ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3174-4614

Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Education (Ph.D)

Department

Education Specialties

First Advisor

Evan Ortlieb

Second Advisor

Michael Sampson

Abstract

For over two decades Italy has been the second destination, first non-Anglo-Saxon, for U.S. undergraduate students studying abroad, with 36,945 students in academic year 2017/2018 corresponding to a 10.8% share and a 4.5% increase from 2016/2017 (IIE, 2019). With over 150 North American college and university programs present in the country (AACUPI, 2019), a specifically designed law (Art. 2 of Law N. 4 of 14 January 1999) created to support study abroad in Italy, and a 40-year-old nonprofit association (AACUPI) focused on promoting and supporting American universities and colleges with programs in Italy, Italy is, and will be for some considerable time one, of the top study abroad destinations for U.S. students. With one in ten U.S. undergraduates studying abroad before graduating, and this group’s race and ethnicity increasing in diversification, 30% in 2017/2018 vs. 18.1% in 2006/2007 (IIE, 2019), it becomes crucial to investigate culturally responsive pedagogy in the context of U.S. students studying abroad in Italy. The purpose of this dissertation is to discover if undergraduate students from a four-year university from the Northeast of the U.S. benefit from culturally responsive pedagogy while studying abroad at their institution’s Rome, Italy, campus. To answer this question a qualitative single explanatory case study was used to research how four Italian teachers applied culturally responsive pedagogy when teaching to these students from the main campus in the United States. Personal semi structured interviews, in-class direct observations, and teaching artifacts were the instruments utilized to study two male and two female teachers with an average of just over 20 years of teaching experience. Coding was executed through a two-step design with one phase of first cycle (open - descriptive) coding and one phase of second cycle coding (axial). The themes generated by this process were then matched against the proposed potential research outcomes. The study’s significance, focused on producing richness of information and not generalizability (Donmoyer, 1990; Patton, 2002), is to help educators in the field of study abroad to understand the importance of CRP in the context of study abroad, as well as to provide further opportunities of investigation in the field.

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