This spring I had the privilege of joining a select group of Americans who since 1948 have promoted improved cultural and geopolitical understanding by studying or sharing professional and educational expertise in more than 155 countries throughout the globe. I became a Fulbrighter.

I spent four weeks as a Fulbright Specialist teaching U.S. journalism ethics at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic’s second city of Brno. Personally, the experience was both challenging and rewarding. But Fulbrighters also share a serious responsibility: ensuring their venture’s significance extends well beyond the personal.

In Brno, I shared information about the United States with European students. What they in turn shared about themselves, their cultures and their countries, I brought back to my Connecticut classroom. This partnership will continue as I work with Czech university officials to develop ongoing collaborative University of Connecticut-Masaryk educational projects.

Building personal relationships helps break down stereotypes while broadening and deepening cultural understanding and acceptance. I forged such relationships with students, Masaryk University faculty and Czech journalism professionals. More importantly, however, a relationship also began between two groups of students — one in Connecticut and the other in Brno.

Through lessons in which both European and U.S. students participated this spring, the groups expanded knowledge and understanding of U.S. journalism practices specifically, but also of each other. They learned what they have in common, as well as the ways cultures, circumstances, political systems and backgrounds make them unique.

Students from Romania, Ukraine, Czech Republic, France and Germany, along with a U.S. study-abroad student, were in my Masaryk classroom. We discussed a variety of case studies illustrating journalistic ethical dilemmas, most of which I also had discussed with my University of Connecticut students. In addition, both sets of students were assigned to comment on ethical questions I posed on a discussion blog.

Distinct cultural and geographic backgrounds sometimes played a part in their comments. U.S. students displayed more anger over particular coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example, while European students saw some justification in German journalists’ refusal to publish the name and photograph of the Germanwings pilot who purposely crashed an airliner in the French Alps in late March.

Both groups of students generally demonstrated an amazing similarity in their thinking about what constitutes ethical professional conduct among journalists, reinforcing a conclusion drawn by many Fulbrighters that the world’s peoples, indeed, have much in common.

Fulbright Specialists are just one group of participants in the wide-ranging Fulbright program initiated by U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who was the longest serving Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.

Since the first Fulbrighters went overseas just after World War II, nearly 123,000 American scholars, educators and professionals have followed. Specialists, who spend between two and four weeks overseas, have worked in more than 140 countries.

Despite the program’s longevity and the large number of Americans who have participated in it, its seriousness of purpose is not obvious. Fulbright himself wrote about this dilemma in a 1989 essay collection titled “The Price of Empire.” He often had difficulty, he wrote, “in trying to find the words that would persuasively explain that educational exchange is not merely one of those nice but marginal activities in which we engage in international affairs, but rather, from the standpoint of future world peace and order, probably the most important and potentially rewarding of our foreign policy activities.”

No single educational or professional exchange can result in complete cross-cultural understanding or, ultimately, world peace. However, if each Fulbright venture takes even one step toward this goal, expanding such programs to allow more students and professionals to participate would be a sound foreign policy investment indeed.

Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald is a journalism instructor at the University of Connecticut and formerly served on the Stonington Board of Education for eight years.