2019 Comprehensive Miami University
As one of the oldest public universities in the United States, Miami University welcomed its first students in 1824. Today, the institution brings a global outlook to its three campuses in southwestern Ohio through its curricular requirements, robust faculty-led programs, study abroad center in Luxembourg, and comprehensive support for international students and scholars.
In October 2018, more than 900 alumni, faculty, staff, and friends of Miami University gathered in the Château de Differdange, a fifteenth-century castle located in a village just 20 minutes from Luxembourg City. The event commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center (MUDEC), which has served as a study abroad site for Miami students since 1968.
The center was founded by alumnus John E. Dolibois, who was born in Luxembourg, immigrated to the United States, and enrolled as a student at Miami University in 1938. Shortly after graduation, Dolibois was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. He interrogated Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials and later served as a U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. In 1947, he became Miami University’s first full-time alumni secretary. Dolibois took on several more roles at Miami before he was named vice president for university relations in 1981. Throughout his life, Dolibois continued to work to strengthen ties between Miami University and countries such as Luxembourg.
At the 50th Jubilee Celebration, Miami University President Gregory P. Crawford bestowed an honorary degree upon the Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg Prince Guillaume, whose father and grandfather had also received the same honor.
“We have had tremendous support from Differdange and Luxembourg,” says Phyllis Callahan, who retired in July 2019 after serving almost 5 years as provost. “We also have a broad base of extraordinarily devoted alumni who spent time there over the years. It gives us a foothold in a part of the world where there are opportunities for our students to learn.”
The establishment of MUDEC, along with more than 140 faculty-led programs to countries all over the world, has helped Miami University make its mark in the field of international education. Miami’s undergraduate study abroad programs rank among the top five in the nation among public doctoral universities.
It is a distinction that the institution has held for several years, according to the Institute of International Education’s 2018 Open Doors report. The university also hosts more than 3,000 international students every year, and it offers a myriad of curricular and cocurricular opportunities for faculty, students, and staff to engage with the world.
“The international efforts here are not a single domain of one college or one unit or one department,” says Crawford. “It’s all throughout our culture here at Miami, which is very exciting.”
Nurturing a Culture of Internationalization
At the helm of Miami’s study abroad and international education programs is the Global Initiatives division, directed by Cheryl Young, who serves as assistant provost and senior international officer. While Miami University has a long tradition of international engagement, Global Initiatives is relatively new. The division, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, Ohio, was created in 2013 as part of a strategic reorganization of globally focused academic support units. Then-provost Conrado “Bobby” Gempesaw wanted to centralize the university’s international activities, bringing them together under the Global Initiatives umbrella. The division now oversees study abroad, international student and scholar services, continuing education, the Confucius Institute, and the Center for American and World Cultures (CAWC).
“Provost Gempesaw asked me to develop a plan for comprehensive internationalization at Miami University,” Young says. “We brought all of these units together with the plan to make sure that we infuse intercultural and global dimensions throughout the university.”
An essential component of Miami’s internationalization efforts is the Global Miami Plan (GMP) for Liberal Education, which outlines a six-credit global perspectives requirement and a three-credit intercultural perspectives requirement that serve as part of the university’s general education courses. Students can take one of more than 80 approved globally focused courses on campus or participate in education abroad.
Many students also use study abroad to fulfill their capstone or thematic sequence requirements in the GMP.
“It is designed to help students understand and creatively transform human culture and society by giving the students the tools to ask questions, examine assumptions, exchange views with others, and become better global citizens,” according to the university website.
Building on the GMP, Miami recently launched a Global Readiness Certificate that has both academic and cocurricular requirements. Coordinated by the CAWC, the first cohort will be piloted in fall 2019 in the College of Education, Health and Society. Approximately 12 to 15 students will go through the orientation, attend globally focused or multicultural on-campus activities, participate in a community engagement or servicelearning project, complete six credits of off-campus study, and take specific approved courses.
“A big piece of it is that we don’t want students to just check the boxes. They actually have to reflect on what they’re doing and engage with global opportunities in multiple ways,” says program coordinator Alicia Castillo Shrestha.
Advancing a Global Vision Through Study Abroad
More than half of all Miami students spend time off campus through study abroad or study away in the United States by the time they graduate. In both the 2016–17 and 2017–18 academic years, over 2,000 students went abroad. The institution aims to have at least 60 percent of its students study off campus by 2020. The vast majority of students who study abroad participate in one of Miami’s short-term faculty-led programs, which have grown exponentially since the introduction of a winter term in 2014. Most of the university’s faculty-led programs count toward the Global Miami Plan’s global perspectives requirements.
Interactive media studies major Brian Velasquez completed a faculty-led program at the University of Calabria in Italy. In addition to a class taught by a Miami faculty member, he took a coding class focused on knowledge representation that was taught by a faculty member from the local university. “I thought that was pretty cool to get a professor with a different teaching style,” Velasquez says. “The coursework was a lot different. Rather than having class two or three times per week, we had class every day,” he adds. “It was an eye-opener to see a different way that people live.”
Velasquez studied abroad immediately after his freshman year, which he says had a huge impact on his personal growth and understanding of different backgrounds. “I definitely look back and appreciate the people that I met because of how far I’ve come socially and professionally in the classroom,” Velasquez says.
Bolstering Miami University’s Profile in Europe
Approximately 10 percent of all Miami study abroad students travel to MUDEC, which can host up to 120 students per semester and another 40 in the summer. Students stay with host families in the local community and participate in a study tour that takes them to other parts of Europe.
The majority of courses taught at MUDEC meet the Global Miami Plan’s general education requirements and have a European focus. Each year, two Miami faculty members travel to MUDEC for one semester, and four others teach an eight-week “sprint course,” which entails an accelerated class format and a brief study tour. All other courses are taught by local European adjunct faculty.
While most Miami students studying in Luxembourg take general education courses, some schools and departments have used the opportunity to develop specialized programs for their majors. Miami’s Farmer School of Business, for instance, offers the FSB LUX Plus, a summer business program based at the Luxembourg center that also takes students to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy. Additionally, cohorts of Miami architecture students get the chance to travel to MUDEC where they can take the general education classes offered to all students and then major-specific architecture classes.
Deepening Community Relations
Miami University’s long-standing engagement in Luxembourg has allowed the institution to develop deep ties with Differdange that go beyond MUDEC. In 2017, Oxford and Differdange signed a sister cities agreement, which has contributed to internationalization on campus and in the surrounding communities. For example, local grocery stores in Oxford stock Bofferding, the leading beer in Luxembourg. The brewery’s chief executive officer Georges Lentz is a Miami University alumnus.
Over in Luxembourg, École Internationale de Differdange et Esch-Sur-Alzette (EIDE), a local public school that offers curriculum in English, has served as a student teaching site for Miami University teacher candidates for the last 4 years. The majority of students enrolled at EIDE are English language learners (ELLs). “This creates a perfect site for placement of Miami’s teacher education candidates who can improve their ELL teaching skills while also getting an authentic international study abroad experience,” says education professor James Shiveley, who also oversees the MUDEC Curriculum Committee.
Under Shiveley’s supervision, nine teacher education and special education undergraduates from Miami University planned and ran two weeklong day camps for ELL elementary and middle school students on site in Luxembourg in July 2019. The Miami students, who enrolled in a three-credit course, received free housing from MUDEC. Financial aid for the Miami students was provided by the College of Education Partnership fund and MUDEC, with additional financial support coming from the Luxembourg Ministry of Education and the city of Differdange.
Private donations from alumni who studied at MUDEC have also provided scholarships for students from Luxembourg to study in Oxford. Claudia Zaunz, a journalism and English literature double major from Luxembourg, is one of the current recipients. She says she didn’t realize how important Luxembourg’s close connection with Miami University would be until she was on campus. “When I arrived at Miami during orientation, the campus was nearly empty,” she says. “I walked into the Armstrong Student Center and saw the sign: Lux Café. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The windows feature the text of ‘Ons Hémecht,’ the national anthem, and there are pictures on the wall of Luxembourg City…. It made it so much easier to make Miami [my] home away from home! Lux Café is my favorite spot to study for exams.”
Welcoming Students From Around the World
Zaunz is one of approximately 3,000 international students who are currently pursuing their undergraduate education at Miami University. For the last several years, the institution’s investment of time and resources in international undergraduate student recruitment has paid off, growing enrollment numbers from fewer than 500 students in 2009 to over 3,000 in 2018, an increase of more than 500 percent.
Undergraduate international recruitment is housed in the Office of Admissions, which has four dedicated international recruiters. There were fewer than 100 international undergraduates on campus when Aaron Bixler, senior associate director for international enrollment, started at Miami in 2003. Today, 85 percent of Miami’s 3,000 international students are Chinese. A significant number of students also come from India, Vietnam, South Korea, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
Bixler says that part of Miami’s early success with recruitment in China was because the school quickly expanded to secondary markets outside of Beijing and Shanghai and hired a full-time recruiter based in China. “Having someone there on the ground freed us up a bit to try to explore new markets,” Bixler says.
Combining Academic and Linguistic Support
To further expand the recruitment pipeline, Miami University established a bridge program in 2011 for international students who are academically qualified but need some extra language support. The American Culture & English (ACE) program, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, offers students with a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) score between 65 and 79 conditional admission. Students in the bridge program take courses in speaking and listening, reading and writing, and social science, as well as an elective that counts toward one of their general education requirements.
According to director Carol Olausen, the program is built around an intensive advising model that helps students to develop skills for academic success. Xiaoyi Huang, an early childhood education major, shares her experience: “I love the ACE program because it’s not only a smooth transition from China, but it [also] kind of blew my mind because of how English textbooks and daily life conversations are so different.”
Students are also required to participate in a minimum of eight extracurricular events during the semester. “It helps them become comfortable with campus resources,” Olausen explains. Zhuoran Bao, a Chinese student who started in the ACE program, notes, “I had more time to get involved on campus, like volunteering or joining organizations like dance club.” She adds that she met U.S. students through the program, which was important to her as a media and culture major.
Students who first complete the ACE program have been found to achieve better outcomes than their international peers who did not start in the program. They have a retention rate of 73 percent compared with 68 percent for international students as a whole, according to Olausen.
The success of the ACE model led to the development of tailored programming for all international students, many of whom struggle with speaking English and listening despite potentially having high TOEFL scores. “Because TOEFL scores often show you more of passive skills rather than productive skills, we identify students through a speaking test administered to all incoming international students,” Olausen says. Students who struggle with speaking and comprehension are automatically placed in a transition course to further develop those skills.
In addition to the ACE program, Miami University has an English Language Center at its Middletown campus, located about 20 miles from Oxford. The center serves approximately 300 students per year, including during the summer. Many students who complete the intensive English program later enroll at Miami as degree-seeking students. The English Language Center also offers a summer program for around 75 English language learners enrolled at local high schools.
Rewriting the Rules of Language Learning
In 2018, Miami launched the English Language Learner Writing Center, which is coordinated by Larysa Bobrova. She hired 10 consultants who collaborate with multilingual writers and are trained in second language acquisition theories. The idea is not to offer proofreading or editing services, but to help non-native English speakers become more aware of their own writing process. “We discuss strategies that our consultants can use to help students to correct their own errors,” Bobrova says.
Bobrova also offers training for faculty members in how to design and give feedback on assignments for English language learners. Moreover, education students taking courses in ELL instruction have been able to observe writing consultations at the center to gain skills and insights they can apply to their future careers as educators.
Like Miami’s overall approach to internationalization, the mission of the multilingual writing center is to be inclusive and welcoming to all students. “Writing persuasively in a language does not imply being a native speaker,” Bobrova says. “This is something that both our students and our faculty need to know in order to make their pedagogy inclusive and to celebrate the diversity of language and cultures.”
