The project director sought to equip a select group of college students from Shades Mountain Baptist Church (SMBC) in Birmingham, AL to increase their Great Commission awareness and participation. The project director addressed a very significant need in his ministry context. He helped college students meaningfully connect their desire for purpose…

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) is an educational framework that illustrates how to foster educational excellence through a focus on cultural competence, critical consciousness, and academic success, which aims to empower students by making education more applicable and responsive to their lived experiences (Ladson-Billings, 1995). This study…

In this article, we report on a National Science Foundation-funded immersive international summer research program for biology students. Six students, representing Cohort 1 of a three-year program, spent 9 weeks at one of three institutes in Japan, working on related molecular, cellular, and developmental research projects under the mentorship of…

What impact do short-term, faculty-led study abroad programs have on student learning? And are such programs more impactful than a standard face-to-face course? University administrators and faculty have long touted study abroad programs' ability to challenge stereotypes and promote cross-cultural understanding among students. However, little…

This study examines whether preexisting close friendships facilitate students' cultural agility development during short-term international study abroad experiences. Using a longitudinal design, we found that study abroad students who had a close friend accompanying them on the experience (i.e., an "international study buddy") had lower…

In response to the call to include experiential learning opportunities in our TESOL program and an invitation by a Montenegrin community to collaborate on the establishment of a summer English language institute, we designed and implemented a hybrid service-learning study abroad (SLSA) program which included two weeks spent in Montenegro in 2018…

The current study attempts to investigate the potential benefit of using a custom-designed virtual reality experience to reduce the social distance between the students and the speakers of the target language. This virtual reality experience provides opportunities for students to acclimate to the Spanish culture and at the same time practice and…

The article summarizes the effects of an eight-week short-term study abroad program (four weeks in the United States and four weeks in Germany) on students' global competence. Students' global competence was measured with the Global Competence Aptitude Assessment (GCAA) before and after the eight-week summer program. Data was collected from three…

Preservice teacher study abroad experiences and its influence on cultural awareness and teaching is explored in this paper. Participants in this study include preservice teachers from a large teacher education program. Teacher reflections and one-on-one semi-structured interview data were gathered, transcribed, coded, and analyzed for themes. The…

We describe the impact of an African American history centred collaborative teacher study group (CTSG) professional development experience on the cultural competence of 20 secondary Social Studies and English Language Arts educators. Using mixed methods, baseline data indicated slight movement from the colourblind to the cultural pre-competence…

This article presents a model for a short-term interdisciplinary study abroad program designed specifically to foster intercultural competence. It provides a description of a one-month interdisciplinary General Education Summer Abroad Program in Valencia, Spain, that attempts to sensitize students to cultural differences, to engage students to a…

Studying abroad can be a very beneficial opportunity for a learner in terms of academic, language, cultural, and life experience. This study aims to survey the opinions of twenty-eight university students towards a six-week English programme run by the Centre for Global Programmes (CGP), University of York, UK. Pre- and post-course survey…

The goal of study abroad programs is to educate and train future global leaders. This article examines the effectiveness of Clemson University's Singapore Study Abroad program in meeting this goal by exposing students to global perspectives of science technology, engineering and math (STEM) research and learning through an international summer…

Minnesota has a persistent and substantial student achievement gap based on race and family income. There are also substantial achievement gaps between native English speakers and English learners (Minnesota Compass, n.d.). In 2019, Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood (SPPN) worked with Hmong American Partnership (HAP) and Saint Paul Public Schools…

This article details a study conducted to determine the effectiveness of a professional development model for inservice Spanish teachers. Subjects were participants in intensive summer immersion programs abroad that included a rigorous methodology course advocating sound pedagogical models for lessons and stressed 90%+ target language use in the…