“One Partnership, One Place”: Building and Scaling Sustained Student-Led, Community-Driven International Partnerships

In the past few decades, research about the effects of engagement in learning has suggested that community engagement and service-learning, including in international contexts, can have a powerful effect on students’ learning outcomes. For example, in 1995, George Kuh in a seminal article “The Other Curriculum” looked at a variety of educational experiences that occur outside the traditional classroom context during college, pointing to their effects. Citing the emerging research by Alexander Astin on the impacts of student involvement in the landmark book Four Critical Years: Effects of College on Beliefs, Attitudes, and Knowledge (1977) and Pace (1984) on understanding student effort as part of quality assessment, Kuh then proposed the Involvement Principle, which is “simple but powerful: the more time and energy students expend in educationally purposeful activities, the more they benefit.” Kuh goes on to describe the various out-of-classroom activities that impact students, citing international travel as one of those activities and demonstrating how it had affected students’ sense of Humanitarianism, Interpersonal Competence, Knowledge and Academic Skills, as well as Cognitive Complexity (Kuh, 1995). More recently, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has captured Diversity and Global Learning as one of the core High-Impact Practices (HIPs), which maximize student learning outcomes, arguing that students who engage in international experiences have a broadened worldview, develop intercultural competencies, sustain difficult conversations in the face of highly emotional differences, and “explore the relational nature of their identities” (Hovland, 2010).