Not blogging,drinking: Peer learning,sociality and intercultural learning in study abroad

Abstract

Research into study abroad students’ intercultural learning has demonstrated a need to provide pedagogical support before, during and after the study abroad experience. This article reports on the authors’ efforts to support the in-country learning of Australian study abroad students through an online guided reflection exercise (blog) with a peer-learning component. Our findings suggest that exposing students to theories of intercultural learning prior to the study abroad experience opens them to the possibility of such learning occurring. However, the unanticipated discovery that the students’ most significant intercultural learning stemmed from the processes of social drinking rather than online interaction emphasizes that participation in an unfamiliar culture is an embodied and social experience, and suggests that concentration of pedagogical efforts in familiar and disembodied online spaces may disconnect students from the very experiences on which we wish them to reflect. We therefore recommend that instructors design opportunities for peer learning through embodied social interactions between outgoing and incoming study abroad students, framed by explicit discussion of concepts in intercultural learning. Such scaffolding is likely to be more sustainable in the current Australian fiscal environment than the intensive in-country instructor intervention that is common in the North American context.

Keywords

Blogging intercultural learning online learning peer learning sociality study abroad

Introduction: intercultural learning through study abroad

In the context of current trends towards internationalization, study abroad is being redefined as a key component of the contemporary Australian university’s mission (Harman, 2005; Universities Australia, 2013). The term ‘study abroad’ is used generically here to describe any period of overseas study while a student is already studying for a degree at their home university. In the Australian context, the term most often refers to reciprocal student exchange programmes, where universities in different countries enter into agreements to exchange students for periods ranging from several weeks to one or two semesters. At the University of Western Australia (UWA), study abroad is explicitly supported in the current Operational Priorities Plan, which declares a commitment to ‘[c]ontinue to develop and embed workplace practicum, field work opportunities and study abroad’ (UWA, 2013b: 13). Furthermore, the connection between study abroad and educational policies that seek to ‘encourage cultural competence among all students’ (UWA, 2013b: 13) is evident in the UWA International Centre’s claim that study abroad fosters ‘global awareness (cross-cultural skills and communication)’ (UWA, 2013a).

The references to ‘cultural competence’ and ‘cross-cultural skills and communication’ in these policy statements provide broad descriptors of study abroad learning objectives deemed to be desirable and appropriate in the context of tertiary education, and deploy terminologies developed in recent decades across a range of intersecting fields including education, psychology and communication theory (see Berry et al., 1992; Buttjes and Byram, 1991; Fiber Luce and Smith, 1986; Gudykunst, 2005; Paige, 1993). Despite the proliferation of models for conceptualizing the processes involved in intercultural learning (Adler, 1986; Bennett, 1993; Bochner and Furnham, 1982; Christensen, 1989; Grove and Torbiorn, 1993; Hanvey, 1986; Meyer, 1991), Deardorff (2006) has argued that there is considerable consensus among educators about the components of intercultural competence. Indeed, as Heyward (2002) has observed, the various models of intercultural development ‘form a not inconsistent picture of staged development from naïve monoculturalism to informed and integrated pluralism’ (pp. 14–15). Heyward integrates various models to produce his own, which proposes a progression through three stages of ‘monoculturalism’ – ‘limited awareness’, ‘naïve awareness’ and ‘engagement-distancing’ – towards a stage of ‘cross-cultural awareness’ and a final stage of ‘intercultural awareness’ (pp. 16–17).

Heyward’s model of intercultural literacy, developed through his research into international schools, succinctly draws together all the components identified by Deardorff and provides the basis for the understanding of intercultural learning that informs this article, not least because his definition is yoked to questions about pedagogy in the context of internationalization, questions that also animate our own research. Heyward defines intercultural literacy as ‘the understandings, competencies, attitudes, language proficiencies, participation and identities necessary for successful cross-cultural engagement’ (p. 10). This definition makes evident that intercultural learning involves the simultaneous development of knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviours and self-conceptions. It is thus a complex process and a challenge for educators to facilitate.

For Heyward, as for many educators in the field of study abroad (Paige, 1993; Savicki, 2008; Vande Berg et al., 2012), the social experience of being placed in a cross-cultural context is crucial for intercultural learning:

It is through the experience of confronting oneself in a cross-cultural situation … that the individual learns what culture is: learns both something of his or her native culture, something of a second culture and something of the concept of culture in the abstract. (p. 15)

However, in examining international schools, he points out that the mere fact of studying in a foreign country does not guarantee the acquisition of intercultural literacy (p. 19).

Similarly, research conducted at UWA has demonstrated that the acquisition of such literacy is not an assured outcome of study abroad (Forsey et al., 2012). Students who had recently returned from exchange and study abroad programmes were interviewed about what they had learned from their experiences overseas. All of the students interviewed ‘responded enthusiastically with grand generalisations about how much they had learnt’, but they found it difficult to articulate exactly what skills or knowledge they had acquired (Forsey et al., 2012: 5). Even when they were asked specifically what they had learned about the culture of the country in which they had studied, students gave relatively superficial answers about food, the cost of transport and even the weather: ‘there was little insight or deeper understanding of the differences or similarities between “home” and “away”’ (p. 6). The researchers concluded that universities need to actively intervene to ensure that students do increase their intercultural literacy through participation in study abroad programmes:

[e]nhancing the experiences of students requires mechanisms for reflective practice through a preparatory workshop, in-country support of the learning trajectory of students, and a more structured follow-up on their return, inviting students to reflect rigorously on their experiences, their learning, and how to use these experiences to better effect into the future. (p. 10)

This conclusion is supported by research findings into study abroad experiences among students from the United States. Vande Berg (2007), for instance, argues that if we want and expect students to ‘learn things, and learn in ways, that they will not if they stay on their home campuses’, then we need to ‘intervene actively in our students’ learning – before, during, and after their experiences abroad’ (p. 392). Study abroad practitioners are thus increasingly focused on creating more comprehensive pedagogical frameworks that emphasize intercultural learning (Ninnes and Hellstén, 2005; Savicki, 2008; Stearns, 2008; Vande Berg et al., 2012). This was certainly our objective in setting out to support the in-country learning of Australian study abroad students through an online-guided reflection exercise (blog) with a peer-learning component. Our design built on research about the pedagogical affordances of digital technologies (e.g. Bach et al., 2007; Garrison and Anderson, 2003), peer learning (Cohen et al., 2001; Packham and Miller, 2000) and the connections between them (Farmer, 2004; Hall and Davison, 2007; Hsu, 2007), especially with regard to the goal of facilitating intercultural learning (Elola and Oskoz, 2008; Ware and Kramsch, 2005), but we were primarily interested in assessing the efficacy of these strategies for enhancing intercultural learning. As such, our study addressed a gap in research articulated by Perry and Southwell (2011) when they observe that

[t]he degree to which intercultural competence can be developed via digital technologies has not yet been examined thoroughly. Most of the current research is limited to exploring the pedagogical dimensions and potential of digital technologies for developing intercultural competences rather than its effectiveness per se. (p. 458)

The results of our study suggest that intercultural learning in the context of study abroad is significantly shaped by the embodied sociality of immersion in an unfamiliar environment.

‘Blogging from Stuttgart’: methodology

We designed a guided reflective blog with a peer-learning component and employed a qualitative research paradigm to analyse both the blogs and the open-ended interviews we conducted with participants prior to and after the study abroad experience. Ethics approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Office at the UWA. Our aim was to establish the extent to which a guided online reflection process and peer discussion can enhance students’ capacity to develop and articulate their intercultural literacy. The 20 participants in our study had all voluntarily enrolled in a short-term exchange at Stuttgart University, Germany, for credit towards a degree at UWA. All students had completed at least two semesters of German in the beginners’ stream before travelling to Stuttgart. The 6-week programme took place during January and February 2012 and consisted of intensive German language tuition (9 ECTS [European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System]) and a cultural elective taught in English (4.5 ECTS): the ECTS is used throughout the European Union to compare the academic attainment of university students, with one academic year corresponding to 60 ECTS credits. Students were billeted with host families in Stuttgart. Participation in the blog and the interviews was voluntary.

In the past, it has been assumed that all students participating in the Stuttgart exchange will increase their intercultural competence as well as their linguistic competence. In order to test this assumption, we asked the students to create a blog, which we anticipated would support and provide evidence of their cultural learning trajectory during the exchange, in keeping with Hsu’s (2007) claim that ‘blogs can be useful for educational purposes, particularly where there is a need to stimulate critical thinking and reflection’ (p. 79) and the finding of Elola and Oskoz (2008) that ‘the use of blogs had a positive impact on students’ intercultural competence’ (p. 472). A website was created which explained the purpose of the ‘Blogging from Stuttgart’ project (http://e-language.wikispaces.com/ex010), and a workshop was held at which students were given assistance to set up their blogs prior to departure for Stuttgart. Students were asked to write six blog posts – one per week for the 6 weeks of their stay in Germany. The blogs were to address a particular topic in the first and last weeks of the exchange, and students were instructed to choose four topics (from a list of six) for the remaining 4 weeks, as follows:

Week 1:

What are my learning expectations? (What do I hope to learn about my host nation? About myself? About intercultural communication?)

Weeks 2–5:

A new culture: first impressions (What is familiar? What is strange?);

A dialogue that challenged my perceptions of my host nation;

A dialogue that made me reconsider my assumptions about my (Australian or other) identity;

Some observations about social issues or challenges that face my host nation;

A miscommunication: what went wrong?

Rethinking a cultural stereotype.

Week 6:

To what extent were my learning expectations met? What did I learn that I did not expect to learn?

The questions were designed to prompt students’ reflection on cultural difference and intercultural communication, and thus encourage some movement along the continuum ‘from naïve monoculturalism to informed and integrated pluralism’ (Heyward, 2002: 15). Students were also invited to shape the learning spaces of their individual blogs through the incorporation of multimedia materials that reflected their cultural experiences. Each student was required to comment on the blogs of three classmates each week, with the objective of providing feedback for each student as well as creating the potential for peer learning.

Open-ended interviews were conducted with the participants both prior to the exchange and after they returned to their home university in order to establish their levels of intercultural literacy before and after the study abroad experience. Questions in the first interview focused on students’ learning expectations and their previous overseas experiences. In the second interview, students were asked about their observations of cultural difference and cultural similarity, their experiences with the blog and what they felt they had learned during their time in Stuttgart.

Both the blogs and the interviews were subjected to a thematic analysis and compared for similarities and differences. For each individual student, the pre-departure and re-entry interviews and the blog were compared in order to determine the extent to which intercultural learning had occurred, as well as the extent to which the student was able to articulate it.

Sites of intercultural learning: results and analysis

Pre-departure interviews

We assumed that individual students would possess quite varied levels of intercultural literacy at the outset of the exchange that might affect the nature and extent of their learning trajectories, so the pre-departure interviews began with a series of questions about the students’ previous experiences of working, studying or travelling overseas. The range of intercultural literacies among students prior to departure was indeed quite marked. One student, who described his mother as ‘half-German’ and his attitude as ‘really open’, was reluctant to identify as Australian and dismissive of the possibility of culture shock, which he described as for ‘the unprepared and unwilling’. His statement that he was looking forward to immersion in a culture ‘I have a great affinity for and that I believe I identify [with] quite strongly’ suggested a defensive desire to ‘replace’ his Australian identity with a German identity, associated with reversed ethnocentrism on most acculturation scales.

Other students demonstrated greater consciousness of their ethnocentrism; for example, when drawing on a stereotype, one student remarked that ‘I probably just got it from a movie or something’, and another student observed, ‘I’ve never really been outside of Australia before so I’m sort of used to … everything around here. I want to … experience something a little different’. A more ethnorelative perspective was articulated by a student who had spent extended periods in Germany with relatives and was conscious of the fact that his previous experience of Germany had been ‘small town and rather religious’, thus communicating an awareness of the diversity of German culture. Even greater awareness of the complexity of intercultural learning was expressed by a student who had grown up in Egypt before moving to Australia:

You just have to adapt to how people interact with each other … I don’t think it takes, like, a year or two to learn the culture, it takes like maybe five to ten years. Sometimes people take forever … It takes a while for a person to sort of understand why his viewpoint is different, or her viewpoint is different, and to just see that things can be done differently, and to try and deal with it, and see whether you like the new thing, or you prefer the old.

Learning from blogging

The students’ blogs provided some evidence of intercultural learning. For example, in week 2 of the exchange, one student observed on her blog that she was shocked to see children as young as 4 or 5 walking to school or catching public transport without adult supervision:

One thing I have noticed that is almost shocking to me is that children … walk around by themselves. I see them every day walking to school, or catching the U-Bahn to and from the city centre without parents or adult supervision. It seems parents are either very trusting of their children or of the general public or both and this is not something I would see in Perth. I consider Perth to be a safe city, however even so I don’t think that people would be so trusting to let their children catch public transport in and out of the city each day without supervision … In any case I think it is a good reflection of a society, as obviously many parents must consider Stuttgart a safe city and the people to be trustworthy.

The difference the student noticed led her to make an ethnocentric judgement about Stuttgart/Germany: the unspoken implication of her observation is that Stuttgart parents are too trusting, unlike Perth parents who are more alert to danger and thus more caring. Using Heyward’s (2002) model of acculturation, this attitude describes a monocultural orientation (level 3, ‘engagement-distancing, consciously incompetent’), in which awareness of difference is expressed but the other culture is perceived as ‘irrational and unbelievable’ (p. 16). Although at the end of the blog post the student modifies her judgement a little, her use of the phrase ‘many parents must consider Stuttgart a safe city’ locates this view as one held by others, that she herself finds surprising.

However, when she was asked in the interview conducted shortly after her return from Germany to talk about any cultural differences she had observed during her time abroad, the student referred again to the unaccompanied young children she had observed in the city and on public transport, but this time there was a subtle shift in her assessment of what she had seen:

[Children are] kind of, like, adults at the age of five. Because initially when I got to the house the mum said ‘Sometimes I’ll let the two youngest kids, who are two and four, walk to school by themselves in the morning’. And I was just, like, well, you can’t do that here [in Perth] … [T]hen when I started catching public transport I noticed that kids were all by themselves …. [T]hat really stood out to me because they just kind of … I don’t know if it’s that they’re getting responsibility at a younger age or if it’s just they feel so safe that they can let their kids do that. But that was a big difference to here.

The difference between the student’s statements in this post-exchange interview and her comments in the blog written just 2 weeks into the 6-week exchange is that she had begun to reflect on this issue as a matter of cultural difference rather than assuming the superiority of one culture’s approach over the other’s. In particular, her consideration of giving children responsibility at a younger age suggests a greater degree of perspective-taking, which Heyward (2002: 16) associates with a cross-cultural orientation (level 4, ‘emerging intercultural literacy, consciously competent’). The contrast between this student’s blog and interview comments would thus suggest movement along an acculturation scale. Having initially assumed that her own culture was the most ‘evolved’ when she observed the phenomenon of unaccompanied children making their way to school, after the conclusion of her exchange the student showed signs of accepting the existence of a culturally different way of behaving. In this example, writing a blog certainly seems to have facilitated the reflective learning that has been associated with this form by a number of scholars (Farmer, 2004; Hall and Davison, 2007; Hsu, 2007).

Limitations of the blog

In many of the blog entries, however, students seemed to have difficulty assigning meaning to their observations and experiences; consequently, their reflection on intercultural issues often remained fairly superficial. For example, blogging on the topic ‘rethinking stereotypes’, one student pointed to the common perception that Germans are ‘rude and abrupt’ which she attributed to the ‘harsh-sounding language’:

I began thinking about the misconception of Germans, that they are rude and abrupt. This stereotype has been conjured up through the harsh sounding language they possess … I have found that most Germans are very friendly and willing to help. When speaking to a German here in Stuttgart I have found when they do not understand what you are asking they remain very friendly, despite their tone, which is surprisingly not always a reflection of their emotion, it is just how they speak.

The student did not reflect on whether the German language really does sound ‘harsh’ or whether this common perception in the English-speaking world might be historically and culturally determined. Ideally, this student could have been prompted to reflect through intervention by an instructor or peer: for example, ‘to what extent may historical factors have contributed to your perception that the German language is harsh?’ In other words, engaging in a dialogue could have prompted this student to think more critically about her observations.

Yet, while we intended for learning to occur through dialogue, with students instructed to comment on the blog posts of three peers each week, most students did not often comment on their peers’ blog posts, and where comments were made, they were almost never responded to by the author of the post. Despite claims about blogging’s potential to foster constructive peer reflection, our study bears out concerns expressed by other scholars, such as Deng and Yuen (2011) who note that ‘not all of the studies on the social aspect of blogging yielded enthusiastic results’ (p. 442) and Xie et al. (2008) who conclude that peer feedback on blogs may even ‘negatively affect students’ reflective thinking skills’ (p. 18).

Nevertheless, despite the limited peer interaction, some students indicated in their return interviews that the blogging exercise had been useful in prompting them to reflect on their experience of German culture. One stated, ‘I think that it definitely made me think about it more. Yeah, so in that regard it achieved its goal’, and another who had thought she would ‘hate’ the task ‘because I generally don’t like the internet’ found that having to sit down each week and reflect on her experience facilitated her learning: ‘I found that the blogging exercise really helped me to … come to terms with the differences in culture, and why I feel a certain way, and why not, and it was really good, I really enjoyed doing that’. On the whole, however, engagement with the blog was limited and written evidence of developing intercultural literacies therefore relatively scarce. Variations in students’ engagement with the blog may also have been impacted by their previous experiences or social profiles, including their levels of familiarity or comfort with social media: as Onorati’s (2010: 214, 2013: 332) research shows, students’ online sociality – including the extent to which it is internationalized – is influenced by their social background, including experiences of mobility, duration of or reasons for mobility, friendships or associations, and the extent to which those relationships are maintained.

Learning from the interviews

In addition to the blog, the process of being interviewed had the unanticipated effect of providing students with a new framework for thinking about what could be learned through the experience of living abroad. Many students reflected upon these possibilities in the concluding comments of their pre-departure interviews. For example, at the outset of one interview, a student identified his reasons for undertaking the exchange as an opportunity for travel and ‘a bit of a fun thing to do’, but at the conclusion of the interview, he reflected,

you’d probably have to go in with the mindset that you are there essentially to learn, not only at the actual university program itself, but also away from that and just with your host family or out on the streets with the friends you make or whatever, just in society.

In the course of the interview, the questions had apparently focused his attention on the potential for learning as well as travel and fun, demonstrating the potential effectiveness of providing frameworks to stimulate students’ reflection about intercultural learning, prior to their departure.

Similar processes also occurred in the return interviews. Even where students asserted that German and Australian cultures are ‘very similar’ or even ‘the same’, when these same students were then asked a specific question, they were able to give concrete examples of cultural difference, thus pointing to the pedagogical importance of appropriate prompts. For example, a student who went to Stuttgart ‘not expecting any cultural difference’ began her re-entry interview with the statement ‘[i]t all seemed the same’, but when asked about levels of political awareness among young people of her acquaintance in Perth and Stuttgart, was immediately able to identify a difference in her host brother and his friends who would frequently talk about politics and compose raps on political themes: ‘we asked this boy what his rap was about and he was, like, ‘Oh, I was making a play on words about the politicians of Stuttgart’. And we’re, like, wow. No-one in Australia does that’.

In another return interview, the student explicitly articulated the impact of the interview process on his learning, stating that while he had applied for the exchange ‘to learn more German’, the pre-departure interview had alerted him to the possibility of intercultural learning: ‘Especially after doing [the first] interview I actually thought about it a bit. So, yeah, I did expect to learn [about the culture]’. In the same interview, the student claimed that Australian and German cultures are ‘relatively similar … I feel like I’m in the same culture. I adjust to the same things’, but when asked whether he had noticed any differences about the way people communicate with each other, he conceded ‘yes, that is a good point … there’s not as much small talk in Germany’. Asked whether he would have noticed this without having first been alerted to the possibility of differences in communication styles, he said he thought so, but ‘if I was asked about it I wouldn’t remember it. It wouldn’t be such a conscious thing’. Here, the student reflected on how his interpellation into a framework of intercultural learning via the interviews had the effect of making intercultural learning a matter for his conscious attention.

Thus, despite their minimal engagement with the blog, a good number of the students were independently able to provide evidence of intercultural learning in their return interviews. For example, one student who had never left Australia before travelling to Stuttgart and found that her perceptions of ‘foreign people’ in Australia had changed due to the experience of having been ‘foreign’ herself stated,

I used to get really frustrated with people that couldn’t speak English very well, and then I went over to Germany and realized, like, I shouldn’t ever be like that, because I’m one of those people now … So I definitely think [the exchange] has helped me, because now I might think a little bit more before I judge other cultures, or when I decide to speak to someone from a different culture I might think about how my culture is different to theirs and how they might find other things confronting, or different, where to us it’s normal, or vice versa.

This comment suggests a transformation in the student’s intercultural literacy: immersion in a foreign culture for the first time had seen her move from feeling ‘frustrated’ with and making prejudicial judgements about outsiders to her own culture, to developing intercultural competencies such as empathy, perspective-taking and tolerance and a desire to communicate and engage with the other culture. The student thus appears to have moved to the fourth level (‘emerging intercultural literacy, consciously competent’) of Heyward’s (2002: 16–17) model for the development of intercultural literacy. In the course of the interview, the same student also articulated her realization that differences in behaviour and communication are a result of ‘our different cultural way of thinking’, and at the conclusion, she asserted that when confronted with cultural difference in the future, she will try to respond differently because she now appreciates that ‘I shouldn’t judge a culture before I know the reasons why they are like the way they are, or why they act a certain way’.

Student reflections on comparative drinking cultures

A number of cultural differences between Germany and Australia were mentioned by most of the students interviewed after their return from Stuttgart: norms around punctuality (70% of students interviewed), direct versus indirect communication (100%) and attitudes towards and consumption of alcohol (70%). Indeed, particularly in relation to youth consumption of alcohol, it was clear that many of the students had gone beyond the observation of a phenomenon and begun to speculate or hypothesize about the cultural context or reasons for the difference they observed:

I never once saw drunken violence. I never saw anyone throw a punch in a bar. I would reckon I’ve seen at least one scuffle every time I’ve gone out in Perth. If I’m out past 9pm I will see some form of punch-up, but it just never happened [in Stuttgart] … In Australia people drink, people have a bunch of drinking buddies and then socializing is second, but in Germany they socialized … and people just drink [beer] because they like it or whatever, it’s never the primary goal.

When asked whether he had pondered the reasons for this difference in social culture, the student said, ‘One of the things I really think is that [in Germany] 16 to 18 you can drink beer and wine but not [spirits] and I think that removes the forbidden fruit syndrome with drinking’. He also speculated as to whether the significantly higher cost of alcoholic beverages in Australia due to the taxes imposed actually operates to make alcohol more attractive: ‘it’s become like a trophy to buy alcohol, particularly if you are under-age’. Several other students also identified the lower drinking age as preventing the development of ‘taboos’ around drinking which then have the effect of making alcohol more attractive to young people in a country like Australia.

Another student had attended Carnival, the festival that precedes Lent, and observed that while young people drank beer at the festival, they were ‘more sensible about it … than 16- or 17-year-olds in Australia’. He attributed this largely to the lower legal drinking age in Germany:

If there were people of the same age in Australia who were … in the same sort of party atmosphere, you would get young people drinking but then they’d … get hold of a bottle of vodka somehow and they’d drink it all.

He suggested that young people drink more ‘like adults’ in Germany and observed that ‘they do the social things and the drinking is just what happens alongside that. Whereas in Australia you sort of go together to drink and then, yeah’.

Several students also referred to the phenomenon of ‘glassing’ (the violent act of smashing a glass – usually a beer glass – on a person’s head). One student identified as a significant cultural difference the fact that ‘they [Germans] don’t know what glassing is’. She recounted being at an all-day festival where people consumed a great deal of alcohol over the day and yet there was no violence:

They drank a lot and they were really not very sober at all but … they didn’t become a menace, and in so many instances in an Australian festival … somebody has to ruin the fun for everyone … and so they didn’t know what glassing was and that was the big joke. For the rest of the time I was like ‘Yep, if you get on my bad side, I’m Australian, I’m going to glass you’.

All of the students who referred to the phenomenon of ‘glassing’ and/or to culturally different practices around the consumption of alcohol were sufficiently intrigued by what they observed to ponder the reasons for the differences and, in some cases, to undertake ‘research’ by talking with locals.

This sort of cross-cultural engagement is indicative of movement towards an ethnorelative position in most intercultural learning scales, involving development of the cross-cultural skill of considering ‘socio-political and intergroup aspects of culture and metaculture’ (Heyward, 2002: 16). Given this intergroup dimension of intercultural learning, it is perhaps not insignificant that the activity of social drinking gave rise to the students’ most extended reflections on cultural difference. This observation is supported by Onorati’s (2013) finding that sociality prompts ‘reflective and learning attitudes which are necessary to intercultural competency’ (p. 332). Furthermore, the recurrence of certain phrases and tropes (such as ‘glassing’) in the return interviews suggests that this sociality also provided the context for shared reflections among peers on this topic. Thus, peer learning occurred not online but through embodied interactions in the shared social context of the study abroad experience.

Conclusion: the embodied sociality of intercultural learning

Students’ intercultural learning on this study abroad programme was enhanced as a result of our intervention, but this was not attributable to the blogging exercise alone. Students’ engagement with the blog was not sustained, and our view that this disengagement was at least partially due to a lack of instructor intervention or feedback is supported by the work of a team of colleagues in Australia who have also been addressing the need to provide pedagogical support for study abroad students via a nationally funded project (Gothard et al., 2012). They observe that contemporary students need ‘constant feedback’ and tend not to remain engaged with learning tasks unless they receive regular responses from instructors (Gray and Downey, 2012). This view is borne out by a project similar to ours that required at-home foreign language students to engage in blogging interactions with their peers who were studying abroad (Elola and Oskoz, 2008). In this project, instructors facilitated regular classroom discussion of the blogs and the students’ work was assessed, resulting in a high level of student engagement and positive intercultural learning outcomes.

Such findings have significant resource implications since, despite Lee’s (2011) recommendation that blogs be combined with face-to-face interviews to enhance intercultural learning, intensive instructor intervention in students’ in-country reflective practice is unlikely to be a sustainable option for many universities operating in Australia’s current fiscal environment. The solution that we explored was to foster peer rather than instructor intervention, but the minimal peer commenting on the blogs in our project suggests that simply providing students with an online peer-learning environment may be insufficient. The lack of peer-to-peer engagement may be attributed in part to the fact that this activity was not assessed, but was arguably also due to the disembodied nature of online spaces and interactions. Educational theory on embodied learning argues against the grain of theories that advocate online learning, suggesting the neglected importance of somatic experience (Bresler, 2004; Brockman, 2001; Crowdes, 2000; Matthews, 1998; Michelson, 1998), its role in developing a respect for diversity (Barlas, 2001; Gustafson, 1999; Mathew et al., 2008) and even its centrality to intercultural learning (Axtmann, 2002; Nagata, 2008). In keeping with the observations emerging from this body of literature, the recurring language and themes related to drinking across a range of return interviews in our study indicated that significant discussion and sharing of ideas among peers studying abroad did in fact take place – but not online. It may therefore be necessary to recognize the extent to which learning – perhaps especially in an intercultural context – arises from embodied social interactions.

Our study suggests that effective intercultural learning could be sustainably supported in two main ways. First, given that the interviews made concepts of intercultural learning transparent, opening students to the possibility of such learning occurring as well as enabling them to verbally articulate it, we suggest that explicit exposure of students to the theoretical scaffolding of intercultural learning is pedagogically important. Indeed, as Engle (2013) has argued, ‘the very act of responding to thought-provoking questions’ can guide students ‘toward the awareness of their own accomplishment … [and] can contribute to the important process of fixing memory’ (p. 118). This would suggest that strategically designed pre-departure and re-entry workshops or materials do not need to be extensive so much as targeted and explicit, introducing students to the concept of intercultural learning and thus seeding processes of independent reflection.

Second, the fact that students’ most significant learning in our study stemmed from the processes of social drinking emphasizes that participation in an unfamiliar culture is an embodied and social experience, and suggests that concentration of pedagogical efforts in familiar and disembodied online spaces may disconnect students from the very experiences we wish them to reflect on. Situating at least some intercultural learning activities, explicitly framed as such, within the embodied spaces of peer interaction may therefore be vital to increasing students’ capacity for recognizing and articulating their learning.

Given that most universities manage a steady flow of outgoing study abroad students as well as incoming students from other universities around the globe, facilitation of contact between these two groups represents an ideal intercultural learning opportunity. Based on our research, designing enjoyable peer-group activities for such mixed groups of outgoing and incoming students, framed by explicitly communicated concepts of intercultural learning, will support students’ recognition of and effective reflection on the learning afforded by experiencing cultural difference, with the added benefit of encouraging interaction (and appreciation of the value of such interaction) among local and foreign students. This model will support students’ learning while they are in-country, with online activities and re-entry workshops at home universities functioning to reinforce the concept that intercultural learning is a matter for sustained and conscious attention. Such pedagogical strategies constitute an effective and sustainable deployment of instructor intervention, focused on developing the capacity of students to undertake effective peer reflection about their own experiences.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to their colleague Mark Pegrum for his assistance with the design of the student blog website.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Kati Tonkin teaches European Cultural History and German at the University of Western Australia (UWA) and coordinates a short-course exchange programme with the University of Stuttgart. Her most notable publication is Joseph Roth’s March into History: From the Early Novels to Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft (Camden House, 2008). More recently, she has published on Balkan and Central European film. She has received a number of grants for her work on intercultural literacy, including a UWA Teaching Fellowship to research and develop teaching and learning resources to support study abroad students’ intercultural learning.

Chantal Bourgault du Coudray teaches gender, cultural and communication studies at the University of Western Australia and coordinates the work placement programme for her faculty. Her most notable publication is The Curse of the Werewolf: Nature, Culture and the Self (I.B. Tauris, 2006). She has also received a number of teaching fellowships and grants for her work on reflective practice, intercultural communication and transformative learning.

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