Students in service of the state: Uncoupling student trips abroad and global competence

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102226Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Student exchange programmes and trips abroad are assumed to be aimed at promoting global competence.

  • In Israel, the discourse surrounding student trips abroad is focused on state needs and benefits.

  • Political science concepts are effective for identifying a wider set of interests.

  • The Israeli case demonstrates an alternative rationale for student trips abroad.

Abstract

Student exchange programs and trips abroad are consistently portrayed in scholarship as a strategy for promoting students’ global competence. Through a thematic document analysis of a mandatory course developed by the Israeli MOE for students embarking on trips abroad and additional sources, I explore the discourse used to portray these trips in the Israeli context, showing an alternative model that places the state rather than students at the center of these programs. Although from an education perspective this discourse is distinct, political science scholarship suggests the goals it embodies could be embedded across many national contexts, albeit more discretely.

Introduction

Student exchange programs and trips abroad are primarily depicted as a key strategy for schools and higher education institutions to promote students’ global competence and intercultural skills through exposure to international experiences. Although the efficacy of these programs has been questioned and critiqued from many angles, their goals are consistently linked to the personal development of students and their employability (Brooks et al., 2012; Di Pietro, 2015). In the 2018 round of PISA, a measure of global competence was introduced (OECD, 2019). In this measure, one of the items in the construct measuring multicultural/intercultural practices in schools refers to the operation of student exchange programs in students’ schools, suggesting an assumed correlation. Studies that use other measures of global competence (e.g. global citizenship, intercultural mindedness) similarly assume the benefits of travel experience and participation in educational programs abroad for the personal development of students (e.g Perry et al., 2013; Salisbury et al., 2013; Tarrant, 2010). These assumptions are also evident in the justifications used by institutions when developing and marketing study abroad programs and short-term student trips, which are framed in student-centered terms that emphasize the personal development of students’ intercultural skills through the multicultural experiences offered (Zemach-Bersin, 2009).

In contrast, in Israel, the development of global competencies is nearly absent from the way student trips abroad are presented in the literature, particularly in secondary education. These trips, almost exclusively referred to as ‘delegations’ in the Israeli context, are overwhelmingly presented in state-centered rather than student-centered terms, and as a result, the development of global competence is not part of the agenda from the outset. Most student trips in the Israeli secondary school system (outside of Holocaust memorial delegations to Poland and Germany, which are beyond the scope of this study) are aimed at strengthening and maintaining relationships with communities in the Jewish diaspora, others have goals that pertain to countering negative portrayals of Israel in foreign media and delegitimizing calls to boycott Israeli companies and goods (Cohen and Liebman, 2000), and few are part of bilateral sister city or sister-school agreements and other initiatives with broadly defined goals.

In this study, I explore the Israeli case, in which secondary school student trips abroad are based on aims that are unrelated to global competencies or intercultural skills. Within this case, I argue that student trips would act as a false signifier in the measurement for these constructs. I also suggest that a more comprehensive framework informed by the field of political science is useful in examining student trips abroad more comprehensively, allowing scholars to take into account a wider array of underlying motives including mechanisms of soft power and public diplomacy preserved and strengthened through these trips.

This study draws on two types of data, collected in July-August 2019: (1) the course materials and tests that comprise the online program produced by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in 2017 and mandated by the MOE for every student embarking on a school based trip to pass1 (2) publicly available local newspaper articles and school website excerpts featuring testimonials and quotes from participating students and staff or administrative officials. The course materials consist of 12 units (subjects), each of which includes videos by a variety of speakers (academics, politicians, MFA workers, celebrities), and a short learning assessment portion with questions. Overall, there are 24 videos, a short introductory paragraph for each section, and the learning assessment questions for each section, as well as the final multiple choice test. The videos were transcribed in full, in Hebrew, and relevant excepts used in this article were translated. Table 1 includes information related to the cohort of newspaper articles and school website excepts.

In order to locate these sources, I used Google to search for both news articles and general search results limited to the years 2014–2019, using the keywords school, students, trip, delegation, visit, and exchange. I then manually excluded results that only included 1–3 sentences about the trip, or did not include detailed information and testimonials, results that were not related to secondary school students visiting Israel or going abroad, and those that pertained to the Holocaust memorial delegations to Poland. This generated 30 relevant articles and excepts.

The data from both the course (including the transcribed videos) and the local newspapers and school websites were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), which provides a flexible method for integrating information and data from different types of sources while taking into account multiple theoretical perspectives. The analysis of the course included an inductive, open and axial coding process, through which key actors, representations, silences, and recurring broad themes were located and compared across the materials. The newspaper articles and school website excerpts were analyzed more deductively, in order to supplement the analysis of the course. Each unit (article or excerpt) was categorized according to the type of source, type of trip discussed (incoming or outgoing delegation; type of initiative- see Table 1), and then coded according to a coding scheme that was relevant to the categories that emerged from the course. This included types of activities mentioned, representations of the state of Israel, representations of Israeli students, and representations of others.). Next, the findings from the articles and excerpts were compared and arranged according to the relevant categories from the course materials. Finally, three major themes emerged that encompassed enough of the data to allow for a detailed framework through which the findings can be presented.

Through the analysis, I explore the characteristics of the state-focused (and state produced) discourse used to describe, explain, and legitimize student trips abroad, highlighting how students are marginalized through this discourse which reduces them to reflections and ambassadors of the state. Furthermore, I demonstrate an alternative model for articulating the goals of student trips abroad, that does not align with the aims and anticipated outcomes commonly delineated in comparative education scholarship. The explicit manner in which these goals are articulated in Israel is not surprising, in light of the education system’s nationalistic nature, but political science scholarship suggests that the goals themselves are not unique to the Israeli context, and could likely appear in other contexts and settings, though in a more subtle manner.

Section snippets

Student trips abroad

Programs that include student trips abroad are not a new phenomenon, and the scholarly interest in them has grown steadily since the early 1900s, with peaks in the post Second World War and Cold War eras as well as in recent years in line with the global trend of internationalisation. Research surrounding these can be divided into two main strands - one that views student trips abroad and study abroad as mechanisms of soft power and diplomacy, and another which concentrates on the outcomes of

Findings

Three major themes were derived during the analysis: Students in service of the state- which details the various ways in which students were reduced to representatives of the state; the commodification of international relationships- which explores both the discursive avoidance of the word friendships and the ways in which contacts made by students were described as being of national value; and learning just enough about the other- which encompasses examples in which students were supposedly

Discussion and concluding remarks

The findings of this study present a narrative that undercuts some assumptions that are integral to the modern understandings and portrayals of intercultural and international experiences as inherently connected to the development of global competencies. I demonstrated that Israel presents an alternative model for articulating the goals of student trips abroad, that does not align with the goals and anticipated outcomes delineated in international education scholarship, and also extends the

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Heela Goren: Writing - original draft, Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing.

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