized with the support of Rice University's Course Development Grant -into my teaching of ethnography on Zoom. Such online activities, which are by necessity intensively interactive and community-oriented, enabled the course to cultivate a deep level of public engagement that arguably would not have been possible in the pre-COVID-19 period.

show abstract