Learning objectives
From AFSWiki
Applying the objectives to Participant Support: 2010 AFS Learning Objectives
Background summary: Support Advisory Group Proposal
AFS is committed to intercultural learning. Through AFS programs of all types, people are removed temporarily from their home environments and introduced to differing values, ways of life, and patterns of thought in completely new environments. This experience enables AFS participants to acquire skills, attitudes, and knowledge useful throughout their lives as they attempt to cope sensitively and intelligently with the urgent challenges of the world of tomorrow. Similar learning often is acquired by others who come into close contact with participants in AFS programs.
Learning through an AFS experience involves growth and change in terms of personal values and skills, interpersonal relationship building, intercultural knowledge and sensitivity, and global issues awareness.
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Personal Values and Skills
At the core of all AFS experiences is the removal of people from their familiar environment and their placement in a new environment. In such unusual circumstances, participants are confronted repeatedly with crises of varying dimensions. They must make judgments and embark on actions in the absence of familiar cues. But AFS participants are well prepared in advance, and they are assured of support and guidance on an as-needed basis. Thus, participants are able to turn these crises into opportunities for reassessing their values, stretching their capacities, and practicing new skills. AFS participants also gain awareness of previously hidden aspects of themselves because of their constant contact with others who organize their lives on the basis of different assumptions
Interpersonal Relationship-building
Every AFS participant becomes fully involved in daily living and working arrangements with a variety of people in the new environment. Whether a participant’s placement is as an individual or as a member of a group of exchange visitors, he or she must develop and maintain relationships with others from diverse backgrounds. The interpersonal skills developed in this intercultural context are transferable to many other settings during the participant’s lifetime. Host nationals often gain similar benefits from their contacts with the AFS participants.
Intercultural Knowledge and Sensitivity
During the course of their immersion in the host culture, AFS participants are exposed to innumerable dimensions of that culture. These dimensions range from the simple acquisition of the necessities of daily life to the complex and subtle distinctions made by hosts among alternative values, social norms, and patterns of thought. In addition, most AFS exchanges include a formal learning component in which host nationals explain the social, political, economic, and religious structures of their country. In the case of exchanges involving adult professionals, hosts and visitors both gain new skills and alternative concepts, leading to a sharpening of their talents. The experience of actually being involved in so many dimensions of life has the effect of deepening participants’ insights into their home culture as well as their knowledge of their host culture, observing its strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of an outsider.
Global Issues-Awareness
Living in a place other than one’s home community often helps people to recognize that the world is one large community, a global island, in which certain problems are shared by everyone everywhere. AFS participants become able to empathize with their hosts’ perspective on some of these problems, and thus to appreciate that workable solutions must be culturally sensitive, not merely technologically feasible. Such awareness well prepares the AFS participant to take his or her place among those who are addressing the crises facing humankind.
Copyright AFS Intercultural Programs Inc. Workshop on Intercultural Learning Content and Quality Standards, 1984.
