Anne Power
Associate Professor Anne Power is Academic Course Advisor for the Master of Teaching Secondary Program at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research interests include music education, music and its relationship to other art forms, professional learning and service learning. Her work with service learning and disadvantaged students converges with themes of creativity. Anne is editor of two journals and is on several editorial boards.
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this might mean engaging with forms of community music- making that sit outside their own cultural traditions, comfort zones, or commonly used facilitation techniques.
Engaging in these different cultural environments can also prompt these community musicians to critically reflect on, problematize, and deepen their understandings of the field of community music and its core principles.
The challenge for community music educators then becomes finding pedagogical approaches and strategies that both facilitate these sorts of intercultural learning experiences for their students, and engage with communities in culturally appropriate ways.
This chapter unpacks these challenges and possibilities, and explores how the pedagogical strategy of community service learning can facilitate these sorts of dynamic intercultural learning opportunities. Specifically, it focuses on engaging with Australian First Peoples, and draws on eight years of community service learning in this field.
Project Background
Australian universities are placing increased emphasis on the internationalisation of their curriculum and students. In progressively globalised world, this development is in keeping with tertiary education trends that recognise the importance of an international outlook and cross-cultural competencies. As Australia ventures deeper into the Asian Century, there has never been a greater need for outward-looking, global-minded graduates. Student outbound mobility is one of the most effective ways to foster internationalisation through transformative experiences. The project, entitled Enhancing Programmes Integrating Tertiary Outbound Mobility Experiences (EPITOME), conducted student-focused research into outbound mobility experiences (OMEs) with a view to providing a comprehensive and usable best-practice guide for tour operators and academic staff.
Project Aims
The EPITOME project pursued four key goals:
• To understand the student experience of current OME programmes;
• To provide empirical data on the key factors that attract students to OMEs and the principle obstacles that hinder participation;
• To create a curriculum resource to guide OME leaders and other key personnel; and
• To enhance expertise within Australian universities in global programming and international mobility support by providing robust, evidence-based research to advance the field.
Project Approach
The approach was student focused with a genuine desire to understand the student experience of outbound mobility. To gain a holistic portrait of the student experience, a longitudinal study was formulated to capture responses before, during, and after the study abroad experience. Recognising the demands on students’ time, EPITOME developed a series of interviews and survey tools that captured demographic and experiential data. Having passed ethics clearance and obtained contact permission from tour leaders, students were invited to take part in the surveys by email and were incentivised with the opportunity to win shopping gift cards. The data collected from surveys was supplemented by a series of in-person, semistructured interviews. These interviews were recorded and transcribed by the EPITOME team. The approach allowed the interviews to focus on transformation while being attentive and responsive to the students, allowing them to tell the stories they wanted to share. The interviews were not restricted to students who had taken part in a university OME. With take-up rates for outbound mobility at less than 15%, the team also approached those students who chose not to participate in OME opportunities to ask about their thoughts and expectations concerning OMEs. The data offered a valuable first-person perspective, which was strategically incorporated into several EPITOME outputs.
A photography competition was organised to harvest the often-untapped resource of student digital images taken while on the OME. The competition asked students to select an image that was meaningful to them and to compose a short narrative explaining its significance. This approach collected rich qualitative data about the transformative qualities of the study abroad experience. The students’ narratives helped to clarify the research team’s understandings of the significant contributions of these events, in particular producing many powerful primary accounts that have fed into further research outputs.
Finally, a survey was designed for academic staff members who operated or supervised OMEs. Tour organisers see firsthand the magnitude of change in students and are an important source of both qualitative and quantitative data regarding the impact of OMEs. The survey asked staff members about their travel histories, their overseas experience, and the level of support offered by their home institutions. This data was invaluable to the EPITOME research project and illuminated discrepancies that exist in terms of staff preparedness and institutional support.
Project Outputs
The EPITOME project compiled data from university staff and students relating to OMEs. Research findings have been disseminated in a number of ways, including
• publications in both the academic and mainstream press;
• research presentations at international and industry conferences;
• three EPITOME newsletters and a website (www.epitomeabroad.com);
• a networking symposium;
• an invited panel speaker at the Forum Abroad conference in the United States; and
• a monograph, entitled The Globalisation of Higher Education Developing Internationalised Education in Research and Practice (2017), by Palgrave Macmillan.
EPITOME has made a notable contribution to existing student mobility literature through a series of academic and nonacademic publications. In June 2015, an article titled “We Need to Get Serious About Connecting With Asia” was published in The Australian (Jones, 2015). It argued that university OMEs could be an effective method of achieving some of the strategic goals set out in the 2012 Australia in the Asian Century white paper. An article titled “Jafari and Transformation: A Model to Enhance Short-Term Overseas Study Tours” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad (Hall et al., 2016). Drawing on the tourism model articulated by Jafar Jafari in the 1980s, the article argued the same ideas could be adapted to enhance OMEs in the age of social media. A third publication of note is titled “If You Build It, They May Not Come: Why Australian University Students Do Not Take Part in Outbound Mobility Experiences” (Jones et al., 2016) which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice. The article draws on key data obtained through EPITOME’s student surveys to outline common barriers to OME participation.
The research findings were disseminated at a range of local, national, and international events. One of the highlights was a group presentation of research findings at the 2016 Asia–Pacific Association for International Education conference, a key opportunity for EPITOME to showcase its research to colleagues and industry experts. In June 2016, EPITOME organised and delivered a networking symposium, Developing Global Perspectives in Higher Education. Bringing in keynote speakers and delegates from across Australia and overseas, this two-day event allowed participants to hear from a range of experts on student mobility and internationalisation. With 90 national and international delegates from 13 universities, the symposium was invaluable, not only as a vehicle of resource sharing but also for the networking opportunities, allowing a wide pool to benefit from the research undertaken by the EPITOME team. Some unsolicited comments from attendees included:
A very genuine thank you to you and to your wonderful team for the exceptionally rewarding two-day symposium in Sydney last week. This was one of the best symposiums/conferences I have ever attended.
— Dr. Deborah Henderson |Associate Professor Queensland University of Technology
Thank you for a great symposium. I usually do not go to conferences. I use my resources to go and work in the developing world instead. — Dr. Vinesh Chandra |Associate Professor Queensland University of Technology
Project Impact
As a generality, research impact has come to be defined as the effect of research beyond academia. As articulated by the Australian Research Council, impact is the noticeable contribution that research makes to the economy, society, culture, national security, public policy or services, health, the environment, or quality of life, beyond the influence to academia. The research undertaken in this project aimed to have a direct impact on tour operators and academic staff members who run OMEs. Additionally, the project has had a more general influence on OME practice by contributing new literature on the value and impact of OMEs. Part of the legacy of the EPITOME project will be the good-practice guide eBook and the edited collection.
I am inspired by the work of the academics . . . their enthusiasm to continue improving global education in Australian classrooms (and beyond) — Andy Houghton I The Global Society
Publications arising from this research provide practical assistance to universities and individual tour operators while promoting OMEs as a valuable tool for both personal transformation and increasing cross-cultural competencies.
Key Findings
A number of key findings have emerged from the EPITOME research:
• Women are twice as likely as men to take part in study abroad.
• Almost one quarter of OME participants had lived overseas for six months or more.
• 72% of students do NOT talk about study abroad with their friends.
• Over 80% of OME participants receive little or no intercultural communication training.
• Individual academic staff members are often responsible for designing their own study abroad experiences with little institutional guidance or support.
• Nonparticipants also acknowledge the value of study abroad.