This study explored interrelationships among identity, experience, and learning that undergraduate students from the U.S. attributed to participation in study abroad programs that traveled to the complex and contentious setting of Palestine/Israel. The findings offer a robust scholarly contribution that addresses social and emotional complexities of experiential education, which are often flattened in evaluative studies about program impact. Using narrative inquiry as a methodological approach to consider how eight students talked to me about their programs, I used membership categorization analysis to understand how they positioned themselves and others in their small stories. Consistent among their reflections was the emergence of a context-based “outsider” identity vis-à-vis the issues they understood as central to this region. This identity was informed by their sociocultural identities and it shaped their experiences during and after the program, as well as their relationships with the places and people therein. More than a year after studying abroad, these students’ outsider gaze continued to frame their stories about their programs with an emotionally detached focus on objective fact-finding. As a contrast, their stories about interactions with peers often carried an emotional charge. The interviewees considered a select subset of their peers to be connected to the focal issues of the programs; these peers figured prominently in the stories that positioned people into certain membership categories. Furthermore, interpersonal dynamics within the peer groups highly influenced the interviewees’ overall perceptions of their programs, both positively and negatively. The interviewees’ different kinds of stories about their various experiences drew attention to important distinctions in experiential learning. Namely, their stories implied that they processed information differently when they were positioned as outsider observers, than when they learned through direct engagement in interactive, affective, and action-oriented experiences. There are three practical, interconnected implications from this study concerning learning opportunities on short-term study abroad programs: 1) the effect of participants’ context-dependent and topical outsider/insider identities on their uptake and processing of information; 2) the importance of peer relationships and group dynamics on students’ learning in cohort-based programs; and 3) new considerations about how the different kinds of experiences involved in experiential learning engage a rich assortment of cognitive, affective, and relational processes. These insights encourage educators to integrate established neuropsychological theories of learning into models that inform intercultural and experiential education.
Read
