Closing the Loop: Debriefing and the Short-Term College Missions Team

Abstract

Colleges routinely send teams across cultural and economic lines to serve other communities. The returning from any cross-cultural experience is laced with dissonance. This article hopes to provide paradigms to assist making these trips a more significant educational experience. Using Mannoia's description of how learning takes place, we perceive that all aspects of the educational experience can become tools for creating learning. Short-term cross-cultural trips have the potential for being one of the most formative pedagogical experiences of a student's college career. The tools presented here should assist them to transform the event into a significant life experience.