This past weekend, under the watchful eye of the rarely seen English winter sun, I brought my students to Stratford Upon Avon. With the weather in full cooperation and all students settled nicely into their cozy B&B’s I handed out information packs, maps and tickets to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear.

Upon meeting the students at the theatre after dinner we embarked on a three and a half hour crusade through one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces. I call it a crusade because it is not an easy production to watch even at its best, and this show was definitely exemplary. King Lear not so slowly goes insane as his daughters back stab and kill. And at the end, half the cast is left bleeding or dead. With the stage covered in carnage the audience is left in shock and the curtain call seems somehow inappropriate after such an intense experience.

After the show I spoke to some of the students about how they felt. While I am not personally a fan of Shakespeare I can appreciate the emotional density of his work, his moral debates and his eloquent diatribes. Not to mention our front row seats kept us in the middle of the action. However, some students did not feel the same. In fact one musical theatre student was overwhelmingly exasperated by the end, feeling as though she had barely made it through. This production had been so out of her comfort zone that it had been near impossible for her to last the entire length not to mention enjoy it.

That’s when I started to think about how students respond to new experiences abroad. In this case King Lear was by all accounts a triumph but at least one very vocal student felt her triumph was sitting still for 3 and a half hours while some people pranced around on stage. She even admitted gagging at the more vulgar points! This is a perfect example of ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’. You can pull students out of their comfort zone but you cannot make them understand it. In this case I was fine with the students liking or disliking the production but I wanted them to analyse the experience and think about ‘Why?’ they felt the way they did. Sometimes the most uncomfortable experiences are those that change us the most, but without the self analysis one may never realize that.

So, I feel that one of the most, if not the most important aspects of study abroad is self reflection. For many programmes this aspect has become almost completely obsolete but this is in fact the way to realize change and growth from the journey abroad, and isn’t that why students go abroad in the first place? To grow and develop? You can bring them all over the world and show them magnificent sights, fantastical shows and mind bending culture, but without the self introspection, does it really sink in? Why is this no longer an intrinsic piece of the study abroad puzzle?

Emily Nunes