From Reverse Culture Shock to Global Competency: Helping Education Abroad Students Learn from the Shock of the Return Home

The “wraparound” model of education abroad programming posits that students will learn more and have a lasting, transformative experience if they receive cultural orientation and mentoring before, during, and after their sojourn. Preparation, support and post-processing help students navigate both the culture shock of the trip and the reverse culture shock of the return home. The pre-trip preparation, in some form, is nearly universal, and during the trip educators often have multiple opportunities to help students think through their experience. It is post-trip, or reentry phase, of study abroad that has proved most difficult to implement, due to the practical limitations of student careers and engineering curricula. Yet reentry programming greatly enhances the global competence that engineers can acquire by helping them adjust emotionally and behaviorally and by giving them the opportunity for transformative learning. This emotional, behavioral, and cognitive development enhances their global competence not only by improving their ability interact across cultural lines, but also by helping them synthesize their experience into a new understanding of how engineers define and solve problems differently across cultures. Educators have come up with a variety of strategies for solving this problem and understanding these different strategies might help overcome those practical barriers. There has been a shift in education abroad in recent decades. As part of the growing awareness of Globalization, both students and employers have become more interested in education abroad as a means to develop intercultural skills, instead of simply going abroad to “soak up” the culture or embarking upon a “Grand Tour” of Europe to become cosmopolitan. Within engineering, this shift to an intercultural emphasis has been translated into the pursuit of “global competency.” The specific term for, and the component elements of, this set of knowledge and skills can vary, but Downey et al.’s definition of what it means provides a useful umbrella: global competence for engineers involves the “knowledge, ability, and predisposition to work effectively with people who define problems differently than they do.”2 Despite this growing discussion of global competency, assessments of the state of it in engineering education have generally found that schools are not doing enough to cultivate it.8,24 These assessments, among other factors, have led schools to increase both the quantity and the quality of education abroad experiences available to students, guided by the commonsense understanding that global competence requires a global experience. Increasing quantity, or participation in education abroad, is clearly an important first step toward providing an enriching global experience, and international studies offices, in collaboration with engineering schools, have had tremendous success. The number of all students studying abroad nearly doubled between 2000 and 2013, and the number of engineers studying abroad nearly tripled.12 This growth is good news, but simply increasing the number of students going abroad will not, on its own, boost global competency. The quality of the international experience also critically matters. Students can easily go abroad, have a negative reaction to that experience, and come back more ethnocentric and closed than they were before they left. The experience must therefore lend itself to acquiring the orientation and the skills needed to be open to and to work with others. Hence, it needs to be a high-quality learning experience. Drawing again on the umbrella definition for global competency, students need to learn that others define and solve problems differently and how they define and solve problems differently, as well as how to adjust their style of problem solving to mesh with that different approach. This kind of learning does not happen without careful cultivation. To cultivate it, engineering educators and education abroad professionals must think of education abroad (including research, work, or service) holistically, and not as an isolated event separate from their oncampus education. It must be more than a short-term (or medium-term) experience that a student leaves campus to have and completes before returning to campus, never to address it again. The experience cannot simply be placed in a "shoebox".18 Rather, education abroad must be seen as a longer learning process that becomes a key component of an engineering education. Students must be prepared for the experience, guided through the experience, and then assisted in the processing of the experience upon their return, so that they can integrate it into their understanding of the world and of engineering. Such a "wrap-around" approach to education abroad has long been recognized among intercultural communications scholars and scholars of education abroad as an excellent means to cultivate learning from that experience.18,22 Despite the benefits of a “wrap-around” approach for maximizing learning from education abroad, few institutions offer such an approach. Many institutions offer some part of an approach, especially before and during travel abroad, but only a few offer a “reentry” course upon the students’ return, thus completing the full cycle. The dearth of formalized, post-trip processing of the experience is an obstacle for increasing global competency because this period, the “reentry” period, is critical for learning from an education abroad experience and therefore for cultivating the skills needed for global competence. A variety of difficulties, some practical and others conceptual, prevent institutions from offering reentry programs and individuals from participating in them. Engineering educators, therefore, need to work to find ways to create such programs at their institutions. This overview continues an ongoing conversation of how to put theory of intercultural learning into practice in already packed engineering curricula, with the goal of helping engineering educators to adapt the theory about intercultural learning into reentry programs for their own institutions. In order to provide the basis for developing and expanding such programs, I will first outline the theoretical basis for reentry training, how it improves learning from education abroad, and how that learning relates to the goal of engineers’ global competence. With that foundation, I turn to the practical reasons why such programs are difficult to implement and then conclude on a hopeful note by exploring how a few institutions are tackling the problem and how these approaches might foster global competence. Culture Shock and Reverse Culture Shock The wrap-around approach to education abroad, and thus the emphasis on reentry training, grew out of the desire to reduce the “culture shock" of travel. Culture shock is that dislocating experience that comes with immersion in an environment in which one's common sense no longer applies. The first scholarly discussions of culture shock that sojourners experience abroad appeared in 1955.21 They noted that sojourners confront a different, perhaps radically different, way of thinking and acting in the “host” culture, and the difference from their “home” culture is cognitively dislocating and emotionally alienating. This experience is usually quite unpleasant and can cause a negative reaction that lasts the duration of the sojourn and beyond. Adequate preparation, however, can “inoculate” sojourners from the worst of the culture shock, allowing them to see it as normal experience and even something they can learn from.22 Culture shock is well understood to be a natural part of education abroad—indeed, it has a commonsensical aspect to it, because the sojourner is leaving “home” to go to a different “host” country. Almost every education abroad program involves some kind of orientation that aims to prepare sojourners for it and cope with it. Thus, the first stage of a “wrap-around” approach to education abroad is well established. Similarly, education abroad programs normally include discussions or activities during the sojourn itself that help sojourners adjust to and learn from the cultural differences they experience. While on the course, the students’ adjustment to and coping with the host culture is a major concern of course directors. This period is when the students are first experiencing culture shock, and course faculty and program directors have to provide for the students’ well being, at the very least by engaging them in discussion about their experience. Often programs will include group discussions about this disconnect. Thus, aspects of the middle stage of a “wrap-around” approach can be found in many programs. The third and last stage of the wrap-around, the return to the home culture, however, is often an unexpected, “reverse culture shock” for the sojourner. Reverse culture shock derives from the fact that sojourners return to home with new eyes and, in a sense, new bodies. While abroad, sojourners learn to see the world in a different way and to move through it in a different fashion. When they return “home,” they are often surprised by how everything that had been natural and normal to them before leaving now seems different and even strange. The severity of this shock depends on a variety of factors, including duration of time abroad, the degree of cultural difference, and the extent to which the sojourner adapted to the host culture abroad. At the very least, the sojourner's family, friends, and colleagues will not have had the same intense experience, making the sojourner feel isolated from others, or else leading them to contain that experience, as in a shoebox. This phenomenon, too, has been well studied by interculturalists, beginning not long after the first work on culture shock,9 and continuing up to the present.5,18,22,27 Martin and Harrell argue that the reentry involves processes in three differ