Date of Award
2013
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education (EdD)
Department
School of Education
Abstract
The purpose of this microethnographic qualitative study was to explore the nature of international cross-cultural travel experiences as articulated by U.S. secondary teachers, through in-depth personal interviews and personal self-reflections. The purposive sample included eight licensed secondary teachers from a rural high school in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, who had traveled internationally with each having more than 16 years of teaching experience. Through the two interviews and reflective journal entries of each participant, I explored the nature of international cross-cultural travel experiences: (1) how did participants describe their international cross-cultural travel experiences (2) what did international cross-cultural travel experiences mean to the participant and (3) what did teachers self-report about how their crosscultural travel experiences have shaped them as teachers. I used a three-stage strategy of coding with initial, focused, and thematic analyses of the 125 pages of transcripts. I found 37 themes during this time that were repeated or similar in nature to at least two or more of the participants. At the completion of identifying themes, I moved to focused coding, where I collapsed the 37 themes into like categories. In this process, I created a spreadsheet with the 37 themed categories and then collapsed them into 13 categories. The final step involved thematic analyses, a process that looked for similarities, patterns, and uniqueness in both the transcript and the spreadsheet and seven themes emerged. As a result of my research I found eight findings. First, secondary teachers travel out of curiosity. Second, pre-travel arrangements and philosophy of travel directly impact participants' experiences. Third, international cross-cultural experiences of cultures much different from their own allowed participants a greater understanding of the minority experience. Fourth, international cross-cultural experiences promoted transformational learning as participants examined their perspect
Recommended Citation
Barnes, Kirsten A., "The nature of international cross-cultural experiences as articulated by U. S. secondary teachers" (2013). Doctor of Education (EdD). 14.
https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/edd/14