Founded in 1972, Florida International University (FIU) is Miami’s first and only four-year public research university. A designated Hispanic-serving institution, FIU currently serves more than 58,000 undergraduate and graduate students, including 4,000 international students and more than 37,000 Hispanic students (66 percent of the student body). The university promotes global learning throughout the curriculum for all undergraduates, international research opportunities, and strong partnerships abroad. Building on the strategic efforts to internationalize over the past decade, the new Global Strategy 2025 will also help the university leverage its existing relationships around the world.

Ana Rojas, MS, never imagined she would become an expert on invasive species—particularly when those invaders are 3,000-pound mammals with an affinity for the water. When she was a graduate research assistant at FIU, Rojas traveled to the Magdalena basin in central Colombia to study the social and ecological impacts of hippos introduced by narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar.

“We call it ‘hippo heaven,’” says Rojas, who now works as a research development officer at FIU. “They have no natural predators, and they’re multiplying at an unprecedented rate. And the people [of the region] actually love them, even though they could become a really bad threat to the ecology of this system.”

Rojas started at FIU as an undergraduate and then stayed to earn a master’s degree in environmental studies. In addition to studying hippos, she did her master’s thesis on arapaima, a giant freshwater fish that lives in Colombia’s Amazon basin.

Her research abroad was about more than just academics. She was able to return to the country that she fled as a child. “I feel extremely privileged and very happy because I got to kind of reconnect with the country that I was born in,” she says.

Rojas is one of the many students who have benefitted from the university’s engagement around the world. Rojas credits the faculty she worked with at FIU for her interest in international work. She wants to pursue a doctorate eventually and possibly do conservation and restoration work in the United States and Latin America, including in Colombia. “I like making those connections and seeing how my two countries can work together,” she says. 

An International Beginning

One of the guests of honor and the keynote speaker at FIU’s groundbreaking in 1971 was U Thant, a Burmese diplomat who served as the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1961 to 1971. The ceremony was held at the base of an air traffic control tower, a remnant of the campus’s former use as an airport, which served as the university’s very first building. Today, the tower, situated in the center of campus, houses FIU’s Office of Veteran and Military Affairs. Current FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg, PhD, has commissioned a bust of Thant, who received FIU’s first honorary doctorate degree, to commemorate his presence at FIU’s groundbreaking.

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When FIU first opened its doors to students in 1972, its founding goals were educating students, enacting service to the community, and fostering greater international understanding. “We have had the mission to foster greater international understanding since our founding, [and] we’re still delivering on that today,” says Birgitta Rausch-Montoto, MS, director of global strategy and faculty success.

Rosenberg, who began his career at FIU in 1976 as a political science professor, was involved in some of FIU’s earliest international endeavors, such as the establishment of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) in 1979. He says that the center’s activities slowly shifted from language and area studies to a broader framework focused on global awareness.

“It provided us a more systematic framework for infusing more cosmopolitan thoughtfulness about what was going on in the world that went way beyond language and area studies,” Rosenberg says. “It was really remarkable how the faculty were willing to go beyond narrow boundaries and try to find ways to infuse that thinking in classes way beyond the social sciences.”

Internationalization Through Accreditation

While FIU implemented some international initiatives throughout the 1980s, it was in the mid-2000s that the institution began reconsidering its approach to internationalization in preparation for its 2010 reaffirmation of accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, says Hilary Landorf, PhD, founding executive director of the Office of Global Learning Initiatives.

Reports from different units on campus showed that global learning was a focus for the institution, but it was not evident in what students were experiencing in the classroom. At the same time, the university was going through a branding exercise, and surveys showed that campus stakeholders found diversity to be FIU’s greatest strength. As a designated Hispanic-serving institution, the university graduates more Hispanic students than any other university in the continental United States.

“There was this disconnect. We weren’t capitalizing on our diversity of the classroom,” Landorf says. “You have students from all over the world and first-generation students who have Hispanic and other backgrounds. Their knowledge, their capabilities, their skills weren’t being used in the classroom. And that led to Global Learning for Global Citizenship as an initiative.”

Landorf, who is a leading scholar of international education and coauthor of Making Global Learning Universal, copublished by NAFSA and Stylus, says that the Global Learning for Global Citizenship initiative consolidated disparate efforts to internationalize FIU. “Global Learning for Global Citizenship really focused all of us faculty, staff, students, and administrators on obtaining and internalizing our three global learning outcomes: global awareness, global perspective, and global engagement,” she says.

FIU adopted global learning, defined as the process of diverse people collaboratively analyzing and addressing complex problems that transcend borders, as the focus of its quality enhancement plan for reaffirmation of accreditation. As of 2010, all incoming freshmen are required to take two global learning courses, one general education class, and one upper-division class in their major area. In 2011, the requirement was extended to incoming transfer students.

Rausch-Montoto says that the internationalization of the undergraduate curriculum was a “real game changer” in terms of wider efforts to internationalize the institution.

The university currently offers more than 250 global learning courses throughout the curriculum in all 72 of its undergraduate academic programs.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineering major or a business major; [global learning] is built into these courses,” Rausch-Montoto says.

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To complement global learning in the curriculum, FIU offers a set of co-curricular programs that provide students with the opportunity to practice what they learn in the classroom. For instance, the Global Learning Medallion program engages students in high-impact practices, such as globally focused internships, fellowships, and research projects. The Millennium Fellowship program enables students to design and implement projects that address the Sustainable Development Goals in their local campuses and communities, and the Peace Corps Prep program prepares them to serve abroad. The Office of Global Learning Initiatives manages all of these programs, and they all have similar missions: to engage students with collaborative local and global problem-solving.

Global Learning For Faculty And Students

As of 2021, FIU trained more than 1,100 faculty to turn their classes into global learning courses. Hands-on interdisciplinary, interdepartmental workshops enable faculty to develop, revise, and lead courses, activities, and assessments that address FIU’s global learning outcomes of global awareness, perspective, and engagement. Faculty may receive a stipend as an incentive for attending these workshops and infusing global learning elements in their courses. All courses in global learning are reviewed every 3 years to ensure fidelity to the global learning elements is retained, Landorf says.

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Alok Deoraj, PhD, is an environmental health science professor in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work. Originally from India, he was immediately intrigued by the Global Learning for Global Citizenship initiative. “I was looking for a venue to share my experiences with students,” he says.

He integrated global learning elements into his general education public health class, Health Without Borders, which explores the interrelatedness of social, economic, demographic, and cultural factors affecting health. For instance, Deoraj says that during the pandemic, he broke up his students into groups by country and asked them to research how each country managed its COVID-19 response, looking at factors such as mask mandates and quarantine regulations. Then the groups made recommendations based on their country’s local situation.

“I have found that it’s very much eye opening for [students to see] that there is a similar problem on the other side of the world, but they have a different way to tackle it,” Deoraj says.

Beyond enhancing undergraduates’ studies, participation in global learning courses can help spark interest in international careers. When Camila Uzcategui, PhD, started as an undergraduate at FIU, she thought she wanted to be a doctor because it was a way she could have a positive impact on her community. But taking a global learning medical anthropology class broadened her perspective. “I think the global learning curriculum really allowed me to understand medicine from a different perspective,” she says.

Uzcategui ended up double majoring in physics and anthropology. “It really reshaped my whole career,” she says.

Instead of becoming a medical doctor, she recently earned a PhD from the University of Colorado-Boulder in material science and engineering. Her research focuses on biomaterials and increasing access to medical devices in underserved communities.

“When you’re seeing all these things occurring in the world, whether it’s a global pandemic [or other] things, FIU global learning gives us the tools to understand them and to be able to draw connections between them,” she says. 

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Consolidation of Global Efforts

To uncover and visualize the breadth and depth of internationalization activities, FIU published its first biannual Global Programs Summary infographic, which summarized key metrics, quantified outcomes, and created awareness of its successes. During the review process, it became evident that multiple departments were duplicating processes and procedures because they were working in isolation. The same audit uncovered many hidden pockets of specialized internationalization expertise, such as more than 40 Fulbright program alumni across campus.

To consolidate institutional internationalization efforts, in 2015 Provost and Executive Vice President Kenneth G. Furton, PhD, created the Office of Faculty & Global Affairs. Three years later, the office was rebranded as FIU Global. The reorganization brought together FIU’s Offices of Study Abroad and International Student and Scholar Services, the English Language Institute, and FIU Genoa in Italy.

Rausch-Montoto says that FIU Global’s commitment to documenting progress, reflecting on results, and using them to map more efficient and effective routes has strengthened the institution’s comprehensive internationalization efforts.

“While we’ve [always] had a lot of different units that worked on international education, we never had an umbrella office serving as a clearinghouse and working toward synergizing all of our efforts,” says Rausch-Montoto, who heads the FIU Global unit. “We have so many administrative leaders who have deep experience and knowledge in regards to internationalization. We have a lot of faculty who do brilliant things. And so nobody had ever harvested that across campus to get us together and say, ‘If we work together, we can do even more.’”

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Internationalization Via Programs and Partnerships

In addition to FIU Global, FIU has a number of programs and partnerships that contribute to wider campus internationalization efforts, including the LACC. Established in 1979, the center continues to serve as a hub for FIU’s extensive engagements in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera, PhD, former president of Costa Rica, is the interim director of LACC. The center currently has approximately 200 affiliated faculty across the university. Solís Rivera says that the center’s areas of expertise include migrations, security, and gang violence in Central America and public health in Puerto Rico with a focus on HIV issues and other infectious diseases. As a Title VI center, LACC also does outreach and instruction in local schools in Miami.

Extending its global focus to the medical field, FIU has operated the Accelerated Option Bachelor of Science in Nursing (AO BSN) for physicians educated abroad since 2001. It is the only program of its kind in the United States, says Yhovana Gordon, DNP, associate dean of academic affairs for the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences. The program was created to provide an educational pathway for medical doctors who were educated abroad but unable to practice in the United States, as well as to help address a nursing shortage in South Florida.

Moises Dobarganes, NP, came to the United States from Cuba at the age of 30. Although he had been trained as a medical doctor in Cuba, he was unable to meet all the requirements to practice as a doctor in the United States. Then he found his way to the AO BSN program, which served as a stepping-stone to becoming a nurse practitioner.

“It changed the way that I saw medicine and the opportunities to work with the community and interact with people in a different way,” Dobarganes says.

A final example of the institution’s excellence in global programming is a hospitality degree program with Tianjin University of Commerce (TUC) in China that FIU has operated since 2006. It is a 2+2 program, with the first 2 years taught by TUC faculty and the final 2 years taught entirely in English by FIU faculty.

“From the get-go, we established the program so that the students in China will get exposure and be taught by U.S. faculty,” says Michael Cheng, PhD, dean of the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

Chinese students can also choose to finish their fourth year in Florida or come for a one-year master’s program. In addition, U.S. students studying hospitality can study abroad for a semester in Tianjin.

The program has graduated 2,700 students and is the only English-speaking hospitality program in China, according to Cheng. 

Internationalization to 2025 and Beyond

The next step for internationalization at FIU was the launch of the Global Strategy 2025 plan in summer 2020 with three priority areas: student, faculty, and institutional success. The global plan is the result of the Global Strategy Committee that was convened by Furton in 2018 with the goal of guiding the institution toward more focused, strategic global engagement in alignment with institutional priorities. Representatives of all colleges and business units were included on the committee.

“It’s been a very intentional university-wide effort,” Rausch-Montoto says. “We’ve done a lot of legwork on identifying where we are, what we are doing, and where we are successful.”

For FIU Global, one area of focus is the establishment of world centers in strategic locations. “The idea is to really have a much more robust intentional presence overseas that allows our faculty and our staff and our students to have a deep connection,” Furton says.

FIU plans to open its first world center in Colombia in the near future, with others to follow in places such as Asia and the Middle East, Furton says. He says that the partnership with TUC in China is a model for future world centers where FIU can tap into its top academic programs. “We’re trying to replicate that in as many as a dozen or more locations around the world,” Furton says.

He added that Global Strategy 2025 and the world centers build on the previous work that has been done by FIU Global. “Having FIU Global has been transformational in the sense that we really didn’t realize everything that was going on at the university until we started doing this,” Furton says. Having a centralized unit focused on global engagement has “really allowed us to crystallize our plan for these world centers [and identify] where it makes the most sense to be.”

Davidson-Davie Community College is a public, two-year community college with two campuses in north-central North Carolina. Despite limited resources, the college has become a leader in international education among North Carolina’s 58 community colleges. With a commitment to enhancing global awareness outlined in its strategic plan, the college exposes its 11,000 students to global perspectives through its globalized courses, internationally focused events on campus, and the presence of international students and scholars.

Ayannia Tripp had never heard of studying abroad before she got a work-study job at the Office of International Education at Davidson-Davie Community College (which changed its name from Davidson County Community College in January 2021). “I was just a regular college student going to school, just trying to get a degree,” she says. “I never really heard of international education. So I just kind of jumped on the opportunity.”

Her supervisor, Suzanne LaVenture, MA, encouraged her to think about studying abroad. “I told her, ‘Honestly speaking, I don’t even know what that is,’” says Tripp, who is now a senior at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Eight months later, Tripp found herself on a weeklong study abroad program to Ireland over spring break. “It made me more confident as an individual,” she says.

Tripp, like nearly half of the students enrolled at Davidson-Davie, is the first in her family to go to college. LaVenture, the director of international education, says that one of the goals of internationalization at the college is to create international opportunities for all students.

Building A Foundation For Internationalization

LaVenture says that much of Davidson-Davie’s commitment to internationalization started with the college’s former president, Mary Rittling, EdD, who led the college from 2003 until she retired in 2018. “She was a huge proponent of international education,” LaVenture says.

Rittling, who served as chair of the board of Community Colleges for International Development (CCID) and was a Fulbright scholar to India, helped bolster international education by increasing education abroad opportunities and working with federal programs such as Fulbright to bring international scholars and students to campus. It was under her leadership that internationalization became embedded in the college’s strategic plan. Rittling appointed LaVenture director of international education in 2010, when she was still teaching a full courseload in the Spanish department. She is still the only full-time staff member working in the Office of International Education, along with a part-time employee who works 25 hours per week. “I’m in charge of anything and everything that has international on it,” LaVenture says. “If we can internationalize at Davidson-Davie Community College, then anybody can.”

Internationalization efforts at Davidson-Davie are also bolstered by the 30-member International Education Committee, which has representatives from across the campus. LaVenture says she has intentionally recruited faculty and staff from as many different areas of the college as possible. In that sense, the committee serves as a vehicle to disseminate information about international education campuswide. The wide representation also helps build a campus culture around internationalization. “The International Ed Committee is where all of the campus internationalization efforts are centralized,” she says.

The members of the larger committee can opt to join a number of subcommittees that work on specific topics, such as study abroad, a global certificate program, virtual exchange, and internationalizing the curriculum.

Victoria Hundley, MA, career and college promise coordinator, serves on the Study Abroad Committee, which selects leaders for education abroad programs. The committee reviews faculty proposals and then identifies the programs they think will be most attractive to students. More recently, the committee was involved with drafting COVID-19 safety policies and procedures.

Hundley says that being on the study abroad committee has been a way for her to get involved with international education even though it is outside of the scope of her regular job. She says it improves not only the student experience but also the employee experience. “Coming from the perspective of somebody who loved international ed and was looking for a way to work in it, Davidson-Davie was just a godsend for me,” she says. “It was [the institution’s] international ed committee that drew me there and made me know that it was where I wanted to work. The people who are doing it do it because it’s something they love.”

President Darrin Hartness, EdD, says that students at Davidson-Davie have access to global experiences that they are not likely to find at most community colleges. “If you had to describe the international experience at Davidson-Davie Community College, it really comes in a variety of formats, and that might be in the form of speakers on global issues or panel discussions of industry leaders who are brought in to talk about the importance of global education and global awareness in the workplace,” Hartness says. “It might be a study abroad experience. In 2020, it might be a virtual study abroad experience. It could be the instruction in a foreign language from a Fulbright teaching assistant.”

Launching Global Scholars

The 2013 launch of Scholars of Global Distinction, a global certificate program that is informally referred to as Global Scholars, ushered in a new phase for internationalization at Davidson-Davie. The program helped faculty internationalize their courses and incentivized support for internationally focused campus programming.

To earn the Global Scholars distinction, students must take five globalized courses; attend eight globally focused activities called Passport Events; participate in a global experience, which includes study abroad or virtual exchange; and produce a capstone project. Students who successfully complete the program receive a designation on their transcript and special recognition at graduation.

As of May 2021, 472 students had enrolled in the Global Scholars program. Of those students, 133 completed the requirements to earn the distinction on their transcript.

One of those students is 17-year-old Grace Upton. As a participant in Davidson-Davie’s early college program, she has been able to earn college credit as a high school student. When she graduates from high school next year, she will earn not only her high school diploma but also an associate’s degree and a Global Scholars distinction.

Upton was planning to study abroad in South Africa last summer, but the program was postponed until summer 2022. The scholarship she received to participate will carry over until next year. “I did know that I wanted to study abroad, but I didn’t think that would be accessible until I went to a four-year university,” she says. “But it’s amazing that I have that opportunity as a high schooler to travel abroad and receive scholarships and have a supportive group that goes with me.”

To meet the Global Scholars program’s requirement for a global experience, Upton participated in a virtual exchange with students from Jordan as part of the Global Solutions Sustainability Challenge, a U.S. State Department-sponsored program that pairs community college and university students in the United States on collaborative teams with their peers in Iraq and Jordan. Upton worked on a team that developed the concept for an app that would link artists with recycled materials they could use in their work.

Upton, who wants to become a veterinarian, says she has been surprised at how much exposure to other countries and cultures she has received at a community college. “It just really teaches you a lot of empathy and communicating and being accepting of viewpoints that you might not understand,” she says. “It just prepares you to be a better student, a better member of society, and it will make you a better employee when you’re working with people from different places.”

Davidson-Davie’s Global Scholars program has also become a model for other community colleges in North Carolina, LaVenture says. In 2014, Davidson-Davie teamed up with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s World View, a public service program focused on equipping K–12 and community college educators with global competency. World View initiated a statewide consortium to encourage other colleges to adopt the program. Many colleges consulted directly with LaVenture on creating their own programs.

In fall 2019, Davidson-Davie hosted a curriculum internationalization workshop in collaboration with World View, drawing more than 90 participants from across North Carolina. The conference included keynote speakers, information sessions, and breakout groups that worked by discipline on globalizing courses. LaVenture has also presented with World View about the program at various conferences, such as those organized by CCID and the Association of American Colleges & Universities.

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Internationalizing The Curriculum Through Globalized Courses

The Global Scholars program provided an impetus for faculty to internationalize the curriculum. As Davidson-Davie began planning the program in 2012–13, several instructors received small grants from World View to globalize their classes. Since then, 81 courses have been globalized by 162 faculty members, and more than 10,000 Davidson-Davie students have been enrolled in one or more of these courses.

Biology professor Paul Stevens, MS, attended a World View seminar on globalizing courses several years ago. He used it as an opportunity to bring international content into his general biology classes. He has focused on the global water crisis and the shortage of clean water in many places in the world. More recently, he has helped students do projects on endangered species in other countries.

Pharmacy technology professor LaQuoia Johnson, PharmD, teaches a course called Pharmacy Trends: What Language Does Your Patient Hurt In? Each week, the course focuses on a different culture and how its beliefs and practices affect health care. She encourages her students to reflect on the conflicts and challenges that patients from other countries might experience in the United States, as well as how to work with colleagues from other cultures.

Charles Wright, a former Marine who served in Iraq in the early 2000s, says he first heard about the Global Scholars program from math professor Amanda Klinger, MA. He was originally interested in the program as a way to add something else to his résumé, but he quickly realized the value of learning about other countries and cultures both in and out of the classroom.

Wright says that his first question to any instructor whose class he takes is whether or not their course is globalized. He says he would seriously consider transferring out of any course that was not globalized because “we’re in college to expand our minds.”

The Global Scholars program has also led to more internationally themed campus programming. Every semester, the Office of International Education hosts 25 to 30 activities known as Passport Events for the campus community. Passport Events include lectures from visiting Fulbright scholars, information sessions about study abroad, panels with international students, presentations by Davidson-Davie faculty, and online video lectures with partners abroad. “We came up with this pretty robust system of trying to offer something for all students on campus [with the idea of] bringing the world to them,” LaVenture says.

For example, history professor Gerald Bosch, MA, hosts a monthly chat for students about international events happening around the world. He started it in 2011 during the Arab Spring protests in several Muslim countries. More recently, he has led discussions on COVID-19 around the world and the coup in Myanmar. 

Leveraging Grant Programs For International Education

Davidson-Davie has hosted 15 Fulbright foreign language teaching assistants (FLTAs) over the past 9 years. The teaching assistants have come from eight different countries and taught Arabic, French, Irish, Portuguese, and Russian, and the college successfully petitioned for Irish language to be added to the common course library in North Carolina. In 2021–22, Davidson-Davie will host a Fulbright scholar-in-residence from Argentina as well as Fulbright FLTAs from France and Ireland.

In 2020–21, Caolán Ó Coisneacháin was the only FLTA on campus due to the pandemic. He has taught Irish language and culture classes and hosted a number of cultural events, including a St. Patrick’s Day sing-along and a demonstration of hurling, a traditional Gaelic field sport. He was involved with the college’s International Club, which organizes events throughout the year and hosts a weekly language hour. 

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Timothy Gwillim, EdD, dean of workforce and community engagement, helps support the FLTAs while they are on campus. He says that FLTAs participate in new faculty orientation and host Passport Events. They also take classes related to U.S. culture and history.

“Everyone’s made me feel at home,” Ó Coisneacháin says. “I feel like even with all the limitations and restrictions that COVID has forced on us, we’ve managed to do okay in making things available for students.

For off-campus programming, the college has used grant funding from external agencies to create some of its education abroad programs. A 100,000 Strong in the Americas Innovation Fund grant helped support a study abroad program to Argentina in collaboration with the Universidad Nacional de Villa María, while an IDEAS (Increase and Diversify Education Abroad for U.S. Students) grant from the Capacity Building Program for U.S. Study Abroad helped LaVenture develop a program in South Africa in partnership with Central Piedmont Community College.

The Office of International Education has worked closely with the Davidson-Davie Foundation to raise scholarship funds for students who would not be able to afford study abroad on their own. “There’s not a big budget for global education, but we’ve been really fortunate that our foundation has been extremely supportive of the scholarship,” Hartness says.

Because colleges do not have financial incentive to recruit international students due to the unique funding model that requires North Carolina community colleges to remit all tuition to the state system, Davidson-Davie has also focused on grant opportunities to bring sponsored students to campus. It has brought international students to campus through participation in the Community College Initiative Program and the Tunisia Community College Scholarship Program, both sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

“We have tried really hard to have international students on our campus,” LaVenture says. “So even though it costs us financially to host international students, we take advantage of any opportunity.”

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Supporting Global Careers

To support global careers, Davidson-Davie leverages an ongoing connection with Egger, an Austrian company that manufactures wood-based panel products. Egger opened its first North American production plant in Lexington, North Carolina, in 2020. Several faculty members and administrators traveled to Austria for a company visit and helped design a curriculum to prepare future employees. “We have developed an apprenticeship program with the company to help train new employees for the company,” Gwillim says.

The company pays students to work 4 days a week and then take classes from Davidson-Davie 1 day a week. After 4 years, students earn an associate’s degree in industrial systems technology or electronics, engineering, and technology. The second cohort to participate in the program graduated in May 2021.

Egger has also participated in employability panels to talk about the global skills it looks for in employees.

Hartness says he often meets with companies that are interested in hiring students from the college. “To be able to say that our students have access to global experiences, it sets us apart as a college.”

Located on the North Carolina coast, the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) is a public research university that serves approximately 18,000 students. An innovative program allows incoming students the opportunity to spend the fall semester of their freshman year studying at Bangor University in Wales before starting classes in Wilmington the following spring.

When Lawson Witherspoon got his letter of acceptance from UNCW in spring 2019, it was not exactly what he had expected. He found out he had been accepted— but not until spring 2020. “Wilmington was my dream school for a while, and at first I was a little upset,” he says. “When you’re a spring admit, you’re like…‘I gotta figure out what to do in the fall.’”

Witherspoon and his family attended a welcome program for new students, and there he found out about the First-Year Spring Admit (FYSA) program in the United Kingdom, which would allow him to spend fall semester at Bangor University in Wales. He says he had never considered the possibility of studying abroad, let alone in his first semester of college.

Witherspoon remembers polling his friends in his high school theater class to see if they thought he should do it. “It was a scary thing,” he says. “I had never been away from home, so leaving was a big thing—and not just going to college but going to college in another country.”

However, his mind eased as soon as he stepped foot in the airport. “It was a huge stressor at first, but I am so glad I just got over that initial fear,” he says.

Providing Pathways Abroad

In fall 2019, Witherspoon became part of UNCW’s FYSA in the United Kingdom cohort at Bangor University in Wales. Because admission to UNCW has become increasingly competitive over the past several years, the university offers spring admission to students, like Witherspoon, who were not admitted for the fall. “These are very good students that we simply don’t have room for in the fall,” says Michael Wilhelm, MA, associate provost of global partnerships and international education.

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Many students admitted for the spring start at community college in the fall and then transfer to UNCW. But for students like Witherspoon, the Bangor program offers another pathway. “We thought about the kind of unique and transformational experience that could occur if these students were to spend their first university experience beyond high school abroad,” Wilhelm says.

Since 2014, more than 100 UNCW FYSA students have started their first year of college abroad, with a cohort of 11 students heading to Wales in fall 2021. The program was suspended for 2020–21 because of the coronavirus pandemic, but close collaboration between UNCW and Bangor University continued as Bangor faculty offered to conduct virtual guest lectures for UNCW courses in disciplines such as film studies and French history, helping to maintain the partnership and create opportunities for students to participate in global learning opportunities during the pandemic. 

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Building Partnerships

UNCW began the FYSA abroad program in 2014 with Maynooth University in Ireland but shifted the program to Bangor University in 2019.

“We wanted to be in a location that was different and challenging but close geographically and English-speaking,” Wilhelm says. “And in a place where we could work intensively with a trusted partner that was really dedicated to student support and services.”

The UNCW Office of International Programs was also looking for a partner with courses that would seamlessly transfer back to UNCW. Bangor fit the bill. Bangor was able to provide orientation, housing, and student services that are not always available at European universities.

Angharad Thomas, Bangor’s former director of international recruitment and development, says the program is tailored to the first-year student population. “The students are mainly 18-year-olds and are straight from [high] school, so we are dealing with visiting students who need a little bit more care and attention,” she says.

One challenge, however, was the difference between the U.S. and U.K. educational systems. Most courses in the United Kingdom have a single assessment at the end of the academic year, so staff from the two universities had to identify general education courses that would allow students to take exams in December before returning to the United States.

In addition to the FYSA in the United Kingdom program, Bangor and UNCW facilitate bilateral exchanges and have similar research strengths in areas such as marine biology. “It’s a unique partnership that benefits both sides in a lot of ways that go beyond just student mobility,” Wilhelm says.

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Starting College Abroad

At UNCW, the international office works closely with the admissions, student affairs, and housing departments to make sure that the students have a seamless experience from the time they receive their admissions letters to when they begin their studies in Wilmington in the spring. The admissions office helps promote the program during recruitment events, and the international office takes over once students identify that they want to be part of the FYSA in the United Kingdom program. All FYSA in the United Kingdom students also work with an academic adviser who makes sure the courses they take abroad are the right fit for their major at UNCW. 

Students then participate in a virtual orientation prior to traveling to Wales. They do a series of online video sessions that allow them to get to know each other as well as learn about topics such as health and safety.

Students pay a comprehensive program fee of $13,300 that includes tuition, orientation, housing, a meal plan, health insurance, airport pick-up, excursions, and special events like a Thanksgiving celebration. This fee is close to the cost of in-state tuition for one semester at UNCW.

Since students enroll directly at Bangor University, they do not receive financial aid through UNCW, but they are eligible for federal loans. In 2018, Hurricane Florence hit the UNCW campus and caused around $150 million in damages. To help support UNCW, Bangor provided one full-ride scholarship for fall 2019, which UNCW split between all of the students in the cohort to reduce costs for everyone.

UNCW education abroad adviser Natalie Palmer, MA, works with the students once they have committed to the program. She also meets them at the airport in the United Kingdom and escorts them to the Bangor campus. “I stay for a couple days just so they’re getting comfortable and they have a friendly face that’s from UNCW,” Palmer says.

While the UNCW students are in Wales, a Bangor graduate student serves as a point of contact to answer questions they have about day-to-day life.

Although the students have multiple courses they can choose from, all participants take part in a Welsh and Celtic studies class together. Not only does it build community, but the course also helps them better understand the culture and history of the place they are studying. “We’ve always been able to have a course that also included field trips as part of the class so that students actually got to go and see what they were learning about,” says Kara Pike Inman, EdD, director of education abroad at UNCW. “And I think that always makes the experience come alive.”

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Returning Home

Upon arrival at UNCW in January, the students participate in a traditional freshman orientation with all of the spring admits but also do a study abroad debrief and a social event just for their group. They receive priority for on-campus housing and are often paired together.

Witherspoon, now a junior, is roommates with Roshan Patel, who was also part of the FYSA in the United Kingdom cohort. “We wouldn’t have probably known each other if it wasn’t for Wales,” Witherspoon says. “We’re all like best friends. Pretty much everyone who went on the trip, we’re all connected.” 

UNCW’s Office of Housing and Residence Life helps place the students in university housing in the spring so that the cohort can continue to live in the same housing area on campus. Peter Groenendyk, MA, former director of housing and residence life at UNCW, says that the Bangor cohort has a leg up over their peers who did not go abroad in the fall. “They had a good foundation of immersion into academic life, and so [they are] able to hit the ground running here at UNCW in a way that really many first-year spring admits usually wouldn’t,” he says.

That readiness translates into academic success for the FYSA in the United Kingdom participants. “We see huge payoffs in terms of the retention of these students, in terms of their persistence, and in terms of the students wanting to study abroad again,” Inman says. FYSA in the United Kingdom participants have a freshman to sophomore retention rate of 93 percent, which compares very favorably to the 85 percent retention rate in the general student population. Additionally, nearly 24 percent of FYSA abroad participants have participated in a second education abroad experience during their time at UNCW.

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University of North Carolina Wilmington

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Miami Dade College (MDC) is one of the largest and the most diverse higher learning institutions in the nation, serving around 120,000 students, of which 90 percent are students of color, 51 percent are first-generation college students, 44 percent live under the poverty line, and 74 percent are Pell Grant recipients. A designated Hispanic-serving institution, the college created in 2017 the first study abroad program in the country focused on homeless students and former foster youth.

“Does it matter if I’m homeless?”

That was a question that stuck with Carol Reyes, MBA, former director of global student programs at MDC, after a workshop she led to encourage students to study abroad. That experience prompted her to reach out to Educate Tomorrow at MDC, a campus-based program that supports homeless students and former foster youth studying at one of Miami Dade’s eight campuses in southern Florida.

Wendy Joseph, MA, a college coach with Educate Tomorrow at MDC, says the role of the program is to connect students to campus and community resources—including education abroad—to help them succeed in postsecondary education. “Our program is the largest in the state that was specifically designed to support students impacted by child welfare as well as young students who are impacted by housing insecurity,” she says.

Miami Dade’s Office of International Education partnered with the program to create Educate Tomorrow Abroad, which was the first study abroad program focused on homeless students and former foster youth in the United States. In 2017, Diversity Abroad recognized the innovative program and provided a $3,000 grant to help get it off the ground.

That first student who inspired the program eventually studied abroad in Costa Rica. Since 2017, Educate Tomorrow Abroad sent nine additional students abroad before the program was suspended in 2020 due to the pandemic. In addition to Costa Rica, students have traveled to countries such as Ecuador, Indonesia, Japan, and Scotland. The programs are scheduled to resume in summer 2022.

Reaching Underrepresented Demographics

Overall, community college students account for less than 2 percent of all study abroad participants in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education, and homeless students and foster youth are among the least represented student groups in study abroad—and in higher education. Only around 50 percent of foster youth graduate from high school, and less than 3 percent graduate from a four-year college, according to the National Foster Youth Institute.

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“Our mission is creating accessibility for the students we serve,” says Liza Carbajo, MA, executive director for international education. “This program is a great example of how we try to really create an international experience for all students.”

One of those students was Claudia Gourdet. She has gone from being an Educate Tomorrow Abroad participant to a staff member at the nonprofit. Having graduated from MDC in 2019 with a bachelor’s in computer information systems, Gourdet now works as a care coordinator and has designed an app used by Educate Tomorrow students to communicate with staff, set goals with their mentor, and receive support services.

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When Gourdet was a first-year student, she lived with her grandmother in a nursing home, which was not allowed. When students have to worry about whether or not they will have a roof over their head or something to eat, they are not going to be able to focus on school, she says. Educate Tomorrow connected her with a community partner that had a housing program, provided a bus card for transportation, and offered tutoring services.

“[The Educate Tomorrow at MDC program] provides holistic support and makes sure students’ basic needs are met,” Gourdet says. “And then from there, once your basic needs are met, then you can really focus on your academics.”

In 2019, Gourdet studied abroad in Ecuador along with two other Educate Tomorrow Abroad students. The program developed students’ knowledge of earth literacy, sustainability, and civic engagement. Before going to Ecuador, Gourdet launched her own nonprofit, STEM Access for Girls, which provides science, technology, engineering, and math instruction to young women in developing countries. Her experiences and studies in Ecuador helped bring a new perspective to the day-to-day operations and long-term vision for her organization.

Gourdet says that Educate Tomorrow Abroad provides a unique opportunity for students who have been impacted by foster care or homelessness, or who were unaccompanied, to be able to travel. “Being able to go [abroad] with a group of students who usually wouldn’t be able to have that opportunity, who often are not exposed to the world in the same sense, was amazing,” Gourdet says.

Funding Transformational Opportunities

To date, students’ participation in Educate Tomorrow Abroad has been fully funded. The Miami Dade College foundation has helped the program identify other funders, including the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) located at Florida International University, a 2021 recipient of the NAFSA Simon Award for Campus Internationalization. As a Title VI center, LACC works with community colleges to fund special initiatives and has offered support for students studying in Latin America, Carbajo says. A partnership with Delta Airlines has also subsidized travel costs by providing flight vouchers to cover students’ airfare.

That kind of financial support helped Jennifer Grandchamps decide she could study abroad. Currently a junior studying computer information systems, Grandchamps joined Educate Tomorrow after immigrating to the United States from Haiti by herself at the age of 17. “The fact that I didn’t have my parents with me, it was a really rough patch,” she says.

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Joseph helped Grandchamps sign up for and complete her GED and later connected her to the study abroad program. Grandchamps says she was initially worried about participating in study abroad because of the cost. But with the support of Educate Tomorrow Abroad, she was able to join the same faculty-led program to Ecuador that Gourdet completed in summer 2019.

Before departing for Ecuador, the students took a two-week class that prepared them to travel. “We had a preview of what was going to happen, and we also learned about the culture,” Grandchamps says. “But it was a very, very much different thing when we actually got into the country.”

Based on feedback from the first program participant, Educate Tomorrow Abroad now sends at least two students on the same program. While Educate Tomorrow students are integrated into the larger faculty-led program, having another Educate Tomorrow Abroad participant helps them feel more connected. “We started to send students together on the same program,” Joseph says. “That way, they had a support system.”

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Educate Tomorrow Abroad students come back to the United States with a newfound desire to serve their communities. Joseph says that while many Educate Tomorrow Abroad participants were already student leaders, after studying abroad “they are ready to just take over the world….They want to rally their peers around causes that really are impacting us day in and day out,” she says. “I’ve seen changes in maturity and the way in which they carry themselves. It’s very evident upon their return how much the program has really helped to shape them.”

Grandchamps has served as a study abroad ambassador to encourage others to go abroad. “I will take my experience to guide my peers,” she says. “Even if it’s not going into study abroad, I will encourage them to do something that will help them grow not only personally but professionally.”

Miami Dade College

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Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington) is a public research university with more than 42,000 total students, including more than 5,000 international students. The Global Gateway for Teachers, a signature program of the School of Education, offers cultural immersion and a unique student teaching experience abroad in any one of 20 countries.

Zach Paul did not plan to go abroad when he enrolled at IU Bloomington to study to be a teacher; however, a 10-day trip to Ireland offered by the university that focused on Irish culture piqued his interest in overseas study. “Having that opportunity with other students made me realize that maybe I could do this for a full 8 or 10 weeks in another country,” says Paul. In fall 2019, Paul went to New Zealand as part of the Global Gateway for Teachers program to do just that.

Before he left the United States, Paul was a student teacher in a second-grade classroom in Indiana. It was helpful to have had that experience in a U.S. classroom before he went to New Zealand, as it gave him a point of comparison for what he experienced abroad. His host teacher in New Zealand spent much less time at the front of the classroom and much more time working individually with students.

Paul’s experience in Zealand provided a practical application for the theories he learned at IU Bloomington. “I knew that kids learn best when you’re working with them one-on-one, but I wasn’t really sure what...that could look like,” he says.

Paul says the school where he was a student teacher in Indiana was not very diverse, but more than half of his class in New Zealand were students of color, many from immigrant or Indigenous backgrounds. It gave him experience working with a multicultural classroom, and since returning he has been able to incorporate content about New Zealand into his own first-grade classroom. “It was kind of cool, because I could say, ‘I’ve actually experienced this,’” Paul says. “Now we can talk about it and have a more valuable discussion.”

Paul, who graduated from IU Bloomington in 2020 with a degree in elementary and special education, was among the last IU Bloomington students to do his student teaching abroad before the pandemic led to the Global Gateway for Teachers program being suspended from spring 2020 through spring 2021. Students who had their program canceled have been invited to do a three-week placement in summer 2022 through Global Gateway’s Overseas Program for Experienced Teachers.

Fifty Years of Growth

Established in the 1970s as the Cultural Immersion Projects, the Global Gateway for Teachers was intended to diversify students’ experiences in teacher education and initially offered placements in the Navajo Nation and a handful of English-speaking countries. “We went from a small overseas student teaching program with maybe 10 IU students in a year going to six English-speaking locations to 20 locations on [almost] every continent where students could experience multiple educational systems, languages, and cultures,” says Global Gateway Director Laura Stachowski, PhD.

As an undergraduate at IU, Stachowski was among the program’s first participants to student teach abroad. She went to England in 1979, formed a close relationship with the program’s founder, James Mahan, EdD, and then worked with the program as a graduate student assistant while completing her doctoral program in education. When Mahan retired in 1994, Stachowski took over as director, and later, with the program’s growth and increased visibility, the name was changed to the Global Gateway for Teachers.

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Today, the Global Gateway for Teachers offers student teaching placements in Australia, China, Costa Rica, Ecuador, England, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Tanzania, and Wales, as well as domestic placements in the Navajo Nation and Chicago public schools. The Global Gateway has also served as an overseas placement provider for more than 30 U.S. colleges and universities since 2012, prior to which the nonprofit Foundation for International Education was responsible for securing overseas school placements. 

The program serves undergraduate teacher candidates at IU Bloomington, guest students from other universities around Indiana, and partner students from institutions around the United States that use the institution as a placement provider. Around one in four students enrolled in the teacher training programs at IU Bloomington participate in international or domestic Global Gateway placements, according to Assistant Director Amara Stuehling, PhD.

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It is a unique opportunity for education majors who have a hard time spending a full semester abroad because of their rigorous courseload and requirements for state teacher licensing. “The overseas program in the Global Gateway for Teachers really allows education majors to have a full immersion experience that links to their teaching degree,” says Stuehling.

Students who are direct admits to the School of Education are awarded a $2,000 stipend— supported by contributions and donations made to the School of Education—that they can apply toward participating in the Global Gateway for Teachers, making the program more accessible. The diversity of participants is also greater than the diversity of the School of Education overall. Students with Hispanic or Latino backgrounds are represented at twice the rate as they are overall in the School of Education (15 percent versus 7 percent). In addition, teacher candidates who participate in the Global Gateway for Teachers represent first-generation college students, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and students on the autism spectrum.

IU Bloomington recently signed a partnership with the University of Hamburg in Germany to launch a new student exchange. In spring 2022, a cohort of German education students will travel to the United States to do a monthlong school placement in Indiana. In March 2022, an IU Bloomington student will student teach for 10 weeks in Hamburg for the first time. The collaboration with Hamburg represents the Global Gateway’s first two-way exchange of students, thus advancing the program’s mission of immersive cross-culture learning.

Attracting and Preparing Future Teachers 

Anastasia Morrone, PhD, dean of the School of Education, says that many students choose to come to IU Bloomington to study education because of the Global Gateway. “It differentiates the School of Education from other teacher education programs,” she says.

Kathleen Sideli, PhD, associate vice president for overseas study, says the Global Gateway was ahead of its time in terms of creating a discipline-specific study abroad program that aligns with students’ degree requirements.

IU Bloomington students and students from other institutions in Indiana take a required preparatory course for credit that spans two or three semesters and includes presentations, activities, and assignments designed to familiarize participants with the cultures and educational systems in which they will live and work. Additionally, when they are on site, student teachers engage in community-based service learning and complete academic assignments detailing their new learning in both school and community contexts.

Stachowski says that since participants generally have enough undergraduate credits to fulfill their program requirements, they earn master’s-level credit, which can be used for continuing education credits or transferred into a graduate program. The program requires all students to complete the student teaching needed for state licensing prior to going abroad, allowing them to have the freedom to teach in other content areas.

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When teacher candidates are placed in a non-English-speaking country, they primarily work with the school’s English teacher and teach conversational and written English, Stachowski says. Many of the placement schools value having a native English speaker work with their students. Students going to Spanish-speaking countries must have at least basic proficiency in the language, and in Spain, where accommodations are made in a residencia, students must be conversant in Spanish. In other non-English-speaking countries, students are encouraged to have some background in the language or knowledge of key phrases.

The program also has a network of around 30 consultants who are current or retired educators in the countries where the Global Gateway makes placements. The consultants arrange school placements and recruit homestay families. “They are Global Gateway on the ground in that country,” Stachowski says. 

Maintaining Communication and Connection

Officer of the British Empire Ken Pritchard, MEd, has been a UK consultant for the Global Gateway since 1986. As soon as teacher candidates’ placements are confirmed, he emails the students with information about their homestays and the school where they will be based. He also asks the homestay family and the school to email the teacher candidates to welcome them before they arrive. “The support begins well before their arrival in England,” Pritchard says.

The students have his email address and cell phone number so they can contact him if they have any questions or problems. He also checks in with them a few weeks after arrival, as well as halfway through their stay, to make sure that no problems have arisen.

Pritchard says that the students become an integral part of both their homestay family and the school where they are student teaching. The U.S. students teach their host family and schools about their own culture and engage in service learning projects in the community. “The applicants are always made to feel that they are a part of the family and not just a visitor,” he says.

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The program’s success “really is based on relationships that are built with our collaborators across the country and the world,” Stachowski says.

For some participants, the Global Gateway has had a lifelong impact, which was been described in recent publications such as a study examining the lasting impact of the overseas experience on participants’ subsequent professional development and personal growth. Pam Fischer, MA, is an English teacher who retired at the end of the 2021 school year after a 33-year teaching career. In 1988, she was a student teacher in Cheltenham, England. To this day, she has remained close to her host family. That experience inspired her to apply to teaching jobs in England after she earned her bachelor’s degree and pursue further professional development opportunities in England.

As a teacher, she wanted to “present the whole world, the rich tapestry that is this entire world and not just Indiana, not just [the United States].” Fischer adds, “I think that’s what the Global Gateway program did. To me, it was indeed a gateway to a whole other way of thinking. And I tried to bring that back to my students.”

Indiana University Bloomington

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