CS6: Breakdown

After a particularly challenging stint working on an ecological sustainability project in South America, your third year Environmental Studies students have had serious rifts in the group dynamic. In the final days of the project, a few of the students had a loud argument in the office of the local community partner. Similarly, some of the students have chosen to “work from home” (completing data entry on their laptops in the hostel) as a way to avoid working with the other students in the office. In a management meeting, the community partner expresses concern that the behavior of your students is affecting the local employees and other foreign volunteers on the project.

By the time you return to your home university, at least ½ of the students are not talking to each other. Other than the completion of a final report on the project, you have not planned any post-engagement reflective activities or team activities. However, the students are a cohort and will be moving into the 4th year of the Environmental Studies program together.

Sustainability

• How do you manage the fallout from this team?
• Has this become a situation in which it’s more work for the community partner to work with you than without you?
• How are you communicating with the community partner and is your communication a model for the students?

Training & Education

• If the teacher is on-site with the students, how are you managing the project if students are given permission to work from the hostel?
• Was teamwork and group processes addressed in the course before you left for the country placement?
• How much did you know about the day-to-day context of the project before taking the students?
• What questions need to be answered by the community partner for you to have an understanding of the context and how it might impact student team dynamics?
• What responsibility do you have as a colleague to try to heal the group dynamic?

Experiential education challenges the traditional foundations of university teaching because it takes the classroom outside of the objective observational realm of learning, and into the subjective interactive realm of learning. In Canada,

“[t]he primary barrier to community-university engagement is…[t]he tendency for the academy to be isolated from the ‘real world,’ …the reward structure recognizes research more than teaching, and that service to the university community is only minimally valued and service to the external community not at all.” (Fryer, Wallis, Sattar, Annette, Battistoni & Lund-Chaix, 2007, p.15)

Experiential education “rests on theories of experiential learning, a process whereby the learner interacts with the world and integrates new learning into old constructs” (Eyler, 2009, p.1). International experiences do not, by default, ensure that participants will return from the experience having made critical learning connections simply through immersion in another culture.

Experiential education processes demand the intentional facilitation of learning by the teacher, and the learning extends to all aspects of the experience. One of the goals of experiential education programs is to actively engage students in their learning process and motivate the process of agency. Agency can be defined as the desire to grow within a community of difference using the imaginative power of taking multiple perspectives. With experiential education, the students must directly negotiate the struggles that often are connected to classroom theory (social justice, power & privilege, hegemony, etc.) in their lived reality and, in doing so, their actions directly affect the community partners.

This case study applies to both the experience and the return phases of the ISL project. In the field, the faculty member can set clear expectations for student communication and conflict resolution. At the onset of team conflict, faculty-led facilitation in rebuilding a positive group dynamic is essential to maintain open communication with all project stakeholders. If students are given permission to disconnect from their colleagues, then what impact does this disconnect have on the overall project?

Later, when the students return to their home university , they will struggle with the re-entry process and the other students from their team are best suited to help them in the transition. Re-entry can be the most difficult stage of the ISL process, but can also be a rich time for reflective learning and transformation. In the spirit of collegiality, the faculty member in this case study could work to re-establish a positive learning environment for future teachers in his/her program by facilitating a return program in which the student group issues are unpacked.

Eyler, J. (2009). The Power of Experiential Education. Liberal Education, 95(4), 24-31.

Fryer, M., Wallis, R., Sattar, K., Annette, J., Battistoni, R., Lund-Chaix, A. (2007) Context and culture: Models of engagement around the world. In Gelmon, S.B. & Billing, S.H.(Eds), Service-learning: From passion to objectivitiy: International and cross-disciplinary perspectives on service-learning research. 2007. Information Age Publishing: Charlott, NC.

Merrill, M. and Pusch, M.D. (2007). Apples, oranges, and jumys: Models for research on students doing intercultural service-learning. In Gelmon, S.B. & Billing, S.H. (Eds), Service-learning: From passion to objectivitiy: International and cross-disciplinary perspectives on service-learning research (pp.21-40) Information Age Publishing: Charlott, NC.