Students abroad –practical ethnography

in the digital age

Some sources/projectsThe Interculture Project (1998-2002)http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/interculture/

Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication – The PIC project (2003-2006)http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/pic/

LLAS Good Practice Guide: ‘Intercultural awareness as a component of Modern Languages HE courses in the UK’ https://www.llas.ac.uk/search/node/robert%2BCrawshaw%2Btype%253Awebguide%252Cpaper

EU LANQUA Languages Network for Quality Assurance (2007-2010)http://www.lanqua.eu/theme/intercultural-communication

Before – During – After… Before: coursework/curriculum, quizzes, critical incidents, video commentary, NESSays, self-awareness questionnaires (the Big 5), role-plays, the ethnographic project…

During: Diaries, ‘projects’ (ethnographic), summary essays, dissertations, coursework…

After: Questionnaire, de-briefing (collective/one to one), oral assessment, presentation/discussion (group/individual)…

Why not… Go app/e with amobile…

There are a number of reasons why the current assessments and outputs deriving from the year abroad are unsatisfactory and in some cases inherently unreliable:

disparity exists between coursework marks obtained at different institutions for students studying at university; accurate marks are sometimes difficult to obtain;

essay writing replicates skills already practised within the degree programme and does not promote active, original analysis of lived experience;

the nature of the task promotes reliance on secondary sources and, by extension, plagiarism;

topics overlap with material covered elsewhere and their selection/approval is resource intensive; the level of linguistic proficiency displayed relative to the time and resource deployed is frequently disappointing;

the varied combinations of marks reflecting the different types of YA experience (split between two countries, university/teaching/professional placement etc.) is unnecessarily complex and demands excessive resource.

Going App/eStudents undertake a single creative project, regardless of the type of experience they undergo. The project would be essentially ethnographic in character. It would focus on the observation and analysis of everyday life, be derived directly from the personal experience of the student and take the form of a filmed documentary. It would incorporate creative images incorporated into a digital output combining landscape (urban/rural), live interview, face to camera, photographs, drawings, stills of documents, voice over and a written commentary in a single target language corresponding to the country/ies in which the students had spent the majority of the year. It would draw on authentic documentation and close observation. Presentation, originality, creativity and readability would be important assessment criteria alongside the quality of the language and the acuity of the analysis. The film would be accompanied by a scrap book/ journal de bord.

Preparation would take the form of a module on ethnography and documentary featuring some celebrated examples (Flaherty, Varda, Wenders, Rouch, Maspéro etc.)

There are clear issues relating to ethical approval, clarity of guidelines and preparation. However, these can be streamlined and the administrative input involved minimised. If the descriptors and criteria are clear and simple, it should be possible to allow students the maximum autonomy to be creative and interesting in a manner which appeals to their imagination and their desire to make sense of what they see.