Crossing Borders Education has produced a trilogy of films documenting students on their journey of overseas study and intercultural experiences. Its founder and director, Arnd Wächter, talks to The PIE about the urgency to tackle tough topics of race and diversity on campus, particularly for students who don’t study abroad.
The PIE: You founded Crossing Borders Education in 2003. What was your inspiration?
AW: There are many reasons why I started it. I had lived abroad already for seven years so intercultural learning and the changes we go through when going abroad became part of my life. So there was a personal inspiration behind it, but the big trigger was 9/11. I lived in London at the time and saw a lot of racism come through in very polite Britain. Mosques were set on fire in Manchester, there were very violent reactions.
I saw that people couldn’t make the difference between a large, very violent event in a political context and then the intercultural context of the diverse cities that we’re living in. And then Tony Blair and George Bush were preparing for war in Iraq so I said: “Is there anything I can do to bring the different sides together?” And it continued to just increase in its urgency, like the Iraq war and now the Syrian war leading to the refugee crisis.
I feel that those concerns of how do we live together are becoming even stronger with the refugee crisis right now.
The PIE: When did you start producing films?
AW: In 2007-2008.
The PIE: You trained as an educator, so how did you become a film director?
AW: We worked with the New York Film Academy on projects. I learned my film work on the job. When I looked for a producer and director of the first film, documentary makers were sitting in front of me saying, it’s your vision. The moment you give it someone else it becomes something different. You need a professional film team but you need to be the director. So I stepped into the role and learned film making in the process of producing those films.
“I did a scouting trip to different states in the US and then looked always for civic engagement projects or social projects”
The biggest creative challenge is I feel our projects can become bridges between different fields. Documentary films that can reach many at the same time, higher education and the field of intercultural learning that aren’t necessarily reaching the public.
The PIE: How do you choose the issues and situations to portray in your films?
AW: 9/11 really led to the programmes [CBE] created in Morocco and the programmes led to realising I need to bring intercultural learning to campuses, because it’s only a small percentage of American students who do go abroad.
After that we were able to have partnerships, so for the China film we partnered with Michigan State University – they had nine programmes in China and 3,000 Chinese students on their campus in Michigan. It was very clear in the partnership with them to focus on China. Also at the time, three or four years ago, the Obama administration was focused on strategies in the South China Sea and was expecting the strongest conflicts in the future from that region. So it seemed appropriate to focus on that. Also a lot of the 300,000 Chinese students on US campuses don’t feel integrated and feel they don’t make any friends while they’re in the US.
It’s such a missed opportunity for peace building if there are 300,000 Chinese students right now at US campuses who will be future leaders 10-20 years down the line from now when those conflicts might hit.
The PIE: Did you have university partners for your third film, American Textures?
AW: No, we did it independently that was in part from when we worked with National Geographic Education. The executive vice president of National Geographic TV was like, study abroad is great but you need something on diversity issues right here in the US, because that’s the 90+% who are not going abroad who will experience intercultural diversity through that lens.
The PIE: How did you find the students?
AW: On the different projects we had either partner universities, we always looked for some regional diversity of the characters and some diversity in background. So either universities we partnered with who looked in their network for people or also on the American Textures film, I did a scouting trip to different states in the US and then looked always for civic engagement projects or social projects. So some of the characters came from those projects.
“Students would sign up to our programmes and pay a fee, and that’s how we would have a budget to live as an organisation”
The PIE: Apart from producing films, what else do CBE do?
AW: We create immersion programmes in Morocco for about 800-900 students a year in small groups – interactive programmes, visiting projects, homestays. Then our work is creating the feature films and breaking them down into toolkits for curricula so that intercultural sessions can be created around these film excerpts.
The PIE: Why do you focus on American students?
AW: Again, the background of 9/11. Also, when I started I wasn’t in the place of getting big grants, and study abroad in the US is fee-driven so it was a way to make it sustainable. Students would sign up to our programmes and pay a fee to be on the programme and that’s how we would have a budget to live as an organisation. And it also made a lot of sense at the time because the US is such a superpower, and many American students don’t travel, don’t have a passport, don’t go abroad. So it seemed like an important target group.
The PIE: Any plans to feature students from other countries in future films?
AW: Totally. Now with the refugee crisis we’ve widened our goal, we want to bring intercultural toolkits into curricula at European universities as well. Now we have charity status so we’re in a place to partner with big European universities and to pitch for grants. The next project will very much be focused on Europe, bringing European and migrant youth together in peer-to-peer dialogues. It will be short films that bring six European youth that are of second generation migrant backgrounds into the places we often see on the news right now – to Turkey, Jordan, Egypt to speak to refugees for example.
The PIE: Where does funding come from?
AW: It’s a combination of programmes in Morocco, at the same time we had investments from some of our university partners and then it’s also down to me making strategic decisions and taking out loans. For the next project there are four other European universities that are applying to European funding to create the short films for the refugee crisis.
“I feel students are sometimes afraid of the tough conversations but they’re really grateful when it becomes real”
The PIE: What has been the response to the trilogy?
AW: Institutional responses that we got, for example National Geographic were interested in creating a landing page with us on cross-cultural skills. Or institutional as well that big universities like Michigan State University, James Madison University, George Mason University, Columbia are working with us because it’s a way of bringing intercultural learning into curriculum.
We often got feedback from people who are really passionate about intercultural learning, it’s often staff who are saying sometimes ‘it’s difficult for us to communicate to faculty why this is important and we as a study abroad office are perceived as a travel agency of the campus’.
On a personal level with students I feel the deepest response. I feel students are sometimes afraid of the tough conversations but they’re really grateful when it becomes real. This really touches us in a way that we perceive our own stories but also how we somehow can relate to complex world situations. The moment you touch on a topic of stereotyping Muslim students, I straight away get responses of other student groups as well – the Latino students say they experience it as well as a racial minority.
The PIE: You’ve shown the films at festivals around the world. Are you aiming to target a wider public audience as well?
AW: That’s the work right now. We’re working with universities like George Mason University’s school of Conflict Analysis and Research. Or Dublin City University’s School of Law and Political Science, their terror studies department. We apply those films and resources of intercultural learning to bring them into short formats, online for the public as well. To bring intercultural learning in an emotional and engaging form to the public is very much the vision.
The PIE: Would you count increasing the number of US students studying abroad among your goals?
AW: Our films and resources support that goal and the targets of Generation Study Abroad. I personally feel more that it’s important to unlock the diversity that is present at EU and at US campuses themselves. Study abroad can itself play into privileges. There is a social justice question that comes with that – who has access? So my vision is: why not bring the intercultural learning out on campus at the same time? Those students who do go abroad could be incredible allies in the process.
“To bring intercultural learning in an emotional and engaging form to the public is very much the vision”
The PIE: In the film you’ve just finished, you explore racial divides in the southern United States. How can this topic translate your goal of multicultural learning to audiences outside of the US?
AW: Intercultural and interracial tensions have places of similarity where you can learn from observing somebody else. From a conflict medication perspective, there is deep value in it, of actually observing two other cultures rather than our own. The observer is in the place of observing the dynamic of what is happening without choosing sides. I had an Israeli student come to me after a screening at George Mason University and she said to me: “I just learned something about our conflict in Israel between Israelis and Palestinians by observing the conflict between Latinos, blacks and white travelling within the United States”.
There is a huge plus as well that we learn about social justice issues in other countries. I don’t think that there is enough awareness around the social justice issues of minority groups in the US. And I think that can create a lot of ways of applying that to European study as well. On the one side the US is far ahead of us, we can learn a lot from that in Europe. And on the other side there are real mistakes done and it’s so deep-seated, the tensions. Again, there is something that we in Europe can learn from if we don’t find ways of responding to the diversity in a more meaningful way.
