Jafari and Transformation: A Model to Enhance Short-Term Overseas Study Tours

An increasing emphasis on university internationalisation, global citizenship education and outbound mobility experiences (OMEs) has seen international study travel become a key staple of tertiary education. University students undertake learning experience for academic credit overseas for a period shorter than a semester under the guidance of an academic staff member. With student participation increasing, greater consideration needs to be given to the ability of OMEs to deliver high quality learning outcomes to students, particularly within an intensive shortterm format. A majority of existing literature relays the experiences of academic staff in designing and facilitating OMEs (Brokaw, 1996; Gordon & Smith, 1992; Koernig 2007; Schuster, 1993), but an emerging literature also considers student experiences (Downey, Gothard & Gray, 2012; Evans, Finch, Toncar & Reid, 2008; Weaver & Tucker, 2010). While these evaluations are insightful, the observations may not be relevant to all of the wide variety of OMEs now being offered. This paper promotes a reconstructed Jafari (1987) tourism model as a framework to understand the various components of the student and staff travel experience while participating in an OME, especially short-term overseas study trips.