As an AU alumnus and alumnus of the World Capital's Southern Africa program, I was dismayed, but not surprised, by the article in The Eagle about the changes to the program.
The study-abroad program under the former directorship of Beverly Peters did more to teach me about international development than any class taken at American University. That is the beauty of studying abroad. It's hard to sum up or explain the educational depth that Dr. Peters brought to the program. Dr. Peters understood that in a quality study-abroad program, classroom lectures and materials are aids to structured educational outings and country traveling, not the focal point.
Robert Pastor, vice president of International Affairs, is completely mistaken; nothing in the classrooms can circumvent going and seeing it for themselves. Educational rigor does not occur by regurgitating information in tests or papers, it takes place in challenging lectures and constant educational interaction with the culture you are there to study. Indeed, that is the purpose of studying abroad, to bring to life the concepts and theories taught in the other seven or so semesters a student spends in AU's U.S.-based campus.
According to The Eagle, Pastor, in defense of professor Caleb Rossiter, explained that he is "one of the most popular professors at AU," adding naively that Rossiter has "retained some of the best parts of the program, and has modified and improved those aspects which reflect a less rigorous program."
Clearly he meant the vital home-stay as "less rigorous," as that was cut from five-to-six weeks down to one. That's right, experience the "African Hospitality," as Rossiter put it, in ONE WEEK. How can a student be expected to be experience a true South African family in one week? The vital underpinnings of any society, the family and community interactions and the cultural subtleties that dictate them, can not be gained in one week. They can barely be understood in five. How do you connect with the family to meet their extended families, go to church with them, play with the local neighborhood kids, be trusted to baby-sit, or be let in on their fears, their political inclinations, their relationships with their parents and children? All of these experiences which inform my understanding of Southern Africa were learned during a home-stay, and no classroom at AU has ever supplanted it.
Instead of traveling and getting the contrasting views of Southern Africa by living in a rural and urban center, an essential part to understanding some of the modern-day problems facing all of Africa, students are centered just at an atypical urban center of Cape Town. The only consolation Rossiter gives is that "students can travel by themselves." But this can be no substitute for a structured program that aims to explain this vital duality of African society.
A good classroom professor does not necessarily correlate to a good director of a study-abroad. They require completely different skills and demands. While one is purely book-driven academics, where the professor is the last and only word on the subject matter, a study-abroad director understands that the education takes place outside of the classroom, and his job is to best coordinate those opportunities. While in a classroom, a professor has the final say on when projects are due, reading must be done and tests occur, a program director is at the demands of a country, where, especially in Africa, things do not go as planned, realities differ from books and authority lies in the hands of the culture we are transplanted to.
It is apparent that professor Rossiter would like to put the control of a classroom onto the control of a study-abroad program. But this is not only impractical; it is a disaster for what was a rewarding study-abroad program. Even with these changes the program may be OK, but it will no longer be the exceptional study-abroad program that made it so rewarding for all of its alumni. If asked as an alumnus, as I often am, about my study abroad advice, I would only give one: forget AU Abroad and try a program that understands that academic rigors occur in the country and not in a book, like the School for International Training Study Abroad program.
What is most disappointingly clear in the article is that AU Abroad's staff would rather circle the wagons and cover its own back rather than try and listen to student's complaints and valid criticism by trying to fix a program in flux.
Jordan Berg graduated from the School of International Service in 2003.
