The Student Exchange Program That Never Leaves the U.S.

This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful

4 min read

In 1991, Saskia Sassen published The Global City in which she asserted that London had more in common with New York and Tokyo than it did with other parts of the U.K. The geography of culture wasn’t delineated by national borders, she argued — there was no need to travel across an ocean to experience ways of life vastly different from your own.

That ethos is embodied by American Exchange Project, an intercultural exchange program for youth that takes place entirely within the United States. The exchanges send students who have just graduated high school on weeklong sojourns to U.S. communities completely different from their own. Participating students then host a cohort of peers in their own town, creating a true interchange of American experiences.

For many of these students, the exchange is not only an opportunity to see a different part of the country, but to have deep discussions with their new friends about how their lives are different — and the same.

“I hadn’t really experienced something where the point of spending time together was to talk about this big, deep stuff,” says Alden Swanson, a student from Chestertown, Maryland whose exchange took place in Orem, Utah. “And that led to so many interesting conversations about differences, but also brought up a lot of similarities about beliefs and how we thought about the world.”

Interactions like these are becoming rarer, as Americans increasingly choose to live in cities and towns where their neighbors hold views similar to their own. According to Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, the share of voters living in “landslide counties” — where a presidential candidate won by 20 or more points — rose from about 26 percent in 1976 to more than 60 percent in 2016. People are proactively moving to communities with less political and cultural heterogeneity. More than two out of five Americans consider it important that their neighbors share their politics, according to Bishop.

That said, American Exchange Project makes it clear that these exchanges aren’t about exposing students to new political views (any more than a foreign exchange program would primarily be about politics). Instead, they’re a rare opportunity to immerse young people in an unfamiliar American context and help them build empathy for those whose communities and cultures diverge from their own.

Sunny Beam, a student from Ilwaco, Washington, had never spent time in a place with a population of more than 10,000 people before her exchange sent her to the Bronx in New York City.

“It’s not even comparable to the places I lived before. It was so nice,” she says. “You’d think that living in a small town, everyone’s super closely knit together, but that’s not always a good thing.”

The culture shock of being transported from small town to booming metropolis was offset by the hospitality she was shown by a city used to embracing people of all stripes.

“Because everyone didn’t know everyone else, you would think that they’d be super-standoffish, but everyone was just incredibly welcoming, even to strangers,” she says. “It felt more community-based than my town because everyone was so welcoming and everyone was so willing to, like, work with the diversity rather than shut people out.”

For Andrew Wood from Kilgore, Texas, who was also sent to New York, one of the biggest lessons of the exchange was that connecting across cultures needn’t be complicated. “I’m a person who likes to bring the group together,” says Wood. “And so as soon as we got there, I’m like, ‘Okay, guys, you want to play some UNO? Because they got UNO cards for us.’ And so we decided to play UNO, and we started talking and getting to know each other, and we kind of just really clicked from there.”

The post The Student Exchange Program That Never Leaves the U.S. appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

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