Reflections on the Meaning of Study Abroad

Abstract

Study abroad begins long before students leave their own shores. The moment that children enter daycare, nursery school, or kindergarten for the first time, they are in foreign territory, and all their antennae are out, testing, absorbing, learning. They begin to develop the first of their many multiple identities. They are no longer "Johnny" or "Sarah" whom everyone knows and loves at home, but Johnny or Sarah whom no one knows nor initially cares about, and they have to figure out what kind of a new identity they will develop so the danger zone becomes as safe as home. 

Leaving familiar surroundings- the sounds, smells, safety, and food of home- and realizing, quite abruptly, that they must learn to adapt to the demands and needs of strangers, is the first and the most challenging "trip abroad" they will ever take. They will use the same set of skills, more mature, more polished (we hope) when they arrive on a foreign campus and move in with a host family or into an international dormitory. 

Learning to make the journey with ease, whether it is on the first day of school or the day a plane drops one in a foreign field, is a necessary accomplishment. We have to make friends out of our peers; we have to gain the respect of our teachers; we have to develop curiosity and concern about the people around us. The stranger they seem, the more there is to learn. To fear diversity is to fear life itself. As the world becomes smaller and more integrated, the more crucial this accomplishment grows.