Summer study abroad in Japan: Maximizing intercultural competency development through self‐guided cultural exploration and reflection tasks

Abstract

The Challenge Due to globalization, students today need to develop intercultural skills, and study abroad is widely held as one of the most effective ways of developing competence, and more university students are attending short summer-long programs. In this context, we ask, how can teachers design a program that maximizes student's intercultural learning in a short-term study abroad program? Can students develop a rich and deep understanding of the culture in short-term study abroad? This article presents unique cultural bridging experiences, self-exploration tasks, and teacher guidance that impacted the development of student's intercultural competency.

Motivation and Learning Conceptions That Matter When Considering Global Citizenship Education

“…If we pretend to promote a Global Citizenship Education, we should encourage learning conceptions which include reflective and critical competences . Our experience is in line with some other initiatives emphasizing the importance of facilitating the engagement of students (Fukuda & Nishikawa, 2021;Oguro & Harbon, 2021) or the promotion of critical reflection through the participation in authentic learning activities (Lourenço, 2021) . Although we are in line with these works, from a transformational learning perspective we have to be cautious and recognize how complex it is to facilitate contexts of inquiry that contribute to revise our conceptions of learning, not only to transcend reproductive models towards models of application and reflection, but above all towards models more focused on our integral development as human beings .…”

The presence and absence of race in world language education literature

“…Articles referenced race to describe the racial makeup of participants (e.g., King de Ramírez, 2015) and schools (e.g., Ee, 2017) and to measure race in research instruments (surveys, questionnaires; e.g., Ducate et al, 2011). Race appeared in empirical analyses as a demographic variable that was controlled for in studies with no effect (e.g., Bassman & Ironsmith, 1986; Kleinsasser, 1992) or as a variable that was not controlled for due to reasons such as a small sample size (e.g., Fukuda & Nishikawa Chávez, 2021) or because the data were not available (e.g., Surface & Dierdorff, 2003).…”

From Caterpillar to Butterfly: Story of an Ordinarily Extraordinary Generation Z L2 Student Abroad

“…Research following similar theories has recently focused on debunking the myth that SA is an inherently life-changing experience, rather explaining that SA has transformational affordances that only turn into transformational forces (Bain & Yaklin, 2017;Mitchell, 2023) when (a) SA programs are based on strategic tasks like observations (Lomicka & Ducate, 2021), reflections (Fukuda & Nishikawa Chávez, 2021;Savicki & Price, 2017), or socialization (Mroz & Gorham, 2023), and (b) students challenge themselves to engage in and with the target language and culture (Antopolskaya et al, 2020). This study investigated an SA program strategically designed to offer a strong experiential learning component and documented students' engagement with different communities (Coleman, 2015).…”