Managing an intimate teaching space, modelling behaviours. One of the great challenges expressed by teachers in the interviews was the need to function in a

dramatically different teaching space in the framework of the international study visit. In the international programme in this case, one academic staff member takes a group of students and is required to attend to all the students’ needs during the entire period: emotional,

personal, academic, technical as well as the group dynamics. This opens an entirely different teaching space, in which teacher – student relationships are far more intensive and intimate.

The study participants were excited to share and reflect on this unique teaching experience.

Nelly describes how intensive it is:

It’s crazy, it’s so intensive. The students go through a dramatic process. It’s about both knowledge acquisition and a very personal and group process they go through.

It’s not exactly group therapy or individual therapy, but at the end of the day, that’s what happens really. Because we live together 24/7, we go out together in the morning, this year we spent every minute together because we were all in the same

project. Breakfast is together, work, dinner, and then the reflective seminar, which is sometimes a couple of hours, sometimes more. We also go out together afterwards to have a drink or something.

Max lends further support to Nelly’s experience and notes the parental role this requires of him:

And it’s very intensive – on the one hand you really have to hold yourself together because you’re representing the country, you have to use English, etc. But on the other, the realities of the site are really tough. And I treat them like my children. I go with them everywhere. They can’t just go out in the evenings without me. So they have to find their place among the group.

He also stresses that this is a unique teaching arrangement, which does not necessarily happen with other groups of Social Work students who go on a study visit:

Look, this programme is unique, it’s not about spending a semester abroad and

experiencing a different place. I can tell you that whenever we’re there, there’s always a group from Germany. The German professor sends the students with an address to go somewhere, but then there’s no close and intimate mentoring like we do.

In this exceptional setting, teachers find themselves responding to the realities of the study visit in a way which completely exposes them to the students, as they contribute their own, personal difficulties to the continuous group dynamics and learning processes. In return, students are invited to learn from the reactions of their teacher to a given situation and are encouraged to shape their own learning. Monica shares an incredible story of how she was mugged once during a study visit, and how her students closely studied her reactions, learning from the way in which she coped with the situation and interacted with the local authorities. That evening she invited the students to reflect with her on what had happened

and conceptualise her responses to the events. This example illustrates the unusual degree of personal immersion and sacrifices teachers demand of themselves in this kind of learning space, and how they enable teaching through modeling their own behaviors. Nelly also points out how unexpected circumstances can develop, and that as a teacher, you have to be

prepared to cope with just about anything:

And everyone comes with their personal story, their personal biography. Sometimes, the intensive contact with the group replicates past experiences and brings up things, and these things have to attended to…. Beyond the purpose of the professional visit itself. We are learning our physical and social environment together. We plan the interventions together, we think about intercultural aspects together, we become aggravated together about disappointments and things turning out differently from how we expected

Like Monica, Rona emphasises the importance of not leaving issues at the level of the experience, but guiding the students carefully towards conceptualising the events of the day:

The topics that come up are extremely personal. The whole set-up is very intimate – you wake up together, you eat together, you take a jeep together for the day. And you have to sustain all that experience both on the intimate level and on the intellectual level. It’s not a ‘trekking’ experience, a ‘travel’ experience, it isn’t! Everything that comes up has a theoretical or conceptualization angle, it is not just left at the level of the experience. The beauty is to intertwine the personal experience with the

theoretical/intellectual level.

To summarise, the extraordinary teaching and learning experience, which is enabled through the international study visit, and which necessitates a tremendous degree of

academic, emotional and personal preparation at the level of the curriculum, results in an

intense, rich and unexpected pedagogical site. Both students and teachers are fully immersed in the experience and return home transformed. Upon their return home, Nelly notes how challenging it is to resume the traditional student-teacher rapport and continue their studies:

As a whole, it’s an extremely powerful experience. And this comes after a lot of work which is done before we go. When we return, we also get together, but my

involvement decreases. I resume my old role as teacher… it’s a process of attachment and detachment. I intentionally distance myself from them, I put a stop to the intimate relationship, it’s a bit unnatural, having lived 24/7 together.

Finally, many of the Social Work interviewees reported that upon returning home they are also occupied with documenting, theorising and publishing their teaching experiences in this setting. In this sense, they are assuming a cyclical and never-ending approach to their

curriculum design.

7.2.4.3 Incorporating self – reflection. As mentioned earlier, the ability to reflect is key to the entire Social Work curriculum, and specifically, of major importance for the international field work experience, where it is embedded as a curriculum piece throughout their stay and on a daily basis. During the international field work study visit, the students must participate every evening in an extended reflective session, where their daily

experiences from the field work, their personal struggles, as well as their interaction with other group members, are processed. According to the research participants, the ability to reflect is central to the transformative experience. As Rona describes:

The reflection piece comes at the end of each day. You come with lots of questions.

It’s actually a draining experience. Transformation is at the heart of it. They have to go through a transformation. They are in a reflective process constantly.

Odilia adds that by exposing the students to the international experience, self-reflection becomes the key tool through which they learn how to process the unfamiliar and which will later develop into one of the fundamental skills they will use as professionals. Monica believes it is one of the elements which may ultimately distinguish their students from other graduates when they do field work:

I know that I hear from social service managers that our students are very different than other students. But I’m not sure that it’s in that arena [cultivating global

citizenship]. I know that they’re different, but I don’t know how to put my finger on it. And I’m not sure that social service managers will be able to identify why they are.

I can tell you that they are more self-reflective, that they are more critical. So maybe that’s an aspect of that.

Different reflective methods are incorporated by the lecturers in their daily work with the students. Rona and Odilia for example, describe personal written narratives to record students’ reflections and experiences while Max describes how he incorporates the

Photovoice technique in a unique way in order to enhance reflection. Altogether, the Social Work international field work experience constitutes an untraditional teaching and learning space, in which the academic team facilitates an environment which constitutes an extensive support system and gives room for all student experiences to be processed on a profound and meaningful level.

7.2.5 Formal curriculum enactment. This section presents the results of the