To be Transformed: Emotions in Cross-Cultural, Field-Based Learning in Northern Australia

Abstract

Students undertaking field-based learning, in which they work with Indigenous people in Northern Australia, describe a profound learning experience redolent with emotion. Inspired, challenged and transformed, the students are compelled in ways that require them to interrogate their own selves and taken-for-granted beliefs. In this paper, we draw on empirical work with undergraduate students in geography and development studies to investigate what these cross-cultural experiences add to experiential learning models and recent work on emotional geographies. We find that an understanding of the sensory and emotive is imperative if we are to encourage students to build understanding across difference and connect with diverse people, places and experiences in fundamentally new ways.

Keywords:

• Emotional geographies
• cross-cultural education
• student fieldwork
• Indigenous people
• affect
• experiential learning theory

Acknowledgements

We thank the Indigenous hosts who have been so generous in our many trips, and with our research, particularly Mandy Muir from Murdudjurl, the Lees from Biliru and Robbie from Kijit tours. Any readers visiting Kakadu and Darwin should look them up! We also thank the students for their insights and enthusiasm, and to Kate, Sandie and others from Macquarie University who have shared the field trip with us on different years.

Notes

¹ Interestingly, the gendered term is left unacknowledged by Smith et al. (2009); presumably to also highlight that like emotions, women were ‘no where’ in the masculinist epistemologies and rationalities of the tradition-bound academy.

² Students' participation in the research was voluntary and ethical protocols were maintained throughout. As part of the research, we also interviewed Indigenous hosts to explore their experience with the fieldwork. We found that many hosts understood the interaction as an exchange where all parties were in a position to learn and to teach. Some challenges did emerge for the hosts, however, particularly if they needed to interact with University bureaucracy (see Wright et al., 2007; Hodge et al., 2011).

³ ‘Country’ is a term used in Aboriginal English to describe land as a living, sentient, richly diverse and multidimensional ‘nourishing terrain’ (Rose, 1996). Country is viewed as an intertwining of Indigenous kinship, ancestry and responsibility and is reflected in terms such as ‘speaking to Country,’ ‘listening to Country’ and ‘making Country safe.’ Notably, ‘Country’ can also refer to these same entwined links to the sea (Langton, 1996; Bradley, 2001).