‘Global competence’ of minority immigrant students: hierarchy of experience and ideology of global competence in study abroad

ABSTRACT

In this article, I analyze implications of recent calls to increase minority students’ participation in study abroad. I argue, although these calls aim for inclusivity, they frame study abroad as the only way of fostering ‘global competence’ and imply that minority students lack it. I also highlight the oft-erased global competence nurtured in minority immigrant students’ experience. My ethnographic researches of three study abroad trips show that bi/multicultural and bi/multilingual minority immigrant students studying abroad already had global competence and utilized it to enrich their experience. I attribute the lack of acknowledgment of their global competence to the elitist legacy of study abroad, emerging regimes of mobility, and current neoliberal conditions that position races hierarchically. I then suggest new approaches to global competence and study abroad.

KEYWORDS:

• Border-crossing
• cultural background
• global competence
• ideology
• minority immigrant students
• study abroad

Acknowledgment

I am grateful for those who participated in this research from Cape College, the professors who led the trip to Sierra Leone, the study-abroad provider in Spain, and the director of the Cape College’s International Education Center that allowed me to carry out this research, Jaime Taber for copyediting the drafts, and the editor and anonymous reviewers of the journal, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education for critical and constructive comments. The text’s deficiencies are wholly my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Neriko Musha Doerr http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1931-9236

Notes

1 http://allabroad.us/question.php?qid=103&cat_id=31&sort=0&category=all, Retrieved March 13, 2015.

2 http://www.nafsa.org/Find_Resources/Supporting_Study_Abroad/Encouraging_Underrepresented_Students_to_Study_Abroad__Making_the_Case_for_Advocacy/, Retrieved June 11, 2015.

3 http://studiesabroad.com/content/binaries/ISA_Scholarship_Application.pdf, Retrieved June 11, 2015.

4 http://www.iesabroad.org/study-abroad/about/diversity-initiative, Retrieved June 11, 2015.

5 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/23/boost-minority-students-study-abroad/3171991/, Retrieved June 11, 2015.

6 http://allabroad.us/question.php?qid=103&cat_id=31&sort=0&category=all, Retrieved March 13, 2015.

7 http://allabroad.us/question.php?qid=301&cat_id=31&sort=0&category=all, Retrieved March 13, 2015.

8 http://www.iesabroad.org/study-abroad/about/diversity-resources, Retrieved March 13, 2015.

9 Hispanic Americans, the biggest minority group studying abroad, were 7.6% of the total in 2012–2013. Bangladeshi students fell into the next largest category, ‘Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander’ students (7.3%). White students were 76.3%. http://www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors/Data/US-Study-Abroad/Student-Profile/2000-13, Retrieved June 9, 2015.

10 Transnational solidarity activism, in which individuals are present in conflict zones ‘as protective accompaniers, witness-observers … or “human shields” for the vulnerable and marginalized’, relies on and perpetuates white privilege because white individuals’ presence matters more than non-whites’ (Mahrouse, 2014, p. 4).