Like almost all of her classmates at Agnes Scott College, Ximena Guillen spent 1 week of her first year of college immersed in another culture. Guillen, now a junior biology major, visited the Navajo Nation in Tuba City, Arizona, through a first-year study away program. “As someone who has seldom left Georgia, I felt so fortunate to be presented with the possibility of taking an in-depth look into the history and customs of another culture in an environment with individuals who were just as eager to learn as I was,” Guillen says.
Due to this unique campuswide program, more than 90 percent of the students at Agnes Scott College, a private women’s liberal arts college in Decatur, Georgia, have a global experience before the end of their first year of college. Whether they travel outside of the United States, or, like Guillen, travel domestically to places such as the Navajo Nation, Puerto Rico, and New York City, all students gain substantial exposure to other cultures.
Every first-year student at Agnes Scott is required to enroll in a semester-long, four-credit course called Global Journeys, which focuses on cultural, economic, and political issues that link the global with the local. A one-week, faculty-led immersion experience at an off-campus destination in the middle of spring semester is bookended by research and reflection. The first cohort of students, who participated in spring 2016, graduated in May 2020.
The diversity of destinations reflects the identities of the college’s enrollment of around 1,000 students, who Agnes Scott attracts from 28 different countries. “Even though the core of Global Journeys is centered around the global immersion experience, it’s fundamentally about trying to develop global competency in our students,” says Regine O. Jackson, PhD, chair of sociology and anthropology and faculty coordinator for global learning. “And some of that starts just by getting them comfortable talking across differences in the classroom or seeing the difference that’s all around them on our campus.”
“Because global learning at Agnes Scott has been designed as a program that focuses on the global patterns, systems, and structures that shape our lives, we did not want to make global learning synonymous with leaving the country or traveling internationally,” says Gundolf Graml, PhD, associate dean for curriculum and strategic initiatives.
The Global Journeys program is funded through the college’s endowment as part of a strategic repositioning plan that created the transformative SUMMIT curricular initiative for global learning and leadership education.
Global Journeys courses are designed as interdisciplinary introductions to global learning with a focus on community engagement. Agnes Scott offers 14 to 16 sections of Journeys courses every spring. While they are offered in different disciplines across the college, the courses share common readings and focus on one of four themes: “Globalization”; “Imperialism, Colonialism, and Diaspora”; “Identity, Self, Culture, Other”; and “Why Travel? The Ethics of Travel.”
These courses also try to thwart the traditional notion of going to developing countries to do service learning and countries in Europe to study history and culture, Jackson adds.
All students travel during the same week and then join with other sections to debrief upon return. “I have found this to be an engaging framework to structure a class because students are having parallel experiences and have common ground, but the details of each of the different destinations are so different,” says Tracey Laird, PhD, music professor. “It opens up an opportunity for students to not only learn about our destination and the experiences we share within a class of 20 people, [but] there’s a real energy among the first years where they’re comparing different ways in which concepts like colonialism manifest themselves in their particular destination.”
While the travel component for first-year students participating in spring 2020 has been postponed until 2021 in response to COVID-19, educators are devising innovative ways to continue global learning. In spring 2020, Jackson taught a Global Journeys course focused on race and belonging in Cuba, and she was able to take students to exhibitions at Spelman College and Kennesaw State University focused on Cuban art. She and the students also ate at restaurants in Atlanta that are owned and operated by Cuban immigrants. “We always emphasize things like local-global connections,” she says.
Biology professor Srebrenka Robic, PhD, proposed and taught one of the first Global Journeys courses offered in the STEM disciplines, a course on the ecology and environment of her native country, Croatia. During the weeklong travel component, Robic and her students explored various continental and coastal ecosystems. She took students to visit a nonprofit focused on sustainability in Zagreb and the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries in Split. For the final project of the course, students were asked to pick an environmental topic and explore the issue in both Croatia and the United States.
Robic says students who have never been able to travel prior to taking a Global Journeys course show the most gains. “The biggest impact I’ve seen is a development of confidence and excitement that [studying abroad] is something that they can do,” she says.
Guillen, who had little travel experience before going to Arizona with Laird’s Global Journeys course, says, “This was my first time riding on a plane as well as being away from my family for so long, so I worried that a possible lack of support would make me not enjoy this experience in its entirety. In the end, this fear of feeling like a stranger in an unknown place quickly modified itself into a personal goal to step out of my usual comfort zone...and to appreciate each encounter.”
The Global Journeys courses lay the foundation for a larger curriculum initiative, SUMMIT, which focuses on providing curricular and cocurricular global learning opportunities throughout students’ 4 years at Agnes Scott. Students are able to study foreign languages or enroll in more than 200 interdisciplinary global elective courses. Students who complete a series of required and elective courses, as well as participate in additional education or internship abroad opportunities, are also able to earn a global specialization certificate.
Data collected over the past 4 years indicate that Agnes Scott’s global learning curriculum has enhanced comprehensive campus internationalization and significantly increased intercultural and global competencies among students. Intercultural competence is tracked through a multimethod, longitudinal assessment called the Global Pathways Study. Students complete the baseline survey before they arrive on campus and then take follow-up surveys after every year of study, 1 year after graduation, and 5 years after they graduate to examine their change over time. Findings have indicated that students demonstrate a significant increase in the subdomains of intercultural competence, including knowing, affect, social interaction, and social responsibility, from baseline to follow-up.
In the 2018–19 academic year, 92 percent of students listed the first-year Global Journeys immersion as a valuable extension of their learning. Students integrate the cultural competencies acquired by the Journeys experience into their résumés and, assisted by Agnes Scott’s Office for Internships and Career Development, practice how to foreground these experiences in applications for graduate school, internships, and jobs.
Laird says that engaging students through education abroad early on in their college career changes how they approach the rest of their education. “It awakens a kind of energy and excitement that, as a college professor, you hope to awaken in every single student,” she says.
Founded in 1787, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is one of the oldest higher education institutions in the United States. As such, the university has an impressively long tradition of international engagement. From its creation of its first Nationality Rooms nearly 80 years ago, to its consistent efforts to make global engagement a part of every student’s university experience, Pitt has long been a leader in promoting international engagement in new and innovative ways.
Perhaps the most visible evidence of Pitt’s commitment to engaging the world are its 30 Nationality Rooms. Housed in a 42-story Gothic skyscraper known as the “Cathedral of Learning,” each Nationality Room celebrates the heritage of an ethnic or cultural group from the Pittsburgh area. The first four rooms—Scottish, Russian, German, and Swedish—were built in 1938, while the newest—the Korean room—was dedicated in 2015. Local organizations that represent the group are responsible for designing and financing the construction of the rooms. After construction, the rooms are governed by committees made up of members of the local community.
Though the Nationality Rooms certainly attract a lot of interest from outside the university, they are primarily used as classrooms, meeting spaces for student organizations, and for other academic purposes. As Associate Director for International Programs Belkys Torres, PhD, explains: “The heritage rooms are a really interesting connection between the university and local and global communities.”
The committees don’t just fund and construct the rooms—they also finance study abroad and research scholarships to their respective country. For example, communications major Noah Coco received the African Heritage Nationality Room Scholarship for a summer program in Cape Town, South Africa, in addition to studying abroad in China. He says, “There are so many sources of funding and opportunities to study abroad at Pitt that I can go to two countries that could not be much further away from where I am right now.”
The Nationality Rooms represent just one of the many initiatives overseen by the University Center for International Studies (UCIS), founded in 1968. Due to Pitt’s decentralized structure as a comprehensive research university, UCIS plays an important role as the university’s keystone for global engagement. The center supports university-wide international programming, activities, services, and research across Pitt’s 16 schools and four regional campuses throughout western Pennsylvania. Torres says: “We function independently, and that allows us to make connections and collaborate across schools and disciplines with faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, visiting scholars, and administrators across all levels.”
UCIS’s portfolio includes education abroad and international student and scholar services. In addition, UCIS currently hosts six area studies and thematic centers, which award a number of undergraduate and graduate certificates highlighting a world region or transnational theme.
Leading the charge for internationalization at Pitt is Ariel C. Armony, PhD, director of UCIS and senior director of international programs. Armony became the university’s senior international officer in 2015, serving as a senior adviser to both Provost Patricia E. Beeson, PhD, and Chancellor Patrick Gallagher, PhD. Armony jokes, “The chancellor likes to refer to me as his ‘secretary of state.’”
Recognizing the connection between the city of Pittsburgh and the rest of the world is central to Armony’s approach to internationalization at Pitt. “We want the world to enrich what we have here at Pitt, and we want to help enrich the world outside of our region. The interaction between the local and the global is very much at the core of the ways in which we conceptualize our role as a global university,” he says.
Provost Beeson concurs: “We say ‘Bring the world to Pitt.’ That means making connections throughout the city and really developing a strong partnership around global issues with our major partners, such as UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center).”
Following the adoption of a new strategic plan that included global engagement as an institutional priority for the first time in the university’s history, Gallagher gave Armony the mandate to develop Embracing the World: A Global Plan for Pitt, a strategy to achieve the university’s internationalization goals for 2016–2020.
“Our university is committed to growing a global community. These plans underpin our efforts to grow international partnerships and experiences that will widen our reach—and connect our students and faculty members to opportunities across the world,” says Gallagher.
Jeff Whitehead, a Pitt alumni who worked in the study abroad office for several years before becoming its director in 2009, explains that the global plan offered an opportunity to take stock of the various international activities the university was already pursuing.
For more than a semester, the UCIS team surveyed staff, students, faculty, and administrators, seeking feedback on where the university should focus its international initiatives. “We made a big point in developing the global plan as a result of a very extensive process of engagement with our campus community,” Armony explains.
Torres adds, “Engagement sessions with faculty, senior leaders, and administrators on all five campuses underscored a need for more robust global operations support, streamlined mechanisms and criteria for developing and tracking strategic international partnerships, and a communication strategy that would connect and inform faculty and administrators across Pitt about their global engagement.”
Students also expressed a need to understand all of the existing opportunities for global engagement on the Pitt campus. The Pitt Global Hub, launching in 2018, will offer students a one-stop-shop for peer mentoring and expert advising about Pitt’s local-global connections.
The ultimate results of the feedback are, according to Torres, “really emblematic of the collective voices and interests of people across our five campuses.” The final global plan has four areas of focus: connecting Pitt’s domestic and international pursuits to create synergies that strengthen its communities, producing globally capable and engaged graduates, creating a global research community that solves global challenges, and developing infrastructure to expand its engagement with the world through global operations support.
In the next year, academic units across Pitt will be asked to align with the global plan as part of their strategic planning process. As part of their annual planning and reporting process, the provost’s office will ask each dean for information on how their school is contributing to the implementation of the global plan.
Many are optimistic that global engagement is now explicitly recognized as part of the institutional mission. “This is the first time in the school’s history where [internationalization] has been a point of focus—for fundraising, programming, recruitment of academics—so it’s a good time for us to be putting a large amount of emphasis on global studies as well as future study abroad and experiential learning pursuits,” adds Whitehead.
The Study Abroad Office has also been central to the institution’s internationalization efforts. Pitt currently sends approximately 1,900 undergraduates and graduate students abroad each year. In fact, around 10 percent of the undergraduate class goes abroad at some point in their academic career.
Over the last decade, Pitt has transitioned from sending the majority of its students abroad with third-party study abroad providers to doing so largely through its own faculty-led programs. “In 2007, about 80 percent of our study abroad participants went through external providers,” Whitehead says. “Now we’ve completely flipped that number on its head.”
Today, only 15 percent of Pitt students studying abroad go through third-party providers, with another 5 percent enrolling in direct exchanges with other universities. The rest participate in Pitt’s own faculty-led programs.
Pitt offers around 350 study abroad options, 100 of which are the faculty-led “Panther Programs,” developed in collaboration with Pitt faculty and the Study Abroad Office. “We credit our faculty—their energy, their enthusiasm, and their creativity—with developing our own offerings,” Whitehead says.
Pitt also has dedicated study abroad managers housed in the Swanson School of Engineering and the College of Business Administration. Both schools have significantly increased the number of students studying abroad over the last few years. Currently, around 45 percent of all engineering students and 50 percent of all business undergraduates will have an international experience before they graduate.
Pitt also administers the Vira I. Heinz (VIH) Program for Women in Global Leadership, which targets young women from Pitt’s four regional campuses and 10 other colleges and universities across Pennsylvania. The program provides $5,000 travel scholarships for female undergraduate students who have never traveled internationally. Around 75 percent of participants are Pell-grant eligible. The program has several components: a predeparture retreat, the international experience, a reentry retreat, and a final community engagement project.
Bethany Hallam, who recently finished her master’s in public health at Pitt, studied in France as a participant in the VIH program during her undergraduate days at Pitt-Greensburg. She says the model provided her with much-needed support: “Before the VIH Program, I never believed that I would be able to accomplish my goal of studying abroad, let alone have the confidence to manage three layovers and live on my own in a studio apartment in the heart of Paris. The VIH mentoring program and predeparture retreat gave me the tools to understand myself and the environment that I would soon be entering.”
Hallam adds that, as the first person in her family to have a passport, the reentry retreat gave her the opportunity to process her time abroad.
In addition to the robust number of students it sends abroad, Pitt also hosts more than 3,100 international students from 100 countries. The Office of International Services (OIS) provides support to all international undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to around 1,800 employees from abroad. The number of international students on campus today is nearly double what it was 10 years ago.
Two-thirds of Pitt’s international student population are graduate students attracted to Pitt’s high-ranking programs in fields such as nursing, law, engineering, and computer and information sciences. At the undergraduate level, they recruit top high school graduates from around the world. “Currently, the university is working toward diversifying the undergraduate international population to amplify the multiplicity of perspectives and experiences in the classroom and on campus,” says Torres.
OIS’s staff and immigration specialists offer immigration advising, as well as run the university’s international student and scholar orientations. In addition to providing direct support to students, OIS also does a lot of campus outreach. Over time there has been a concerted effort to increase services for international students and scholars across the entire institution, especially as the international population has grown, says Genevieve Cook, OIS director.
For international scholars and their families, OIS runs the Experience America program, which is a series of events and activities designed to help them understand U.S. culture. OIS also hosts a workshop series where participants learn about topics such as U.S. politics, the healthcare system, and recommendations for surviving the winter in Pittsburgh.
OIS also works closely with student affairs for much of its programming, in particular the Office of Cross Cultural and Leadership Development (CCLD). Students can, for example, volunteer through CCLD to assist with international orientation. According to Summer Rothrock, the director of CCLD, the office works with fraternity and sorority life, leadership development, cross-cultural and diversity programming, and student organizations. CCLD also collaborates with the Study Abroad Office and UCIS on social and educational programs for students.
Global Ties, for example, is a program for incoming international freshmen and transfer students that pairs new students with a mentor who helps them adjust to life at Pitt. “We want the Global Ties program to provide a global experience right here on campus for any student who may want it as well as to help integrate our international and domestic students together,” Rothrock says.
Both domestic and international students serve as mentors. Jiahui Wei, a senior science major from China, notes, “I actually got a mentor from Global Ties when I first came here. We became really close friends and then I joined Global Ties as a way to give back.”
CCLD also brings together 50 international and domestic student leaders for the annual Hesselbein Global Academy for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement. Students participate in a four-day retreat in Pittsburgh that includes mentoring from professionals in the business, government, and nonprofit sectors.
In addition, CCLD works closely with the Office of Residence Life, which oversees Pitt’s 25 Living Learning Communities (LLCs). Several of these communities focus on themes such as diversity or social inclusion, and the Casa Cultural and Global Village LLCs both have an international focus. Students living in Casa Cultural must enroll in Spanish or Portuguese, and Global Village residents participate in programming that explores global issues.
Assistant Director of Residence Life Philip Badaszewski is also in charge of the Pitt to You initiative, which sent 11 student ambassadors to China during the summer of 2017 to run an orientation for incoming Chinese students. “When everybody is back on campus in the fall, the ambassadors will meet with their mentees,” he says.
One of the hallmarks of Pitt’s internationalization is its commitment to multidisciplinary international scholarship. More than 550 faculty members from across the university are affiliated with its various centers, which include four U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers: the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the European Studies Center (ESC), the Global Studies Center (GSC), and the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies (REES). As a Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence, the ESC holds the additional distinction of being one of only eight such centers in the United States funded by the European Union (EU). UCIS also hosts the Asian Studies Center (ASC) and African Studies Program (ASP). While the other centers are focused on area or regional studies, the GSC focuses more on cross-cultural themes related to global health, global security, global economy, and global society.
The various centers also do outreach to the local community. Drawing on resources and expertise from all of UCIS’s centers, the Global Studies Center coordinates the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for Global and International Studies, a four-week summer residential program for high-achieving high school students from around the commonwealth. Another initiative run through the African Studies Program is the Model African Union, which provides opportunities for both Pitt students and local high school students to participate in a four-day conference and take part in simulations.
UCIS has a number of other affiliated programs, including the Center for International Legal Education. Every year, the center’s director, Ronald Brand, JD, takes law students to Vienna, Austria, for the International Commercial Arbitration Moot competition. Pitt law students compete against other teams from around the world. Brand uses the competition to recruit talented lawyers from abroad and build relationships with law schools in other countries. “It has become a platform for legal education. We have used it to build legal curriculum in transition countries,” he says.
Through UCIS, Pitt also awards 250 undergraduate and graduate certificates each year in area studies or global studies. Students from any major are able to enhance their degree program by taking courses with an international focus. The 11 undergraduate and eight graduate credentials have been designed to complement students’ existing degree requirements. They also offer an interdisciplinary bachelor’s of philosophy degree in international and area studies, in partnership with the University Honors College.
International advisers help students customize their course plan and study abroad opportunities to maximize their impact. Because Pitt’s general education requirements include nine credits with a global focus, students are able to complete their certificates with an additional two or three classes. Khadija Diop, a film studies major who is completing a certificate in African studies, says, “the certificates help you look at your major through a global perspective and integrate the global aspect into every single thing that you’re doing.”
Environmental studies major Rachel Bukowitz adds that her certificate in global studies has also given her a talking point during job interviews: “As an environmental studies major, being able to say that I learned about sustainable development in the Middle East or water rights in the Gaza Strip has really made me stand out.”
