Magazine
Summer/Fall 2002

Why Immersion Learning?

The Campaign for Leadership has as one of its goals providing an immersion learning experience for every Wabash student. Why such a focus on these relatively brief and directed cross-cultural experiences?

Professor Rick Warner: Why? Frankly, our students are going to be inhabiting a very different world than the one that their parents grew up in——a world that will require them to understand other cultures and better understand international situations. You simply can’t gain that understanding by staying here in the country. You need to be able to have quality cross-cultural experiences whether you're going to be in business, medicine—whatever field you enter.

Professor Dan Rogers: All of these cross cultural experiences are tightly integrated with the curricular and pedagogical mission of the College, not addendums or appendices to the kinds of experiences that students have here, but are experiences that are woven into the fabric of what happens here on campus.

Professor Warner: They receive a great education here in a residential liberal arts environment and that’s a very important value to us. We don’t want them to go away for two years. But I think immersion learning like that which we experienced in Chiapas will enrich their studies when they return. The high quality level of their year-end projects, and the fact that two of the students are already returning to Chiapas for internships, suggests that this is already happening.

What are your thoughts?
Click here to submit feedback on this story.

Return to the table of contents