ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how our perception of the world, particularly as adolescents and young adults, evolves through the developmental perspectives of stage theories, and how these transformational perspectives affect our engagement with our environment, particularly during study abroad. It considers why the natural developmental process often falters and stops short of its possibilities. Theorists use the phrase "transcend and include" to indicate that nothing is lost in the transformation from a lower to a higher stage—each perceptive stage is not a view of a different world, but a more inclusive, complex worldview of the same world. Laske's great contribution to stage development theory was to separate the cognitive from the social-emotional strands, to show the relationship between the two, particularly the influence of the cognitive on the social-emotional, and to indicate how cognitive development can be influenced, the constraints of the chapter allow only a focus on the more general and more approachable social-emotional.
