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IN THE era of what I will call the discourse of excellence at institutions of higher learning, it might seem counterintuitive to begin an essay in a professional journal with the exhortation to think in small, local terms about what constitutes success in departments of languages, literatures, and cultures in the area of study-abroad or international service-learning projects. Surely the better advice is to set the bar high: to raise standards, name lofty goals, and provide proper tools of assessment and accountability to demonstrate to ourselves and to external audiences how we have reached those goals. While I believe that we should be doing this as well, I want to concentrate here on encouraging us all to “make our bowl small”—the governing metaphor of the study-abroad semester that twelve Gustavus Adolphus and Saint Olaf College students and I spent in the centers of Lutheran Reformation in Germany in spring 2000.
Faced with twelve exhausted, overwhelmed students with jet lag and a pile of residency paperwork before us on our first afternoon in Wittenberg, I repeated something told to me in a similar situation years ago: that we might think of the five months ahead as representing a bowl of expectations. If our bowl was large, we would feel more and more cheated as expectation after expectation went unmet. The bowl would remain empty. If, however, we had few expectations—if our bowl of need was tiny—we would soon find that we had abundance. We would be more likely to greet changed plans, language mistakes, missed trains, strange customs, and unfamiliar food with humor and as a source of delight and surprise. Similarly, I argue here that we should measure the success of our programs against our own highly distinctive and variable missions—our small bowl—even as we articulate those missions based on a knowledge of both the field of language and literature study and our larger institutional cultures.
If we consider which goals in the field of language and culture study lead us to send students abroad or into our local non-English-speaking communities, we might name linguistic or grammatical competence, communicative proficiency, and intercultural exposure and sensitivity. We would like to think that we will be able to quantify how those goals are met, and, indeed, there are studies done that attempt to do just that. But how else might we be thinking about what we are up to? The title of this essay is “Serving the Mission,” and I would like to take seriously the multivalence of both those terms. As I illustrate what the two might mean in the local context of some of Gustavus Adolphus College’s initiatives—a kind of case study—I hope that you will muse on the institutional culture in which you reside and will question what other competencies might emerge as study-abroad or service-learning goals where you are.
When I attend ADFL Seminars, I get excited about initiatives described by colleagues at other institutions, and I take copious notes about the details, but I forget one global truth: if we trace the genealogy of most successful models for study abroad or the way the study of world languages and cultures has been woven into the fabric of institutions, we find that these models evolved from the commitment, passion, and sense of ownership of a faculty member or administrator. Someone had an idea one day, got excited about it, and was willing to take a risk by trying to engender excitement in someone else. The ancestor, therefore, of a model is usually a person in a specific local space. So when I illustrate some of the ways my institution has thought about the intersection of our disciplinary missions and our larger vocation as those who “profess,” I am telling you about the individuals and the community that have been integral to the success of these ventures, and I am not necessarily encouraging you to adopt a model of study abroad that works for us. The invitation, rather, is for you to reflect on the people and the community where you come from and think about what gifts are there to be discovered.
For Gustavus, an institution located at the intersection of Swedish heritage and Lutheran legacy, the notion of such unquantifiable ideals as spiritual, ethical, or intellectual growth is consonant both with our history and with the understanding of the liberal arts project named in our institutional mission statement. Our mission, perhaps in keeping with the Lutheran theological notion of paradox, has words and goals that are often a challenge, given our demographics. On the one hand, we extol the virtues of an education that is both international and interdisciplinary in perspective. On the other hand, a good number of our students are still blond, blue-eyed, Lutheran, and from the upper Midwest; they come to us wanting to proceed down a direct path—through a discipline-bound major—that will lead them to a job.1 The college also encourages a commitment to service, and usually the model for service our students bring comes from their local churches or mission trips with their congregations. They have embodied the desire to serve, in other words, but they have not struggled with notions of charity or mission. Nor have they attended to reflection on or systematic analysis of the global, economic, and cultural issues that inform the communities in which they do that service. The college further seeks to encourage students toward a mature understanding of Christian faith, which implies questioning that faith, putting it to the test, and considering it in the light of other world-faith traditions. There is often a black-and-white resistance to that gray project. Finally, the college asks its graduates to work for peace and justice in the world, even as it is aware that many of its students are relatively privileged and have not interrogated this possibility.2
How, then, has Gustavus shaped its study-abroad and international service-learning initiatives to intersect the traditional goals of linguistic and intercultural competence with these paradoxical mission quandaries? We have accepted that there will be no way to achieve what we set out to do without a significant expenditure of faculty time; without faculty members’ willingness to expose their vulnerability and risk their authenticity; and without their willingness to reach out, in collaborative fashion, to those nonfaculty members of the institution and the community who can provide support, resources, and enthusiasm to our students both before and after the study-abroad or service-learning experience.
My own experience as a faculty member has been one in which words like “autonomy,” “critical distance,” and “mastery” were valued highly. So the very things I have listed as necessary for the success of these programs do not always come naturally, I fear, to the professoriat in general. Yet participating in these programs has allowed me to remember why I felt called to profess in the first place, has strengthened my idealism about the liberal arts project, and has constituted my best teaching—although I was not in a conventional classroom and only rarely drew on my expertise as a scholar of twentieth-century German literature.
When I began planning a course on multicultural Germany in January 1999, I had in mind the most traditional activities: take a group of students to Berlin; deposit them in rented classrooms; hire a few of my German colleagues to provide them with some facts and figures about immigration patterns, hybrid identities, and so on—all in the context of the postwar realities of the legacy of the Holocaust, forty years of Communism in the east, and the “gentle” revolution3 and subsequent (re)unification of Germany. In short, I assumed that it would be a Gustavus course lifted and transplanted into the target of our studies. Had the course gone that way, it would have been an interesting and enriching January for our students.
But it did not. Instead, a modest enrollment and the cost of honoraria, classroom rental, and living expenses in Berlin forced me to face the choice of rethinking the course or canceling it. Not wanting to disappoint the students who had enrolled, I decided to forge ahead. I wrote to the central office of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (the Protestant Church of Germany), the umbrella under which the Lutheran Church in Germany exists, and inquired about colleagues in Berlin who might be working in multicultural ministry and service there. A surprised and enthusiastic response provided me with a contact in Berlin. I then sent numerous faxes and e-mail messages to service organizations in Berlin, some of which worked through the church; some of which were public; and all of which helped refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in Berlin and the state of Brandenburg. I told them that I was coming with students, provided them with a copy of Gustavus’s mission statement—highlighting the emphasis on international and interdisciplinary experience and service—and asked them if they might allow us to talk to them about their work. I said that we did not want to be tourists; we would welcome the chance to do hands-on work in local communities, if that seemed appropriate. The response was positive, and so we set off for Berlin with a varied and intense schedule for a month of interning, observation, conversation, and service.
We spent time with a group of women who provide a neighborhood gathering place and literacy center for Kurdish refugees; with a legal-aid service in a remodeled Lutheran church in the primarily Turkish neighborhood of Kreuzberg; with a group of Germans and Palestinians who find furniture and living space for asylum seekers of all nationalities; with a youth home for underaged and unaccompanied refugees; with a flea market and teahouse for Lebanese, Turkish, and German members of the Tiergarten neighborhood, just to mention a few of our many experiences. In addition, we had conversations with the German senate office for foreign affairs, the leaders of the migration project for the service wing of the church, and a journalist and leaders in the Jewish community. We played sports with young ethnic Germans who had spent most of their life in Russia; we processed donations and provided child care at the flea market; and we observed consulting sessions with refugees at a kind of high-rise, urban ghetto called Gropiusstadt. In all these situations, we were anything but tourists. Our work was emotionally draining, often frustrating, fraught with the effects of multiple language barriers, our inexperience, the disheartening plight of many of the people we met, and the poignant commitment and exhausted demeanor of the German workers at these organizations. Yet the experience was exhilarating. We came away from many of the days of work with a sense of awe at how meaningful our tiny contributions had seemed. And we knew that we were offering our service in ways that illuminated the nuances of current debates about dual citizenship and immigration policy. This knowledge would simply not have been possible from reading the newspaper or hearing a lecture.
The next year, in spring 2000, I led the first iteration of the college’s semester-long program in Germany. This initiative originated from the desire of several presidents of institutions with our denominational affiliation to offer a consortial program focusing on our common Lutheran legacy.4 Eventually, only Gustavus and nearby Saint Olaf College remained in the consortium, and I accompanied the first group of our students. We spent one month in Wittenberg, three months in the Halle-Leipzig area, and one month living in the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt where Martin Luther had been a monk. The month in Wittenberg included service projects in the local community, which were assigned on an individual basis according to the German proficiency of the students. For example, those students who had the least German were assigned to work in a kindergarten; those with more worked in a variety of social service agencies. In the monastery in Erfurt, our service was integrated more naturally into the curriculum: I taught a course on monasticism, and the Sisters of the Casteller Ring, the resident order at the Augustinerkloster, invited us to participate side by side with them in their community life. This participation translated into maintaining the cloister garden, washing the floor of the church sanctuary, cleaning up courtyards, overseeing exhibits, and other activities that helped the sisters provide hospitality to the many tourists and pilgrims who passed through.
In both the January term in Berlin and in the semester in the Lutheran heart of Germany, the students’ German improved by leaps and bounds, although little of their work was in the classroom. They were asked to use German to facilitate the communication necessary in providing a service. They not only increased their linguistic competence, but they also fulfilled community needs and—most important—forged relationships that helped them begin to see the world through a somewhat wider-angle lens.
Traveling overseas is not the only way to offer experiential learning opportunities to students, and faculty members are not the only people who can structure these experiences. In Saint Peter, Minnesota, we have a growing Latino population, and Gustavus has an active and popular Community Service Center. Two of the student volunteers at the center were also students of Spanish. In talking to the Saint Peter public school teachers about the Gustavus students’ Study Buddies program,5 they learned that the Latino children were not integrating well. The teachers had trouble communicating with the parents, because of the linguistic barrier and because of the fear that many of the Latino parents had of American bureaucracy. The recognition of this community need led the two students to develop the Amigos program, which has grown to encompass after-school programs, a junior Spanish club for American and Latino pupils, an on-call translation service, ESL tutors, a great-books program, and other services. Dozens of Gustavus Spanish students have volunteered in this program, and the service they have given has awarded them better Spanish, a more intimate knowledge of the cultures from which their new friends come, and a better understanding of the obstacles to the integration of new immigrants.6
The Amigos program won two coveted service awards at the college—the first time a language-associated group has won these awards—and inspired its faculty mentor, Gastón Alzate, to develop a new January-term course. Alzate noticed that many of the student volunteers initially assumed that the Mexicans had come to Saint Peter not only because of poverty but also because of a sense of lack in their own cultures. A January-term course that had students travel to Latin America to explore the great Mayan and Incan civilizations was developed, and it has enjoyed healthy enrollments from Amigos volunteers. Curricular needs often precede the integration of service-learning opportunities into existing courses, but sometimes service can lead to the development of whole new courses, offering a more organic integration of theory and experience in our curricula.7
Perhaps even more important than what happens in the experiences just summarized is what we do in our institutions after students return. I remember my own reentry into college life after what felt to me like a fundamentally transformative year in Germany in 1978. I was full of stories, but few people wanted to hear them, especially at the formal, institutional level. I had been sent off to do my study abroad and was welcomed back as if the entire experience could be reduced to a number of transfer credits on my transcript and a documented increase in German fluency. This lack of response was deflating. I am now lucky enough to be in an academic community whose members are eager to help one another think about how to receive students back into our midst in ways that honor the experiences they have had. We also tap a pragmatic potential, using them as ambassadors for the study of languages and cultures. We have a nonrequired but well-attended daily chapel program in which students can serve as homilists and talk about their experiences abroad. We have a local art center eager to host evenings where students read from their travel journals. We have staff people who are good listeners.8 We have centers for vocational reflection and community service. Above all, we are a residential college typically known for the communitarian values of its campuses. We know who is here, and we are able to bring together people who want to tell their stories and people who want to hear them.
If we can identify phases in the reentry of students after study-abroad or service-learning experiences, the first phase might be the simple need of students to have their stories heard. What are the venues on your campus where such storytelling might be facilitated? Is there an international house or other living situation that might be hospitable to an eager returnee? Do you have colleagues or friends in your academic community who might serve as an audience for an evening of storytelling? The second phase is activism. Students who experienced an earthquake during a January-term trip to El Salvador organized a clothing drive. Students who returned from the term in Germany entered the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. How might you foster similar impulses of developing and engaged citizenship on your campus? The third stage of reentry I would call integration. I have seen students return to language and culture study after a service-learning experience with a different sense of the relevance of their study—not in the utilitarian or applied sense of job outlook but in the sense of the benefits of real communication with real people.
Let me share some of the lessons I have learned from my experiences with the intersections of language and culture study and service learning here at Gustavus.
One direct benefit to your program might come in the area of increased enrollments. But recalling the metaphor of the small bowl, let us measure benefits more indirectly and unconventionally. For example, I have been hopeful about the connection to other offices on campus and to the number of people who by that connection have been educated about what my department does. I am happy that some of the courses in my program have been identified as central to the mission of the college. I have been gratified that in addition to getting better at adjective endings, my students have helped Turkish and Kurdish boys learn to play soccer together peacefully in Berlin. I have been awed to hear students who arrived in Wittenberg in January—barely confident enough to order lunch in German—use their improved skills in May in the monastery in Erfurt to comfort one of the newly arrived sisters as she mourned the loss of her old community. Ultimately, I have noticed students who have connected their study of language to the possibility of engagement in the world.
At the beginning of this essay, I mentioned the importance of the words “serve” and “mission.” Both are tied intimately to the vocational aspect of our profession. I hope that the description of some of the very local projects at my institution will lead you to think about what your own mission is as one who professes at your institution. Aside from the expectations of the dean, the president, the board of trustees, the legislators—who together constitute an impossibly large bowl—there are your own expectations as individuals who decided at one time to share your love of languages, literatures, and cultures with your students and your colleagues. You must attend to the need to provide external constituencies with quantifiable measures of your efforts, an important part of defining your success, but such an exercise may not be what sustains your enthusiasm. Remembering your personal definition of mission within your department is an equally crucial process. May that small bowl represent great abundance for you.
2 My thanks to Brian Johnson and Carolyn O’Grady of Gustavus for discussing these observations with me, a result of their initial research for a book on spirituality and service among college students.
3The revolution of 1989 has been called sanfte in German.
4 Gustavus is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
5 Study Buddies is an afternoon tutoring service offered by Gustavus students in the public schools.
6 Emily Dale and Christine Weber were assisted and mentored in their efforts by my colleague in Spanish Gastón Alzate and by the directors of the Community Service Center, Sara Pekarna and Kari Lipke.
7 The integrating of theory and experience is the crucial difference between volunteerism and service learning. In service learning, students are prepared ahead of time; mentored through the experience; asked to reflect regularly, write position papers, read, and so on; and are expected to examine the experience afterward through papers, more reading, analysis, and other tools. See Canada and Speck’s brief overview of service learning in the Jossey-Bass series on higher education.
8 Carol Lawrence, the administrative assistant in my department, and Julie Johnson, the director of academic advising, are well known by students for their delight in listening to stories from abroad.
Canada, Mark, and Bruce W. Speck, eds. Developing and Implementing Service-Learning Programs. New Directions for Higher Educ. 114. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.
The Gustavus Mission. 26 Feb. 2003 http://www.gustavus.edu/welcome/mission.cfm.
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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