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At best, study abroad programs are expected to do no harm to the communities in which they are located; rarely is the question raised as to how they can actually do good (Tonkin 2011, p. 193).

In the current historical moment, efforts to globalize U.S. higher education abound. To judge from the language of institutional mission statements and strategic plans to the proliferation of new, globally-oriented centers, programs, and majors on U.S. college and university campuses, a central concern of U.S. higher education today is to equip students with the tools, knowledge, and dispositions for engaging in a globalized world. Yet what, exactly, institutions mean when they evoke the term, global, is often unclear. Learning goals across institutions may include “preparing students for global citizenship”; “increasing students’ global competencies”; or “educating students for global awareness,” among others (e.g., Lewin 2009). However, within these same learning goals, the global is rarely operationalized.

This failure to fully define the global has implications for the programs, classes, and objectives that operate in its name. The global is often defined as in tension with or opposition to the ways in it is used in other contexts. Efforts to educate students to understand, participate in, or challenge features of an existent globalized world in one course or program may be at odds with what they do in another. With an eye to this issue—and sensitive to the ways in which English language teaching draws upon globalist discourses (Phillipson 2003)—we engage 11 teacher education students in a short-term study abroad program entitled, “Language and Culture Service Learning in Costa Rica” (LCSL) and describe our experience in this chapter. Under the auspices of a large, southeastern U.S. university (and, indeed, aligned with the university’s goals of preparing students for a globalized world), we deliberately design our program to focus on the local. Drawing upon what Sobel (2004) calls “a ‘pedagogy of place,’ a theoretical framework that emphasizes the necessary interpenetration of school, community, and environment … to prepare students to solve the problems of today” (pp. 11–12), our program emphasizes place-based education in study abroad rather than viewing our host site as a global venture. We use this pedagogical approach not only to draw students’ attention to global/local (or “glocal”) connections between the U.S. and Costa Rica, but also to situate our program within the tenets of ecojustice theory.

According to Mueller and Bentley (2009), ecojustice theory “emphasize[s] the holistic relations between social justice and environmental justice” (p. 58), and ecojustice education—what Bowers (2006) calls commons education—stresses renewing and revitalizing the commons as a main goal of all education. Place-based education, as a pedagogical strategy, corresponds with ecojustice education when it connects local communities and residents (of all cellular types) and their knowledge uses to wider questions of social and environmental justice. High school students in an ecojustice-informed, place-based science class in the U.S. state of Iowa, for example, might monitor local water quality in streams adjacent to hog confinements. Yet, ecojustice ethics takes this class further: they might study the international trade agreements that allow for lax oversight of agribusinesses or interview nearby migrant workers to discuss labor conditions and the treatment of animals in meat processing facilities. Ecojustice theory thus augments traditional environmental and place-based education, which Bowers (2006) argues remain human-centered and exacerbate existent economic and social paradigms at the expense of the commons. Mueller (2009) also notes that traditional environmental education relies on crisis modes of thought that distance rather than connect youth to ecologically sound social action.

While place-based education uses the assets and problems of a local community to drive curricular development (Tomkins 2008), ecojustice education extends place-based education and asks students to consider how and in what ways local (and glocal) knowledges, practices, landforms, and organisms stand in relation to one another, the vitality of the commons, and to broader questions of ethics. Using a place-based educational approach that is informed by ecojustice theory, then, the people, flora, fauna, and social realities of one, small Costa Rican village shape LCSL’s goals and student learning outcomes. We also teach our students to attend to the cultural assumptions and thought patterns that undergird all place-based knowledge systems (Mueller and Tippins 2010), both those systems in the Costa Rican cloudforest or home in the Southeastern U.S.

Noddings (2005) writes that educators must “recognize the power of the local in building a global perspective” among students (p. 122). We agree. Using our short-term study abroad program as a platform, we argue for a paradigm shift in higher education’s myopic focus on the global—particularly in study abroad programs. Berry (1990) suggests that the idea of anything ‘planetary’ is useless in its abstraction; similarly, Gruenewald and Smith (2008) call for practices of “new localism” in the face of global economic development patterns that disrupt rather than support community life (p. xiii). In concurrence with these place-based education scholars, we offer that it is through intense engagement with the specificities and dynamics of local places that students can come to realize the specificity and interconnectedness of all places. The global, as a scale, does not produce or subsume the local; rather, scales of place interweave, are in relation, and are deployed for various purposes (Herod 2008). Higher education, though, often restricts its attention to the global. To offer some perspective on why this is so, it is to a discussion of the global in higher education that we now turn.

Framing “the Global” in Higher Education

The concept of the global is undoubtedly part of the Zeitgeist. One can barely turn a U.S. corner without confronting the global in some way, be it through a sighting of one of the ubiquitous “Think globally, act locally” bumper stickers or an admonition to care for “the planet” by buying a green or eco-friendly product (Jakubiak and Mueller 2011). Despite a rampant, often personally encroaching, nationalism that has gripped the U.S. over the last three decades (Berlant 1997), the global as a point of reference, scale, or orientation remains salient in U.S. daily life.

Scholarly attention to globalization, however, takes a more nuanced approach. While some work characterizes globalization as increased time-space compression under late capitalism (Harvey 1989), other work explores how cross-border flows of people, ideas, money, language, and art are contributing to the deterritorialization of the nation-state and producing hybrid cultural forms (Kearney 1995). Marxist-leaning scholars define globalization as a process of top-down economic restructuring led by supranational organizations such as the World Bank. Their scholarship examines how multinational corporations consolidate massive amounts of wealth and power at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable (e.g., Graeber 2010). Related perspectives on globalization interrogate the effects of fast-footed capital in realms like labor (e.g., Wright 2006). As manufacturing centers—maquilas—on the U.S.-Mexico border relocate to cheaper locales, for example, migration to the U.S. rises. This migration produces new, gendered forms of care work as paid childcare, domestic cleaning services, and even manicures become more affordable to the U.S. middle class (Kang 2010).

Other research on globalization investigates the phenomenon’s discursive power. This literature base can be synthesized to evidence that talk about, reference to, and expectations of globalization generate new material conditions, which are then treated as referents for the process (e.g., Doerr 2012a, b; Herod 2008). As more native English language speakers teach abroad in the name of development, for example, local language shift becomes “evidence” of globalization (Jakubiak 2012). Similarly, the relative ease of travel to places like Tanzania has increased demand for English-speaking tour guides. In response, competitive-minded, East African guide schools now import National Geographic videos and Global North travel literature as curricular documents. These schools then teach their guides to be conversant in the Global North-produced discourses of wildlife, exoticism, and adventure that Western tourists seek through safari (Salazar 2006).

Given the breadth and depth of scholarship on globalization (only a fraction of which is illustrated here), it is extremely difficult to discern which definitions of or ideas about globalization U.S. institutions of higher education are employing in their mission statements, strategic plans, and learning goals. That said, many institutions appear to abide by New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman’s (2005) “the world is flat” thesis, which posits that nation-state borders are eroding, goods and services now move freely around the globe, and new technologies and mass media are generating a universal culture. This version of a globalized world centers largely on economics: the globalized world is one large, expansive marketplace in which people compete internationally for jobs and interact with consumers near and far.

Preparing students for a globalized world, in the Friedman frame, may mean teaching cross-cultural competencies (for successful interactions in business); world language instruction (for ostensible work in international settings); or increased technology use across the curriculum (for “international communication”). Nolan (2009) offers an example of this perspective. He argues that global competence should inform the goals of U.S. higher education, writing that “you can be a heck of an engineer, for example, but do you know how to work with the Germans, the Japanese, or the Brazilians to develop the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles? You might be a whiz at growing corn or soybeans, but can you show the people in Africa how to do this?” (p. 268) In Nolan’s conceptualization, the globalized world assumes a homology between nation-people-language-culture (i.e., Germans, Japanese, and Brazilians) and the expectation that U.S. individuals will be increasingly interacting with others across these same (stable) categories. Noteworthy is Nolan’s construction of “the people in Africa” as uniformly in need of agricultural instruction from abroad. Global competence, in this depiction, seems to move knowledge in one way.

Dissatisfactory as Nolan’s description of global competence may be, many U.S. study abroad programs find root in this Friedman-esque discourse. These study abroad programs frame the globalized world as a corporate arena in which people engage with increasing frequency across nation-state lines to secure their own, largely material, assets (Zemach-Bersin 2009). Kiely (2011), discussing the recent expansion of study-abroad programs in U.S. higher education, notes that

[f]rom WWII through the Cold War to September 11, 2001, and to the present day, the movement to internationalize higher education has been very much a matter of satisfying national interests in order to compete more effectively with other nation-states in an increasingly interdependent, and sometimes contentious, world (p. 245).

The global in U.S. study abroad programs generally relies on a “globally competitive worker” ideology that takes for granted a U.S./global binary. This binary conflates international and global, and suggests that any experience outside of the U.S. automatically renders one global (Woolf 2006). This U.S./global binary also assumes that the people whom U.S. students will encounter while studying abroad are parochial—in place—and not themselves already cosmopolitan (Doerr 2012a).

U.S. study abroad programs’ adoption of the globally competitive worker ideology is problematic for other reasons, too. For one, it elides transnational diversity within nation-states, such as the large and growing Latino population that lives, works, and is schooled in the U.S. without legal status (Zúñiga and Hamann 2009). It is not necessary for U.S. students to go abroad in order to experience linguistic and cultural diversity. Second, and more profoundly, the globally competitive worker ideology avoids discussions of what new social or ecological obligations people might have in an increasingly interconnected world. Speaking to this point, Kiely (2011) asserts that

[t]he rhetoric of intercultural competence (i.e., language proficiency, tolerance, openness, empathy, intercultural sensitivity), and more recently, transformation in study abroad promotes very little dialogue regarding the role of study abroad in fostering socially responsible action to address global injustice and inequality (p. 264).

Learning about global problems that originate in or are sustained by one’s home country is rarely a focus in study abroad. If and when students view injustices or live (temporarily) through material scarcities, these experiences are more likely to be commodified as adventuresome cultural capital than examined for their links to structural problems (Mowforth and Munt 2009).

Observers also opine that U.S. study abroad programs’ active acceptance of (or acquiescence to) the globally competitive worker ideology frames the world outside of the U.S. as an undergraduate classroom. Akin to the Grand Tour of the nineteenth century, when young American men of means traveled to Europe to visit historical sites and return home cultured (Mowforth and Munt 2009), study abroad is often cast as a liminal time during which U.S. students become global through simple “immersion” in another country. This discourse of immersion implies that sitting in Parisian cafes, getting lost in the streets of Valencia, or making small talk with fruit sellers in Quito constitute steps toward global citizenship (Doerr 2012b). Tonkin (2011), addressing this concern, notes that there exists a

painfully widespread view in many study abroad circles that the study abroad enterprise exists to serve an American purpose, namely, the liberal education of the student passing through it. It is but one step from this belief to the damaging notion that the larger world exists as a kind of classroom where the American student can learn values or skills that can be transferred to the United States and that student’s adult life (p. 193).

Relatedly, study abroad programs’ construction of the world outside of the U.S. as an undergraduate classroom is often buttressed by links to colonialism. Study abroad marketing campaigns frequently use words such as “discover,” “explore,” and “adventure” in their promotional literature, which casts the globe as ripe for American sojourning and links present-day study abroad to colonial conquest. “Even under the banners of global citizenship and cross-cultural understanding, [study abroad] advertisements endorse attitudes of consumerism, entitlement, privilege, narcissism, and global and cultural ignorance,” Zemach-Bersin (2009) writes. “[M]any students study abroad as a commodity, an entitlement, and a non-academic adventure” (p. 303). In this view [t]o become global through conventional study abroad is to venture outside the U.S. and repatriate the experience home for one’s own, primarily economic, benefit.

Dissatisfied with this limited, consumerist view of a globalized world, some institutions of higher education are augmenting their curricula and traditional study abroad programs with other offerings. Redefining the global, though, is challenging for numerous reasons. Not the least of these reasons is U.S. K-12 schooling.

Challenges to Confronting Dominant Global Discourses

As discussed above, some institutions of higher education have begun to reject Friedman-esque global discourse and implement alternative visions. Higher education programming taking this more cautious, less celebratory, approach to a globalized world may offer courses and study abroad programs that do one, or more, of the following: promote critical discussions about the rising role of non-governmental organizations in civil society (cf. Fisher 1997); interrogate the recent rise in ethnic nationalisms (cf. Kearney 1995); or examine how cross-border flows of ideas, goods, and services affect indigenous peoples and create new forms of ethnic solidarity (cf. Brosius 1999). Institutional mission statements, strategic plans, and learning goals may evoke the ways in which information communication technologies, international trade agreements, and failed development initiatives have resulted in uneven standards of living across the globe (e.g., Bringle et al. 2011). Additionally, issues such as climate change, resource depletion, and public health problems may be a focus of a global agenda on other campuses (e.g., Bringle et al. 2011). Alternative off-campus study options such as international service-learning, service-learning in diverse domestic settings, and international field research reflect some of this new thinking (e.g., Bringle and Hatcher 2011).

Nascent challenges to “the world is flat” version of globalization, then, are being posed in and through various higher educational programs. An obstacle to these programs’ effectiveness, however, is the entrenched point of view of many recent high school graduates. Despite its claims to increasing educational opportunity, a primary result of the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation was to codify individualistic, careerist notions of the globalized world across K-12 curricula. As detailed above, these notions promote rather than interrogate increased economic and social disparity at all scales and countenance widespread ecological destruction in the name of U.S. economic progress (Pyle 2008).

Many contemporary U.S. college and university students have been immersed throughout their K-12 schooling in the idea that education is for human capital alone (Spring 2004). For these students, to do well in school is to accept and reproduce particular globalist logics as measured by standard tests. In the words of Kiefer and Kemple (cited in Sobel 2004),

Most contemporary school restructuring efforts—be they called ‘systemic school change’ or ‘standards-based education’—are essentially programs for retooling students to become efficient workers, designed to make children more competitive in the national economy, or more recently, in the emerging global economy. Absent from the debates has been … critical discourse on the responsibility of schools to the communities that support them and to the planet’s life-support systems (p. 16).

No Child Left Behind’s focus on leveling educational access, holding schools “accountable,” and creating globally competitive workers has left little room for teaching students to question the broader purposes of K-12 schooling. Even the recent Race to the Top legislation limits the contours of educational debate to testing, school funding, and achievement goals (Darling-Hammond 2012).

Having been educated in No Child Left Behind’s priorities, many newly matriculated U.S. college and university students arrive on campus with an uncritical “the world is flat” perspective. Ideas of globalization as necessitating new forms of ecological literacy or creative community revitalization have been displaced by the market mantra-often in the name of educational equity. “[T]he discourse of standards, accountability, and excellence has been linked to efforts to close the historic achievement gaps between different racial, cultural, and economic groups,” Gruenewald and Smith (2008) write,

[t]hus, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is invoked at once as legislation aimed at ending inequality of educational opportunity and at strengthening the economic advantage of the entire nation. When the narrative of globalization becomes effectively linked to the narrative of social justice and equity, globalization becomes increasingly difficult to challenge (p. xv).

Akin to many U.S. study abroad programs, U.S. public schools have taken up the globally competitive worker ideology mostly without critique. Schools that reproduce its norms are deemed successful. Alternative metrics of school success such as whether graduates live sustainably upon the Earth or understand the effects of discrete disciplinary knowledge on ecological and social systems are practically nonexistent (Orr 2004).

Educational orientations that do consider the ways in which discrete disciplinary knowledge, economic development, local community resilience, and lively commons are interconnected and multi-scaled are ecojustice education (Mueller 2009) and, to a lesser extent, place-based, or place-conscious, education (Sobel 2004). Below, we discuss our use of ecojustice-framed, place-based education as an attempt to mediate the careerist legacy of No Child Left Behind and offer an alternative to traditional study abroad programming. On, metaphorically, to a beautiful place: the cloudforest region of Costa Rica.

“Language and Culture Service Learning in Costa Rica”: Enlightened Localism, Diversity in Community, International Service-Learning, and the Global/Local Dialectic

Study Abroad as “Enlightened Localism”

As we discuss in this chapter’s introduction, our 5-week course, “Language and Culture Service Learning in Costa Rica” (LCSL) does not run along the ideological lines of most contemporary U.S. study abroad programs. Eschewing the “the world is flat” thesis, our program instead follows the tenets of ecojustice theory and employs place-based education as its primary pedagogy. In lieu of viewing study abroad as a temporal moment in which U.S. students become “global” through immersion in a distant country, we see short-term study abroad in Costa Rica as a way to introduce students to ecojustice principles: ideas of the commons, the instability of the local/global binary, and how language and social practice produce particular views of the Earth and our relation to it.

LCSL encourages students to examine how their lives, language, and thought processes intersect socially, economically, and politically with the lives (and livelihoods) of the people, plants, animals, land, and commons of Costa Rica. Following ecojustice theory, LCSL aims to have students consider how these intersections affect broader ecosystems. According to Mueller (2009),

The central focus of ecojustice is developing an understanding of the tensions between cultures (i.e., intergenerational knowledges and skills, beliefs and values, expectations and narratives) and the needs of the Earth’s ecosystems. Ecojustice philosophy is based on the notion that language carries forward particular cultural metaphors and deemphasizes or ignores others, which influence attitudes towards nature. (1033)

We see traditional U.S. study abroad programming and its attendant focus on the global as a cultural and linguistic metaphor that ignores specificities of place, the health of interconnected ecosystems, and wider questions of social and environmental justice. As a corrective to this metaphor, LCSL follows the tenets of ecojustice theory and utilizes place-based education, “the educational counterpart of a broader movement toward reclaiming the significance of the local in the global age” (Gruenewald and Smith 2008, p. xiii). Place-based, or place-conscious, education is not “tuned to nostalgic or homogenous images of the local, but to local diversity, the diversity within places and the diversity between places” (Gruenewald and Smith 2008, p. xxi). Thus, an overarching goal of our program is to have students understand that the Costa Rican community they visit is not only unique among places in Costa Rica, but also in many ways more cosmopolitan than the U.S. Southeast communities from which they come. Some forms of Costa Rican cosmopolitanism, moreover, come with steep social and environmental costs, such as the long and tenuous history of Latin America’s involvement in multinational agribusiness (Galeano 1973). In examining some of these costs, it is our hope that students come to see that U.S. cosmopolitanism, too, is fraught with complexity and tensions.

Through intensive field experiences, class discussions, daily readings, and on-line reflective journaling, we aim to have our students understand that the local and the global exist in relation to one another. Both scales construct and are constructed by the another. As one LCSL student observes here in her on-line journal, the people in our Costa Rican host site are connected to others worldwide because of the commons, the cloudforest. She writes:

(1 August, 2011) I have been very intrigued by the focus on nature and wildlife during our stay. It’s interesting that men and women from all over the globe with different professional backgrounds (e.g., education, medicine, conservation, landscape architecture) come here to learn more about the nature practices here. The men and women in this community discuss these topics because it’s their life; yet, it connects them to individuals around the world.

Zucker (cited in Sobel 2004), asserts that place-based education is “‘enlightened localism’: a local/global dialectic that is sensitive to broader ecological and social relationships at the same time as it strengthens and deepens people’s sense of community and land” (p. ii). Knowledge, in ecojustice-informed place-based education, is knowledge-in-use for ethical ends. This is another primary goal of our program: we want our students to engage with the idea that that one does not truly “know” something if one does not understand the effects of this knowledge on real communities and the Earth (Orr 2004). One cannot say they possess global knowledge, for example, if one lacks an understanding of how a particular global process affects the environment, local community relationships, and economic activities at multiple scales.

Our program’s approach to the study of exports, for example, illustrates a way in which we teach about the global/local dialectic, or “enlightened localism.” Rather than simply naming Costa Rica’s exports (as students learn to do in U.S. K-12 schools), the LCSL group discusses exports as points of friction (Tsing 2005): nodes where the global and the local connect and chafe. A pineapple, for example, that is consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been produced in a small Costa Rican village where chemical input regulation is minimal. This intensive input use not only creates immediate health problems for community residents, but also alters the community’s future economic stability, as transitioning to organic farming may be difficult. The political significance of imbibing a piña colada at a U.S. Applebee’s, then, is clearer when one connects the act to Costa Rican public health, economic resiliency, and questionable labor practices (McMillan 2012). Through a place-based educational approach informed by ecojustice ethics, however, such global/local connections become more legible and relevant.

Guided by ecojustice theory and using place-based educational pedagogy then, the overarching aim of our short-term study abroad program is to teach students to engage with the limits and possibilities of the global by focusing on the local—or even the glocal, a creolization of the two (Hannerz 2003). With these ends in mind, we arrange for the LCSL students to participate in the following activities over their 5-week stay: work as English language teaching assistants in two Costa Rican elementary schools; participate in homestays and community events with resident families; talk with elders, adults, and students to learn about community challenges and resources; visit local businesses, nature preserves, and a women’s cooperative; tour two organic produce farms; visit an organic coffee plantation; tour an international grant-funded tilapia farm; and take daily classes on the university satellite campus alongside (and often in tension with) other U.S. study abroad groups. Through these various engagements, LCSL students learn that one, small Costa Rican village is itself both cosmopolitan and parochial—comprised of the global, the local, and the glocal.

Our host site illustrates the inherent tensions between ideas of the global and local extremely well. Being the site of a U.S. university satellite campus and located in the ecologically rich cloud forest, our focal Costa Rican village hosts an ongoing stream of scientists, tourists, and visitors from around the world. Many of the village’s permanent residents augment their incomes by serving as homestay families. Consequently, LCSL students (many of whom are abroad for the very first time) are humbled to learn that many of the village’s families—despite never having left Costa Rica—hold more cosmopolitan perspectives than they do. One of us, for example, is shocked to be served pure maple syrup on pancakes (something she denies herself at home!) while staying with a local host couple. As it turns out, the syrup is a gift to the family from a former international visitor from Canada. This is just one example of how, throughout the trip, students encounter the global/local dialectic in surprising ways.

Over the course of their 5 weeks in Costa Rica, LCSL students come to attend to, invest in, and make sense of the social realities and lived experiences of the people in our host community by exploring their own, albeit temporal, places in it. Sutton (2011) writes that, “Local does not mean isolated. It does not mean unchanging. Furthermore, local systems are not always geographically based, and even when they are, they refer to all who inhabit an area, not just those who have been there a long time” (p. 127). Consequently, a place-based educational approach to study abroad—one informed by ecojustice ethics—insists that no place is “remote.” The local and the global are in constant dialogue, especially when embodied in the commons: the cloudforest, the nearby ocean, and through cultural practices such as dance and song. Our small, focal Costa Rican village and its commons are impacted and changed by multiple glocal forces: Canadian visitors, the sweetness of maple syrup, and present-day LCSL students alike. Per an ecojustice perspective, some of these glocalities further enclose the commons, such as how use of the university satellite campus is restricted to fee-paying visitors. Yet, ecojustice theory and place-based pedagogy open up such topics for study in our 5-week program.

Diversity in Community

Sobel (2004) writes that, “[p]lace-based education is about connecting people to people, as well as connecting people to nature” (p. 62). Thus, one of LCSL’s primary foci is to have our students connect to the local community: one another, other U.S. study abroad groups on the university satellite campus, workers at the campus facility, and long-term Costa Rican residents. The LCSL group itself is comprised of 14 people: 2 co-instructors, 6 traditionally-aged undergraduate students, 5 masters-level students (4 in their 20s and 1 in her early 30s), and the teenaged daughter of one of the instructors. Even among our own group, there is considerable diversity. Eleven of us identify as white, two as African-American, and one as Latina. Twelve of us identify as women, two as men. One participant holds dual Costa Rican and U.S. citizenship; the rest of the group holds U.S. citizenship alone. Of the two males in our group, one, an undergraduate, is participating in LCSL for a second time; the other male, a graduate-level student, is planning to continue on at the university satellite campus facility for 6 months as an English language teaching volunteer. Two of our students have previously studied abroad in Spain and one has traveled extensively; most of the other student group members have never before left the U.S.

The LCSL group’s leadership is diverse as well. Paula, the primary LCSL instructor, has lived and worked in Costa Rica for over a decade, is fluent in Spanish, and is married to a Costa Rican national. The 2011 trip marks her fourth time leading the LCSL group, and she is well-respected and known throughout the community. Cori, a long-term English as a Second Language teacher, is visiting the host site for the first time and speaks only limited Spanish. A central part of LCSL is learning about, negotiating, and accommodating difference between and among LCSL group members, instructors included. Simply being from the U.S. does not result in our being a homogenous unit.

Calling our students’ attention to the weakness of the “U.S.” side of the oft-presumed U.S./global binary is central to the larger purpose of LCSL. Part of our 5-week trip includes engaging in international service-learning (ISL), a main component of which is understanding diversity in community. While multiple theoretical approaches to international service-learning exist (cf. Bringle and Hatcher 2011), LCSL takes a “justice-oriented” approach to service-learning (following Westheimer and Kahne 2004). This conceptual framework sees the main goal of community service engagement as learning about the underlying causes of social and economic disparity. LCSL is also mindful of critical studies of volunteer tourism (e.g., Butcher and Smith 2010), which suggest that short-term, international voluntary service work often attends to the symptoms of problems rather than their causes.

With these theoretical constructs in mind, we approach the ISL component of LCSL cautiously. Before students even begin ISL, it is essential for them to understand the heterogeneity of the community with whom they have come to work. Kahn (2011), taking up this point, writes that

[i]t is naïve of ISL practitioners to think that they can help or develop a community, since communities and cultures spill out across borders and are composed of various individuals who do not necessarily think like their neighbor. Do you think like your neighbor? Do we assume community members in developing countries inherently do? Is this another form of imperialist thinking that must be dismantled, and that encourages us to listen to only a few voices or organizations as representative of the greater community? (p. 120)

Difference and even dissent among LCSL group members, then, help to illustrate the complexity and conceptual limits of the term, community. This is a key issue in both an ecojustice-informed place-based education and ISL.

In order to learn about the composition of the local community, the LCSL group participates in many activities. For example, while staying at the university satellite campus (weeks 1 and 4 of the program), LCSL students take turns mopping and clearing tables in the dining hall after communal meals. This allows them to mingle with the maintenance crew, chat with kitchen staff, and talk casually with members of other U.S. study abroad groups, up to four of which overlap with ours at any given time. For evening fun, LCSL students recruit a facility maintenance worker to give salsa dance lessons, and they invite campus kitchen staff, their family members, and other U.S. study abroad groups to join in. These lessons lead to many informal conversations on and off the dance floor. Additionally, during the first week of our stay, the LCSL group attends a community-wide fundraiser at one of the village elementary schools. While there, we place bets on local horse races, try our hands at bingo, and dance late into the night to salsa and reggaeton music in circles of multi-aged people.

The community-wide fundraising event provides LCSL students with a key chance to understand diversity in community and disrupt the U.S./global binary. During the evening bingo game, LSCL students each sit with their assigned host families. These are the Costa Rican community residents with whom LCSL students will live for weeks 2 and 3 of the program. By dispersing and sitting among local residents, LCSL students feel that they minimize their outsider presence and “fit in” better with the mise en scène.

Another U.S. study abroad group, however, cuts quite a different figure. In contrast to the LCSL students, this other group stays in a tight-knit huddle throughout the evening, speaking in English quite loudly and barely mingling with resident Costa Ricans. The LCSL group notices how this other U.S. study abroad group stands apart rather than within the community. As a result, they want to disassociate themselves from them. In a post to her on-line reflective journal, an LSCL student summarizes the group’s sentiments as follows:

(20 July, 2011) I think that it’s easy when we’re in a country where a different language is spoken to say that we are different and separate from others because we speak different languages. But what I am finding more interesting here is how we separate ourselves from people who speak the same language. There’s a [U.S.] group staying here [at the university satellite campus] that we are all trying to distance ourselves from in the community, because we don’t want to be associated with them simply because we all speak English and are from [the same university]. And I’m thinking that even though we all speak English, I think that maybe our group speaks a different language from them socially.

Here, we see an emergent understanding of the varying ways in which community is constructed. Language use alone need not indicate affiliation or common interest. “To deeply learn through ISL, students must become aware of [the] heterogeneity within communities,” Kahn writes (2011, p. 120). This idea comes opportunistically to the LCSL group.

Related to the issue of diversity in community, Sobel (2004) writes that place-based education “teaches about both the natural and built environments. The history, folk culture, social problems, economics, and aesthetics of the community and its environment are all on the agenda” (p. 9). Thus, an additional and related learning goal of LCSL is to have students understand that the built environment in this Costa Rican village is comprised of (rather than just host to) a U.S. university satellite campus. To ease this awareness along, we begin our program’s next step: going into the local schools and participating in ISL through English language teaching.

International Service-Learning Through English Language Teaching: Limits and Possibilities

A central component of ecojustice-informed place-based education is community engagement, which can often take place in school contexts. Schools, in an ecojustice-informed place-based educational framework, are not walled-off testing sites or buildings of child-care provision. Rather, schools are commons, community centers—places where students, teachers, and community residents come together for non-commodified conviviality as well as to solve real-world problems. “Community vitality and environmental quality are improved through the active engagement of local citizens, community organizations, and environmental resources in the life of the school,” Sobel (2004) writes. Accordingly, the two elementary schools in our Costa Rican host village are pivotal to our study abroad program. We see them not only as places in which to experience local community life, but also as sites for learning about collaborative, real-world problem solving among community members. Ecojustice theory, moreover, teaches us to see schools as vital commons—places that are publicly held, shared, and rich in non-market based activity.

Paula, LCSL’s main instructor, draws upon previously established relationships with the local school board and the village English language teacher to facilitate our group’s entry into the schools. Our role there is to serve as English language teaching assistants under the tutelage of the main, locally-based English language teacher—an itinerant educator who travels between two buildings. The LCSL students work in two schools, helping small groups in multi-grade English language classes and hosting an English language day camp on the university satellite campus.

As aforementioned, LCSL takes a “justice-oriented” approach (Westheimer and Kahne 2004) to community engagement. Thus, even while engaging in short-term, international voluntary service work, we have our students read and discuss relevant critiques of the practice. These critiques include: congruence with neoliberal principles (Conran 2011), exaggerated volunteer expertise in international settings (Simpson 2005), and a reduction of communal political action to personal “life politics” (Butcher and Smith 2010). Unlike short-term, international volunteering, however, in which service work is extra-curricular and often detached from community life (e.g., Gray and Campbell 2007), ISL is embedded in coursework and relies on guided, active reflection to help participants engage with the structural issues that undergird social problems. According to Bringle and Hatcher (2011), ISL is

a structured academic experience in another country in which students (a) participate in an organized service activity that addresses identified community needs; (b) learn from direct interaction and cross-cultural dialogue with others; and (c) reflect on the experience in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a deeper understanding of global and intercultural issues, a broader appreciation of the host country and the discipline, and an enhanced sense of their own responsibilities as citizens, locally and globally (p. 19, emphases in original).

Akin to ecojustice-informed place-based education, ISL stresses deep understanding of a local context prior to and during service work. As Sutton (2011) asserts, successful ISL requires “understanding local modes of civic engagement, local political and economic relations, and local concepts of what constitutes community in the first place” (p. 130). One does not simply “do service” in ISL—or, in our case, drop into a new community and “teach English.” Rather, a justice-oriented ISL approach promotes “inquiry into the social groupings and divisions that are present; the environmental, political, demographic, and economic forces shaping (and reshaping) lives and communities … the playing out of global forces in this particular local arena” (Sutton 2011, p. 137).

Yet, ecojustice theory allows us to go even further. Discourses around English language teaching and learning carry linguistic and cultural root metaphors, many of which negatively impact the Earth and community vitality (Bowers 2006). Thus, before we even enter the local schools, we ask our students to consider why and how English language study is occurring there. In whose interests is English teaching operating? For what or whose purposes is English being learned? Research indicates that English language study in Latin America generally reaffirms rather than challenges peoples’ current social positions (Niño-Murcia 2003). Why, then, is English language study taking up precious curricular time and scarce resources in a small Costa Rican village? What are the effects of English language study on cultural and land-use practices? In order to answer these questions, we read, discuss, and debate while walking home from the local schools, during class meetings, and through on-line reflective journaling. Guided by ISL and ecojustice principles, we want LCSL students to understand the local/global forces that contribute to English language teaching/learning in Costa Rica and in the Global South more generally.

Indeed, the reasons for global English language spread are complex and many. Under conditions associated with late capitalism, language not only serves as a marker of authenticity but also operates as a powerful form of cultural capital (Niño-Murcia 2003). The de facto language of the Global North, English is symbolically associated with technology, modernization, and development—whatever is new (Block and Cameron 2002). Consequently, many Global South nation-states (Costa Rica included) have adopted English language study as part of a national educational curriculum. English’s symbolic power moves parents, political leaders, and other stakeholders to demand access to English language study in the face of reduced job prospects (Niño-Murcia 2003).

As in other Global South contexts, English in Costa Rica is linked to ideas of cosmopolitanism, travel, and increased employment opportunities (e.g., Block and Cameron 2002). Jobs near the university satellite campus in transportation, canopy zip-line operating, or cloudforest guiding are perceived as more accessible to those with English language skills. Indeed, it is this supplementary work in tourism that often allows local families to keep their land rather than sell it to development interests. Thus, LCSL students are encouraged to place their community-based service work in a larger, often contested, political context.

To be sure, another affinity between ISL and ecojustice-informed place-based education is a cautious—even skeptical—approach to service. Similar to how large-scale, “one-size-fits-all” solutions to community-based problems are antithetical to place-based education, ISL also opposes externally conceived, non-collaborative service work. Elaborating upon this issue, Plater (2011) cautions that

[k]nowledge and experience acquired in the United States may not transfer to other nations in any but superficial forms. The unintended consequences of poorly conceived, implemented, or supervised ISL can be harmful to the communities where the failures occur, and occasionally disastrous since the innocence or good intentions of the American foreigners can quickly become insults and incidents in unfamiliar settings that magnify similar domestic shortcomings (p. 41).

While many might argue that the work of a volunteer English language teacher would not cause disaster in a Costa Rican village, the concept of English language teaching as “service” merits increased scrutiny. Within the tenets of ecojustice theory, the relations among English language use and ecological stewardship are many and complex. Too often, international development organizations frame any kind of English language teaching—even that conducted by well-meaning but untrained volunteers—as a solution to poverty and job scarcity (e.g., Global Volunteers 2002). This framing of English as a panacea unhinges English’s role in disrupting linguistic ecologies (Skutnabb-Kangass 2000) and obscures the fact that primary language literacy remains far more important for vulnerable people than simple phrases or greetings in a foreign language (Bruthiaux 2002). Further, displacing local languages with English ignores the ways in which root metaphors operate on and through local languages and how these root metaphors may be shaping peoples’ sustainable interactions with and understandings of the Earth (Bowers 2006).

Weaving together ISL, ecojustice theory, and place-based educational pedagogy, then, we have LCSL students read extensively about English language politics, the anthropology of language, and ecojustice while working in our host site’s schools. We want LCSL students to understand the various purposes to which English is being put in Costa Rica while recognizing that English language spread may be disrupting local community practices and livelihoods (Bowers 2006).

LCSL students’ on-line reflective journal entries demonstrate their growing understanding of the politics and limits of volunteer English language teaching, particularly in a small Costa Rican village. Following our discussions, readings, and reflections after working in the schools, our students come to realize that their teaching curriculum should reflect local priorities rather than abstract “global” ones. In the words of one LCSL student,

(15 July, 2011) It’s not service-learning for us to just run into a classroom and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna teach y’all English’ and start teaching the ABC’s and 123’s. It is imperative to find out the needs of the group and really get to know the group in order to truly create service-learning.

Relatedly, the LCSL group has been struck by the fact that a Costa Rican fourth grader includes a mango tree while drawing an English-labeled map of her community. Akin to the local church and health center, the tree assumes a prominent place in the student’s drawing and she wants to label it in English accordingly. After an initial chuckle about the improbability of this occurring in a U.S. classroom (“What U.S. fourth grader would view an apple tree as the orientation point of a town?” our students laugh), the LCSL group realizes that the Costa Rican student’s drawing reflects her community’s priorities. The LCSL group has recently visited a local organic farm, and they are aware that some of its fruit trees and edible plants are treated as community commons. This information then guides LCSL students to question their language instruction; a debate ensues about the relations between words, representation, and reality. The phrase “to throw away” is brought up; as a popular bumper sticker asks, “Where is away?” and how does this root metaphor shape our understanding of “waste”? Such are the questions our ISL provokes.

Like U.S. schools, many international English language teaching programs are undergirded by the globally competitive worker ideology. These programs frame English as a tool for accessing an abstract “global arena” rather than having local purposes (Jakubiak 2012). In contrast to this rhetoric, the LCSL group comes to see English language teaching in Costa Rica cautiously: they see English as useful in some contexts, but also disruptive in its potential to carry particular root metaphors forward. Commenting on this new awareness, one LCSL student posts the following to her on-line journal:

(14 July, 2011) Since we have been here, I have been struck by the importance of incorporating what students [already] know into our teaching. When we visited Finca La Bella [a local organic farm], I learned so much about the plants that we saw. I thought about how I could apply some of that knowledge into different lessons. I, however, had to learn about what was in the community before I could apply that to my work.

Here, we see an LCSL student positioning local community members as knowledgeable: they understand farming, local produce, and ecology in a way that our group does not. Consequently, the LCSL group’s English language teaching curriculum becomes focused on community-based knowledge: K-5 students draw maps of the local community and label them in English and Spanish (to be used as maps for visitors from the university satellite campus); they practice giving English language directions (for the interactions they may have with visitors); and they talk, in small groups, about local community life using simple English language expressions.

Our ISL is useful for LCSL students in other ways, too. All pre- or in-service teacher education students, LCSL students use their ISL experience to work toward becoming better teachers in the U.S. Despite increased linguistic and cultural diversity in U.S. schools, in 2006, only 1 % of all teacher education students in the U.S. studied abroad (Cushner 2009). Not surprisingly, then, U.S. teachers often misunderstand or misinterpret immigrant students’ work, prior knowledge, or interests due to language or cultural barriers (Moll and Luis 2005). The time we spend in Costa Rican schools helps LCSL students to better understand the students they will someday teach. One LCSL student writes explicitly to this point in her on-line journal, saying:

(14 July, 2011) I think that teachers oftentimes forget that they have lots of things to learn from their students, as well. I had a good reminder of that yesterday when the students were doing the word scramble at camp. When we asked them to draw pictures that represent the words they had unscrambled, I would have thought that they would draw north with an arrow facing the top of the page (and some of them did). But a couple students drew the arrow on the page facing true north based on where the page was facing at that time. It was interesting, because if a teacher took that up to grade at his/her desk, the teacher would probably misunderstand and think that the student didn’t understand the concept. On the contrary, the student had learned the realistic and practical use of cardinal directions.

It is critical for U.S. pre-service teachers to understand non-U.S. schooling practices. Visiting schools that the parents of immigrant children may have attended, for example, “allow[s] pre-service teachers to learn more about the educational assumptions, perspectives and experiences of some of their [future] students” (Cushner 2009, p. 164). Spending time in Costa Rican schools thus helps our pre-service teachers become more informed about how the global/local dialectic influences classrooms worldwide.

In sum, the LCSL group does not engage in short-term, volunteer English language teaching as a way to spread the globally competitive worker ideology. Rather, English language teaching becomes a way for LCSL students to enter the schools and learn firsthand about community-based knowledge, local people, and various commons.

Power Relations and Community Change: The Global/Local Dialectic Revisited

A final, key piece of the LCSL program is having students understand the unintended effects of their presence in a small, Costa Rican village. Although short-term, volunteer English language teaching may not produce substantive results, an ongoing stream of international visitors to a small, Costa Rican village undoubtedly has long-term effects. Although our students may teach Costa Rican elementary students no more than a few new English words, the LCSL group’s presence shapes the community in profound ways. “Students participating in international partnerships should be prepared not to have expectations for meaningfully contributing to community change,” Longo and Saltmarsh (2011) note, and continue,

but they can be prepared to participate in reflective inquiry on the origins and intent of the projects in which they participate, the relationships of the projects to the social and power structures of the host community and country, and the degree to which their projects and activities might either perpetuate or liberate political, social, and economic structures (p. 77).

Through their work as short-term, English language teaching assistants, LCSL students engage in more than simple language teaching. The continual presence of short-term, study abroad students at the university satellite campus (and in the community) changes the very “locality” of that community and its schools. English language study may receive greater traction there because of the continual presence of “teaching assistants”; how and in what ways, we want the LCSL students to ask, does our presence alter the thought practices and priorities of this community?

Luckily, our efforts are fruitful. In about week 3 of our stay, many of the LCSL students begin to sit less comfortably with how a U.S. university satellite campus alters power dynamics and influences what is “local” in a small Costa Rican community. By bringing in hundreds of international visitors every year, the university satellite campus contributes to community change, social relations in the village, and local culture. LCSL students begin to recognize this—and often with a new sense of humility. In her on-line journal, for example, one LCSL student posts the following:

(26 July, 2011) From my homestay experience, I feel like I have gained a peek into the community and [have seen] the results of the families having close relationships with the university. I noticed that the families who have taken advantage of activities like ecotourism and coffee touring seem to have more “things.” Not just material items but say in the community. I feel like the families who are not involved in activities with the university are not able to have those “things/privileges” the other families do have.

Here, the LCSL student expresses an understanding of how the global/local dialectic shapes and changes communities. Despite its seemingly parochial location, one small, Costa Rican village is very much affected by global processes.

Relatedly, LCSL students are also intrigued by how inequitable access to the university satellite campus and its international visitors creates new problems for the local community. Students worry that material gain is being wrought at the expense of social cohesion. Speaking to this point, one LCSL student posts this to her on-line journal:

(26 July, 2011) I also wondered about differences in the community that we cannot see. I wondered if there were any class differences, particularly between families who have been able to take advantage of some of the ecotourism such as waterfall visits, organic coffee, crafting, farm tours, etc. and families who have not. It was nice to hear men and women talk about using those opportunities to help their extended family, but I wondered if they have gained any new influence in the community because of their businesses.

Again, we see a student coming to a new understanding of the global/local dialectic: communities both produce and are produced by processes near and far. The presence of a U.S. satellite campus in a small, Costa Rican village not only “cosmopolitanizes” certain people, but also renders others more parochial.

Balancing the Situated Tensions of a Study Abroad Experience

As we discuss in this chapter, we do not take a study abroad group to Costa Rica with the intent to create globally competitive workers. Instead, we seek to teach our students about one very specific place—a village in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, which temporarily includes ourselves. In doing this work, we attempt to give to our students a sense of the uniqueness of place as well as a clearer understanding of the ways in which local knowledge and practices are not transferrable, not able to be “scaled up” or standardized. In contrast to the “global” rhetoric that circulates endlessly in study abroad circles, our short-term study abroad program aims to have students generate a keen and appreciative sense of the local and the ways in which the global and local intersect. By having our students study the complexities of one, small Costa Rican village through a cautious ISL, we hope that they will come to understand that their own local, the Southeast U.S., is complex and multi-scaled, too.

Are we successful? The jury is still out. Orr (2004) suggests that if and when U.S. colleges and universities replace global rhetoric with a “homecoming” major, a more ecologically and socially just world will follow. In the meantime, we urge other educators, as we did, to reframe study abroad. To the extent that study abroad can become learning about someone else’s local (rather than an abstract global), we’re all for it. Research demonstrates that U.S. schools will only become increasingly diverse in the twenty-first century (e.g., Noddings 2005). It is time we begin seeing place-by-place uniqueness as good and important—indeed, our ecological future may depend on it.