Loving Neighbor as Self: Translating the Study Abroad Experience into Cross-Cultural Friendships on the Home Campus

Higher education focuses significant attention on internationalization in an effort to prepare graduates for the global marketplace. As a result, institutions engage more students in study abroad programs and expand international student enrollment. However, scholarship has yet to consider the essential role returned study abroad students may play in meeting the friendship needs of international students. The present research aimed to determine if study abroad experiences have any impact on friendships between study abroad participants and international students who study on the domestic campus. The study maintained the goal of identifying key factors that either enhance or constrain intercultural relationships between study abroad participants and international students. The study also uncovered experiences that facilitate authentic friendships between domestic and international students at a medium-sized, faith-based, college in the U.S. Midwest. The researcher interviewed returned study abroad student focus groups, international student focus groups, and key administrators using a qualitative phenomenological approach. Focus group participants also responded to a brief survey. Four basic themes emerged: exercising intercultural competencies; empathy toward internationals; friendships between study abroad students and international student; and institutional contributions. A key finding of the study also revealed that institutions do not teach study abroad students to utilize their study abroad experience in fostering empathetic friendships with international students upon returning to campus. Instead, study abroad debriefing sessions typically focus on helping domestic students “get back to normal” or dealing with reverse culture shock. International students reported that study abroad participants demonstrated growth in intercultural competencies but still struggled to move beyond shallow friendships with internationals on campus. Findings suggest the need to incorporate notions of how the experience can more effectively contribute to building friendships with international students

Loving Neighbor as Self: Translating the Study Abroad Experience into Intercultural Friendships on the Home Campus

Universities focus significant attention on internationalization to prepare empathyglobally minded graduates by engaging students in study abroad programs and expanding international student enrollment. However, scholarship has not yet considered the role returned study abroad students play in meeting friendship needs of international students. This research aimed to determine if such experiences impact friendships between participants and internationals. Four basic themes emerged: isolated application of intercultural competencies, differences in empathy experiences, friendships between study abroad and international students, and institutional contributions. Key findings revealed institutions do not teach study abroad students to utilize their experience in fostering empathetic friendships withinternational students and should consider how the experience can more effectively impact intercultural friendships rather than focusing solely on domestic students’ reverse culture shock

The Journey to R4D: An institutional history of an Australian Initiative on Food Security in Africa

Internal Revie

Simulation of Lablab Pastures

The potential of legume-based pastures to address declining soil nitrogen on marginal cropping soils is increasingly recognised in northern Australia, as such there is a need for cost benefit analysis of pastures and crops in a mixed farming system. In highly variable rainfall environments, biophysical modelling may be the best way of identifying and quantifying interactions with mixed crop-livestock systems on a seasonal basis. This paper describes a case study where both animal productivity and lablab pasture production is simulated. Lablab (Lablab purpureus) is an annual tropical legume widely used as a short-term legume phase in crop-pasture rotations, providing high quality forage for animal production and a low risk nitrogen input for crop production

Improving Predictions for Helium Emission Lines

We have combined the detailed He I recombination model of Smits with the collisional transitions of Sawey & Berrington in order to produce new accurate helium emissivities that include the effects of collisional excitation from both the 2 (3)S and 2 (1) S levels. We present a grid of emissivities for a range of temperature and densities along with analytical fits and error estimates. Fits accurate to within 1% are given for the emissivities of the brightest lines over a restricted range for estimates of primordial helium abundance. We characterize the analysis uncertainties associated with uncertainties in temperature, density, fitting functions, and input atomic data. We estimate that atomic data uncertainties alone may limit abundance estimates to an accuracy of 1.5%; systematic errors may be greater than this. This analysis uncertainty must be incorporated when attempting to make high accuracy estimates of the helium abundance. For example, in recent determinations of the primordial helium abundance, uncertainties in the input atomic data have been neglected.Comment: ApJ, accepte

A New Observational Upper Limit to the Low Redshift Ionizing Background Radiation

We report a new Fabry-Perot search for Halpha emission from the intergalactic cloud HI 1225+01 in an attempt to measure the low redshift ionizing background radiation. We set a new 2 sigma upper limit on Halpha emission of 8 mR (5 x 10^{-20} ergs cm^{-2} s^{-1} arcsec^{-2}). Conversion of this limit to limits on the strength of the ionizing background requires knowledge of the ratio of the projected to total surface area of this cloud, which is uncertain. We discuss the plausible range of this ratio, and within this range find that the strength of the ionizing backround is in the lower range of, but consistent with, previous observational and theoretical estimates.Comment: 46 pages including 9 figures (7 ps, 2 gif