Ireland in Focus: Interdisciplinary Study Abroad and the Benefits of Collaboration

Abstract

Beginning in 2015, New Mexico State University’s Office of Study Abroad, Faculty-Led International Program (FLIP) encouraged us to create a two-course/cross-disciplinary experience for students. All students enroll in both GEOG491-Cultural Geography and COMM491-Culture, Communication, and Place, regardless of their discipline. Both undergraduate and graduate students participated. The course was open to all majors, but the majority were from geography and communications. The combined course approach provided a fruitful avenue for transformative experiential student learning objectives, while joint participation within the disciplines of Communication Studies and Geography created a richer international study abroad student experience. Our purpose here is to outline the structure of our study abroad learning experience design as well as to identify and discuss our learning objectives. We started with a desire for students to gain the transformative benefits of real-world exposure, travel challenges and self-discovery, and person-to-person interactions. These are key to any student travel experience, but such broad learning objectives are inevitably complex and difficult to measure. However, indicators are present as increasingly contextualized student responses during trip discussions; demonstration of the synthesis of ideas in their final written interpretations; functionalizing conceptual and methodological structures of each discipline; and most interestingly, connecting the two disciplines in their interpretations.