Routledge Coming Home Your Way: Understanding University Student Intercultural Reentry

Coming Home Your Way offers college and university students returning from an education-abroad experience a wealth of pertinent information, opportunities for meaningful reflection, and practical guidance on making the most of their time abroad. Grounded in research and addressing an array of aspects of education abroad – including intercultural communication, changing relationships, and career impact – Coming Home Your Way will be an invaluable tool for any student planning, experiencing, or returning from a stay abroad. Drawing from theory and research from multiple disciplines, and real-world experiences of students who have studied abroad, the volume addresses key themes critical to understanding reentry, including individual differences in taking in experience, communication patterns and approaches, the reentry transition, the nature of relationships in reentry, bridging reentry and career, and more. Within each chapter are opportunities for self-reflection that allow readers to integrate the ideas presented into their own experience. Compelling short fictional accounts add flavor and detail that bring theory to life. Coming Home Your Way provides a window into the complex experience of intercultural reentry. Reentry from an education-abroad experience can be a period of intense growth, and can feel disruptive and confusing while it’s happening. The authors explain and explore these complexities in a conversational style that will engage students, and with the rigor expected by their instructors. Like no other book currently on the market, Coming Home Your Way will give college and university students insight into the challenges and intercultural opportunities that reentry offers. Review "Rick Malleus and Marina Micari know the scholarly literature on intercultural reentry, but – perhaps more importantly – they know the reentry experience personally, emotionally, and kinesthetically. Their wellspring of scholarship and lived experiences provides students with useful tools to understand their own reentry encounters. This is a small book with very big, and very important, ideas. It is about an area of intercultural communication that is largely overlooked. After an international sojourn, reentry into one’s "home" culture initiates changes that can range from the very positive to the very negative, from the transformational to the disconfirming. Drs. Malleus and Micari provide returning students with an approach to understanding their intercultural experiences that will help them to learn and to grow from their reentry encounters. It is a much-needed addition to the intercultural communication literature." - Myron W. (Ron) Lustig, Professor of Communication, San Diego State University, California, USA "In an engaging and thought-provoking style, the authors illuminate and unpack the often-challenging experience of students’ return back into their own culture after an overseas study experience. By skillfully combining real-life examples and current interdisciplinary theory and research, they present tools and strategies for maximizing the insights and skills acquired during the overseas experience - and provide useful suggestions for marketing these new skills to future employers." - Judith Martin, Professor Emerita of Intercultural Communication, Arizona State University, USA "Malleus and Micari’s new book provides a unique and welcomed addition to the literature on student reentry. Specifically addressing the returning student, the book skillfully provides an accessible but comprehensive survey of the scholarly literature while guiding the student through reflective questions intended to deepen understanding while providing adaptation tools. The authors have seamlessly combined developmental psychology, intercultural communication and reentry research to provide students with a wide-ranging perspective on their transition experiences. Every student returning home from an international exper