AFS volunteers are instrumental in providing quality experience for all participants and host families and ensuring program excellence throughout the exchange year. In providing orientations at select times during the year, and providing guidance and support throughout the year, AFS volunteers work together to ensure that participants and families experience meaningful and memorable programs.
The local support volunteer structure is particularly critical in supporting participants and families. The following roles are assigned to volunteers that are directly involved in the support of participants and their host families throughout the program:
- A Liaison is a vital volunteer role in all AFS-USA area teams.
- Associate Support Coordinator is an important volunteer role in many AFS-USA area teams.
- Support Coordinator is an important volunteer role in many AFS-USA area teams.
Local team level support volunteers have an extremely important role to play in AFS programs:
- Volunteers help ensure the safety and wellbeing of participants on program.
- Volunteers help ensure that participants and families are adhering to AFS rules, guidelines, and expectations.
- Volunteers monitor and advance the on-going adjustment of each hosted participant within the context of the following four predominant relationships:
The participant’s relationship with the new culture
The support volunteer helps AFS monitor a participant’s cultural adjustment, and helps provide support, guidance, and counseling when this adjustment appears to present challenges.
The participant’s relationship with the host family
The support volunteer helps monitor and guide the student and host family’s adjustment to living together and developing a safe and familial bond.
The participant's relationship with their school and host community
Just as the participant is adjusting to life with their host family, so too are they adjusting to life at school and in their community. The support volunteer helps the participant adjust to school and ensure that they continue to progress at school academically and socially throughout the year.
The participant’s understanding of self
In conjunction with the participant’s adjustment to a new culture, the support volunteer helps the participant reflect upon personal questions they may have about themselves and their reactions to- and expectations of- the exchange experience. It is important to remember that the participant is going through developmental stages on a personal level, and that these might factor into what they might be experiencing.
Experience shows that all participants will undergo several emotional stages during the AFS year. These highs and lows are charted in the Exchange Participant Adjustment Cycle. By consulting the adjustment cycle, AFS volunteers can time and plan their interventions with hosted participants and host families in the form of routine orientations or formal/informal check ins. In this way, they provide the participant and host family with the tools needed to navigate the next “emotional low”.
Experience also shows that when difficulties occur during the exchange experience, they are often due at least in part to miscommunication and cultural misunderstanding. The following articles help expand on how volunteers can model and facilitate effective communication and intercultural learning for participants and host families, to help to ensure a successful experience throughout the year:
- Effective Communication Skills
- Support and Intercultural Learning
Value of Crises in Learning
When working to support participants and host families, it is important to keep in mind the “Value of Crises in Learning” concept put forth in the Statement of AFS Educational Content and Learning Objectives drafted by the participants in the Workshop on Intercultural Learning Content and Quality Standards, Otter Lake House, Quebec, Canada, during February 27-29, 1984.
“The Value of Crises in Learning concept reminds us that it is not accurate to conceive of participant orientation and support as aiming toward a crisis-free intercultural experience. Personal crises are bound to occur throughout an AFS experience because the participant is continuously compelled to act and react in the absence of familiar cues. When they remain manageable, such crises become highly productive bases for intercultural learning because they force the participant to challenge old assumptions, to think creatively, and to acquire new knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Crises rarely become overwhelming for AFS participants because of the emotional security provided by the host family and other host nationals, and because of the network of support available from AFS volunteers and staff members. Participant orientation and support should be reconceptualized as an effort to provide AFSers with knowledge, awareness, and skills that will better enable them to seize, cope with, recover from, and above all learn through the succession of personal crises that inevitably will occur throughout their intercultural experience.”
AFS programs bring people together across differences, and it is natural at times for participants and host families to find navigating these differences challenging, as they work to build relationships. The AFS support structure is designed to maximize the learning opportunity for all involved in moments of challenge.
Click here for more information on the AFS Learning Objectives.
Click here for information provided to host families regarding AFS on the AFS Help & Learning for Host Families platform.
Click here for information on the welcome materials received by AFS students prior to their arrival.
Click here for more information on AFS orientations.