•  
  •  
 

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Abstract

International travel seems necessary for understanding international conflict and yet, bringing entire classes of students to the locus of the conflict can be daunting. This essay uses one such example of a class trip to demonstrate the potential learning that occurs with international travel and why, particularly when studying international conflict, onsite learning is crucial.

The genesis of this trip comes from the favorite learning experiences in college: two different international trips taken by author Andrea Schneider ("Andrea"). The first was during her junior year in a seminar on Greek-Turkish relations. The class traveled to both Greece and Turkey, meeting with government officials, NGO's, and even the Prime Minister of Turkey, Suleiman Demiral, (who was overthrown in a coup a few years later). The second experience she helped plan (little did she know how those skills would later be used as a professor), after she persuaded her professor that a class on the Conventional Defense of Europe would be best experienced by going to Europe. It was a whirlwind tour of NATO headquarters, visiting United States troops stationed on the Fulda Gap, and visiting Berlin and Warsaw; it made a huge impression. There was something about seeing the land and meeting the people that turned the abstract into something tangible.

This essay will explain the significance of this type of experiential learning and why a trip to the conflict area itself is a different and deeper kind of learning. The first part of this essay discusses the latest thinking on experiential learning theory. The second part of this essay will discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-the focus of these classes and trips-to review what students learn before traveling to the region. We will start with some of the typical assumptions that U.S. students have about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and then outline the crucial pre-trip information that must be discussed. In the third part of this essay, we use a five-sense rubric to organize the different types of experiences and learning that students valued on these trips. We conclude with some examples of student learning to demonstrate the qualitative difference that occurs when studying international conflict is linked to international travel. Based on the latest research, we now know that the reason these trips in college were so memorable for Andrea was not what she learned, but rather how she learned.

Disciplines

Comparative and Foreign Law | Dispute Resolution and Arbitration | Education Law | Law | Legal Education

Download

Share

COinS