Pitzer College Study Abroad Programs
Botswana : China : Costa Rica Semester : Ecuador Advanced Ecuadorian & Andean Studies
Ecuador Intensive Language : Italy : Nepal
Summer Health Program in Costa Rica : Summer Study in Japan
Pitzer College Educational Goals for Study Abroad on Pitzer Programs
Pitzer has developed eight of its own semester programs and two summer programs that are informed by the College’s strong commitment to cultural and community immersion. The Pitzer program model integrates traditional classroom instruction with experiential opportunities that lead to an understanding of different cultural perspectives through firsthand interactions with host cultures. This coupling of formal classroom and participatory learning encourages you to think in ways that cross over disciplinary, cultural, and social boundaries. It combines cognitive and affective knowledge to allow you to live successfully and appropriately in new cultural contexts, to better apprehend the cultural adjustment process, and thus to recognize how you have been shaped by your own culture. This type of learning can powerfully transform the way you look at the world and yourself.
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Content and Design
Pitzer programs are designed to create comprehensive, semester-long experiences rather than an assemblage of unrelated courses set in foreign locales. You learn not only while engaged in intensive language classes and an interdisciplinary core course focused on the host culture, but also when you are with your host family, on study trips, and while conducting independent study or internships. These activities are tied together by writing assignments that require you to reflect upon your experiences, apply your capacity for critical thinking and analysis, and express yourself effectively.
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Interdisciplinary Core Course
The core course in Pitzer programs combines a series of lectures given by the host university’s faculty and specialists from governmental and non-governmental organizations with the more experiential program components of family stays, fieldwork, and study trips to provide a high degree of cultural immersion and cross-cultural learning. In the core course, you also develop a portfolio of analytical, narrative, descriptive, and creative writing in your Fieldbook, which serves as a stimulus for critical reflection and a record of your intercultural learning.
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The Fieldbook
The Fieldbook recognizes that writing is one of the deepest and most precise records of experience and an activity that both generates and reflects learning. Demanding of your time and intellect, the Fieldbook asks you to integrate the theoretical and experiential components of the program through a series of writing assignments. It helps you clarify and articulate your thoughts, insights, and beliefs as they evolve over the program and provides a forum for discussion of those ideas with program staff and participants.
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Intensive Language Study
The Pitzer language faculty use an interactive approach to language teaching that focuses on facilitating communication with people of your host community. A major goal of the language curriculum early in the semester is to jumpstart your ability to develop relationships with the new people you will be meeting. Student teacher ratios are kept small to allow ample time to practice new vocabulary and grammar structures before hitting the streets to use your language skills in real life.
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Directed Independent Study Projects
Pitzer programs provide an opportunity for you to conduct a directed independent study project. Most programs can provide opportunities to complete a project to meet major requirements in any of the academic majors at Pitzer. Depending on the program, these projects may include a research tutorial, directed fieldwork in science, community internship, or apprenticeship in the arts. Projects are guided by program staff, university professors, local experts, or artists and require a significant reflective component in the form of a written report as well as other discipline-appropriate documentation of learning. Because of the field nature of most of the Pitzer programs, we encourage you to select a project that involves field research, oral interviews, ethnography and other techniques that facilitate cultural immersion over those involving library research. See what students have focused their research on around the world by clicking this link: What's your research interest?
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Community Learning Projects
Pitzer is committed to developing strong relationships with its host communities. On some programs, this results in ongoing community service opportunities that are a component of the core course. Often these result in cooperative projects with local organizations. In addition to the modest contribution the projects may make to a particular community, they provide excellent opportunities for you to utilize your language skills and cultural knowledge while gaining firsthand experience with local issues.
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Family Stays
Central to the success of Pitzer programs is an extended stay with one or more host families. More than any other aspect of a Pitzer program, family stays help you understand the host culture and the issues important to their community and country. Family stays demand full participation in community life and make it possible for you to develop meaningful relationships with family members and neighbors who will vary in age, gender, ethnicity, and educational background. They put a human face to ideas and theories presented in your classes and allow you to test assumptions offered in other more formal contexts. Family stays accelerate the learning and mastering of culturally appropriate behavior.
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Limited Number of Participants
To best support your learning and minimize the impact of our group’s presence on host communities, we limit the number of students in our programs to a level appropriate for each program site, generally ranging from 12 to 25. Sites with rural components often have more restricted enrollments than sites in urban centers.
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Health and Safety
Helping you stay healthy and safe while abroad is a priority for Pitzer. We ask you to pay careful attention to health and safety guidelines in pre-departure materials and during orientation sessions. We urge you to follow those guidelines as well as exercise good personal judgment and responsibility for your health and safety during the program. Each of the Pitzer programs has contacts with the U.S. embassy, local government and community leaders, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, international travel clinics, and in-country health professionals to stay abreast of conditions that may affect the health and safety of our students.
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Pitzer Programs Enhance Scholarship Eligibility
Pitzer’s cultural immersion programs make students strong candidates for Fulbright fellowships as well as other prestigious national awards like the Watson and Rotary scholarships. The majority of students winning such fellowships completed a Pitzer study abroad program. Nationally, Fulbright records show that no school with an enrollment of fewer than 1000 students has ever won as many Fulbright awards as the eighteen bestowed on Pitzer graduates in 2006.
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