Charting Your Path as an Global Educator

Education abroad is more than logistics—it’s an opportunity to create transformational learning experiences. To support education abroad educators in their efforts to develop courses, programs and experiences that are academically rigorous and culturally relevant, The Forum provides curated resources to support you in continuing your journey as a reflective, international and global educator. This section of our website is designed to help you conceptualize, design, and facilitate high-impact courses and programs rooted in evidence-based practices.​

How to use the Teaching and Learning section of our website:

• Foundations
  • ​Educators as Learners & Leaders: Effective teaching and learning begins with us. Examine your role, assumptions and expectations.
  • Education Abroad as a High-Impact Practice: How to maximize education abroad's educational benefits.
  • Where's the Learning in Education Abroad?: Discovering integrative and transformative learning in education abroad.
  • Critical Reflection: Understanding the role of critical reflection in transformative learning.
  • Syllabi & Educator Resources: Links to instructional materials and open access resource banks.
• In Focus
  • Addressing Unteachable Moments: Approaching difficult topics with confidence and care using the HOT Moments Framework and Deliberative Dialogue.

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Relating The Standards of Good Practice to Pedagogy

The Standards of Good Practice stand at the intersections of policy, compliance, and pedagogy. However, the work of conceptualizing education abroad as an instructional practice and area of pedagogy is not only bound by the Standards and Code of Ethics; rather, these are springboards for practice and reflective inquiry for those that lead and facilitate education abroad programs.   

Like other high impact educational practices, high-quality teaching and learning through education abroad invites the consideration of: 

• Underlying theories of experiential education and student development from a range of scholarly traditions and ways of knowing.
• Grappling with one’s own assumptions and expectations about the role of educators; including the importance of self-care.
• Attending to one's own assumptions and expectations about the assets, capacities and readiness that students and onsite partners bring to a program context.
• Aligning goals, objectives and activities in ways that challenge and support all learners academically as well as in their intercultural growth and development.
• How to effectively integrate education abroad with related instructional strategies (e.g. COIL, internships, mentored undergraduate research, community-based learning, capstones, etc.)
• Effectively using critical reflection and other tools in which students build their capacities to analyze and wrest meaning from immersive experiences.
• Integrating feedback loops, learning assessment and evaluation that support learners to demonstrate their learning and growth.
• Examine how border crossing experiences "out there" intersect with broader issues connected to disciplines, professions, wicked problems experienced "at home."
• Balancing the interests of the potential benefits of education abroad with the costs to the environment and host communities. ​​