Content uploaded by Brigitte Kürsteiner
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Brigitte Kürsteiner on Dec 15, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
STUDENT LEARNING ABROAD: A SOCIO-
MATERIAL ANALYSIS OF LEARNING PROCESSES
OF TEACHER EDUCATION STUDENTS ABROAD
Brigitte Kürsteiner
Trogen AR
2022
Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde an der Philosophischen Fakultät
der Universität Freiburg (Schweiz)
Abstract
International education, as a political agenda, aims at fostering international student exchange
thereby pursuing diversified respective objectives, ranging from economic benefits, across
geopolitical strategies, to peace building or geostrategic identity building. Within the field of teacher
education, the focus has always been on intercultural understanding as this bears a practical relevance
because of the urgent need for dealing with diversity and migration issues in schools in many
countries and for many decades. Thus, the focus of study abroad in teacher education has for a long
time been on intercultural competence development. Hence, respective research has shown that the
development of intercultural competence on the occasion of study abroad does not correlate with
mere intercultural encounters and/or immersion strategies. According to a majority of respective
studies, students are not developing their intercultural competence without targeted intervention
measures.
Both policy agendas of international education in general and study abroad in particular, namely
the logic of benefits on the one hand and the assumption about interculturality on the other, have
been criticized from different angles, particularly for their neoliberal orientation. Furthermore,
models of intercultural competence used within the field of study abroad research and practice such
as the well-known and often used Intercultural Development Inventory of Milton J. Bennett (2012)
are criticised for their essentializing and homogenizing characters. The essentializing character of
this and similar models concerns their culturalist approach to interculturality and the idea of cultural
standards as learnable and fixed entities. Students are homogenized in that they are all seen as equally
able and willing to achieve degrees of pre-defined intercultural competences according to the models
if only they get trained or coached in the right way.
This poses two main problems: Firstly, because study abroad does not seem to correlate with the
above-mentioned essentialist and homogenizing assumptions about intercultural competence
development and culture, current conventional study abroad research holds on those premises by
pushing training and coaching approaches. This necessarily leads to a normative and judgmental
attitude towards study abroad students. Secondly, the lacking correlation between study abroad and
2
interculturality brings up the question of usefulness and benefits of study abroad in general. This
concern for accountability has been strengthened recently in that the Covid19-pandemic and the
climate strike movements across the world are threatening physical mobilities of education.
My own critique of this approach to international education additionally targets a biopolitical
critique of disciplining individuals to acquire competences and skills, aiming at integrating into
globalized job markets or geopolitical spheres (e.g the EU’s identity building objective). I will
address this question by taking a perspective of educational sociology (Bauer et al., 2012), thus
proposing to shift study abroad discourses away from what has been called ‘purposeful socialisation’
(Luhmann, 1987) towards a more socio-ecological approach. Thus, I aim at querying the benefit
orientation and the essentialisms and socialisation approach of actual study abroad discourses by
starting from the beginning: how does study abroad learning look if we capture it from a different
angle?
As study abroad is characterized by changes of physical components, be it non-human (material
and institutional) or corporeal (individual and social), the focus of the present study is on socio-
materiality of study abroad learning processes. Therefore, the theoretical foundation is based on
posthumanist (Braidotti, 2013, 2019) and new materialist (Deleuze & Guattari, 2020, DeLanda,
2006) paradigms which inform the research questions and methodology.
For this purpose, a study abroad cohort of the University of Teacher Education in Lucerne,
Switzerland has been interviewed before and after their study abroad period. The teacher education
students additionally had to record experienced situations during their study abroad term with their
smartphones using the Experience Sampling Method. Also, social networks of the students have been
studied before and after the study abroad period.
Findings of this triangulated quantitative-qualitative study suggest that study abroad offers a
potential to smoothen and blur pre-existent territorialisations, in that students traverse many ‘borders’
in which they are normally caught (e.g. institutional assumptions about education). This leads to
innovations of their professional identity. Thus, study abroad opens a space of possibilities of
deterritorialization, of change, and of leaving fixed patterns of acting, thinking and being on many
levels. This process is characterised by non-linearity (different speeds, temporal-spatial nearness and
proliferation of events) and tendance towards disequilibrium (parallelism of different learning
trajectories). Consequently, the learning processes can be described as a topology in which past +
present + future + different spaces and socio-materialities become related, thus triggering learning
processes which move study abroad away from encounter-centred assumptions of intercultural
learning.
Another finding concludes about the spatiality of study abroad learning processes. The results
allow for carving out immanent features of these learning processes. Regionality (e.g. specific
figurations) + mobility learning features (e.g. time availability, international community or
institutional settings) + global space + place specific features (e.g. university offering content)
together build large learning assemblages and produce student’s learning trajectories. Unlike
conventional study abroad, which assumes study abroad learning as a matter of cultural encounter
and national culture immersion, study abroad shows qualities of a global landscape offering
multiplicities of intensive capacities encompassing aspects of the global environment. For example
university as one of the place specific features in my sample proves to be a strong component of
study abroad learning processes in general and specifically regarding global capacities as it offers a
multiplicity of intensive capacities that reach far beyond mere representational knowledge
distribution.
3
Furthermore, the international student community proves to be more important than so called
host-national students within social-networks of study abroad students. The international community
allows students to get socially and physically entangled with global and global educational issues. It
plays an important role in that it provides a sense of globality and reorientation within many fields
but especially within the professional one.
In short, study abroad offers a potential to break down existing constraints or territorial fixations
of students and helps moving forward their identities beyond conventional concepts of
interculturality and intercultural competences.
References
Bauer, U., Bittlingmayer, U. H., & Scherr, A. (Ed.). (2012). Bildung und Gesellschaft. Handbuch
Bildungs- und Erziehungssoziologie. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.
Braidotti, R. (2019). The posthuman knowledge. Polity Press.
DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity.
Continuum.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2020). A thousand plateaus (12th ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original
work published 1987)
Luhmann, N. (1987). Soziologische Aufklärung 4: Beiträge zur funktionalen Differenzierung.
Westdeutscher Verlag GmbH.