Experiencing an exchange program in a whole new way

A new Arts and Science course will help students returning from studying abroad, international exchange students and students thinking about global engagement opportunities reflect on the experiences of studying in unfamiliar places.

Facilitated by Jean Wilson and Hartley Jafine, Movement & Integration  challenges students to imagine ways of integrating their experiential learning into their lives. Ultimately, the course aims to help students develop an ongoing practice of reflective, lifelong learning.

Artsci student Veronica Klassen, currently completing her one-semester study at the University of Auckland, has always loved to travel and had considerable interest in exchange opportunities, but says it was Movement & Integration that really helped her cement her plans to study abroad.

What helped most, she says, was receiving a measured reflection from students who have actually gone on exchange so she could keep her expectations in check and carefully weigh the pros and cons.

“Until I took Movement & Integration, I was really only exposed to the ‘set’ narrative surrounding exchange,” she says.

“You hear how great it is, you hear that it’s life-changing, you hear about all of these mountain-top experiences. But this course taught me that that’s not always the case. Hearing fourth-year students reflect on the challenges involved with exchange made me realize that it’s a lot more complicated an endeavour than people might think.”

Movement & Integration consists of very little lecturing. Instead, the small group learned while hiking through Cootes Paradise, co-created a poem, and discussed exchange over a potluck dinner.

For Society of Arts & Science Students President Balie Tomar, the course was not only a highlight, but a means of reintegrating herself into the McMaster community after so much time away.

“The course is by far the best post-exchange support and reintegration program there is,” says Tomar, who spent half of her third year at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “It was just a fantastic way to integrate a seemingly distant exchange experience with my peers here at McMaster.”

Signe Aagaard, a student at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, was able to experience the course from a unique perspective.

As an exchange student at McMaster, she was able to think, speak and learn in the moment, instead of doing so retrospectively or prospectively, like the majority of students around them.

“The students who had already been on exchange talked about what you could expect when you returned home, which I originally didn’t think would be hard,” Aagaard says.

“It still wasn’t easy coming back, but, having talked with friends who didn’t have an opportunity like Movement & Integration, I see how lucky I was and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to take the course.”

The course, now heading into its second year, is the offspring of research conducted by Wilson in partnership with a number of her Artsci students, all interested in exploring the concept of study abroad as experiential learning.

Presented at an international conference in Halifax and published in Comparative and International Education, her study — co-authored with five former undergraduate exchange participants — posits that post-sojourn programming would equip students returning from exchange to continue their experiential journey.

At McMaster’s 2017 International Summer Institute on Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching, Wilson worked with a new group of Artsci students and alumni to create a course that would enable study abroad participants to build upon their experiences — collaboratively, thoughtfully, and energetically — well after they return home. The result was Movement & Integration.

“The pedagogy that informs the course, designed to encourage critical reflection and promote creative thinking, takes seriously the idea of study abroad as experiential learning,” explains Wilson. “It resists a consumerist mindset, which would bracket exchange as an isolated adventure, and contributes to a more capacious understanding of the potential of international study and global engagement.”