Culture shock is hard. It causes stress, anxiety, and can often lead to frustration, unhappiness, and depression. Ryan and Twibell (2000) defined culture shock as that phenomenon people experience when adapting to a new culture. We usually reference culture shock with international travel, but culture shock can apply to any change in a person’s experience with culture. In higher education, students can experience culture shock whenever there is a new transition: as they enter their first year at the university, when they transfer into the school, when they switch their majors, and of course when they experience international travel, be it study abroad or even coming to the United States as international students.
I’ve noticed that as we work to help our students combat the difficulties that arise with their identities, academics, and their personal lives, some of us want to jump in and help the students go through the process of completing their education without struggling the ways we may have when we were students. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we try to save students from “the struggle” by removing all the hurdles in front of them, we’re taking away their chance to grow and develop. I realized this recently when I was researching ways to help international students navigate our U. S. institutions. By looking at cognitive development theories, I began to think more critically and innovatively about the student experience and how I, as an educator, can help international student development. Looking at the theories explain how the struggle has the potential to help international students grow in their cognitive development.
One aspect of the international student experience that has plagued me is that sometimes, the students don’t express or fully form their cultural identities on their own, but rather American students and instructors create these identities and stories for the student. Because the student isn’t FROM America, the student becomes tokenized as a “foreigner” and as Marshall (1970) states, the student serves as a cultural carrier who represents a country, region, or people to the Americans. To get rid of this “othered” identity, Li (2007) says students may choose to integrate or assimilate and may not retain aspects of their home culture. While this situation can be looked at with a social justice perspective with a hope for change, when we look at cognitive development theories, we can see how an unfortunate experience can actually help students grow.
Bennett (1993) developed a stage model for developing intercultural maturity. The model helps break down how students learn to be more culturally sensitive, an important competency a person needs to develop in order to work in today’s global society. As students study in the United States, they are sometimes forced to process the ideals and values of their home culture. This happens when they are tokenized and become cultural carriers. But when students do this, when they begin to contemplate and think about their home culture within the U. S. context, students develop cognitive complexity. As they begin to wrestle with the societal expectations of their home or host country and take actions to integrate, they can begin to develop intercultural maturity.
Building the intercultural maturity requires a shift in ways of thinking. Students from collectivist cultures may view professors as complete authority figures. Wang and Mallinckrodt (2006) note that students from certain cultures do not usually speak up in class and may not be comfortable forming their own opinions or even in challenging texts, classmates, or instructors; this would go against societal law. However, the cognitive dissonance students experience when adapting to the U. S. educational system requires students to think critically and move past Kohlberg’s (2011) preconventional judgments, where rules and social expectations are external to the individual, and into conventional and possibly even postconventional levels of judgment where expectations and knowledge become more contextual and are contingent on more than the individual’s thoughts or feelings of expectation.
Perry’s (2011) Theory of Intellectual and Ethical Development has a similar relationship to international students’ experiences. When students believe that instructors, texts, or other authority figures are omniscient and always correct, they may be operating from Perry’s first position of basic duality. As mentioned before, international students may not feel comfortable challenging their instructors. However, when students encounter graduate teaching assistants or other professionals who don’t appear to be “experts,” students start to struggle with the system and will begin to question truth and knowledge. This struggle helps students develop critical thinking skills and to establish why knowledge is more complicated than they originally thought.
Another set of theorists who can help us understand the cognitive development of international students are King and Kitchener (2011) who introduced the Reflective Judgment Model. As students experience the culture shock and changing norms in their academic lives, they make judgments about truth and knowledge which helps them move from prereflective thinking to later stages of the model: quasi-reflective thinking and reflective thinking.
As students begin to develop intellectual processes, they start to make meaning of their experience. Keagan’s Theory of Evolution of Consciousness claims growth happens when people make meaning of the shifts from stability to instability based on their environments (Evans, 2010). In the new environments at U. S. institutions, international students face a lot of difficulties that causes hardships. But the struggle actually helps students become more developed thinkers and can be beneficial.
By looking at these cognitive development theories, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t support or fund more programs to help alleviate the stress and struggle of international students. I actually believe the opposite. We do need to support our international students. But I think the support needs to be better researched; we, ourselves, need to think more critically. Rather than only worrying about integrating our international students into the U. S. institution and teaching them to navigate “our” world, we need to be purposeful in creating a campus culture that is more focused on the global society we say we believe in. If we want to help our students develop into thoughtful and productive global citizens, we must engage them in relevant discussions, we must create meaningful programs, and we must support them as they develop their individual identities. If we start to focus too heavily on just removing the hardships or difficulties our international students encounter, we will miss the bigger picture. We will ignore the process that develops students into better thinkers. Supporting international students requires intentionality and thought and may encompass a bit of student struggle as we educators encourage cognitive development processes as the way to navigate the difficulties.
References
Bennett, M. J. (1993). Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In M. Paige (Ed.), Education for the intercultural experience. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.
Evans, N. J., Forney, D. S., Guido, F. M., Patton, L. D., & Renn, K. A. (2010). Student development in college: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
King, P. M. & Kitchener, K. S. (2011). Reflective judgment: Theory and research on the development of epistemic assumptions through adulthood. In M. E. Wilson (Ed.), ASHE reader series: College student development theory (2nd ed.) (367-384). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Kohlberg, L. (2011). Moral stages and moralization: The cognitive-developmental approach. In M. E. Wilson (Ed.), ASHE reader series: College student development theory (2nd ed.) (401-422). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Li, J. (2007, June 27). Immigrant students struggle with assimilation: Students seek benefits of speaking English without losing their culture. Bay Area Multicultural Media Academy. Retrieved from http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/bamma/008618.html
Marshall, T. (1970). The strategy of international exchange. In Students as links between cultures (pp. 3-31). Oslo, Norway: Scandinavian University Books.
Perry, W. G., Jr. (2011). Patterns of development in thought and values of students in a liberal arts college. In M. E. Wilson (Ed.), ASHE reader series: College student development theory (2nd ed.) (299-320). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Ryan, M. E. & Twibell, R. S. (2000). Concerns, values, stress, coping, health and educational outcomes of college students who studied abroad. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 24, 409-435.
Wang, C. C. D. C. & Mallinckrodt, B. (2006). Acculturation, attachment, and psychosocial adjustment of Chinese/Taiwanese international students. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53, 422-433. doi: 10.1037/0022-0167.53.A.422
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