The impact of Antioch education through experience abroad

THE IMPACT OF ANTIOCH EDUCATION THROUGH EXPERIENCE ABROAD*

Irwin Abrams

A B S T R A C T : Part ic ipants in a program of living, studying, and working abroad in the 1960's consider th is in retrospect to have been one of the most impor tant experiences they ever had. A prel iminary analysis of quest ionnaire data indi- cates, along with academic outcomes, a significant impact upon subsequent behavior. Educational and job decisions were influenced, as well as th ink ing about values and American identity. I t appears t ha t the more a program overseas encourages involvement in other cultures in a var iety of roles, wi th work experience prominent among them, the more we can expect endur ing a t t i tudina l and behavioral outcomes,

When Antioch College first ventured overseas in 1957 to establish educational programs for its students--and only a handful of institutions had done so--it was regarded as a risky under- taking. Moreover, regularly including work experience in the educational program abroad was practically unheard of. In the intervening years, however, undergraduate study abroad has become respectable and even respected in American higher education. Schools that have no programs themselves now readily accept the credits earned by their students abroad, generally in special courses in which the learning can be tested for in traditional ways. Nevertheless, the learning that students display in their papers and bluebooks is not always what they themselves regard as most significant; they usually come home to report that it was really their encounter with the culture outside the

*This study was made together wi th Dr. Ruth Churchill , Dean of Educational Evaluat ion at Antioch, and Paula Spier, Director of Student Programs, Antioch Internat ional . It was first reported in February, 1978, at the nat ional meet ings of the In ternat ional Studies Association in Washington, D.C., and a condensed version was pr inted in Antioch Notes in March, "Working into Another Culture."

Dr. Irwin Abrams is Professor of History at Antioch Universi ty, Yellow Springs, Ohio. 176 Alternative Higher Education, Vol. 3(3), 1979

0361-6851/79/1300-0176500.95 © 1979 Human Sciences Press

IRWIN ABRAMS 177

classroom that affected them the most. Yet, except in language courses, these outcomes of learning abroad are too often left unexam- ined.

In their rigorous review of study-abroad programs, Sanders and Ward (1970) said that the greatest possible immersion in another culture is the most valid purpose that these programs should set out to achieve. They recognized that it was difficult to evaluate the learning outcomes that are generated but they insisted that ~the academic fu- ture of study-abroad programs may well depend upon the development of procedures by which the student's experience can be described and evaluated. The student rather than the course is the relevant factor." Since in its own educational design, Antioch has placed such emphasis upon experience, it seemed appropriate on this twentieth birthday of Antioch Education Abroad (AEA), to try to capture these less tangible consequences of experiential learning in other cultures--to try to mea- sure the immeasurable. We concentrated on individuals, not courses, and, with the advantage of their longer perspective after graduation, we looked for lasting effects of what had been learned through the experience abroad.

It is in this realm--beyond the strictly academic, but well within the area of learning--that we conceived the present study. With the help of a grant from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, we inquired into the impact of Antioch Education Abroad upon a sample of the participants of the nineteen-sixties. We found certain enduring effects of this experience of living, studying, and working abroad. Seven to seventeen years later, a great number of the alumni consider this experience one of the most important they ever had. They feel that it has a significant influence upon their subsequent educational and job decisions and their way of living, and there is evidence in their actual behavior to support this. The experience made them think hard about their values and especially about their American identity. Apparently, the work experience, the distinctive part of the Antioch educational pattern both at home and abroad, had much to do with these outcomes.

The objectives of AEA, as Antioch came to formulate them, were three: the experience was to be ~a stimulus to the student's growth in academic competence," ~'a means to further the development and growth of the student's personal philosophy," and ~a preparation for intelligent participation in the student's own society" through com- parative experience in other societies (Office of Antioch Education Abroad, manual, p. 1).

After the first ten years an evaluation of AEA was published by Esther A. Oldt, who had been its organizer and first director (Oldt,

178 ALTERNATIVE HIGHER EDUCATION

1969). In those days undergraduate programs abroad still needed to prove their academic legitimacy and this report was concerned chiefly with evidence of academic accomplishment. She found that it was the abler and more intellectual students who entered the program, and that they raised their grade point average on their return, duly com- pleted their undergraduate programs, and went on to win a dis- proportionate share of graduate fellowships. The evidence was compel- ling that the first objective of AEA was being achieved.

What about the other two objectives? Both the development of a personal philosophy and preparation for usefulness to society had been part of Antioch's educational purpose since the college had been rebuilt by Arthur Morgan in the nineteen-twenties. Morgan wanted his graduates to emerge with a set of values that would inspire their fu- ture behavior. And he hoped that his work-study plan would help them ground these values in actual experience in the ~'real" world beyond the campus. Experience was the keynote. When Antioch extended this educational plan beyond our borders, the earliest handbooks were enti- tled, ~Antioch Education through Experience Abroad."

In the decade of the nineteen-sixties about 1500 Antioch students participated in AEA. We sent to 670 of them a thirteen-page questionnaire. It was comprehensive and demanding; to answer it a respondent needed one to two hours and a continuing concern for the program. Over half of them did reply, and we were able to use 330 in our statisti- cal analysis. For a control group we sent the applicable parts of the questionnaire to 200 comparable students of those years who had not gone on AEA, and we received 94 usuable replies.

We first identified the characteristics of the foreign experience of our sample. Antioch Education Abroad was not one program, but a variety of programs, ranging from the highly structured group plan in Mexico to individualized arrangements that took Antioch students to many countries of the world. The program in Guanajuato lasted for the three months of a campus academic quarter and stressed language learning, with family stays and special courses on Mexican civilization given in Spanish. Other more structured programs were those in Japan and Scandinavia. In the program Earlham College administered for the Great Lakes Colleges Association in Japan, the participants studied Japanese intensively, lived and worked with Japanese families, but took their courses in English at Waseda University. Antioch students in this program also held jobs. In the program of the Scandinavian Seminar, Antiochians studied language, intensively practiced it on homestays and followed regular courses in folk high schools. In France, French Switzerland, and the Federal Republic of Germany, Antioch

IRWIN ABRAMS 179

students arranged to follow regular universi ty courses with assistance of Antioch staff members in those countries, who also placed them on jobs during the vacation periods. In the British Isles Antioch students were widely dispersed at tending regular courses at a number of universities; some of them used their vacation periods for jobs, others for travel. In our sample the highest number of Antiochians went to France and Germany and nearby countries, excluding Scandinavia (114), then the British Isles (75), next Latin America (46), Medi- ter ranean countries (29), Scandinavia (28), Asia (18), Africa (8), and East Europe (5).

The group programs were similar to the great majority of United States programs abroad. The important difference was Antioch's work program: 70% of our sample had job experience abroad, as the 1962 AEA Manual points out, ~not primarily for vocational t raining nor for earning one's way, but for an added dimension of experience in the life of another c o u n t r y . . , as a participant, not merely observer, guest, or tourist." Antiochians abroad worked in children's homes, hospitals, factories, offices, international voluntary work camps, as social service aides, domestics or farm helpers, and in many other capacities.

Along with the work experience, what other features characterized the programs of our sample? One was the length of stay. The great majority spent more than six months abroad. The short-term Mexican program was the exception. Another was the degree of cultural immersion. Antioch's earliest report to the educational community, after two years of the program, stated that it seemed clear ~that it is education- ally sound and administrat ively feasible to have a program that im- merses the student in the foreign culture ra ther than one that trans- plants him to an Antioch colony abroad" (Abrams, 1969, pp 1-5). In our present data we found that 71% studied in regular courses provided for students of their host country; only 29% studied in special courses provided for foreigners or arranged by foreigners, as was so with the great majority of other undergraduate programs abroad. Moreover, as compared with the increasingly popular but often academically suspect study-tours, only 1% of our alumni said that the major focus of their program had been travel, although 98% reported that they had tray- eted while abroad.

The most gratifying finding was that today, twelve years later on the average, most of the AEA alumni who responded have the most positive feelings about their participation: 53% consider it ~'one of the most important experiences of my life," and another 26% regard it as ~a great experience." Thus 79% in all give Antioch Education Abroad a resounding yea. Still another 17% think that it was ~a good experience


on the whole." Only 4% consider the experience disappointing. Even taking account of the greater probability that we would be more likely to hear from the well disposed, this is still an impressive finding.

A high percentage of the respondents feel that they had participated significantly in another culture. Seventy-eight percent think that they became highly involved, either ~as much a part of that life as one there for a limited time could be" (40%) or ~beginning to understand and fit into some aspects of the picture" (38%). Only 22% judge that their involvement was superficial. As to communicating with people in that society, 80% think they succeeded well: 32% report that they could communicate ~even on very sensitive issues on which our backgrounds differed markedly," and 48% say that they could express their own and understand the other people's feelings on most issues. What made such a high record possible was that 80% learned a foreign language, including even those who studied in English-speaking countries, and 65% think they learned it well enough to read with understanding and speak about complicated issues.

Indications of a high degree of immersion in another culture also showed up in answers to the question, ~What was a high point of your experience on AEA?" Twenty-eight per cent referred to experiences that could be grouped as a sense of communion or sharing or belonging to the host culture or some part of it. Another 16% said that a high point came in personal relations with a foreign individual or individuals (some of which led to international marriages).

We asked what they did that gave them the best understanding of the people in the foreign society. The preponderant number of responses referred to the family stay, the work experience, and the relations with students of that country. Travel and study were also men- tioned, but only a third as frequently as each of these three.

To support what they told us about success in communication with people in their country, we asked for an example. One respondent reminded us that ~there is a closeness, if only for a few moments, that tells you there is special communication." Others gave specific exam- ples, and they defy categorization. They range all the way from participation in meaningful political discussions and group leisure activities to experiences as diverse as sharing a hospital room in Yugoslavia--~'she told me her life story and taught me folksongs. I taught her about birth control"--to ~coming down off Mt. Kenya with a fellow exchange student. We got our shoes shined in downtown Nairobi after which we shined the shoes of the shoeshiner (spit shine)" or ~get- ting drunk with a Rhodesian refugee who swam the Zambezi to freedom." Two respondents teased us by answering in their second language, Japanese and Spanish.

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Many comments about readjustment to life in the United States indicated a close involvement with the country left behind:

For approximately two years after India I couldn't uncover my legs due to Indian training. Couldn't eat meat. Felt like a lost soul.

English felt like a foreign language. I was used to more structure and more repressed ways of acting.

Difficult at first to shed the Europe-engendered feeling that one's life is not completely private and return to the relative anonymity of life in much Ameri- can society.

Resented abrasiveness of day-to-day life in America.

As these responses suggest, the experience on AEA did affect personal philosophies as the college had hoped in formulat ing the objectives. In the answers to a var ie ty of our questions, we found an almost unanimous feeling tha t students ' social and political values had been challenged. We asked in par t icular what effect AEA had on "your perception of yourself as an American?" Only 8% reported there had been no change. We grouped the other answers like this: 44% who felt tha t their perception had become more positive; 20% who thought it had first been affected negatively but ended up positively, and 26% who felt the experience had changed their perception of themselves as Americans negatively. This finding is consistent with tha t of an earl ier study of 1959-60, which compared comparable groups of AEA and non-AEA students (Churchill, 1960). It was found tha t before their departure, the group heading abroad were more negative toward the United States than their fellows. On their r e tu rn from abroad, however, the AEA students were making fewer negative comments about the United States, while the students who did not go on AEA were making more. Most of our AEA group went abroad later, during years of s tudent turbulence and protests, and from many of thei r comments we received the impression tha t but for these events, the percentage of positive perceptions would have been higher.

Some s ta tements from the alumni suggest what may have happened to many of them:

I think I found a new interest in everything around me. I began looking at things, examining issues and asking questions in a way that I knew my Euro- pean friends would. I began to interpret events in two ways--as an American and as a German visitor.


There are such things as cultural screens and despite my relative alienation from American society, I too was an American in some sense.

While I was deeply opposed to the ever increasing involvement in Vietnam, I began to appreciate my right of dissent and other freedoms which I enjoyed as a U.S. citizen. (After a visit to East Berlin and German Democratic Republic)

My experiences abroad gradually helped me realize the Americanness of my seeking change, trying to adapt, individuality, informality and deep need of equality.

I am caught between the traditional but very rich life over there and the hang-loose society and flexible political system here.

For political freedom and a dynamic multi-faceted society, I would rather live in America than anywhere else.

I became convinced finally that America was my arena of combat, it would take many years to be as familiar with another country as I was with the U.S. and being born here gave me a moral right to fight to change it.

Many students who were disposed to be critical of thei r own society's shortcomings, as so many students of the nineteen-sixties tended to be, found themselves defending it--~surprisingly, '' as one wrote- -and what was more important , they became aware of their freedom to criticize and to work to correct these shortcomings. Many answers indicated a newly discovered sense of this country's flexibility and heterogeneity. In part icular many participants came back from Latin America with an appreciation of the greater degree of freedom for women in the United States.

The experience abroad had an important influence upon subsequent behavior of the alumni both in thei r educational and job careers. Our findings corroborated those of the Oldt study of 1969: this was an academically oriented group to begin with, and a higher percentage than tha t of thei r non-AEA classmates finished college at Antioch or elsewhere, went on to graduate school, and earned Ph.D.'s. We asked specifically what they thought the effect of AEA had been on their educational choices. A similar question put in 1964 to alumni of the first six years of the program had elicited a prevailing feeling tha t AEA had had little or not specific influence on the i r academic life (Sparks and Oldt, 1967). Looking back now from a greater distance of time, 21% of our own sample judge tha t AEA influenced their choice of graduate school and 39% their choice of a graduate field. Fifty-one per

IRWIN ABRAMS 183

cent think that in general their AEA experience strengthened their academic interests and motivation.

With regard to their job history our findings also reversed those of the 1964 study, which found that shortly after their AEA experience alumni could see little or no effect on their vocational life. Now about one-third of our own sample report that AEA influenced their choice of both field of work and specific jobs, 38% that it continues to influence their job aspirations. Almost half of them think that ~marketable skills or background" gained from AEA helped them to obtain a job. The specific ~tools" they referred to include language, self-confidence, cultural knowledge, and experience abroad. Almost 50% report that since graduation they have used a foreign language on a job.

Sensitivity to people of another culture may have enabled many of them to develop closer relationships with people at home. Many answers highlight these important relationships. In fact, we may have here a people-oriented group as well as an academic-oriented group. In a study of Antioch seniors of 1969 and 1970 that probed for differences between AEA returnees and those who had not been in the program, the AEA students were found more often to enjoy activities with other people, in particular intellectual activities with their peers and the faculty. They were more likely to report that they were becoming mo~e accepting and understanding of others, and they were more likely to acknowledge other people (peers, co-workers, and faculty) as having something to do with these changes they perceived in themselves.*

Whether such characteristics would apply to AEA alumni of other years, we do find that our sample, as compared with the control group, report more close friends, more professional colleagues, and more ac- quaintances in other countries. Some of these associations go back to their AEA days, since over half report that they keep up with people whom they met on AEA.

As might be expected, they also travel abroad more than those who did not go on AEA, but Antiochians as a whole do much traveling between campus and job during their undergraduate years, and they remain a traveling lot. Of the AEA sample, 64% have made two to five trips abroad since graduation, compared to 54% of the control group. About one-third of each group was planning a trip for the next year.

Of the AEA alumni 46% have lived outside the United States since graduation, and 7% are living there now. Of the control group, 31% have lived abroad, 4% are currently there. When asked whether they would consider permanent residence abroad, 46% of all respondents,

*Office of Educational Evaluation and Research, June 21, 1971.


AEA and non-AEA alike, said yes, with no difference between the two groups.

The two groups did differ significantly on certain activities tha t can be considered international: a higher percentage of the AEA alumni keep up with current events outside the United States (60% to 48%), read foreign newspapers or magazines regularly (23% to 16%), and have read a book in a foreign language in the past year (31% to 10%).

As to involvement in social and political issues, we anticipated tha t it would be difficult to ascertain any special influence of AEA. As Burton Clark found in his study of Antioch in the early sixties, ~the spirit of political involvement, directed to off-campus issues, per- meated the climate of the campus," (Clark, 1970, p. 84) and this atmo- sphere may even have become more intense at the end of that decade with the general student turmoil on campuses and the Vietnam protest. It was not surprising to find that over half of all respondents felt good about their involvement in activities on a community, a na- tional, or a world level, and tha t about a third said they were involved ~'whenever I get a chance." All the same it was impressive to discover tha t as many as 69% reported tha t during the past year they ~'signed a petition, wrote a letter, card, or telegram concerned with some political issue." So although 45% of the AEA alumni thought tha t AEA had made them more involved, it looks as if they would have been just as involved if they had not participated in the program.

The work experience appears to have had a most important influence. The AEA alumni who did not work abroad were less likely than those who did to finish their B.A. degree. They were less likely to be able to use a foreign language and less inclined to note an influence of AEA on their graduate school and job choices. In fact, they were generally more likely to attr ibute to AEA little impact upon them.

In these areas and others, the AEA alumni without job experience look much more like those who did not go on AEA at all than they do those who went on AEA but held jobs. For example, consider the respondents who now hold a job abroad. Among those who worked abroad under AEA for more than three months, 1 in 5 now holds a job abroad, of those who worked less than three months, 1 in 6, while of the non-AEA group and the AEA non-job group, the figures are 1 in 11 and 1 in 14.

Another relevant statistic is tha t 59% of those who held jobs on AEA have close friends from other cultural backgrounds; only 44% of the non-AEA group and 46% of the AEA non-job group say the same. A similar difference is reported with regard to their professional colleagues from other cultural backgrounds. We also found that those

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country programs where the students held no jobs had significantly less impact on educational and job history and the other areas of subsequent behavior tha t we investigated. This was true of Mexico, for example, which, to be sure, was also short-term, but in the case of the two long-term groups in Great Britain, those who did not have jobs showed significantly less impact than those who did. Nor did it seem to mat ter where the job was located. Sixty-two per cent of those who studied in Great Britain and worked held their jobs outside that country.

It was the same story when we looked at those who registered the highest level of satisfaction with their AEA experience. They were likely to have gone to countries where they worked as well as studied. Programs in Mexico and Great Britain, without work, were the two that produced less satisfaction in the participants.

There were other factors besides work that appear to be related to the degree of participant satisfaction with AEA. Those who were least satisfied were less likely to have been abroad more than six months, to have traveled extensively, or to have taken courses regularly taught for students in the host country. And, as might be expected, they are more likely to consider that AEA had little effect upon them,

In general, then, what seems to be the case is the more immersion, the more satisfaction and the more impact. To put it differently, the more a program overseas encourages involvement with the host culture in a variety of roles, with that of worker in the society very important among them, the more we can expect to find enduring at t i tudes and behavior.

Again, we must emphasize that this hypothesis is based on a pre- l iminary analysis of our data. There is much more to be done. We do not know, for example, whether there are differences between the first five years and the second five years of our samples when there were certain changes in the Antioch college culture. We want to look further into program pat terns and the relationship of the various components, such as length of sojourn, to satisfaction levels and impact. We need to know more about the influence of work experiences compared to family stays. We would like to analyze the responses about present jobs, com- muni ty activism, and international interests in relationship to the location of the respondents. We would like to study comparable college populations on s tudy-abroad programs to ascertain how special are our findings. In advocating more cultural immersion, Sanders and Ward called for the preparation of ~the kind of s tudent who can handle an international experience with a greater degree of independence" (San- ders and Ward, 1970, p. 96). Such students seem to have been turned out


by Antioch College, which places a high degree of responsibility upon the individual student within a framework of alternating campus study and work in different parts of the United States. Other institutions have different ways of preparing their students, and there are now a small number of programs that put the individual students almost on their own as cultural explorers. We need more studies on the qualities of personality that are needed to make such arrangements work and on the best methods of preparing students for successful cross-cultural learning. Many of our AEA alumni thought that the college should do little more than provide language training and then just launch them!

These and other questions remain to be studied. What we discover about the impact of foreign experience outside the classroom may help us understand better and plan for similar extramural education at home, and the increasing attention to nontraditional learning in this country should help us improve our programs overseas and the evaluation of their outcomes (Keeton and Associates, 1976).

In becoming academically respectable study-abroad programs may have become too occupied with traditional ways of learning and ac- counting for it. It is heartening to find leaders of international education beginning to take a broader view. Rose Lee Hayden of the Ameri- can Council of Education in a recent paper spoke of what she called "non-formal" educational experiences overseas and urged that they be seen "as a legitimate mode of learning and as part of the total academic experience" (Hayden). We are indeed concerned with an area of educational experience of power and potentiality. Study-abroad programs may finally become in academic theory what they have always been in practice--programs of learning through experience abroad.

REFERENCES

Abrams, Irwin. An Interim Report on Antioch's Education Abroad. Clearing house of studies in higher education, special reports, OE 50009, Office of Education, Washington, DC, April 1969, pp. 1-5.

Churchill, Ruth. The effect of Antioch Education Abroad on students" attitudes, mimeographed publication of the Testing Office, Antioch College, 1960.

Clark, Burton R. The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, and Swarthmore. Chicago, 1970. Hayden, Rose Lee. Non-formal education: towards reinforcing and extending interna-

tion education. Mimeographed document, no date. Keeton, Morris T. and Associates. Experiential learning, rationale, characteristics, and

assessments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976. Office of Antioch Education Abroad. Antioch Education Abroad Manual. Antioch Col-

lege, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1962. Oldt, Esther A. Antioch Education Abroad: An Evaluation, Antioch College Reports,

No. 10, May, 1969.

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Sanders, Irwin T. and Ward, Jenni fe r C. Bridges to understanding international programs of American colleges and universities. Third of a series of profiles spon- sored by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. New York. 1970.

Sparks, Lois R. and Oldt, Es ther A. Antioch students look back. mimeographed, April, 1967.

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The impact of Antioch education through experience abroad