Impacts of A Cross-Cultural Experience on Faculty/Staff Development Relevant to

Education for Personal and Social Responsibility

Joseph Orlando, Ed.D.Seattle University

•Context for This Research Study

•Program of Interest

•Research Focus

•Findings Relevant to Educating for Personal & Social Responsibility

Context for This Research Study

•My role with faculty/staff development at Seattle University

• Jesuit educational mission that resonates with education for personal and social responsibility

Seattle University mission statement: “Seattle University is dedicated to educating the whole person, to professional formation, and to empowering leaders for a just and humane world.”

•Range of programs that serve faculty, staff and administrators

•An experiential education program of interest Nicaragua Immersion Experience (annually since 2001)

Program of Interest

•Nicaragua Immersion Experience - program goals

• 1. To provide an international experience that explores global justice issues in the context of a developing nation.

• 2. To encourage the application of the international experience into a participant’s curricular and program responsibilities.

• 3. To further participants’ understanding of the mission of Jesuit higher education with its emphasis on education for justice.

•Setting, Partners, Group Size/Distribution, Duration

Program of Interest (cont.)

•Program elements

- learning about the Nicaraguan context (especially in terms of development challenges) through presentations/meetings with leaders of various sectors and through educational encounters with Nicaraguans facing economic hardship and organizing to address those hardships (cooperatives, rural health organizations, faith communities, etc.)

- learning about the Jesuit university mission expressed in Nicaragua through educational meetings with UCA colleagues, and through presentation/field visits to outreach programs connecting the university with the needs of the community/countryside ( law clinic, microlending initiative, etc.)

- learning through collegial, small group experience through facilitated reflection sessions, common itinerary, emphasis on group participation

Research Focus•2007 study:“Impact of a brief international immersion experience on faculty and staff development for Jesuit university mission”

•Qualitative study with a representative sample of faculty and staff seeking to learn about whether and how this experience carried impact for them.

•Research findings grouped according to:

•whether/how participants grew in their understanding of the Jesuit educational mission and its emphasis on education for justice and education for global engagement

•key components of the Nicaragua Immersion Experience that carried impact for participants

•expression of impact through both behaviors and attitudes as self-reported by participants

Findings Relevant to Educating for Personal & Social Responsibility

•Impact of the People and Context of Nicaragua

- the reality of poverty- poverty in contrast- “intimate and humanizing encounters with poor

persons”

•Impact Expressed in Teaching

-enhancing course curricula-development of new initiatives-strengthening of “voice”

Impact of the People and Context of Nicaragua - the most significant component of NIE *

The reality of poverty:

“seeing the extreme poverty was shocking, it was enlightening, it was emotionally devastating”

“I think it is important for those of us in North America to go and see for ourselves. It doesn’t guarantee that, if you see that is the world, your life will change; you have some kind of epiphany. But unless one puts oneself in situations where you understand or at least have some exposure to…this poverty, this disparity in the distribution of resources, you will never understand fully.”

•Seeing in general, seeing together, seeing through a disciplinary lens

Poverty in contrast (within Nicaragua; between us & Nicaragua):

“I just remembered again the stark contrast, because of course the hotel itself was just wonderful, just beautiful, and then I just remember throwing open the curtains and stepping out onto the balcony, and…across were all of the poor homes along the ridge…it was just being unable to avoid the stark contrast between rich and poor”

“Nicaragua provided some of those kinds of moments for me, to experience people who were radically different from me, had very different lives, very unprivileged lives compared to my own, but also (to) encounter them with their full humanity…and identify with them as a fellow human being, to be welcomed by them, to see commonalities with them, as much as my differences…And so that for me is why global education, particularly to developing nations, is so important for us to be engaged in.”

Intimate and humanizing encounters with poor persons:*the quality of interactions

“And in particular I think on this trip to have the opportunity to interact with people whose lives were so different from my own, and in many cases were so less, in most cases, were so less privileged than my own—you have to walk away from those conversations again and again inspired by their sense of hope, their sense of happiness, their sense of passion, despite what seems to me like great difficulties, many times. That was part of that sense of being privileged…privileged not as a North American, but privileged to be able for these seven or eight days to share little bits of these other lives and be motivated and inspired by those other lives. But mostly even just have my own sense of who I am and what the world is like broadened.” (cont.)

(continued)

“If I had traveled to Nicaragua on my own as a tourist, I would have talked to a few people, but I wouldn’t have had those kinds of conversations. I wouldn’t have met these kinds of people. I wouldn’t have been in the kind of context where they were so willing to open up to me and tell me about themselves and their experience in their life. And that was really rich for me.”

Impact Expressed in Teaching

-enhancing course curricula

examples for class content: (re: coffee cooperative progressing to fair trade status)“I actually use it in teaching, their willingness to work together for the good of the whole…I actually use it as an example of what we mean by this connectivity to the other”

Speakers in class:“Because of…experiences there I am on the list here locally (regarding) what’s going on in Nicaragua, so when people come through from the…underground labor movement, I have them in and talk to the class, and those people really touch students in ways that I could not, because they tell their life story.”

Reshaping an approach to teaching:“I can envision a change in the way I teach some of those classes, where I try to prepare students to be voices for positive change. I can see myself…pushing students much harder to pick issues that really matter…I could see myself focusing much more on the emotional dimension of doing advocacy work and dealing with issues of social justice….If they are working on that issue of poverty, they need to go research poverty. They need to go find the statistics, they need to talk to people, they need to understand what the laws are, they need to understand what the institutional structures are that perpetuate poverty. Now it seems to me they also need to know what poverty feels like…It is not enough to go talk to some experts about poverty—they need to go talk to some poor people as well. They need to understand what it is like for people who are poor, if that’s what they are working on.”

Impact Expressed in Teaching

-Developing new initiatives

“I really started putting together more of an international dimension to it, the graduate program that I direct. I started becoming more involved with looking for…ways of involving the graduate students in Latin America…So I definitely started moving more in the direction of internationalizing the curriculum.”

“I have tried to push…harder for social justice to be incorporated in a variety of classes, and in part that has been inspired by the program in Nicaragua. I mean, it was something that I was trying to do; I had visions of doing before. I came back from Nicaragua with a stronger sense of this can make a difference.”

Impact Expressed in Teaching

-Strengthening of “voice” internally & externally

“I am much less reticent…when I think about these issues related to poverty or our foreign policy as it impacts other countries…I am not overbearing about this, but I will just simply say what I think. I am much more able to do that in the classroom than I have been in the past.”

“It (NIE) has given me the opportunity to tell other people about Nicaragua and talk about the problems in Latin America and in developing nations as a whole. For instance, I gave a presentation…to my (science) colleagues…here in Seattle…It gave me a chance to provide some background and show them some pictures of the country and to at least briefly describe the coffee crisis, the level of poverty, to some extent the historic role the U.S. has played…and to let them know that addressing social and economic justice issues was a big part of the reason I was down there, in addition to the science.”

Conclusion

•Educating Students for Personal & Social Responsibility includes developing faculty who are motivated and prepared to deliver values-based education

•This research suggests that faculty development programs of the kind studied here can support the advancement of PSR education, and cultivate a commitment and awareness in faculty:

“I do think about the Organized Women of Yasica Sur now when I am reading or preparing for certain classes…This might sound really idealistic, but because of the connectedness, they have a stake in what I teach and what my students learn, they really do. And so yes, I do think about them.”