Chasing Shadows: Engagement with Host Communities

Some First Principles

Encounters with the unfamiliar are at the heart of any educational endeavor. In education abroad, those encounters occur in unfamiliar places; disruptions stimulate those senses through which we construct meaning and memory. The inter-connection of body, mind, and space is critical. Leaving home involves crossing literal and metaphorical frontiers into landscapes of uncertainty.

What can students expect? An opportunity to encounter, not necessarily engage with, the unfamiliar. The term "encounter" is neutral. In contrast, "engagement" implies some level of participatory outcome. The common collocation "community engagement" raises problematic questions:

• What is the nature of community in the contemporary world?

• Does engagement impose an expectation of untroubled involvement?

Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner

London has been transformed in my lifetime in ways that would make a good deal of it unrecognizable to my father and grandfather. They were taxi drivers with an intimate knowledge of the city its alleyways and hidden byways. Were they to return to our neighborhood, they would be bewildered. A predominantly White working-class community is now a diverse space in which Black British residents coexist with Muslim and Hassidic families. Simultaneously, young upwardly mobile couples have begun to gentrify houses in creeping encroachment.

Areas a little further to the east have been reconstructed as Docklands, a modern glass and concrete metropolis. International capital has been invested to create a space dedicated to transnational corporate life. There is nothing much left of the close-knit communities who lived and worked on the old docks. The boats moored here now belong to the wealthy who come in the summer to avoid the heat of Dubai or other far centers of commerce. The connection between those who reside here is money.

For ill and for good, London is probably the most radically altered city in Europe though similar transformations can be seen in other urban spaces. The dynamics of change, driven by globalization and mobility, have created, and continue to create vibrant environments. Money and mobility have, in combination, reshaped the fabric of London life. Traditional communities may exist, but they are not what the visitor sees in the city's central districts. London has always been a magnet for students attracted by, among other things, iconic representations of the past. They are still there but you may need to look for them rather more closely than before. The tallest building in Western Europe is The Shard. Its needle like structure houses luxury apartments, offices, and restaurants. From most directions it blocks the view of Christopher Wren's masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral. The shadow of commerce obscures the spiritual heart of the city.

In Search of Communities

In the fractured nature of contemporary reality, communities, where and if they exist, tend to be less visible and, often, less accessible. The argument for the centrality of community engagement in education abroad derives from a largely conservative and static perspective. Further, it misrepresents the transactions that shape education abroad and creates expectations that are frequently unrealistic.

Nationalists, against all the evidence of history and politics, believe that countries are communities. If so, they are peculiar manifestations. Countries are constructed entities formed by war, colonial interventions, accidents, myths and all the other myriad ways in which we invent our environments. They are rarely logical or coherent spaces built upon shared values.

On a micro level, what we call home, however we define it, may represent a form of community. There we find security and identity. That said, home in our age of mobility, is not so simply found. It may be the place in which we currently live or those "blue remembered hills" of the dreamed past. An Irish friend, who spent over 50 years working in the building trade in London, returned to rural Ireland to die in the house in which he was born. That kind of continuity belongs to pre-modern experience. For most of us, home is as much an idea as it is an address.

I have lived in the same apartment block in London for over 15 years. I cannot tell you the name of many of my neighbors (except for those notable for eccentricity or criminal tendencies.) This is not at all unusual in London or indeed in many of the cities that are popular destinations in education abroad. Populations in urban environments tend to be more transient, individuals less connected to particular locations.

In contrast, villages and rural environments have often retained some sense of communal identity. However, most of the world's populations do not live there. What we mean by community frequently crosses borders. The dual impact of technology and enhanced mobility has led to the proliferation of forms of association not constrained by space. This is demonstrably true for international educators. At any session at one of our professional conferences, I will know the names of many colleagues in the room. I will have worked with some of them and have good friends among them. That sense of community is one of the things we have all missed during the restraints arising from the pandemic.

However, communal identity may also be defined by outsiders in terms of deficit, a source of issues and problems for the wider population. There are constructed communities defined by negative traits, anti-social and criminal tendencies, generalizations that lead towards demonization. Pride is a device that groups so defined use to create counter narratives. Demonstrations of pride in, for example, Black or gay identity may generate an alternative myth of collective consciousness but that is, historically, in response to negative constructions. Community, we might deduce, is an attempt to both create and counter the politics of identity.

From another perspective, what we call community originates in a kind of comforting fantasy that we use to counter unease. This is illustrated historically by popular American TV shows that offered seductive narratives against a background of urban disorder from the 1960s onwards. The television series Cheers exemplified a narrative counter to that of isolation and displacement. Set in a bar in Boston, it drew upon a yearning for a place where we are recognized and valued. The opening theme song precisely defined this sanctuary:

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,

and they're always glad you came.

You wanna go where people know,

people are all the same.

In contrast to racial marginalization and discrimination, at Cheers "people are all the same." Urban social fractures became invisible within a closed secure space protected from disturbing reality, a space where "everybody knows your name." Other comedies and soap operas carried, and continue to carry, similar messaging of community: Golden Girls, Taxi, The Cosby Show, Friends, etc. That is not to say that such communal relationships do not exist, but they are not part of what most of us experience in our daily lives.

Religious faith clearly establishes forms of community. However, in the UK traditional church membership and attendance has significantly declined. The fastest growing religion in England is Islam. Black British churches are also expanding. In terms of access for education abroad students, these places of worship may or may not be welcoming to strangers but, in any case, engagement is not likely to be simple.

The Past is Another Country

Nostalgia, the memory of communities of the past, real or imagined, also generates notions of lost identities.

The idea of working-class solidarity and community is exemplified in the struggles conducted over mining in England in the 1980s. There was an unprecedented, planned campaign designed to close most of the pits, and destroy the influence of the union. The Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 enabled the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to conduct what was effectively a bitter class war.

The number of deep coal mines fell from 174 in 1984 to 15 by 1994. The last deep coal mine in England closed in December 2015. Mining generates community despite, perhaps because of, difficulty and danger. Remnants of the traditions of mining villages exist now in museums, monuments, memories, brass bands, and tattered flags.

An element of working-class nostalgia in Britain is for those lost worlds: spaces called home. Emanuel Litvinoff in Journey through a Small Planet (1972) describes a sense of community loss:

Until I was sixteen I lived in the East London borough of Bethnal Green, in a small street that is now just a name on the map. Almost every house in it has gone and it exists, if at all, only in the pages of this book (Litvinoff, 1993, p.8).

The search for community may, therefore, direct students towards the library and museum as well as to the buildings and streets beyond. We may be directing our students towards forms of archaeology, digging out versions of constructed memories, or towards marginal vestiges. That is not an invalid exercise as long as we teach students something of the elusive nature of community in the city.

Community and African American Identity

The lenses of nostalgia and a yearning to belong resonates with an atavistic desire for connection, security, and home. A version of Africa exists in this context. Africa is both a geographical space (albeit a generalized location that does not distinguish between 54 diverse countries) and a dreamed landscape, a form of imagined community. This is expressed in Maya Angelou's memoir of her return to Ghana, All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes:

Our people had always longed for home. For centuries we had sung about a place not built with hands, where the streets were paved with gold, and were washed with honey and milk. There the saints would march around wearing white robes and jeweled crowns. There at last, we would study war no more and, more important, no one would wage war against us again (Angelou, 2008, p.20).

In this respect, it parallels the notion of Zion for diaspora Jews: a metaphor for space in which persecuted minorities belong, safe from hostility.

There is an inevitable fracture between these dreamed landscapes and realities of place, as Barack Obama observed: "Africa had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land" (Obama, 2004, p. 302). There is a sense that we are all in exile from a dreamed space that some of us call Eden.

Thomas Wolfe wrote of his protagonist in You Can't Go Home Again (1940):

"¦he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began (Wolfe, 1990, p.50).

If home eludes us, how do we find community?

Community in Symbols

Students belong to a kind of constructed community and may wear distinctive clothing (bearing an institutional logo) that declares their membership. Other groups adorn and display their bodies to demonstrate a communal identity. We might think of Goths and the zoot suit in the USA in the 1930s and 1940s; Mods and Rockers in England in the 1950s similarly wore distinctive clothing that identified alliances. In religious contexts, uniform is a common way of signaling community, and some degree of separation from the rest of society (the hijab, Hassidic dress, Amish costume, etc.). Encounters with these communities may not be impossible but they are likely to be facilitated, limited, controlled, and potentially complex. Engagement is a much less realistic aspiration.

Western Europe is not free from communities created by prejudice. From the 1950s onwards Algerian shantytowns grew in the suburbs of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. These sites are literally and metaphorically peripheral, beyond the archetypal Paris of wide boulevards, quaint streets, and pavement cafes. There are quasi-hidden communities in many of the cities in which our students study; outsiders may or may not be welcome. They do not in any case, exist to be used as a learning resource for the enlightenment of students.

Students engage, of course, with the people they meet. However, it should not be assumed that these are engagements with communities. Treating individuals as somehow representative leads towards generalizations in which personal characteristics may be taken as communal traits. Any statement that begins with Americans are, the English like, the French have, the Irish believe, represents a way of not seeing the individual, a simplification that may lead towards harmful stereotyping.

Host Communities

In education abroad, the term "host community" creates a misleading metaphor. Host and guest suggest a kind of intimacy in a domestic environment. That is not how education abroad is constructed. Students studying abroad are not guests entering into space in which they will inevitably enjoy privileges and unconditional welcome.

The idea of a host family extends the metaphor in further misleading ways, creates further potential misunderstanding. In almost every case, students engage in a commercial transaction. Friendship is not a requirement on either side of the transaction. The relationship is better thought of as that between landlord/landlady and lodger. However enjoyable and successful the experience is for both parties, it is essentially based upon buying and selling services.

Nothing is gained by employing metaphors that impose artificial roles and generate false expectations.

How We Really Live: Conclusion

Myths of community are seductive in so far as they modify our innate fears of individual isolation and collective social disintegration. They resonate with an atavistic desire for identity, security, and home.

Our forebearers worked the land in a fashion that they believed was timeless. The skills they taught their children were passed on through generations. Knowledge was rooted in community. We do not have the luxury of that continuity; the canon of necessary knowledge that the older generation hands on to the younger has become conditional, of fragile utility and limited relevance We have become, like it or not and in some sense or another, orphaned.

Social media ensure that friendship is no longer dependent on physical contact. Even the youngest or those who never leave their home country can have any number of "friends" they will never meet in places they will never visit. We do not love the people we never see or touch. We barely notice when they disappear. Popular social media have broadened what we mean by community; beyond geography, not constrained by frontiers.

Engagement with host communities is an intended outcome in education abroad. This expectation may be a cause of student frustration. It is not unusual for students to be disappointed at what they perceive as their "failure" to "immerse" themselves in overseas spaces. It is not their failure; it is ours. We have not taught them to understand that communal identities may have eroded, or disintegrated through a combination of urban development, globalization, secularization, and other social dynamics. What they seek to find may belong predominantly in history, in memory and myth, in libraries, in images that have begun to fade. They may be chasing shadows.

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References

1. Angelou, M. ([1987] 2008). All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes. Virago.

2. Litvinoff, E. (1993). Journey Through a Small Planet. Robin Clark.

3. Obama, B. ([1995], 2004). Dreams from my Father. Crown Publishers.

4. Wolfe, T. ([1940] 1990). You Can't Go Home Again. Scribners.

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Michael Woolf is the Content Creator - Blogger.