Integrating Worlds: How Off-Campus Study Can Transform Undergraduate Education

What if our students learn the most when they’re far from campus?Integrating Worlds demonstrates how high-quality off-campus study epitomizes integrative learning, both supporting and enhancing the entire undergraduate experience.While off-campus study (both study abroad or study away) occupies a marginal position on most campuses, it has the almost unique capacity to bring together a high concentration of high-impact educational practices. When we combine global learning with collaborative work, shared intellectual pursuits, learning communities, and more, these practices reinforce each other, exerting a multiplier effect that can potentially result in the most intense learning experience our students will have. It can energize and inspire them for the work they will continue to undertake on their home campus.It thus becomes crucial for us to identify or design high-quality programs that will achieve these goals. Moreover, we need to reimagine off-campus study as an integrated portion of the undergraduate arc―one that begins well before our students depart and continues long after they return. In this way, we help them understand the interconnectedness not only of the world, but also of their own education.At the same time, the authors recognize material constraints and educational imperatives. Off-campus study costs money; its complexity makes it difficult to assess; it overlaps increasingly with internships and civic engagement; and by its nature, it is more subject to external forces than the on-campus experience. In careful, practical ways Integrating Worlds advances suggestions for dealing with these issues.This book urges educators to go beyond the episodic ways we currently link on-campus curricula to off-campus experience. While of interest to specialists in international or intercultural education, it speaks most directly to faculty, deans and provosts―many of whom may have little (or dated) experience of study abroad and who thus feel unprepared to address this issue of pressing importance. As our disciplines and institutions face the complexities of a rapidly changing world, this book seeks to fuel the necessary conversations.

Scott D. Carpenter is the Marjorie Crabb Garbisch Professor of French and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College (Minnesota), where he serves as the chair of French and Francophone Studies, Director of Cross-Cultural Studies, and the founding director of Carleton’s Center for Global and Regional Studies. A frequent leader of Carleton’s own program in Paris and Morocco, he has helped develop programs or internship opportunities in Spain, Germany, Cameroon, and China. A member of the academic board of CUPA, he presents work regularly at the Forum on Education Abroad (European conferences) and the AAC&U.

Helena Kaufman is originally from Poland. She is the Director of Off-Campus Studies and Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Carleton College. In addition to her studies in Poland, Portugal, and the U.S., she has broad experience teaching on the topics of national and cultural identity. In Off-Campus Studies she is involved in everything from curriculum planning to risk management for a vast array of off-campus study programs of nearly every flavor: term-length and short-term faculty-led programs, consortial and third-party provider programs, and more. She is a member of and a frequent contributor to NAFSA and the Forum on Education Abroad.

Malene Torp is the Executive Director of DIS―Study Abroad in Scandinavia (headquartered in Copenhagen), one of the largest non-profit, independent programs for American students in Europe. Trained as a political scientist, she has a deep understanding of American higher education, having been a Fulbright Scholar at New York University and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. She is a member of the Association of International Education Administrators’ (AIEA) Leadership Development Committee and a frequent contributor to NAFSA and the Forum on Education Abroad.