This summer, a month in Barcelona became more than a study abroad experience. For Stephen Craft, Ph.D., dean and professor in Oglethorpe University’s Hammack School of Business, it was a chance to bring Oglethorpe’s discussion-driven approach to international business into a global classroom.

I spent the month of July working from Barcelona. I was onsite to teach two course sections of International Business in the LeadAbroad program. Going in, I knew the summer would be filled with incredible architecture, rich history and world-class cuisine. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how deeply the city itself would become such a rich source of learning engagement or how novel the Oglethorpe-style of learning would seem to students mostly drawn from a cross-section of large SEC schools.

Barcelona didn’t just serve as a scenic backdrop, it became our living laboratory. We integrated the port of Barcelona, maritime history, the spaces dedicated to entrepreneurial creators and Spanish outposts of international brands directly into our class experiences. It is one thing to discuss commerce, but the experience hits differently when you stand with your students in a market that has run continually for over 800 years.

However, the true magic of the month lay in the classroom dynamic itself. The program brought together a cohort of students, many from massive state universities. Accustomed to sprawling campuses and lecture halls filled with hundreds of peers, these students arrived with a vastly different educational framework than what we provide our students in the Hammack School at Oglethorpe.

Many of the students are accustomed to a passive style of learning defined by taking notes during a lecture, memorizing facts and repeating them on a multiple-choice exam. Several students told me that my assignment was the first paper they had written in college. Certainly, the students were unaccustomed to the highly interactive, discussion-driven model that defines the liberal-arts-informed classroom at Oglethorpe.

The students experienced culture shock, both with Spain but also with the pedagogy. When I asked open-ended questions and expected the students to drive the conversation, they initially looked for the “right” answer to repeat back to me. But as the days rolled on, something important happened. These students proved to be absolutely thirsty for engagement. Once they realized that their opinions were valued, that nuance was encouraged and that blind memorization wouldn’t cut it, they stepped up to the challenge with exuberance. The students began asking tougher questions, challenging one another’s perspectives and looking at the world through a much more critical lens. Watching them adapt to, and eventually crave, the rigorous interaction of an Oglethorpe-style classroom was profoundly moving. It also reinforced for me what a privilege it is to teach at this university.

By the end of July, these students weren’t just tourists collecting credits for a “blow off” study abroad course, they were critical thinkers actively engaging with a foreign culture and with each other. They learned to lean into discomfort, question their assumptions and articulate complex ideas in real time.

Looking back, the entire experience was deeply rewarding. It reinforced my belief in the value of a human-level and high-impact education that has been too widely abandoned across much of the higher education landscape. No matter the size of a student’s home institution, there is a universal hunger for meaningful, collaborative and deep intellectual engagement. Taking the spirit of Oglethorpe across the Atlantic and watching it transform a classroom in Spain was a summer highlight I won’t soon forget and an energy I am thrilled to bring back into my classroom at home.