Global Engagement on Campus: Roadblocks and Pathways

With an increasing demand of globally minded graduates, colleges and universities are trying to internationalize their campuses with increasing number of international students, expecting global engagement on campus. However, the opportunity for American students to engage with the world through their international peers is largely untapped due to lack of meaningful engagement opportunities. This constructivist study explores American undergraduate students' experiences of interactions with their international peers on campus. Based on 10 in-depth interviews and 3 focus group transcripts (N=25), a model of undergraduate students' on-campus global engagement experience is created using grounded theory. Interview and focus group participants were selected from the respondent pool of a screener survey sent to 2,000 students randomly selected from ~32,000 American undergraduate students. From the stories of U.S. students about their interactions with international peers vis-àvis their beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions, the study identifies headbumps (roadblocks) and headways (pathways), the elements that motivate or demotivate cross-national interactions on campus.