The purpose of this study was to explore meaning making in the context of education abroad. This was conducted through three articles exploring elements of this process, including how programs may be framed through marketing and advising practices; the foundational importance of social and geographic place; the dialectical interactions between embodied experience with conceptual schema, figurative language, and narratives; and the role of student agency within these processes.The first article explored the relationship between virtual delivery and student development as mediated by embodied experience. Through this analysis, concerns about the possibility for the creation of a simulacrum of education abroad were identified as well as opportunities for deliberate curriculum construction. The second article was a metaphoric analysis of marketing language used by education abroad program providers, exploring common figurative language constructions used to frame understanding of education abroad programs. One form of the journey metaphor and three variations of a container metaphor were identified and analyzed, and implications for practice were outlined. The third article is the outline for a proposed model for analyzing meaning making: the Kaleidoscope Model. This includes elements of affect, embodied experiences, physical and social place, schema, figurative language such as metaphors, the Social Construction of Reality model, narrative, and the context of reality and virtuality modalities. This disquisition concludes with an analysis of the insights each article provides into the research questions, implications for practice, and opportunities for future study.