This volume focuses on two questions. First, how can education abroad be embedded into undergraduate education so that students experience it as an integral component of their education and something they help shape, rather than as time away from their education and as a commodity to be consumed? Second, how can colleges and universities maximize the educational value of education abroad by forging stronger connections between it and other undergraduate experiences, including other high-impact educational practices (HIPs)? This book maps the considerations that need to be addressed, and how the relationships with the disciplines and institutional and outside stakeholders need to be rethought, noting pitfalls to be avoided, to position learning abroad within the work of the larger institution and students’ overall education.
Organized within three sections - Critical Perspectives on Education Abroad and its Integration into Undergraduate Education; Supporting Student Learning and Development toward Education Abroad Integration; and Partnerships in Education Abroad Integration - the chapters question many current assumptions and stimulate thinking about how colleges, universities, and international education organizations can integrate student learning and development that is fostered abroad into the undergraduate curriculum and co-curriculum to create lasting educative value. They suggest strategies to afford students multiple opportunities and ongoing support to enable them to draw connections with their learning abroad with other dimensions of their undergraduate education.
Chapters cover topics such as the additive value of integrating multiple HIPs with education abroad to span disciplinary boundaries and promote critical thinking, problem solving, perspective taking, confidence, curiosity, and adaptability; the importance of maintaining the disruptive quality of the encounter with the foreign to enrich study at home; issues of commodification and reciprocity; increasing access to study abroad to community college–particularly adult–populations; facilitating students’ social and intellectual development, identity formation, and reflective practice; rethinking orientation programming to emphasize the continuity of learning pre-, during- and post-program; asking fundamental questions about the purpose of education abroad to rethink assessment and its purposes; the faculty role in the internationalization of the curriculum; and developing more intentional relationships with in-field partners and international educational organizations to more effectively connect leaning abroad with other dimensions of undergraduate education.
For everyone involved in international education - whether SIOs, faculty, department chairs or deans - the critical questions and new perspectives offered here will inform and shape the growing movement to integrate education abroad with the overall undergraduate experience.
