Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Student Learning in an International Community Engagement Program

Although international community engagement programs are widely implemented across higher education, qualitative evidence detailing how students internally process cross-cultural friction and contextual design adaptation remains sparse compared to administrative reporting. This study addresses this gap through a reflection-centered qualitative inquiry, analyzing reflection transcripts from ten Indonesian and Singaporean student participants (BINUS University and Singapore Polytechnic) engaged in short-term rural field projects at A Green and Yayasan KDM. Using reflexive thematic analysis grounded in Kolb's experiential learning cycle and Schön's reflection-in-action, the analysis revealed four core experiential dynamics. Intercultural dialogue developed by combining emotional translation with rapid visual sketching, while working-pace mismatches between structured planning and local flexibility were resolved through nightly debriefings and user-evidence affinity synthesis. Unscripted rural constraints forced a design pivot toward low-tech cardboard mockups refined through elder ergonomic feedback, while an immersive community stay shifted student perspectives away from top-down technical assumptions toward active community listening and empathy-rooted design ethics. These findings offer a reflective framework for structuring debriefings and ethical co-design in international service-learning, moving beyond superficial activity metrics.