Several months ago, I was preparing to present on the topic of supporting students from underrepresented backgrounds in education abroad/study abroad. In an attempt to demonstrate when international educators generally engage in conversations about student identity in the education abroad process, I found myself searching for a visual aid that showed the process by which undergraduate students (at U.S. institutions of higher education) generally engage when going abroad. I searched a wide variety of search terms, and found primarily visuals that related to the psychological adjustment of students who have gone abroad (there are some good ones out there!).
I found one that seemed relatively close to what I was looking for that a group of folks (Erica Haas-Gallo, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Alan Masters, PhD, CIEE; and Janelle Papay, Elon University) presented at the 2015 CIEE Conference (presentation here, visual presented on slide 45). It was good and provided the broad cycle of going abroad, but I felt as though there should be more.
As a result, I drafted a visual with a few more steps that I felt was a more robust representation of the student experience, and put it into the image below. My goals in posting this are twofold:
- Provide a visual for others who might be interested in demonstrating the various touch points where different campus offices/departments and providers/foreign institutions may need to be involved; and,
- Generate discussion on what the process looks like at other institutions, and how this visual might be modified to be more inclusive of the components that make up the education abroad process.
I imagine this is something that others will find useful, or at least interesting!
Lily Lopez-McGee, PhD 