Empowering Students To Create The Study Abroad Experience

Abstract

The literature is filled with numerous findings demonstrating the benefits of a study abroad experience for a student.  These benefits include the broad-based student growth that goes well beyond the topics studied abroad.  There is also significant substantiation in the literature to suggest empowerment learning enriches and facilitates the total academic experience for students.  This paper describes a class whereby preparing students for study abroad and marketing study abroad are integrated with empowerment techniques to create a more meaningful study abroad program.  This class, the Global Business Exploration Program (GBEP) is student-managed and guided by the desire to promote the importance and benefits of global exploration.  Consensus decision-making and other processes within Total Quality Management (TQM) are employed by the students to manage the GBEP class interactions.  Ethnographic data collected over a four semester period (two years) were analyzed to illustrate the benefits as well as the difficulties of utilizing empowerment techniques to create the GBEP class and improve the study abroad program in the college of business.