Community Engaged Course Hones Students’ Intercultural Aptitude
by Stephanie M. McPherson
This summer, 8 students spent three weeks in Siem Reap, Cambodia and its surrounding villages working with the community there to solve pressing issues affecting residents’ day-to-day quality of life. The trip was the summer portion of the Schiller Institute’s course Working for and with Communities: Community Engaged and Project Based Learning for the Common Good.
“This experience focused on working across the borders of culture and language to be able to communicate and learn how to work with the community. Not telling them what they need, but understanding where their needs are,” says Sriya Jampana, a premed sophomore majoring in finanace.
The class, offered for the first time in Spring 2023, focused on introducing intercultural thinking to students in the hopes they would carry that mentality through their education and into the working world. Class participants spent the first semester preparing for their travels and learning how to work across cultures and about Cambodian life, history, and assistance needs.
Many Cambodian residents live with amputations or other disabilities due to injuries from active landmines from the decades-long Cambodian civil war that ended in 1998. As such, one group of students was tasked with creating recommendations surrounding accessible home agriculture techniques and structures to assist Cambodians with their gardens. Another team was assigned problem solving around waste reduction methods.
Upon arrival in Siem Reap in May, students got to know daily Cambodian life by spending time both in the city and nearby villages. Some students built a wall for a blind couple’s garden, some planted trees at a school, some visited a trash dump to better understand waste management, some planted rice.
“It’s a community engagement course, so they’re not just going to go in there and jump right into the project or only ask questions to get to a deliverable,” says Jim West, Assistant Director of Programs at Schiller and the course manager and instructor. “They really tried to learn from folks about their life and their situation. And then while doing that the students would also weave in some questions about the project.”
The work required the students to exercise a good amount of flexibility, both in their daily schedules and in their expectations for a deliverable.
“Often students that I’ve worked with in the past will romanticize international development or international public health work, and it’s a lot harder than you think it is,” says Tara Casebolt, a Core Fellow at Boston College and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Global Health who co-led the group in the summer. “Also, Americans have this very obsessive 24/7, very ‘live to work, not work to live’ attitude. And that's not the case in a lot of the rest of the world.”
For many of the students, this was their first experience living outside of these norms of American life. One surprising custom was the mid-day break to stay out of the heat, during which no one worked. They also had to get used to a certain degree of time flexibility, as plans for the day could never be guaranteed considering traffic, weather, people’s availability--which was an adjustment coming from the regimented environment of a college campus.
“The way time management works, the way you think about family and work, those are elements that I hadn’t thought were tied so much into culture,” says Charlotte Hackett, a junior sociology and applied psychology major. “I normally would think of religion, foods, some of the more surface level things that are easy to study. And after being immersed in that culture I realized that it really impacts the everyday part of your life.”
On the project side, the waste management team in particular needed to think on their feet. They had prepared for plastic waste solutions but when they arrived, they learned the more pressing concerns involved battery and general waste disposal.
“The villages had really narrow roads that garbage trucks weren't able to get down,” says Jampana. “So instead of letting waste accumulate in their homes, they would just go ahead and burn it, including a lot of plastic, which is affecting their health.”
As a first response, her team planned for waste reduction education in schools—the “reduce reuse recycle” mantra American students are taught—hoping students would bring the information home. They also suggested implementing community trash drop off sites reachable by trucks. And other cities in Cambodia have established battery disposal programs, so the team recommended Siem Reap and its nearby villages follow that model.
The agriculture team’s mission didn’t have as many surprises, but there was still a lot to learn on the ground.
“As a sociology major, agriculture is not something I had a ton of prior knowledge about,” says Hackett. “Going in, my perspective was that I have much more to learn from all of these people than I have necessarily to give. Throughout the course of the time there, though, I gained more confidence in our project and in seeing that there was a deliverable that we could create that would be realistic and feasible, and have the potential to create a real assistance in people's lives.”
The team coalesced everything they learned from the community and created an online guide to accessible homestead farming, which included tool modification, plants recommendations, and instructions for building structures such as ramps and raised beds. The guide will be distributed via the JRS Facebook and other channels.
Introspection played a large role in the course, from journaling prompts to taking some meditative time during the day to reflect on their experiences. That carried through to the presentations of the summer’s work that were held on August 31 on the Boston College campus. Many students were so impacted that they intend on mentoring the next crop of students to take the course, or have planned fundraisers to support the work done by JRS Cambodia.
“The students did a termendous job of presenting their work thoroughly and professionally. We will consider their feedback carefully as we work on future iterations of this course” says Dr. Laura Steinberg, Seidner Family Executive Director for the Schiller Institute and Instructor of Record on the course.
The class will be offered again in the spring term. Some students will spend the summer building on the work of their predecessors in Cambodia, and others will travel to a new location to be determined. In the fall, those students will come back together for a full fall semester of reflection, project iteration, and communication lessons.
“I want them to be able to explain it in a way that resonates with a potential employer because this is an experience that not everybody has, and they should be able to talk about it,” says West. “And then also I want to help them talk to maybe that cranky uncle at Thanksgiving about why it’s important to understand other cultures and go to other places and have these meaningful experiences.”
The students who participated in the inaugural Engaged Course have already felt its impact.
“Before this class, a lot of the message that I had been hearing was ‘it’s better to recognize similarities than differences,’” says Jampana. “But after this trip I understood where I was wrong in that because it’s also really good to be able to understand where people come from and appreciate those differences. It makes cultures and people who they are, and it doesn’t minimize people’s shared experiences.”
And interacting with the Cambodian people and faculty at the JRS has encouraged Hackett to think more broadly about what would bring her happiness in a career.
“The JRS staff told us it’s great to have talents and abilities and to get this education, but it doesn’t really mean anything unless you’re using it help others,” she says. “And that’s what actually turns this privilege into social change.”