ABSTRACT

The main objective of this chapter is to contribute to the better understanding of American students' motivations or inhibitions towards cross-national communication. It uses a constructivism perspective to understand the values, attitudes, and experiences of American students that guide their decisions on whether or not to engage with their international students. Constructivism provides affordance to understand how a learner constructs knowledge via different concepts: complex, cognition, scaffolding, vicarious experiences, modeling, and observational learning. The chapter attempts to build a model of on campus global engagement between the international and domestic students in a large US research institution in the South. Global engagement results when students can bump up headway factors. Domestic students do have a modicum of motivations to engage with their international peers, which can be enhanced and promoted with the types of incentives appealing to local students. When local students can see the value in interacting with international peers, they would see them as resource rather than nuisance.