This paper focuses on the value of teaching about cross-national perspectives on sustainability and climate-change issues in a highly experiential context: the study abroad program and the international campus. It is limited principally to the U.S. study abroad experience and addressing the gaps between students’ domestic and personal understandings of sustainability and their newfound international perspectives.

Two sustainability courses taught to US students in Rome extensively incorporated local field experiences and comparative analyses of US and Italian/European experience. Some additional insights are included from sustainability courses taught in Japan, to a mix of Japanese and foreign students. Students completing these courses generally find the field experiences, and their contextualization, to be extremely valuable and thought provoking. Several commented about the importance of interpreting the (relatively) familiar through new lenses. Much of what the students take away from the experience seems to involve thinking about ways in which they can improve their own lifestyles and lower their personal environmental footprints. The wide divergence in emphasis between individual action and societal-level responses is particularly apparent in the transportation, waste management, water, and food system sectors. A majority of the students tended to internally “scale up” the contributions of relatively small projects, such as mini-banks of solar panels atop parking pay stations. End-of-term focus sessions were used to assess the extent to which learning outcomes reach beyond these personal lifestyle concerns toward a more nuanced and critical assessment of how and why these differences have come about. A major challenge for international educators is in encouraging students to think more deeply about systemic change, policy-based approaches, and global dimensions of climate change and other sustainability issues—and perhaps less about “cultural differences” across countries and regions.