From reverse culture shock to global competency: Helping education abroad students learn from the shock of the return home

Abstract

The "wrap-around" model of education abroad programming posits that students will learn more and have a lasting, transformative experience if they receive cultural orientation and mentoring before, during, and after their sojourn. Preparation, support and post-processing help students navigate both the culture shock of the trip and the reverse culture shock of the return home. The pre-trip preparation, in some form, is nearly universal, and during the trip educators often have multiple opportunities to help students think through their experience. It is post-trip, or reentry phase, of study abroad that has proved most difficult to implement, due to the practical limitations of student careers and engineering curricula. Yet reentry programming greatly enhances the global competence that engineers can acquire by helping them adjust emotionally and behaviorally and by giving them the opportunity for transformative learning. This emotional, behavioral, and cognitive development enhances their global competence not only by improving their ability interact across cultural lines, but also by helping them synthesize their experience into a new understanding of how engineers define and solve problems differently across cultures. Educators have come up with a variety of strategies for solving this problem and understanding these different strategies might help overcome those practical barriers.