Samantha Chaffin
Editor-in-Chief
Americans by nature tend to be incredibly ethnocentric and often culturally unaware in general. I don’t consider myself an exception to this; however, I have grown exponentially in terms of my cultural understanding during my time at Idaho State University.
A college experience should involve growth on an academic or intellectual level as well as on a personal level. Cultural awareness and acceptance is something that fits into both personal and academic or intellectual growth, yet that growth is often severely lacking at ISU.
In many instances, students at ISU are not interacting with international students and vice versa, which is a prime example of a missed opportunity if I’ve ever heard of one.
The reason for this isn’t a lack of opportunity or availability of cultural experience, with hundreds of international students on campus and at least a dozen cultural activities and resources, but rather a lack of facilitation on the part of the university.
Although general education requirements for many degrees include stipulations that students be exposed to a foreign language as well as course from the “cultural diversity” category, classroom requirements are not enough.
Resources like the Janet C. Anderson Gender and Diversity Resource Center are great, don’t get me wrong, but there are two main problems I see: first, students’ awareness of the center, and second that this only furthers the issue of international students clumping together rather than expanding throughout groups on campus. ISU doesn’t need more “diverse” activities and groups, we need more diversity within our activities and groups in general. We need to integrate our international student population into the general student population, not segregate groups even further.
A primary purpose of studying abroad is not only to gain an education in the academic sense of the word, but to experience life and people from another culture, in this case the U.S. On the other hand, for Americans a huge benefit of having international students on campus is to learn about another culture and meet new people with new, different perspectives.
The lack of campus camaraderie aside, there are also several other issues regarding the general understanding of the way U.S. and U.S. academic culture work, from the lack of awareness regarding key university bylaws about plagiarism to general classroom etiquette and student conduct.
The segregation and lapses in information we see between American and international students isn’t intentional, and I understand that these things are difficult; however, I see some basic steps that could be taken to make improvements.
A huge missed opportunity on the part of the university is new student orientation, both the general orientation as well as the international student orientation. A more comprehensive approach with regard to cultural awareness and protocols, in my view, would be immeasurably helpful in cultural understanding for both American students navigating a more diverse set of surroundings as well as international students looking to succeed and build relationships in the U.S.
The university should take a proactive role in preparing international students for success in an American academic setting. International Students should be introduced to basic American concepts including plagiarism, academic integrity, and general classroom etiquette before they begin classes. An ideal time for these introductions would be a portion of New Student Orientation for international students, which is already, from what I understand, a separate orientation.
This information is vital to a students’ success and the dispersion of that information cannot be left up to first-year academic skills courses that students are not even required to take. The university needs to take ownership, as well as hold students accountable for that information before classes begin. Allowing students who are unaware of these key academic policies to partake in coursework is as good as setting them up for failure.
In the same vein, U.S. students should be introduced to the international population at ISU and provided information and a basis for cultural awareness during orientation. It’s not much, but it would be a start to bridge the gap between international and local students, and the ISU community as well as the Pocatello community needs that.
