By Amanda Moore McBride, Associate Dean for Social Work, and Eric Mlyn, Executive Director of DukeEngage, for The Chronicle of Higher Education

The last decade has seen the proliferation of international volunteer programs and international service-learning courses offered by American colleges and universities. Such opportunities send undergraduate and graduate students abroad to work with local nonprofits and other community partners. Think of students building a health clinic on an alternative spring break, teaching English in remote villages, or holding babies in an orphanage.

We have followed and been a part of the growth of this pedagogical approach, building programs and researching their results. Our experience has made it clear that we need to better understand what exactly these volunteer activities are producing for the students and communities. The future of this field will be best served when practice is closely linked to research. As a field, service learning has made progress in this area, though much remains to be done so that the possible positive outcomes do not get lost despite its best intentions.

If there is one common theme on which nearly all of us in this field agree, it is that these types of service experiences must simultaneously contribute to student development across a whole host of areas—including international awareness, intercultural relations, and international career intentions—and make significant contributions with the communities where our students work. Those contributions can be "just being an extra pair of hands" or actually transferring skills or building capacity, like training local preventative-health volunteers on effective practices. And in the end, we all share the goal of increasing our collective sense of humanity. But we must continually ask whether we are doing enough to create benefits for the students and the local communities. To foster this discussion, here are suggestions on how best to run international service efforts based on the growing evidence from burgeoning research and field experience.

Begin with the end in mind. Service learning must be directed by its goals, focusing on achieving positive outcomes for all the groups involved: the host communities, the students, and the institutions we represent. This win-win-win is achievable, but requires negotiation and understanding of social, economic, and political dynamics. America's imperialistic past is not so distant. Having the community's goals front and center is important lest this become "self-service" for the students or institution only. This means knowing what the community's assets and self-identified needs are and matching these to what the students are capable of providing. Without this match, we run the risk of actually doing harm.

Emphasize and "process" the process. Achieving the proverbial win-win-win means forming partnerships for the long term. Arrangements are not just made and service activities executed; expectations and relationships across all the groups involved require careful management. As our campuses have learned through our community engagement at home, sometimes faculty members and students do not bring adequate nuance to the partnership dance. Having staff with knowledge of community-engagement theories and skills in negotiation as well as international experience is a fundamental piece of any international-service arrangement, be it a student-driven alternative break or an endowed chair's international service-learning course. That said, no partnership or service experience will be completely smooth even with this seasoned support. The world is far less predictable than the classroom, but therein lies opportunities for learning, on all sides. A core component of international or domestic service is reflection, the opportunity to "process" the process. One thing that we do know for sure is that this kind of reflection, which is sometimes resisted by our students (and our professors) fearing that they are engaging in some kind of group therapy, leads to many of the positive outcomes we seek for our students and host communities.