Education students are learning more than what classrooms have to offer by teaching in foreign countries.

Fourteen students are traveling abroad this spring to complete the College of Education’s student teaching requirement.

Gayle Huey, director of field experiences for the College of Education, said the number is higher than in the fall semester, when eight students completed their student-teaching abroad. Huey said the decrease was mainly a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Huey said the international student-teaching program began in the early 1970s. Until the mid-1990s, the program was run in conjunction with the state university in Minnesota.

Iowa State now runs the program alone and enables students to teach in many locations, including Scotland, Italy and Australia.

“It is usually a capstone of their total experience,” Huey said.

Huey said a faculty member assigned to each location visits the students at least once while they are abroad to offer advice and to help coordinate the visit.

Huey said the student-teaching experience takes 16 weeks and is a 16-credit semester. She said students usually spend the first eight weeks of the semester in Iowa and complete the semester abroad.

Jamie Swift, senior in elementary education, spent eight weeks in Rome during the 2001 fall semester.

“I really wanted to experience living in a different culture and it seemed like an adventure,” Swift said.

Swift said she chose Rome because she knew a little Spanish, which helped her learn Italian.

“It just seemed like a good fit,” she said.

Melissa Laukkonen, ISU graduate and current sixth-grade teacher at Sawyer Elementary School in Ames, taught in Scotland during the spring of 2001.

“I thought Scotland would be somewhere that I probably wouldn’t travel to otherwise, so I chose to try it out,” she said.

Huey said the international teaching option offers many benefits to those who participate.

“It offers the experience of working and living in a different culture,” Huey said.

“Students who choose this have a much more global view of the teaching, politics, languages and cultures and they share that in their teaching.”

Huey said students return with a knowledge of “the larger world” of books, art, music and culture.

The student teachers prepare an Iowan culture kit to take with them and present to different groups in the various countries they visit.

Swift said flexibility, problem-solving and open-mindedness were major things she learned from the experience.

“Mostly I learned how to truly be in a culture and not try to change it,” she said. “If you choose to go somewhere that is a completely different culture and immerse yourself in it, it makes you evaluate your perspective and your life path.”

Swift said another overseas position she applied for fell through, but she has a definite interest in teaching abroad in the future.