Abstract
This chapter focuses on the intentions and outcomes of a May 2015 peace and social justice student travel experience to Japan titled “Seeking Peace: Embodying Peace and Justice in Postwar Japan” and a May 2016 travel experience called “Civil Rights and Social Justice in the U.S. South.” From this foundation, we discuss the pedagogical challenges, impact, and value of co-curricular experiential learning for students interested (or not yet interested) in religions, collective memory, memorialization efforts, social conflict, and peace using this particular trip as a case study for wider reflections on teaching and place.
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Notes
- 1.
“Global Connections.”
- 2.
The authors wish to express their sincere thanks to the following individuals for helping make our Global Connections programs possible: Dr David Gowler, Dr Lovick Pierce and Bishop George F. Piece Chair of Religion at Oxford College; Rev. Lyn Pace, Oxford College Chaplain; Ms Regina Barrett, Senior Associate Director of Programs, Academic Affairs; and Ms Allison McKelvey, former administrative assistant to the Pierce Program, and our on-site collaborators for each travel experience. McGehee would also like to thank colleague Dr Susan Ashmore, Professor of History at Oxford College, for her outstanding co-leadership of the May 2016 Global Connections trip.
- 3.
For student reflections from the 2015 Japan trip, please see the blog located at: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/globalconnections2015/.
- 4.
Sobania and Braskamp, “Study Abroad or Study Away.”
- 5.
Here we engage Hovland’s “Global Learning: Defining, Designing, Demonstrating,” when he notes, “It is a common habit to think of global learning as occurring elsewhere. What kinds of designs emphasize the local in the global and the global in the local?” Hovland, “Global Learning,” 9.
- 6.
Hovde, “Opening Doors,” 7.
- 7.
Those individuals included: Rev. Ed King, chaplain of Tougaloo College during the civil rights movement; Dr Susan M. Glisson, Director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi; Randall Williams, founding member of Klanwatch at the Southern Poverty Law Center; Ellen Mertins from the Alabama Historical Commission; Jim Baggett, archivist at the Birmingham Public Library; and Adrienne van der Valk, managing editor of Teaching Tolerance at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
- 8.
Sobania and Braskamp, “Study Abroad or Study Away,” n.p. “As both a concept and strategy,” they write, “study away recognizes that students can have experiences that open their minds, hearts, and behaviors to difference and allows them to experience such difference firsthand, either internationally or domestically. Additionally, by expanding the concept of study abroad to study away, the range of experiences that can move students toward living effectively with difference is greatly expanded. These various options provide students with multiple entry points to such learning. For some students the entry point will be an on-campus course and an internship or volunteer activity; for others it will be a short- or long-term study away program. For some that program will be overseas; for others it will here in the United States.” It is our belief that the use of the term “study away” allows not only for a more expansive understanding of what activities can enrich students’ educational experiences but also provides a more inclusive and democratic model for student learning.
- 9.
Hovde, “Opening Doors,” 5.
- 10.
Feinberg, “What Students Don’t Learn Abroad,” B20.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Hovde, “Opening Doors,” 4.
- 13.
The Global Learning VALUE rubric is available at https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/global-learning.
- 14.
Hovde, “Opening Doors,” 6.
- 15.
We draw here from critical theorist Walter Benjamin’s paired ideas of flânuering and excavation. Flânuering, for Benjamin, is an activity actually learned in childhood. In an early essay on children’s books, Benjamin notes that typically people fail to notice that “the world is full of the most unrivaled objects for children’s attention and use … For children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on.” Benjamin, “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” 408. Flâneuring is a kind of “aimless” or unscripted wandering that results from the childish attention described here. One aimlessly strolls arcades or food stalls, for example, and allows the experience of material objects—their sights, smells, tastes, and feel—to permeate one’s senses; one may or may not be struck by “something” as a result. If one is struck by this wandering through “things being worked on,” one then begins a kind of “excavation” as a mode of memory: memory, Benjamin writes, “is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This determines the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. They must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns soil.” Benjamin, “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” 611. We urged students toward both this wandering and this “digging.”
- 16.
Recently, historian Tim Tyson revealed that Carolyn Bryant had fabricated her story about Till. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/emmett-till-lynching-carolyn-bryant-donham.html
- 17.
See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford UP, 1923, 1950, 1958).
- 18.
Young, “Money Road.”
- 19.
Hovde, “Opening Doors,” 6.
- 20.
Morrison, Beloved, 43.
- 21.
Hovde notes that the single-site residential model is held “by some as an inherently superior model.” “Clearly, if immersion in a culture is the primary goal of the experience, a single-site residential program may be a better way,” he concedes. But a single-culture travel seminar, in which the itinerary is confined to a single country or cultural area, “could be enriched by the many exposures to important sites (cultural breadth) at a modest cost to immersion (cultural depth).” Hovde, “Opening Doors,” 5. Disciplinary or interdisciplinary foci, such as those shared by Global Connections offerings, often drive the need for the traveling model.
- 22.
Hovde, “Opening Doors,” 7.
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Adams, J.P., McGehee, M.T. (2017). Seeking Peace, Seeking Justice: Place-based Pedagogies and Global Connections. In: Shannon, D., Galle, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50621-0_11
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