Episode #180
NDSL #189: Leadership Learning through Study Abroad with Drs. Joshua K. Taylor and Trisha Teig
In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Trisha Teig , leadership educator at the Archer Center for Student Leadership Development at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Dr. Joshua Taylor , director of the Hargis Leadership Institute at Oklahoma State University, co-editors of New Directions for Student Leadership Issue #189, Leadership Learning Through Study Abroad: Considerations, Best Practices, and Innovative Ideas . This marks the 21st episode in the TLE–NDSL partnership series. Both editors came to the work through practice: Teig built programs in Costa Rica, Ireland, and Northern Ireland through the Pioneer Leadership Program at the University of Denver, while Taylor has led roughly a dozen short-term programs across six continents, most recently a 47-student program in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. The conversation returns repeatedly to access. Both editors are direct that study abroad cannot remain, as Teig puts it, for the rich and elite only, and the issue treats structural choices — third-party providers versus faculty-led courses, cost, program design — as the levers that determine who participates. Teig discusses applying Heifetz's adaptive leadership framework to sort anticipatable risk from the genuinely unforeseeable, while Taylor describes nightly campfire reflection as the structural backbone of a faculty- and staff-led program in rural Zimbabwe. Both land on the same point about emergent curriculum: the learning that matters often has to be facilitated in the moment. And both are emphatic that leading study abroad is immersive, always-on professional work — Taylor has now been in hospitals with students on six different continents — while still urging educators who haven't led one to find or create the opportunity. Resources mentioned in this episode: New Directions for Student Leadership, Issue #189: Leadership Learning Through Study Abroad — the issue at the center of this conversation, co-edited by Teig and Taylor Volpe White, J. M., Guthrie, K. L., & Torres, M. (2019). Thinking to Transform: Reflection in Leadership Learning. Information Age Publishing — the reflection scholarship Taylor connects to his program's nightly debriefs Hoffa, W. W. (2007). A History of U.S. Study Abroad: Beginnings to 1965 . Forum on Education Abroad — a foundational source for Teig's historical research in the issue Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. — the adaptive leadership framework Teig uses to categorize program risk Archer Center for Student Leadership Development , Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — Teig's center Hargis Leadership Institute , Oklahoma State University — Taylor's institute Service Learning in a Pandemic with Dr. Tara Coste — Coste's prior TLE appearance; she contributes to Issue #189 and collaborates with Dan on his Cape Town program
