Applying Culture and Appreciative Education lenses, this qualitative study, eliciting detailed descriptions, examines six North American adult and higher education scholars’ lived learning experiences and insights gained from their academic collaborations in and with the East. Our findings indicate that participants hold unique international collaboration experiences with commonalities. Most participants experienced language and cultural barriers in real-time, on-site collaborations that they would not have considered otherwise without these experiences. Many differences made them realize the fundamentals for intercultural collaborations. They consciously learned to reposition with appreciative mindsets and co-construct goals and solutions with counterparts. All participants indicated that transnational contexts enable profound reflective and authentic learning, renewed understandings of cross-cultural sensitivity, and different ways of thinking and doing. This study demonstrates that international collaborations promote adult learning with self-awareness for a new dimension of global learning and cultural competency in the internationalization of adult education.

运用文化和欣赏教育的视角，这项定性研究引出了详细的描述，考察了六位北美成人和高等教育学者的生活学习经历以及他们在东方和与东方的学术合作中获得的见解。我们的研究结果表明，参与者拥有独特的具有共性的国际合作经验。大多数参与者在实时的现场协作中遇到了语言和文化障碍，如果没有这些经验，他们不会考虑其他情况。许多差异使他们意识到跨文化合作的基础。他们有意识地学会了以欣赏的心态重新定位，并与同行共同构建目标和解决方案。所有参与者都表示，跨国环境促成了深刻的反思和真实的学习、对跨文化敏感性的新理解以及不同的思维和行为方式。这项研究表明，国际合作促进了成人学习的自我意识，以实现成人教育国际化中全球学习和文化能力的新维度。