Integrating Worlds

Could undergraduates learn most effectively while studying far from home? This book argues that off-campus study, whether abroad or elsewhere, can draw together many proven teaching approaches at once. Global learning, teamwork, shared intellectual projects and learning communities can strengthen one another, potentially producing the most intense learning of a student's college years and carrying that energy back to the home campus.

Carpenter maintains that such programs must be chosen or designed with care. He proposes treating off-campus study as one piece of the full undergraduate journey, beginning well before students leave and continuing after they return, so that they see how the wider world and their own education are connected.

The author does not ignore practical limits. Off-campus study is expensive, hard to evaluate, increasingly tangled with internships and civic engagement, and more exposed to outside pressures than teaching on campus. The book offers measured, workable strategies for handling each of these difficulties.

The primary readership is faculty, deans and provosts, especially those whose experience of study abroad is limited or out of date and who feel unprepared for a problem of growing importance. Specialists in international and intercultural education will also find it relevant. Its larger aim is to move institutions beyond occasional links between classroom work and time away and to spark the conversations that changing global conditions require.