learnings. Faculty leaders then read journals weekly, entering into

conversation with students, raising additional questions, affirming insights

and assisting with providing frameworks and contexts for understanding. In

addition, most SST groups use retired GC communication professor J. Daniel's

Hess's book The Whole World Guide to Cultural Learning,⁴⁷which includes

scores of experiential exercises and activities, to glean as much as possible

from the term.

Several studies in the last two decades have confirmed particular types

of measurable learnings in international education. In Students Abroad:

Strangers at Home:Education for a Global Society, authors Norman L.

Kauffmann, Judith N. Martin and Henry D. Weaver report their findings

regarding personal and intellectual development as well as perspectival

changes wrought through study abroad. According to the researchers,

students who are less mature when going abroad, but who then immerse

themselves in the local culture, are the ones who demonstrate the most

personal growth in terms of gaining intrapersonal (self-esteem, autonomy,

self-confidence, self-reliance and self-differentiation) and interpersonal

skills, as well as developing values and life and vocational direction. Students

who are less mature and who experience another culture only superficially

have minimal gains in personal growth and in intellectual development and

worldview. Students who are more mature, with a keener sense of who they

are and their vocational goals, benefit primarily in intellectual development

and expanded worldviews.⁴⁸

47_{(Yarmouth:Intercultural Press, Inc., 1994).}

48_{Norman L. Kauffmann, Judith N. Martin, and Henry D. Weaver, with Judy}
Weaver, Students Abroad:Strangers at Home:Education for a Global Society
Yarmouth:Intercultural Press, Inc., 1992). The authors, two of whom were
long-time administrators at Goshen College and based some of their research

27