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CHANCES are that the summer of 1991 will remain for Maria, a Connecticut College student, a special souvenir. Maria was, at the time, a zoology major who had studied Italian as her second language. At the end of her junior year, she welcomed the opportunity to spend her internship abroad at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, in Naples. Maria spent three months working alongside Italian scientists and observing the various stages of development of copepod larvae. As the larvae were provided courtesy of the fishermen associated with the stazione, the young zoologist no doubt felt it her duty to participate, late at night and early in the morning, in the collecting of the precious samples. The problem was that, in the small southern fishing community of Piano di Sorrento, it was not considered proper for a girl to go down to the docks at night, even to fetch zooplankton; nor did it seem right for a young woman—whose place is traditionally at home—to engage in manual labor, especially in rugged company. The experience lent another dimension to Maria’s foray into new cultural territory; it also added another layer to her work: she decided to conduct, among villagers, a series of interviews that she managed to incorporate, along with her scientific observations, into her final integrative project.
The same spirit of adventure took a sociology major, Tim, to Oruro, Bolivia, during the summer of 2001, to work with the organization Save the Children; and it will take Kara to Avignon in 2003. Kara is a double major, in French and theater, who is hoping to spend her internship working for the renowned festival.
What do Maria, Tim, and Kara have in common, aside from being intrepid globe-trotters? As CISLA scholars, they are part of the international program that has become, since 1990, the trademark of Connecticut College. Since the focus of this article is study abroad, I will briefly describe the program’s history and main components and then concentrate on what is, arguably, CISLA’s most innovative aspect: the internship abroad.
The idea and impetus for the program came from Claire Gaudiani, who had just become, in 1988, the eighth president of the college. Before coming to Connecticut College, she had been the associate director of the Lauder Institute at the Wharton School of Business and Finance, at the University of Pennsylvania. As a possible model for a new center of international studies, she offered the Wharton program, in which students were (and I assume, still are) encouraged to become proficient in a foreign language and then to seek an internship abroad, the internship allowing them to hone their linguistic skills while gaining a different kind of professional experience. The reaction to Gaudiani’s proposal was, in general, quite positive, especially among us, in foreign language departments: at the time we viewed the new initiative as an opportunity to increase our visibility and to expand our role on campus. But strong as it was, the new commitment to internationalization could not be framed at Connecticut College in the preprofessional terms of the Wharton School: it had to be firmly grounded in the liberal arts context—hence the dual emphasis in what CISLA stands for: Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts.
Since its inception, the program has somewhat evolved; it has also taken on different tones, depending on the director. The first years emphasized ethical concerns and global values, very much in keeping with Gaudiani’s vision of civic leadership. The mix of intellectual and moral matters made some faculty members, including some of us in foreign languages, feel uneasy—despite the fact that the first two directors came, as expected, from our ranks. Nowadays, the moral tone does not seem as pronounced, and the directorship has gone to a historian, Fred Paxton. He has been working on tightening the ties between CISLA and the intellectual community both on and off campus; to what degree he has been successful, in particular from the point of view of the foreign languages, is a point to which I will return.
CISLA is not so much a program in international studies as an attempt to internationalize every discipline on campus and to encourage students to think outside and beyond their chosen specialization. As stated in a recent brochure about internationalization at Connecticut College, “students with any major from anthropology to zoology may enter the program to broaden and potentially redefine the focus of their work though the optic of international and area studies”; to qualify, students must have a sustained 3.0 grade point average and be willing to take on a tough challenge. CISLA is an ambitious, demanding program whose components are built into a three-year sequence: starting with a five-page proposal submitted at the time of application (in the fall of the sophomore year) that lays the groundwork for the senior integrative project (SIP); and an interview, designed along the ACTFL guidelines, that evaluates, at both the entry and the exit levels, the student’s oral proficiency in the target language. The entry-level varies according to the difficulty of the foreign language, but the requirements are calibrated in such a way as to make it possible to apply even after only three semesters of language learning (meaning it is theoretically possible for sophomores to apply to CISLA, say in French or German, even if they started French or German only in their freshman year).
The hardest part of the application process is the proposal, since it has to include, along with the topic of the research, some indication of a “dream” internship, which is to take place during the summer of the junior year. It also has to put together a coherent set of four courses, designated, in addition to the two required core courses (International Studies 201 and 401), as the “support courses”; those four courses cannot be part of the major, nor can they be the primary focus of the major. Their purpose is to provide the CISLA scholars with a broad, interdisciplinary background of knowledge related to both the internship and the final project.
Obviously, the internship abroad is the pierre de touche of the whole enterprise. It is a crucial step toward completion of the research, but it also represents a major challenge and can be viewed as an accomplishment in itself. Indeed, it often seems to be the part of the experience that CISLA graduates remember most vividly. How does it work—or, rather, and maybe more accurately, to what extent does it work? Are there problems or points of tension that can be identified at that strategic level, especially from our point of view, in foreign languages? Conversely, what does a program like CISLA tell us about our role on campus? To what degree does CISLA’s version of internationalization challenge us? And how are we to define the role we could, or should, play in international studies?
To try to answer some of these questions, I will take a closer look at the nuts and bolts of the internship, and I will begin with basic data about who goes where to do what (with the understanding that every CISLA student does go somewhere; the internship is funded and comes with a stipend, which compensates for the fact that the young interns do not usually receive a salary).
The enrollment figures for the most recent CISLA classes—2003 and 2004—show a noticeable increase from the first years: thirty-three for the class of 2004, twenty-nine for the class of 2003, compared with about ten in the first year. In terms of race and gender, the same holds true for CISLA as for study abroad in general: the program continues to attract more women than men—men represent about one-third of the total enrollment—and relatively few members of ethnic and racial minorities participate.1 Where CISLA innovates is in the geographical range and the variety of disciplines represented. The proposals for 2003 and 2004 show a true global reach, from Chile to China, including Cuba, Senegal, Switzerland, and Venezuela. Western Europe remains a favorite destination—four each in Italy and France, two in Germany, and one each in Spain, England, and Belgium for 2004—but there is a steady interest in Latin America—three each in Venezuela and Chile, two in Mexico, and one each in Ecuador and Costa Rica. China appears to be a popular destination, with three internships in 2003 and two in 2004, but Asia in general does not fare too well. Nor does Africa, at least in this batch—one in Mali in 2003 and one in Senegal in 2004—but it still does better (and again these figures may have only local, limited significance) than Eastern Europe and the Middle East (the latter is, of course, not likely to be a favorite destination for some time).
In terms of topics and fields, the range does reflect a genuine attempt at diversifying study abroad; and from that point of view, there is not doubt that CISLA comes as a timely response to Richard Lambert’s urgent call: “with the physical and health sciences becoming increasingly globalized,” warned Lambert as early as 1989, “the nation would be well served by having a fair proportion of young scientists having had some contact with their counterparts in other countries as part of their normal education experience.” Maria, the young zoologist whom I introduced earlier, was only one of the pioneers in this new generation of enlightened scientists. There are more to come: the science projects for the next two years include DNA analysis in a lab, in Argentina (the idea is to reunite orphans with their families); preservation of natural flora, in Spain; traditional medicine and the healer-patient relationship, both in Mexico; and a favorite of mine, a study of how the salmon industry has affected the environment, in Chile. As suggested by this brief survey, environment is a key issue and a chief interest. So is education—another of Lambert’s wishes—and the problem of poverty, in particular as it affects children. Even the more typical topics, in fields such as economics and political science, often come with a twist: consider, for instance, Lana’s proposed study of globalization and the Italian wine industry (if all goes well, she is to spend her internship in an Italian vineyard); or Sean, our next man in Havana, who plans to grapple in situ with the effect of communism on art and sociopolitical categories. Liberal arts on the move, liberal arts at its best.
Or is it? The brief description I just attempted is enough to raise a number of questions, some of them obvious. For instance: for all the emphasis on liberal arts, why so few projects in the humanities? I am not even talking about literary studies, which seem to be, at least these days, fairly absent from the CISLA preoccupations. But what about history, philosophy, religious studies, art history, film studies? There seems to be, in contrast, a heavy tilt toward the social sciences. When we talked about it, Paxton offered as a possible explanation the affinities between his program and international relations, which appears to be a favorite specialization among CISLA students. Both are internationally focused concentrations; both require some knowledge of a foreign language (personal communication). But, from a larger perspective, it seems to me that the trend—which, by the way, Paxton is determined to reverse—reflects a stance that has long characterized international studies based on so-called area studies: a vague suspicion of the humanities in general, viewed, in Michael Holquist’s terms, as the dilettante domain of “soft,” “nonstrategic” concerns (111). I will have more to say about this later.
The other issue is more directly related to linguistic preoccupations: the oral proficiency requirements are kept relatively low at the entrance and the exit levels, even for languages more frequently spoken. How is a young intern expected to function in a foreign, specialized environment if he or she is, at that point, in between the two levels—for French, Italian, or Spanish, between Intermediate-Mid and Intermediate-High? The problem proves more severe, paradoxically, for the so-called easier languages than for, say, Chinese or Japanese; and the reason seems to be simply that in most cases, the students electing to go to Asia for their internship are already fluent in the target language, because of origin or personal background. They are part of a group that constitutes a good portion of the CISLA contingent, the international students. Now, one might argue that that is the very clientele who are the least in need of being internationalized. Nevertheless, a strong and diverse international presence can obviously be most beneficial not only in terms of general ambience but in the context of the core courses, where students get to know each other and work together.
What about the linguistic preparation for the average, not preinternationalized, presumably all-American youngster? I am told by the CISLA staff that most students spend either a year or a semester in the country—or one of the countries—of the target language, even though doing so is not required.2 No doubt that a semester or a year abroad should be enough to prepare the young interns for meaningful contacts with their foreign counterparts; and recent statistics show that the oral proficiency scores are gradually becoming better and higher, at both ends of the trajectory.3 But we still hear, more than occasionally, of seniors who repeatedly fail the exit test; and in such cases (we had, alas, two in 2001–02 in French) one does wonder about what happened, or rather what did not happen—could not have happened—during the internship. When it comes to oral proficiency requirements, CISLA appears to be torn between two contradictory, equally valid, aims: to preserve rigor and intellectual exigency, while remaining as flexible as possible, in the hope that students will feel motivated enough to go beyond the requirements.
The problem is that by lowering its standards for linguistic ability, the program risks sending the wrong signal: that the knowledge of a foreign language does not matter or, at least, does not matter as much as the other components, for which the requirements and expectations are decidedly higher. What CISLA risks doing is shortchanging a learning process that is supposed to be at the core of the whole experience.
This is not a new criticism. From early on, foreign languages have repeatedly vented their frustration at being marginalized in the program. Instead of playing the key role we had envisioned, we felt reduced to a peripheral status, charged with the menial task of setting up a series of hurdles that most students were likely to find, if not superfluous, at least cumbersome.
This was certainly my experience when I served as the associate director of foreign languages, for what was originally intended to be a two-year stint. As the liaison between CISLA and the language departments, I was supposed to supervise the students’ work in the target language, check their progress, organize the oral proficiency interviews, and provide the weakest with extra support and training. This was the easy part of the job; my other duties proved much more challenging. Through the year, I tried to make students understand the centrality of the learning process they were going through, and I fought the tendency even among my colleagues—the non-foreign language faculty members associated, like me, with the program—to see languages as mere tools devoid of any intrinsic value. I resigned at the end of the year, with a sense of complete failure. Looking back, I cannot help feeling that the cards were stacked against me from the outset: the position I was in did not carry any real weight; I was merely a gatekeeper, facilitating access to higher, more serious and substantial pursuits.
The position has been eliminated for budgetary reasons, as might be expected in the current environment. In this particular case, however, the financial gain may lead, down the road, to a loss in structural consistency and cohesion; for the decision to cut such a key position could easily be construed as yet another sign pointing to the auxiliary status of foreign languages in the program.
CISLA’s major aim and claim is to be integrative, combining, and I am quoting the Handbook, “the student’s language skills, international understanding, and internship experience with the disciplinary concerns and methods of the major field” (5). But how can a program be truly integrative if one essential component is not fully integrated? And how is “international understanding” to occur, if it is not through the mediation of language, and the access that language alone provides to a different, foreign, frame of reference?
In the case of a sociology major electing to spend her internship in West Africa, wouldn’t “international understanding” require that she take, at some point and preferably before leaving, one or two courses in French on francophone literature or culture? And yet when a recent CISLA brochure uses the young sociologist as an example and recommends possible “support courses” for her project, French is nowhere in sight. Listed instead are Economics 234 (“an examination of the economics of developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia”), Government 246 (Politics in Africa), Anthropology 245 (Ethnology of Subsaharan Africa), History 433 (Readings in the History of African Women), Art History 211 (African Art), or Gender and Women’s Studies 224 (“transnational women’s movements”). All these courses make perfect sense in the light of the planned research (“studying the changes in women’s sexual and reproductive rights in West Africa”). But the point here is not so much what is recommended as what is omitted; and what is omitted is again the emphasis on foreign languages.
Maybe the problem is the very expression “international understanding,” a pervasive, all-encompassing catch phrase that has the presumed authority and instant legitimacy of self-evidence: “international understanding” is what international studies promote. But aside from being slightly tautological, the claim is anything but obvious. The phrase is, in fact, evasive, not to say misleading: what does it mean to promote “international understanding,” and what exactly is one to “understand”? CISLA’s answer seems to privilege what Heidi Byrnes calls a “quantitative” approach, the approach that often defines international programs anchored in area studies. The goal is the acquisition of a body of knowledge, presented through a variety of perspectives, with a strong emphasis—which I alluded to earlier—on social sciences. “International understanding” in that view would derive mostly, if not solely, from the ability to ingest a certain amount of facts relating to major sectors of activity in a given foreign country. But one could argue, as Byrnes does, that “international understanding is not achieved through an aggregate of information. It is not merely a quantitative goal. Indeed the aim is a qualitative shift in one’s stance, a shift that crucially depends on a realization of the limitations . . . [of] one’s own culturally derived acting and being” (11). That kind of shift is not likely to happen without the incorporation, at different stages in the program, of a serious, rigorous, and sustained foreign exposure, which could mean an additional language requirement for the juniors who cannot afford to go abroad before the internship (Paxton tells me that such a requirement is about to be put into place) and a call for some form of advanced work in the target language, at the senior level. I do not have statistics on that last point, but I suspect that only a minority does so, most likely the small group of CISLA students already specializing in foreign languages.4
This is the final question I would like to address, the question of CISLA scholars who happen to be majors in a foreign language. The necessity to find, for their sake, some kind of common ground has been, over the years, one of the most neuralgic points of tension. But there are now signs of a promising, long-needed rapprochement. I have alluded before to the troubled relationship CISLA has had, almost from the beginning, with most foreign language departments (the exception is Hispanic studies). The early hopes for a strong, productive collaboration quickly gave way, on both sides, to a kind of désenchantement, which then turned into a tacit, mutual indifference. In some ways, we have been reenacting, on a smaller scale, the old war referred to earlier between social sciences and the humanities. Needless to say, the estrangement has been harmful to both parties and especially detrimental to foreign languages. The worst part of it is that we have only ourselves to blame. Confronted with the CISLA challenge, we have decided to ignore it, indulging instead in what may be our most dangerous tendency, to view ourselves as foreign enclaves, yearning for campus-wide recognition while proudly cultivating a splendid isolation. By doing so, we have made ourselves much more vulnerable to the danger we dread most, the danger of becoming mere service units.
The time has come for a truce and a change, and a change is coming. When I recently met with Fred Paxton, it was, in part, to discuss the status of some senior projects that were to count both as SIP for CISLA and Honors in French. One of the projects was devoted to la campagne anti-tabac en France et aux Etats-Unis (the antismoking campaign in France and in the United States). Aside from the language (it was to be written in French) and the topic (having to do, to some extent, with French culture) I could not help wondering what was French about it and, even more to the point, what it had to do with the French department. To me, it was like asking one of my colleagues in English to direct a thesis on hydraulics; and the temptation was very, very strong to dismiss the whole thing as irrelevant and out of place (the fact that it was supposed to be written in French only made matters worse, for it instantly raised the specter of the instrumental, reductive view à la Berlitz). Paxton’s answer was to try to revise the topic and make it closer to the interests and the expertise of the French department. Whether or not this was feasible, his response made me realize how wrongheaded my reaction had been. The idea is not to dismiss but to find ways to collaborate, and to learn to think creatively, so that the collaboration remains meaningful, productive, and intellectually satisfying for all parties.
I can think of two avenues I would like to explore in developing this new partnership with CISLA. One would be a renewed effort to regularly engage in joint ventures, seminars and workshops focusing on the very questions we are debating today: What does “internationalization” mean? Can we think of different, equally valid versions? How do we reconcile the “quantitative” and the “qualitative” approach? In more concrete and immediate terms, and this is something Paxton himself suggested, we could organize, as a form of advanced “foreign” work, some kind of capstone symposium in which CISLA students, working in team with foreign language students, would participate in presentations and debates, in the target language, about their experiences overseas. The second avenue has to do, further down the road, with the creation, within foreign languages, of our own program in international studies. This is an initiative we have just begun discussing, but the CISLA director, Paxton, is part of the team, and I hope he will play a major role in helping us design a multilingual, pluridisciplinary, flexible structure on whose resources CISLA could be the first to draw. It would be a way of consolidating CISLA’s base in liberal arts, by encouraging exchanges across the whole broadened spectrum of international studies; it would also help to make certain that true and sound internationalization remains Connecticut College’s trademark. I will let that be my hopeful, final word.
1The percentage of minority students enrolled between 1997 and 2002 is about 15 (22 students out of 150).
2The percentage of students in the 2002 CISLA class who spent time abroad before their internship is 51 (17 students out of 29) for a semester and 35 (11 out of 31) for a year. For the 2003 class, the percentage is 69 (20 out of 29) for a semester and 14 (4 out of 29) for a year.
3No data are available for the entrance scores, but at the exit level, the percentage of students scoring higher than required is 64 (20 students out of 31) for the class of 2000; 53 (14 out of 26) for the class of 2001; and 68 (19 out of 29) for the class of 2002.
4The number of CISLA students specializing in foreign languages has been steadily declining since 1997, even though these students represent about half the total enrollment: 78 out of 150.
Byrnes, Heidi. “Foreign Language Departments and the Cultural Components of an International Studies Program.” ADFL Bulletin 22.1 (1990): 10–15. [Show Article]
Connecticut College: International Studies. New London: Connecticut Coll., Office of Admissions, 2000.
Handbook, Academic Year 2001–2002. Toor Cummings Center for Intl. Studies and the Liberal Arts, Connecticut Coll.
Holquist, Michael. “A New Tour of Babel: Recent Trends Linking Comparative Literature Departments, Foreign Language Departments, and Area Studies Programs.” Profession 1996. New York: MLA, 1996. 103–14.
Lambert, Richard. International Studies and the Undergraduate. Washington: Amer. Council on Educ., 1989.
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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