The Dutch immigrants who settled in western Michigan in the mid-nineteenth century brought not only their culture and Reformed Protestant faith, but a strong interest in establishing schools to impart their principles and religion to the next generation. “Onze school for onze kinderen (our school for our children) was the operating description of both the college and the Christian day schools that they established,” according to a history of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Calvin, one of the largest and most academically rigorous Christian colleges, remains firmly in the Christian Reformed fold. But Calvin is no longer onze school for onze kinderen. Fewer than half Calvin’s 4,200 undergraduates belong to the Christian Reformed Church. Ten percent are minorities, and there are more than 320 international students from five dozen countries. The majority of international students receive more than $10,000 a year in financial aid.

As recently as the 1970s, 90 percent of the students came from Christian Reformed high schools in the Grand Rapids area and sister schools in midwestern suburbs, southern California, Canada, and other places where Christian Reformed families clustered. When Ellen B. Monsma came to Calvin to teach French in 1971, “if you looked around the fine arts auditorium, all you’d see was blonde heads.” But, says Monsma, director of Calvin’s Off-Campus Programs, “it’s very different now.”

Ninth in International Students, Fourth in Study Abroad

According to Open Doors 2006 data, compiled by the Institute of International Education, Calvin ranked ninth among baccalaureate institutions in attracting international students, and fourth in sending students to study abroad. Rather than catering to onze kinderen, Calvin has internationalized its faculty and curricula and aggressively expanded ties with scholars, theologians, and institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In 2006 Calvin launched the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity under former provost Joel A. Carpenter to better understand the growth of Christianity in the developing world. While buildings across campus attest to the college’s Dutch roots—with such names as the Spoelhof College Center, Hekman Library, and Noordewier-VanderWerp Residence Hall—and a chair recently was endowed in Dutch Language and Culture, students from Asia and Africa far outnumber those from the Netherlands and rest of Europe. Fully 74 students had citizenship or roots in South Korea, a country with a large number of Reformed or Presbyterian churches and a vigorous missionary tradition. Home for those Korean students means 17 different countries, from Fiji to India to Germany to the United States to Brazil. Calvin also has become a favored destination for “MKs” or missionary kids—U.S. citizens, Canadians, Filipinos, Koreans, and others raised overseas. Many MKs are supported by scholarships provided by Calvin alumnus Stanley van Reken and wife Harriet through their Christian Missionary Scholarship Foundation. It all adds to the international flavor of the 390-acre campus straddling the East Beltline on the outskirts of Grand Rapids.

Open Admissions but Lots of Merit Scholars

Calvin produces more future Ph.D.s than all but a few dozen liberal arts colleges, according to tallies kept by the National Science Foundation. Calvin enrolled 80 National Merit Scholars in 2006–07, including 29 in the freshman class. But it also admits virtually every applicant. “It’s a very unusual student body,” says President Gaylen J. Byker. Open admissions are “part of who we are.”

Calvin, borrowing language from the Book of Revelation, embarked in 1985 to attract those “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” At the time it had a single off-campus study program in a small town outside Valencia, Spain. Today it runs semester-long, off-campus study programs in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Beijing, China; Budapest, Hungary; Accra, Ghana; York, England, and Grenoble, France, as well as Valencia. It has added majors in international development, international relations, and Asian studies as well as a minor in African and African diaspora studies. In a 2001 overhaul of the core curriculum, it specified that students must study a non-Western or pre-Renaissance subject to fulfill a global and historical studies requirement. “We call it ‘the long ago or far away requirement,’” Provost Claudia Beversluis says with a smile.

Leaders with Global Resumes

Two alumni with broad international backgrounds were brought in to lead the institution in the mid-1990s: current president Gaylen Byker and Joel Carpenter, provost from 1996-2006. President Byker is a former international lawyer and investment banker with a Ph.D. in international relations who dropped out of Calvin as a freshman in 1966, enlisted in the Army and served as an artillery officer in Vietnam. Byker, son of a Michigan state senator, returned home, wed, started a family and captained the wrestling team at Calvin while carving out an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree. He earned both a law degree and master’s in world politics from the University of Michigan, clerked for a federal judge, and worked for a Philadelphia law firm before resuming graduate studies.

A mentor at the University of Pennsylvania coaxed him to head to Beirut to help rebuild Lebanon after its civil war. Byker landed on the faculty of the American University of Beirut while his wife Susan taught at an international school, which their 11- and 5-year-old daughters attended. But what was thought in 1982 to be the end of violence in Beirut was just a lull; from five miles away, the Bykers felt the force of the truck bomb that blew up the Marine barracks on Oct. 23, 1983, and killed 241 American and 60 French soldiers. Two months later, Byker was returning to the Middle East from co-teaching a January interim course at Calvin when he learned that Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, had been assassinated. The Bykers were among the Americans evacuated by U.S. Marine helicopter crews from the Beirut beaches in February 1984. The family returned to Beirut in the spring, but Byker later had to be smuggled out of the country after militants began kidnapping male Westerners, including their friend, the Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary. Susan Byker, not wanting to disrupt further her Lebanese students’ education, waited until the end of the school year to depart with her daughters.

During those chaotic years in Beirut, Byker managed to complete a survey on the attitudes of Lebanese citizens toward their wildly fluctuating currency. It would be 1993 before Byker completed writing his dissertation. He spent those interim years jetting around the world as an investment banker for Chase Manhattan and Banque Paribas, helping governments and corporations hedge commodity price transactions. Then in 1995 he answered the call to serve as Calvin’s president.

“Part of the challenge here is to keep the very distinctively Christian and Calvinistic or Reformed characteristic of the college, while really opening it up to this global perspective,” says Byker. A tradition of respect for intellectual inquiry made this task easier, notwithstanding strict religious restrictions on who can belong to the faculty, he says. “We expose our students to everything. We bring everybody here to lecture,” says Byker. Rosemary MasonEtter, the international admissions director, puts it, “Calvin seeks to have conversations, not prevent conversations.” The college also hosts a celebrated January Series of lectures that it bills as “15 days of free liberal arts education,” that fills the Fine Arts Center Auditorium at lunchtime for 15 consecutive weekdays. Speakers have included Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life manager of Hotel Rwanda; Dr. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health; Egyptian scholar and dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector.

Far From Fundamentalism

Calvin is far from fundamentalist. Kwabena Bediako, 20, a senior chemistry major from Mampong-Akuapem, Ghana, observes, “For the most part the college is not afraid of tackling or confronting issues that are seen as controversial in other Christian colleges. Nothing is too awkward or too controversial to be investigated or be discussed, especially in the sciences.” Bediako’s older brother is a 2004 graduate working on a Ph.D. in immunology and a master’s in public health at Northwestern University. Bediako, a chemistry major, says, “I’m going to have to confront some of these issues at some point in my career. We might as well start to think about them critically now rather than be caught off guard later in life.”

Bediako’s parents, Kwame and Gillian, founders of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission and Culture in Ghana, are working with Calvin’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity. The Nagel Institute recently received a $2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund a three-year program of scholarship and lectures for Chinese scholars on the intersection of science, philosophy, and belief. The executive director for the project is Kelly J. Clark, a Calvin philosophy professor whose friendship with a Chinese professor he met on sabbatical in Scotland led him to become a student of Chinese philosophy. After an exchange of visits, Clark says he decided that “there were things we had to learn from them, so I devoted myself to the study of Chinese thought.”

Religion professor Diane B. Obenchain, a Harvard-trained expert on Confucianism, came to Calvin to teach world religions in 2005 after long stints at Kenyon College and visiting professorships at Peking University and other Asian institutions. Daniel H. Bays, an authority on the history of Christianity in China, came to Grand Rapids in 2002 after a long career at the University of Kansas, where he chaired the history department and directed the Center for East Asian Studies. Bays secured a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that Calvin agreed to match 3-to-1 to create a $2 million endowment for Asian Studies. Political science professor Amy S. Patterson, a Peace Corps veteran who wrote her dissertation on grassroots democracy in Senegal, was attracted to Calvin both by its religiosity and the strong interest in international issues. She is the author of The Politics of AIDS in Africa and editor of a second compendium on the AIDS crisis.

President Byker likes to tell visitors that, “There were three Calvin colleges before Calvin College in this country. One was called Harvard, one was called Yale, and the other was called Princeton. They were all founded by Calvinists very much in the exact intellectual tradition within which we exist today.” Of the more than 200 Protestant Christian colleges founded before the Civil War, “zero are Christian today,” he adds. All jettisoned their religious identity and became secular, he states. Calvin began as a Christian Reformed seminary in 1876, opened a junior college in 1906, and became a baccalaureate college in 1921. It remains the principal educational institution of the Christian Reformed Church, which claims a quarter-million members in the United States and Canada.

Looking toward the Global South and East

Carpenter, a historian and authority on evangelical movements, directed the religion program of The Pew Charitable Trusts before he was hired as provost in 1996. Upon returning to his alma mater, Carpenter pushed the college to pay more attention to issues of “the global South and East.” Beversluis, the current provost, says, “he kept telling us, ‘Look, the church isn’t headquartered in Europe and the U.S. anymore. The growth areas, the edge, is in the global South and East, so Calvin College better know where it’s happening. We’d better be on top of things and not graduate students who think that west Michigan is somehow the center of the universe.’” Carpenter says he found a Calvin ready “to break out of its protective ethnic shell.”

Sociologist and Dean for Multicultural Affairs Michelle R. Loyd-Paige has both lived and helped drive change at Calvin, which was far more homogenous when she arrived on campus as a freshman 30 years ago. “We see ourselves as having this unique position of being a credible, Christian, and scholarly voice on these issues. We believe we have something to say to—and to hear from—a wider audience,” says Loyd-Paige, an ordained minister in her African-American church in Muskegon, Michigan.

Nana Yaa Dodi, 23, of Asamankese, Ghana, a business and international relations major, can attest to the attention she received when applying to the college. “I felt like the admissions counselors actually cared about my being able to make it here to Calvin. They were willing to work with me and my parents on finances. At various times, especially when I was receiving so much correspondence and replies to my e-mails, I wondered, ‘Am I the only student applying? These people get back to me really fast.’”

More than 700 Calvin students study abroad each year, 500 on three-week classes during the interim term and upwards of 200 on full-semester programs. Under the leadership of Frank Roberts, a former academic dean and director of Off-Campus Programs, and Monsma, the current director, “we really bootstrapped the semester programs abroad,” Carpenter says. Now the college is scrambling to keep up with the demand. The International Development Studies major requires students to study in a developing country, which explains why Monsma is exploring an arrangement with an institute in Thailand to supplement an existing development program in Honduras (Calvin also runs a language study program in Honduras).

Students can take their full financial aid to study at the Calvin-run programs in Britain, China, France, Ghana, Honduras, Hungary, and Spain, and also at five other Calvin-endorsed programs in Austria, Germany, Greece, Japan, and the Netherlands. They are eligible for half their financial aid if they choose from 16 other Calvin-approved semester programs.

Growing By Finding the International ‘Pioneers’

While Calvin has parlayed its religious interests and connections into a deeper involvement in study and research abroad, Carpenter believes there are lessons to be learned here for any institution seeking to internationalize.

“This sort of thing can bubble up. I’d be amazed to find a campus in the nation where the interest in internationalization is not there,” says the Nagel Institute director. “I’ve seen a lot of post-tenure faculty saying, ‘I’m getting a little bored with the thing that really excited me in graduate school; I’ve ridden this horse long enough. There are some new worlds to discover.’”

“In some ways that is how change happens in a lot of fields. You go with the pioneers first and see if their commitment and enthusiasm can excite the interest of others,” says Carpenter.

One of Calvin’s preeminent international “pioneers” is Roland Hoksbergen, professor of economics and business and the driving force behind the International Development Studies major, which in two years has attracted 85 students. Had such a major existed when Hoksbergen entered Calvin in1971, he might have completed his bachelor’s degree in four years instead of eight. But he dropped out, bought a van, and drove to Alaska. He wasn’t sure what he would do there, but he was intrigued to learn about far-away peoples and cultures. A few years later he wound up doing earthquake relief work in Guatemala and in the process met his wife and found his vocation. “I poked my head out and said, ‘Man, people are poor here. I wonder what’s going on and what can be done about it?’” That led him back to Calvin for a bachelor’s degree and a desire “to understand the economic part of life.” Calvin hired him even before he completed his Ph.D. in economic development at the University of Notre Dame. He took leave to spend three years in Costa Rica as director of the Latin American Studies Program for the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities and two years in Nicaragua running the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee’s efforts. He also led Calvin study abroad programs in Ghana in 2002 and in Honduras in 2005.

Another pioneer is Beryl Hugen, director of Calvin’s social work program, who has led several January interims to Russia and Mexico and spends a third of his time teaching at the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) in Moscow, a small liberal arts college affiliated with Calvin and other religious colleges. “It’s easy to get caught up in off-campus study,” says Hugen, a 1971 Calvin graduate. “It’s almost a rite of passage for our students now.”

A Last Minute Switch to Kenya

Calvin offers instruction in Chinese and Japanese as well as Spanish, French, German, and Dutch. Recently, with a $140,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to launch its minor in Africa and African Diaspora Studies, it began offering Kiswahili classes, and plans are in the works to teach Korean. Geography professor Johnathan Bascom helped start the African and African Diaspora Studies minor. He is writing a book about Eritrea and had planned to take an interim class there in January 2007 to study its geography. Eight weeks before departure, unrest made that impossible. Bascom quickly regrouped and took the same seven students to Kenya to work in a rural village with a German charity fighting trachoma, a blinding, bacterial eye disease spread by flies. The Calvin students also got to visit a game park and snorkel in the Indian Ocean, but only after spending several days and nights in a remote village of the Sumburu, an ethnic group related to the Maasai. Using handheld Global Position System devices, they mapped the village to help determine the best sites for digging new wells and latrines. Bascom, who has twice taught in Eritrea on Fulbright grants, said the trip was “a deep cultural dive” for his class. Says Sarah Holland, 21, a senior geography major from Grand Rapids, “It was dusty and dirty and fantastic.”

“The GPS work got us beyond merely providing a meaningful cross-cultural experience, which is what the interim is supposed to accomplish. I think we got to the edge of providing an actual contribution,” says Bascom. Pointing to the college’s 52-page blueprint for diversity, racial justice, reconciliation, and cross-cultural engagement, he adds, “I think that the African studies and diaspora minor is part and parcel of this college responding to our own self-subscribed mandate, From Every Nation.”

An Egyptian Student’s Legacy: Rangeela

One of the traditions at Calvin is an annual variety show called Rangeela—the word means “many colors” in Hindi—put on by international students. It was started by a young student from Egypt named Anne Zaki in her freshman year, 1995–96. Zaki, a pastor’s daughter from Cairo, Egypt, came from an international, all-scholarship boarding school for student leaders in Vancouver, Canada. Initially she found the Calvin campus too tame and homogenous for her liking. Her resident adviser and the college chaplain offered words of wisdom.

“They challenged me and said, ‘Look, if you don’t like it, change it. Don’t just up and go. Isn’t that what you learned in your school back (in Vancouver)? You’re supposed to be a leader,” Zaki relates. The 18-year-old conceived the idea for Rangeela, which was a big hit from the start. After graduation, Zaki returned to Cairo for a master’s degree and married a minister who was a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary. The couple moved back to Grand Rapids, where the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship hired Zaki to give the institute a more global focus. Now she works part-time for the institute and is on the path toward a divinity degree at Calvin Theological Seminary. She takes pride in the growth of Rangeela, which has become such a hot ticket that seats are even sold to dress rehearsals. “I nudged Calvin in a good direction,” says Zaki. “International students are becoming more aware of their own culture. Korean students go back home over Christmas break, visit grandma in the village and ask, ‘Can you teach us a folk dance?’”

Reviewing the 2007 Rangeela, a reporter for the student newspaper, Chimes, griped that an emcee’s accent was “too thick to be understood.” The performers were stung, but perhaps no one was more upset than Linda Bosch, the international student adviser who works closely with students on the production and is revered by them. “She’s like a mother when we arrive,” says senior Jane Cha, 22, a psychology major born in Philadelphia and raised in Beijing by Korean missionary parents.

Bosch says aspects of the variety show were fair game for criticism—including its 2¼-hour length—but not the accent of the host, who hailed from an English-speaking country, Singapore. “Everyone should talk like we do here in Michigan—yeah, right,” she says acidly. But Bosch counseled restraint on those upset by the Chimes review. The following week the newspaper ran several tempered letters of complaint and a 1,300-word Q&A with Bosch—twice as long as the offending review—in which the adviser explained the anguish caused by the review, but also stressed the importance of more communication across cultures, not less. Her advice to future Chimes reviewers? Be more welcoming and hospitable to guests in our country—but don’t patronize them by limiting criticism.

Students at many campuses joke and sometimes fret about living in a “bubble,” and Calvin students are no exception. “I’m always struck by the activist inclination of the students,” says Bruce Berglund, a cultural historian and assistant professor of history. “I’ve had a number of students really eager to go out and save the world.” One of his students—now in graduate school in architecture—designed a community center for a small town in northern India on an internship, and another worked with AIDS orphans in Africa.

Before spending the fall semester in classes in Calvin’s program at Capital Normal University in Beijing, Christi Bylsma, 20, a junior from Holland, Michigan, spent the summer working in a private foster home in a Chinese village. Bylsma, an Asian Studies major, says, “You have to understand the world before you can address its issues. The best thing we can do to make the world a better place is to get out there and get educated. That’s what Calvin is trying to provide for us.”

Following a Study Abroad Class on the Web

When Matthew Kuperus Heun, an associate professor of engineering, and wife Tracy Kuperus, an international development instructor, led students on an interim to South Africa in January 2005, they also pioneered a “web log” that allowed parents, professors, and students back home to follow their progress on their journey across a country that has moved from apartheid to democracy. Heun, a 1989 Calvin alumnus, says, “If I was a parent sending these students halfway around the world, I’d want to know what was going on. The people in Calvin’s IT department thought that would be an interesting experiment, so we did it. We assigned one student for each day we were away to write an entry and upload their pictures. By the time we got home, we had 60 to 70 pages of student-generated content, both written and visual.”

In Calvin’s engineering program, professors such as J. Aubrey Sykes and Edward G. (Ned) Nielsen encourage students to engage with the world through projects and internships. In Sykes’ senior design class, one team of students designed a kit that could pop 50 pounds of amaranth an hour so that African villagers consume more of the puffed, nutritious grain instead of just grinding it into flour. Other teams worked on projects to make a low-cost water purification system, use a Stirling engine to convert solar energy to electricity, and cannibalize the motor and transmission from an old Toyota Tercel to build a rudimentary utility vehicle.

Breaking Taboos

Economics professor Adel S. Abadeer came to Calvin in 1999 after teaching at Tufts and Boston University. Abadeer, once a shot putter on the Egyptian national track team, says, “I’d never even heard of Grand Rapids or Calvin College. Calvin Klein came to mind before Calvin College or John Calvin.” But it has been a happy match for the economist. He welcomes Americans’ growing interest in other cultures. “Many taboos are being broken,” says Abadeer, who grew up in poverty. “We see the Chinese now differently from 50 years ago, not as very poor but as mathematicians. We see the Indians or Russians as chemists or software engineers. As we get to know more about them, we associate better attributes to foreigners.”

Abadeer tells students that people in Egypt and other African countries are no different from people in the United States. “We think, we hope, we fear, we love, we aspire the same as you, but our resource set and our cultural set is different,” he says. People in less developed countries want “your understanding before your second-hand clothes,” he tells them.

“Students are more interested now because there is some compatibility, some rivalry, and even some fear,” he says. “There’s fear of competition, but also hope and hunger to learn more. We used to have problems attracting students to go to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Now we have problems accommodating students who want to go to those parts of the world.”

Calvin College

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Heart of Mexico tells the stories of Raúl Borges, a young father in Tunkás, Mexico, struggling with the decision of whether to immigrate to the United States for work, and José Madero Pech, another father in the same village who returned home to meet his 9-year-old daughter for the first time. The authors of these two men’s stories are not professional writers, however. They are students in the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas (UNT), located in Denton.

Since 2013 UNT has run an annual study abroad program in narrative journalism in collaboration with Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEM). “The program represents UNT’s commitment to campus internationalization and study abroad. Heart of Mexico is a wonderful example of the importance of internationalizing teaching and curriculum and providing students with study abroad programs that promote global learning and professional training,” says Amy Shenberger, interim vice provost for international affairs and director of study abroad.

Approximately 30 students, half from UNT and half from UAEM, spend a month in a rural community in Mexico working in interdisciplinary teams to capture the stories of local residents. The program is set up as a field school, where students are expected to report, edit, and produce their own full-length feature stories, essays, videos, and photos that are published online at heartofmexicostories.com.

Many program alumni have gone on to have successful careers in journalism. “The experience of being dropped in the field and asked to find the story is so invaluable when you are trying to get a job as a reporter,” says Sam Guzman, who participated in the program as a UNT graduate student and later came back as a professional mentor.

Guzman is currently an associate producer at KERA, the Dallas affiliate of National Public Radio (NPR).

Exploring Cultural Connections Between Texas and Mexico

Program director and journalism professor Thorne Anderson says the program was born out of a desire to explore the close cultural connections between Texas and Mexico. “Our university has a diverse student body that’s drawn largely from North Texas, which is upwards of 40 percent Hispanic. Our students have family on both sides of the border,” he says.

In 2012 Anderson and his colleague George Getschow received seed funding to travel to Mexico to explore collaborative projects with long-time partner UAEM. In Mexico, Anderson was able to reconnect with UAEM communications professor Lenin Martell, whom he had previously met at a conference at UNT. The next year, they took the first group of students to Tenancingo and Malinalco, in the state of Mexico.

Anderson says that the key to the program’s success has been having committed people on both sides: “You need to have an equal partner in developing the program, and for me, that partner is Lenin. I really need his local expertise, because working in a place like Mexico, there are a lot of logistical and other kinds of problems that can come up.”

“Lenin and I also share a deep commitment to each other’s students and to collaborative storytelling as a means of exploration and understanding.”

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After receiving initial seed funding from the UNT grant, the program has sustained itself primarily through tuition. The program has also received support from partners such as the Dallas Morning News, who allowed its journalists time off to teach in the program. Many of its professional mentors also volunteer and cover their own travel expenses. In addition, the HoM website has attracted donors who contributed scholarships for individual students from both UNT and UAEM.

An Interdisciplinary, Intercultural Approach to Storytelling

In 2016 the program ran for the fourth time. During the first week, students participate in an intensive training period that includes lectures from Martell on the historical, social, and political contexts of Mexico.

In addition to UNT and UAEM faculty, the program draws on the expertise of professional journalists working at the Dallas Morning News who serve as instructors during the four-week program. Students are also exposed to social science research on the topics that they are covering, such as migration.

Anderson also introduces students to narrative storytelling techniques and gives them opportunities to hone their reporting skills by doing short interviews and immersive observations, which might later form the basis of the longer pieces they eventually produce.

In the last three weeks, students work in interdisciplinary teams to produce narrative articles, photography, and videos, all of which are published on a bilingual web platform.

Anderson and Martell intentionally built the program to be interdisciplinary. “We set it up as the journalistic version of an archeological dig, where you embrace people with various expertise who all come together to work on a common project. That’s kind of how we structured this, but our outcome is narrative storytelling. We bring together videographers, photographers, writers, translators, and ethnographers,” Anderson explains.

Guzman says that all students, regardless of discipline, receive the same training. “We need to get an understanding of how the others would approach the story. For example, translations for video might be much different than translations for a written story,” she says.

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She adds that the intercultural nature of the teams also “creates much more dynamic storytelling” as the Mexican and U.S. students often approach a story from different perspectives.

Greta Díaz, a UAEM student who participated in 2014, learned about her own country as a program participant. “Sometimes we are not aware of our cultures or surroundings, but explaining things to [the] UNT students also makes you wonder about why things are that way, or makes you realize new things about your own...country,” she says.

The program also challenges many U.S. students’ preconceptions about Mexico. “I think stories about Mexico tend to be the same stories told over and over again. What’s so great about the Heart of Mexico is that it takes you to places you don’t usually get to. Our stories are not just about drugs or violence, they are about culture and people.... Ultimately, that’s why I got into journalism,” says Guzman.

In addition, the program has touched the lives of the people whose stories the students are telling. At the end of each trip to Mexico, the faculty and students make a public presentation in the communities where the work was produced. Subjects of the stories are invited to attend and are often excited to see the final results of the project.

One particular story about the efforts of Paloma Méndez, a resident of Malinalco, Mexico, to save stray street dogs also caught the attention of a woman in the United States. That U.S. donor has subsequently made five separate contributions to support Mendez’ dog rescue efforts.

In another case, Karla Serrano, a shopkeeper in Tenancingo, was interviewed for a students’ reporting assignment in 2013. After the interview she began asking questions about the program, and the team learned she was planning to enroll in communication studies at UAEM. Two years later, Karla participated in Heart of Mexico as a writer and then became an assistant to Martell.

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Exploring Synergies Between Narrative Journalism and Social Sciences

Since its beginning, the program has gradually expanded its interdisciplinary reach by exploring the synergies between narrative journalism and social sciences. In 2015, Pedro Lewin Fischer, PhD, an anthropologist at Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History in Yucatán, joined Heart of Mexico as a faculty member. The next year, the initiative expanded the student teams to include anthropology students Fischer recruited from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY).

“I wanted a program where ethnography and social science research could better inform journalism, while journalistic storytelling techniques could enliven social science and ethnography,” says Anderson.

Martell adds that incorporating social science research into journalism “gives more precision and context to the stories. We can give a more compelling story to the public and contribute to creating new conversations in the public sphere.”

Fischer has spent more than 15 years studying the emotional and psychological impact of migration on the indigenous Mayan population in Yucatán. “Migration is an invisible issue in the public policy arena in Mexico and in Yucatán,” he explains.

He says that ethnography and narrative journalism are similar in the way that they put people at the center of their research and intend to “make visible social phenomena that are usually hidden.”

He says his collaboration with Heart of Mexico has helped make his ethnographic research on migration available to a wider public. “Anthropologists normally write books or read papers at conferences, so it’s always a very narrow audience—usually other anthropologists who already know the issues,” he says.

“By [working with journalists], we are also shortening the distance between what we do and the potential reader or viewer. This whole thing has to do with creating new forms of knowledge and communication, because through a video, through photography, through an essay, you have different ways of accessing an issue,” Fischer says.

Creating a Cross-Border Community

Martell and Anderson both say their own professional work has benefited from the program. “When you are a journalist but then you go into teaching, you kind of miss the everyday adrenaline. But now I’m teaching this program in narrative journalism and it’s given a new dimension to my work,” Martell says.

“We really wanted this to be something that was challenging for faculty members and made us learn and grow as well. I think it has been valuable for the students to see us putting ourselves on the line as well,” Anderson adds.

A strong sense of community—both personal and professional—has also developed among faculty and students. “The students have developed lasting relationships with each other. They travel back and forth and visit each other during holidays, and have attended each other’s weddings,” Anderson says.

The program’s name captures much of the spirit that Anderson and Martell have tried to foster. “We didn’t have a name for the program the first year. We called it the Literary Multimedia Storytelling Program or something like that. It was very cumbersome. We had brainstorming sessions with the students. The word ‘heart’ kept coming up, meaning that we wanted to get to the heart of people’s stories and we wanted these stories to touch people’s hearts,” he says.

“And ultimately, what we want to provide students with is an experience that changes them, that gives them bigger minds and bigger hearts.”

University of North Texas

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In 2015 a South African white rhino named Hope made headlines around the world after surviving a brutal attack by poachers who hacked off her horn. Rhino conservationist Will Fowlds was one of the team of wildlife veterinarians charged with the animal’s care.

Through Fowlds’s connection with Texas Christian University (TCU), several TCU students had the opportunity to watch a procedure that attempted to restore Hope’s facial plate during a study abroad program to South Africa. Environmental studies master’s student Jimmy Greene, who participated in the program as an undergraduate, was present during Hope’s facial reconstruction surgery.

“Students were able to closely watch the procedure and be educated on efforts that wildlife veterinarians are taking to save poached rhinos. While viewing the surgery, I was asked by one of the veterinarians to assist with her IV bag. For the remainder of the surgery I was close to Hope and able to see the devastating impact of human greed on wildlife,” he says.

Global demand for rhino horn has led to increased poaching of these gentle giants in recent years. Although there has been a ban on the international rhino horn trade since 1977, a belief in the rhino horn’s curative power has fueled a lucrative black market in countries such as Vietnam and China. Seventy-five percent of the world’s rhinos currently live in South Africa, after being wiped out in many other parts of Africa.

“Rhino are one of many species threatened by extinction due to the global illegal wildlife trade...While the purchasing of these products is often naive and innocent, the implications are brutal, painful, and tragic for both animals and humans in places like Africa,” Fowlds says.

Promoting Global Innovation

Fowlds’s relationship with TCU came about when professor Mike Slattery, PhD, director of the Institute for Environmental Studies, applied for a $25,000 grant through the TCU Global Innovators program. The grant brought Fowlds to the TCU campus in Fort Worth, Texas, and provided seed funding for longer-term collaboration, which eventually became the TCU Rhino Initiative. The initiative focuses on four key areas: 1) rhino rescue; 2) rhino education/awareness; 3) demand reduction; and 4) community development.

The Global Innovators grant is part of TCU’s quality enhancement plan (QEP), “Discovering Global Citizenship,” for reaccreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). “The idea is to increase our university’s engagement with developing countries,” says James English, grant co-chair and international student adviser.

TCU awards one grant every semester to a faculty member who collaborates with an innovator abroad on projects that advance the innovator’s work on a critical global issue.

“It’s been amazing partnering these groundbreaking individuals with our faculty. We’re doing everything from combating human trafficking in India and conserving rhinos in South Africa to advancing disability rights in Haiti and working with indigenous artists in Panama,” English says.

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In addition to the innovators grant, Slattery has also been working to create study abroad scholarships to South Africa, as well as raise funds for the construction of the African Rhino Conservation Collaboration (ARCC), a facility at the Amakhala Game Reserve that will provide a physical space for future research collaboration.

Creating a Platform for Awareness

Fowlds first visited the TCU campus in 2014, where he gave a series of public lectures both on campus and in the Fort Worth community, and had the opportunity to interact with TCU students. Slattery then had the opportunity to visit Fowlds in South Africa, where they developed a field-based course, “Biodiversity and Human Development in South Africa.”

The next step was taking a group of students to South Africa to see the rhino crisis first hand. “We realized early on that, while we could provide logistical and financial support to the effort in South Africa from afar, the only way to make this initiative truly impactful was to get students into the field and then embed this into the curriculum,” says Slattery, who is himself a South African native.

In May 2015 the first group of 15 TCU students flew to South Africa. They first traveled to Johannesburg and Cape Town, where they learned about the social, political, and historical contexts of South Africa. Then the group spent 10 days at the Amakhala Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape, where they were immersed in the reserve’s wildlife conservation efforts targeting rhinos and other endangered species. The itinerary included a wildebeest darting, a collaring of a white rhino mother and calf, several game drives, and Hope’s facial reconstruction surgery.

Environmental studies major Katie Smith, who graduated in May 2017, was part of the first group to travel to South Africa. Being able to see animals in the wild was one of the highlights of her trip. “We went on multiple game drives where we got to see wild animals interact in their natural habitats and there is honestly nothing like it. To be able to see these animals how they are supposed to be seen just constantly filled me with awe and wonder,” she says.

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Raising Awareness in Vietnam

Slattery took a second group of students to South Africa the next year. Because Vietnam is the major market for rhino horn, Slattery provided scholarships for two international students from the TCU Vietnamese Student Association to join the trip.

“I was already aware of the rhino crisis in Vietnam. However, I was not involved in any organizations or activities that called for a stop to rhino horn trade and consumption. Dr. Slattery said coming on this ‘rhino trip’ would give me a whole lot more credibility to influence people, so I went,” says senior biology major Tu Huynh.

She says she has always been passionate about the environment, but the trip taught her how she can help raise awareness. “Watching people in South Africa putting so many efforts in wildlife conservation and seeing how Dr. Slattery strives every day to serve both his countries of citizenship, South Africa in wildlife conservation and the United States in education, I was inspired and realized what my dream is. I want to do something like what Dr. Slattery did. I want to come back and change the situation on environmental conservation in Vietnam,” Huynh says.

Another Vietnamese student who traveled to South Africa, Nguyen Le, says she was unaware about the crisis until she took a class with Slattery. “My family used to own a rhino horn, and I had never known that there was a misconception with the medical use of the horn,” she says.

The two students, along with their classmates, were able to watch a dehorning procedure of five rhinos. During the dehorning process, veterinarians remove the horn while the animal is sedated with the goal of making them less desirable targets for poaching. The horns are made of keratin, the same substance as human fingernails, and will eventually grow back.

ReillyJo Cavanaugh was another TCU student who witnessed the dehorning procedure. “This creature is so magnificent but vulnerable all at the same time. This species is experiencing unnecessary suffering because of human greed. The flinching of the rhino, the sound of the chainsaw, and the confusion once the rhino woke were all uncomfortable [experiences for me] and inside all I felt was anger,” she says.

Global Efforts Are Needed

Huynh, Le, and Cavanaugh have all been involved in awareness- and fund-raising activities since they returned home. The Vietnamese Student Association organized Born with Horn, an exhibit on the rhino crisis, and all three students helped plan the Rhino Run, a charity race that raised nearly $5,000 for rhino conservation.

Slattery also offers a one-credit class the semester following the trip to give students an opportunity to design a project that requires “sustained engagement” with the issue. Several students have produced awareness-raising videos, and a graphic design student created an art exhibition with photos and illustrations from her trip.

“It’s the greatest joy I’ve ever experienced in 25 years of teaching, watching these young people in the field, when they get their hands on, not just a rhino but any of these animals. I know that I never have to worry about turning any of them into an advocate, because they already are by the time they come back from the trip,” Slattery says.

Fowlds says his ongoing relationship with TCU has been important to his own work because it will take a global effort to solve the rhino crisis:

“The value of forming strong relationships with institutions that can help broaden our global reach and explore improved educational and awareness mechanisms...is something of enormous value. Not only has it been inspiring for us to know that there are people on the other side of the planet that care, but the ongoing commitment to find effective ways to help is...growing into something very meaningful and exciting.”

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English and Slattery are equally enthusiastic about Fowlds’s collaboration with TCU through the Global Innovation Grant. “Dr. Fowlds has been a phenomenal partner in the Global Innovators Initiative,” English says.

Slattery adds that from the beginning the Rhino Initiative needed to go beyond the TCU campus, and even beyond South Africa. They hope to be able to eventually extend the program to Vietnam. “The TCU Rhino Initiative needed to have several components that addressed the various components of the Rhino crisis. It’s a very complex international issue related to global supply and demand,” he says.

“We’re raising awareness about what the Rhino crisis is, and how people here in Fort Worth can help. Rhino rescue and rehabilitation is one component of that, and so is demand reduction in Vietnam, as is uplifting the local community in South Africa.”

Texas Christian University

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In 1888, Nora Antonio Gordon, a graduate of Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, traveled to the Congo as a teacher and missionary at a time when few African American women had access to educational opportunities. She was the first in a long line of Spelman women to go abroad, followed by other alumnae such as Flora Zeto.

Zeto, who was a Congolese orphan brought to the United States when she was 5 years of age by another Spelman alumna, returned to the continent of her birth after graduating in 1915 from Spelman Seminary, which became Spelman College nearly a decade later.

The legacy of these first Spelman students to go abroad was commemorated in the naming of the Gordon-Zeto Center, which was established in 2011 with a philanthropic investment of $17 million to oversee all international initiatives on campus. One of the center’s primary aims is to send Spelman women abroad with the mission to “engage the many cultures of the world.”

“The combined name Gordon-Zeto is meant to reflect the spirit of sending Spelman students abroad and receiving students from around the world,” says Associate Provost for Global Education ’Dimeji Togunde, PhD, who oversees Spelman internationalization.

Leveraging Accreditation to Promote Global Learning

The Gordon-Zeto Center was established as part of the implementation of “Spelman Going Global: Developing Intercultural Competence,” a quality enhancement plan (QEP) adopted in 2009 during a reaccreditation process for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC).

SACSCOC requires all institutions to develop a QEP that addresses a specific topic related to enhancing student learning. After working with departments across campus, the accreditation committee decided to focus on global issues. The main aim of the QEP was to increase the number of Spelman students who have access to global learning experiences.

As one of the 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States, Spelman plays a unique role in creating study abroad opportunities for students of color. “We wanted to make sure that we are breaking down the barriers that tend to prevent African American students from having a global experience. The QEP became a deliberate strategy to include underrepresented groups, especially those who are on Pell grants, first-generation college students, as well as those who are in the STEM disciplines,” Togunde says.

According to the 2016 Open Doors report published by IIE, African Americans made up only 5.6 percent of U.S. college students who participated in education abroad programs in 2014–2015. At the same time, the National Center for Education Statistics’s (NCES) Digest of Education Statistics, 2015, reports African Americans make up 14 percent of the overall college population.

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During that same period, 20 percent of Spelman’s 2,100 students went abroad. Since the QEP was launched, the number of Spelman students going abroad has grown from 218 in 2011–2012 to 402 in 2015–2016, an overall increase of more than 80 percent.

Spelman has been able to boost its study abroad participation by increasing scholarship support, developing more exchange partnerships, and increasing the number of faculty-led programs abroad.

Creating a Culture of Study Abroad

The college has also attempted to foster a culture of study abroad that extends to students’ families. When Margery Ganz, PhD, director of study abroad and international exchange, arrived on campus in 1981, Spelman only sent two students abroad per year.

Part of her job has been reaching out to families about the benefits of global experiences. “Sometimes you have to work really hard to convince parents to give up their daughter for a semester. We have found that the majority of our parents don’t have passports, and they’re nervous about sending their daughters off,” Ganz explains.

Spelman has been actively promoting the message that study abroad is an integral part of the Spelman experience through first-year orientations that involve study abroad returnees who can speak to the benefits of their own global experience.

Spelman has also partnered with the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) to develop CIEE-Spelman Intercultural Engagement Programs, which allow 180 students to participate annually in two-week programs in six international cities. Participants also receive partial scholarships that help offset their travel costs.

Lizette Terry is a recent graduate who participated in a two-week CIEE program in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, as a first-year student.

“While in Santo Domingo, we studied everything from the culture, language, and history of the city, to the arts! Although the program was relatively shorter than many of the other study abroad programs, its short, but intense, nature kept us constantly engaged and immersed. We visited historic sugar mills in the north, and ports that once served as sites for major international trade,” says Terry.

She says that studying abroad early in her college career encouraged self-exploration, leading her to eventually switch her major to women’s studies with a concentration in visual studies: “It was because of my experience in the Dominican Republic that I was able to find my true passion for storytelling...International exposure at the onset of my Spelman journey also allowed me to understand and explore the true meanings of becoming a global citizen.”

Research Opportunities Abroad for STEM Majors

As one of the top minority-serving institutions awarding degrees in science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM), Spelman has also focused on creating opportunities for STEM majors. Students in these fields often face the additional challenge of curricular rigidity when deciding whether or not to study abroad.

The Enhancing Global Research and Education in STEM (G-STEM) program, which is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Education Title III program, provides funding for STEM students to do research abroad.

According to G-STEM director Kai McCormack, PhD, 105 students participated in the program between 2011 and 2017. Students are paired with faculty mentors who work with them in preparation for their time abroad. While students are abroad, they are in weekly contact with their faculty mentors. Spelman also funds travel for faculty who want to visit their mentees at their research sites.

McCormack says nearly half of the students who participate in G-STEM have continued to work or pursue graduate studies in the STEM fields, which is an important factor for receiving NSF funding. “It’s been exciting to not only develop international opportunities for them, but also help them really blend their passion for science and research into that same experience,” she says.

Measuring Students’ Intercultural Competence Through Learning Outcomes

An important aspect of the QEP has been measuring the growth of students’ intercultural competence. To do this, Spelman faculty identified two learning outcomes for study abroad participants: 1) identify differences and commonalities of two world societies; and 2) develop a personal definition of cultural engagement that reflects openness to cultural difference.

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All students going abroad must register for Study-Travel Seminar (STS 100), a one-credit orientation class. The two learning objectives are embedded into the coursework and aim to connect the curriculum with students’ international experiences. In addition to learning about their destinations, students become much more aware of their own culture and identity through pre- and postsurveys and reflection activities.

“We talk about how they enter another culture, given their own identities and our institutional identity as a historically black women’s college,” says Kathleen ­Phillip Lewis, PhD, history professor and director of cultural orientation.

Morgan Robinson, who recently graduated with a history degree, first studied abroad in the Netherlands. “During that course, we researched our destination in order to learn basic things about Amsterdam’s history, government, economy, and cultural norms. We also had the space to discuss our feelings and possible concerns about traveling abroad as black women and discuss ways to navigate any encounters and questions we may get while abroad,” says Robinson.

Students like Terry and Robinson are an example of the Gordon-Zeto Center’s success at achieving its mission to encourage Spelman women to engage the many cultures of the world. Terry, who will spend next year in Thailand teaching English, says her international experience has taught her to be a global leader.

“Those unique experiences in and outside of the classroom taught me how to be open-minded, a critical thinker, and how to see life through a new hue—which are all essential to establishing race relations in our global community. With a new perspective I was able to examine differences and similarities between [the] cultures of the African diaspora. Looking back as a graduating senior, all of these learned values and skills are what made me the fervent Spelman activist and leader I am today.”

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Spelman College

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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.

Nationality Rooms Connect Local and Global Communities

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.”

Creating a Campus Clearinghouse for Global Engagement

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).”

A Strategic Focus on Embracing the World

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.

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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.

Sending Students Abroad With Panther Programs

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.

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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.

Supporting International Students and Scholars

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.

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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.

International Programming and Cross-Cultural Leadership Through Global Ties

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.

Promoting International Scholarship Through Interdisciplinary Centers

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.

Recognizing Academic Excellence With International Certificate Programs

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.”

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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.”

Through its global initiatives and community outreach efforts, the University of Iowa (UI), well-known for its Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has excelled in recent years in welcoming the world to its campus in Iowa City. The campus, situated on the former grounds of Iowa’s first state capital, is integrated into the heart of downtown. The UI’s 33,000 students—4,300 of whom are international—make up nearly half the town’s population.

Situated in a central location on campus, the UI International Programs (IP) office serves as the hub for international activity. In addition to study abroad and international student and scholar services, IP also offers grants and funding support to faculty and students and provides a number of intercultural training opportunities.

Senior Leadership Pushes the Internationalization Agenda

Internationalization at the UI has been more than 20 years in the making, according to Downing Thomas, PhD, associate provost and dean of international programs. “If you look back 20 years, international activities at the university were largely a boutique operation for students in humanities and social sciences. It’s taken some time to gain momentum, but I think that now we’re seeing that the success and the true value of internationalization occurs when it is riveted to the core missions of the institution,” says Thomas, who also serves as the UI’s senior international officer.

Thomas’s position as dean was created in the late 1990s, when former university president Mary Sue Coleman, PhD, recognized that the institution needed senior leadership to advance its internationalization agenda.

Former provost Barry Butler, PhD, who left the UI in March 2017, adds that Coleman and then-provost John Whitmore, PhD, also provided funding to each college and asked them to come up with creative ways to internationalize the curriculum.

At the time, Butler, associate dean of engineering, used the seed funding to start the Virtual International Project program, which drew on emerging industry practices for working in remote teams. Engineering students were able to collaborate with peers abroad to work on international design projects. Since the initial partnership with Aix-Marseille University in France, the program has expanded to include Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Current president Bruce Harreld plans to continue building on the legacy of his predecessors. “Moving forward we hope to be more purposeful in designing an international experience specifically augmenting each student’s on-campus work and career interests,” he says.

Community Outreach As a Cornerstone of Campus Internationalization

A key feature of the UI’s internationalization efforts is its community outreach initiatives. IP currently has seven full-time staff that work exclusively with communications efforts.

“The UI strives to serve not only its students but all citizens of the state. We need to do all we can to share with fellow Iowans the groundbreaking research that happens on our campus and in collaboration with international partners,” says Joan Kjaer, director of communications and relations for International Programs.

International Programs’s signature event is the annual Provost’s Global Forum, which brings together experts from a variety of disciplines to discuss international and global issues.

Full-time faculty are invited to submit a proposal for an award of up to $20,000 to bring speakers to campus. The 2016 Global Forum included an artistic exhibition, a multidisciplinary academic conference, and an undergraduate course on the redefinition of the nation-state in the twenty-first century. The 2017 forum focused on women’s health and the environment.

“It’s an opportunity to focus on a specific issue or topic and have experts from around the country and around the world engaging with our faculty and students,” Thomas says.

Another initiative is WorldCanvass, a monthly radio, television, and Internet program that Kjaer describes as “International Programs’s largest public outreach initiative.” Programs are recorded before a live audience and distributed over television, YouTube, iTunes, radio, and the IP website.

“WorldCanvass conversations are focused on themes that are international in scope. They’re thoughtful, reflective, and inspiring, and we tape the live programs for multiplatform distribution. Interested audience members anywhere in Iowa or the world can enjoy them in the comfort of their home, their office, or their car. We want to reach people where they are and not be limited by time or place,” says Kjaer, who also hosts WorldCanvass.

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IP also works with outreach to local K–12 schools. Through the International Classroom Journey program, teachers can enhance students’ understanding of unfamiliar parts of the world by bringing international guests into the classroom to talk about their home countries. For more than 15 years, International Programs and the College of Education have also partnered to present the Teacher’s Institute on Global Education with the goal of helping K–12 educators from around Iowa integrate global perspectives into their classrooms.

Exploring the World Through Writing

Another major outreach effort is the International Writing Program. Since 1967, more than 1,400 writers from more than 150 countries have been in residence at the University of Iowa through its International Writing Program (IWP). The IWP hosts 30–35 well-known authors, poets, and novelists every fall for a three-month residency. Notable alumni include Nobel literature laureates Mo Yan from China and Orhan Pamuk from Turkey.

The IWP, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2017, was founded during the Cold War with the goal of bringing together writers from around the world. “It was a place where writers from the Soviet Bloc could meet writers from the west and have free and frank exchanges of ideas,” says Christopher Merrill, IWP director.

Merrill says that since 9/11, there has been a shift at IWP toward a focus on the Islamic world. Because the majority of the IWP’s funding has come from the U.S. State Department and various embassies, much of the program is focused on public diplomacy and cultural exchange.

“After 9/11, we’ve been involved in conversations about the ways in which cultural diplomacy can be a part of the larger diplomatic strategy. And so we started to think of cultural diplomacy as a two-way exchange,” Merrill adds.

As a result, IWP has also started taking groups of U.S. students abroad, hosting symposia in countries such as Greece and Morocco.

To reach an even wider international audience, IWP eventually developed a robust distance-learning program. Since 2012, it has offered more than 30 distinct MOOCs, courses, exchanges, and events on different topics related to fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays. In addition, IWP runs a two-week summer writing program at the University of Iowa for young writers, ages 16-19, with workshops taught in English, Arabic, and Russian.

The IWP led the charge in gaining Iowa City’s designation as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) City of Literature in 2008. As a UNESCO City of Literature, Iowa City also has an obligation to mentor aspiring cities. Merrill subsequently worked with the Iraqi deputy minister of culture to help Baghdad become a City of Literature in 2015. The connection to Baghdad came out of the connections to the Iraqi literary community made possible through the IWP.

“We like to think we’re helping to jump-start a conversation about world literature,” says Merrill.

UI Creates a Welcoming Atmosphere for International Students

According to the UI, its international student population has nearly doubled over the last 10 years, from around 2,200 in 2006 to 4,300 in 2016. Most of the growth has occurred at the undergraduate level. The top three countries represented on the UI campus are China, India, and South Korea.

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To accommodate the growth, International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) has implemented several programs to support its international population and to promote their integration into life on the UI campus in addition to its standard immigration advising.

One of the initial initiatives in 2008 was the creation of the International Student Committee, which was tasked with auditing existing services and programming for international students to ensure that adequate infrastructure was in place. The committee’s goals have subsequently expanded.

“It drives resources from all units across campus, from housing, public safety, counseling, the registrar’s office, and the colleges to try and make sure that [international students] have the best student experience they can,” says Doug Lee, assistant provost of international programs.

ISSS also runs a number of intercultural programs targeting the wider campus community. The Bridging Domestic and Global Diversity certificate is a leadership program designed to educate students to adapt to cultural differences. Approximately 25 domestic and international students participate in diversity and intercultural training every spring semester. Participants also plan the Bridge Open Forum, an intercultural event to educate the campus about intercultural issues.

The Building Our Global Community certificate is a professional development program that helps UI faculty and staff support international students and scholars. To earn the certificate, participants attend a series of sessions on topics such as helping international students with the cultural adjustment process and the basics of F-1 and J-1 immigration regulations.

The UI also offers individual and group mental health counseling services in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Students first learn about the University Counseling Service (UCS) at their orientation, when one of the doctors presents about mental health and available counseling services.

“In efforts to meet the needs of students having mental health concerns, the UCS acknowledges that communicating about emotions, insight, and internal conflicts can be highly culturally based and varies greatly due to the construction of how we think about ourselves based on variances within language. As such, the UCS desires to remove as many barriers as possible by providing opportunities for students to communicate in the language that best represents their experience within UCS resource limits,” says UCS director Barry A. Schreier, PhD.

According to Lee Seedorff, ISSS senior associate director, support for using mental health services comes from the students. For example, a group of Chinese students interested in mental health has started a student organization called Heart Workshop, which helps other Chinese students become aware of the support available. Another group is Active Minds, which focuses on mental health awareness and support for both international and domestic students.

In the last few years, the UI has also used technology to reach out to prospective students and parents. According to Lee, it holds welcome sessions in Beijing and Shanghai for incoming Chinese students. To reach students from other countries, they are also creating orientation webinars that students can watch from anywhere in the world. They have also started broadcasting graduations online in Arabic, Korean, Mandarin, Farsi, and Spanish for families who are unable to travel to Iowa City for the ceremony.

The Tippie College of Business, one of the most internationalized schools on campus, has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate international students into life at UI. Around 15 percent of its undergraduates are international, compared with 10 percent on the campus as a whole. To support its large international population, Tippie has created opportunities outside of the classroom such as an international buddy program, which pairs domestic and international students and is open to students from across the campus.

Comprehensive Support for Education and Research Opportunities Abroad

According to the 2016 Open Doors report, the UI ranks in the top 50 U.S. institutions for study abroad, with 21 percent of all undergraduates going abroad. The UI also has several initiatives that create education abroad opportunities for underrepresented students. The total minority undergraduate population is 14 percent, and 16 percent of all undergraduate study abroad participants were students of color in the 2015–2016 academic year.

There are a number of awards available, including a $500 scholarship for traditionally underrepresented populations, such as first-generation students, students of color, LGBT students, and students with disabilities, to help finance study and research opportunities abroad.

IP also recently collaborated with the UI Center for Diversity Enrichment to host the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Passport Caravan. IP and CIEE sponsored passports for 116 first-generation students and students of color who were first-time passport holders.

International Programs also receives support from the Stanley-University of Iowa Foundation Support Organization (SUIFSO) to fund research projects abroad. Both undergraduate and graduate students, including students who are not U.S. citizens, can apply for international research grants.

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In the past five years, 100 graduate students received a total of $250,000, and 26 undergraduates received a total of $59,000 to conduct international research.

“Every year we have a pool of money for students to do preliminary research, or a creative project. They must be abroad for a month and these are a wonderful starting point to apply for a Fulbright,” says Karen Wachsmuth, PhD, associate director for international fellowships and Fulbright adviser.

The UI has been recognized as a top producer of Fulbright awardees for the last two years. In the 2016–2017 academic year, 15 UI students were awarded grants to conduct research or serve as English teaching assistants abroad.

Wachsmuth sees her outreach and recruitment for Fulbright as a springboard to start more general conversations about opportunities abroad, especially early in a student’s academic career. “There are a lot of different programs going on to start conversations, and fellowships are a part of that because they also encourage students to put together their language training or just things that they’ve learned in their coursework and to apply it to an arena that eventually helps them develop their professional goals,” she says.

“The biggest compliment that I get from students is ‘Even if I don’t get this grant, I’ve learned so much about myself and about where I want to go from doing this,’” Wachsmuth says.

Douglas Baker, who graduated in 2015 with degrees in music and Japanese, spent a year in Japan as a Fulbright fellow. He was able to combine his two majors to investigate the work of a nineteenth-century Japanese composer.

He says that the UI’s position as a research institution gave him the resources he needed to prepare his proposal. “The university has many qualified people, from professors to librarians, who know the ins and outs of creating projects or grant writing or conducting research. Karen [Wachsmuth] and International Programs also provide so much assistance in the application process in terms of information sessions, writing workshops, [and] draft writing get-togethers,” he says.

UI Runs Largest U.S. Study Abroad Program to India

The UI’s single largest study abroad program is the India Winterim, an intensive, three-week field-based program held every January. Due to the program’s overwhelming popularity, no other U.S. college or university in the United States sends more students to India. In 2016–2017, 85 students participated in five different courses.

The program is the brainchild of founder Rangaswamy “Raj” Rajagopal, PhD, also a professor of geographical and sustainability sciences. Rajagopal started the program in 2006 and has subsequently sent more than 1,100 students and 60 faculty members to India.

Students are placed at nonprofits and academic institutions through a variety of faculty-led courses in various disciplines, ranging from engineering to art history. Courses have addressed issues such as water poverty, craft traditions, sustainable development, education, and nonprofit management. Students work with Indian partner organizations to learn about their approaches to addressing social issues.

Janice Cousins is a premed and psychology major who traveled to Kerala in South India this past winter break. She took a course titled Pain, Palliative Medicine, and Hospice Care: Learning from Each Other led by a faculty member from the school of medicine. She learned about end-of-life care in India by working with a physician who founded a community-based palliative care program.

“He started this program for people who cannot afford medicine and aren’t getting the correct care. He was really passionate in teaching us about palliative medicine, which considers everything about the disease, including the mental and spiritual aspects. This completely expanded my perspective on medicine. The things I learned in India, I’m not going to learn in medical school here,” Cousins says.

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Rajogopal spent six months working with the Indian physician to develop the palliative care course. He says that cultural comparison is one of the key aspects of the program. In the United States, hospice care in an institutional setting is most common, whereas in India, end-of-life care is provided in the patient’s home.

“The lesson learned is that there is no single right model of living life. What we are trying to teach is that America doesn’t necessarily know best. There are different models of evolution, culture, and history,” he says.

Rajagopal says that many students, like Cousins, have come back from India with a desire to go to medical school after participating in courses related to health care.

“All of these kids come back, and they’re renewed. They’re totally fearless. You see people living in extraordinary conditions and doing all these kind of things, and it changes you forever,” he adds.

With more than 30,000 students enrolled at its campus in Southern California, including 3,500 international students from more than 110 countries, Santa Monica College (SMC) is one of the most diverse associate’s institutions in the United States. Domestic and international students alike benefit from the college’s Global Citizenship Initiative, which provides a variety of international education opportunities across the SMC campus.

Launched by former college president Chui Tsang, PhD, in 2007, the initiative is a four-pronged strategy that promotes campus internationalization through study abroad, staff and faculty professional development, curriculum development, and international student services. Over the last decade, the initiative has led to the development of several faculty-led programs, an undergraduate research symposium, faculty and staff trips abroad, and a global citizenship requirement for all SMC associate’s degrees.

Global Citizenship Becomes an Institutional Mandate

Dean of International Education Kelley Brayton, who joined SMC in 2008, co-chairs the Global Citizenship Committee with a faculty leader. According to Brayton, “internationalization became a mandate for the institution” under Tsang’s leadership.

The college then convened a task force comprised of faculty and administrators to govern the initiative and to figure out how to make it sustainable beyond the initial funding period. In 2008 the SMC board of trustees adopted the initiative as a strategic priority and committed $200,000 a year for a three-year period. The task force eventually became a permanent standing committee, known as the Global Council, in the faculty senate.

Brayton says the program has been successful due to the support of senior administration, as well as the large amount of financial and human resources dedicated to the initiative. “I have never been at an institution where [internationalization] has had this level of support,” she says.

SMC has continued to provide funding for global citizenship activities, including earmarking $75,000 a year for study abroad scholarships. The college has also successfully pursued two Title VIA grants, which provide federal funding for foreign language, area, and international studies infrastructure-building at U.S. higher education institutions.

Kathryn E. Jeffery, PhD, who became president in 2016, remains committed to the initiative, even in the wake of a state budget crisis. “We are being very guarded around making sure that we continue to support the Global Citizenship Initiative to create opportunities for students. We don’t want that to fall off of the list of priorities,” she says.

Defining Global Citizenship

One of the first steps toward implementing the initiative was defining what “global citizenship” meant for SMC. “Dr. Tsang empowered the campus. He set the direction, but he left it up to us to figure out what exactly global citizenship would look like,” says Gordon Dossett, English professor and one of the original co-chairs of the global citizenship task force.

“Dr. Tsang saw the bigger picture and helped us realize that this was something we could work on as a faculty,” adds Janet Harclerode, chair of the English as a Second Language (ESL) department.

In 2008 SMC adopted its formal definition of global citizenship: “To be a global citizen, one is knowledgeable of peoples, customs and cultures in regions of the world beyond one’s own; understands the interdependence that holds both promise and peril for the future of the global community; and is committed to combining one’s learning with a dedication to foster a livable, sustainable world.”

According to Vice President of Academic Affairs Georgia Lorenz, PhD, the process of defining “global citizenship” eventually led to the adoption of global citizenship as an institutional learning outcome, which has had important implications for accreditation. “For something to become an institutional learning outcome is really significant. At the course and program levels, faculty will map their course outcomes to the competencies related to the institutional learning outcome” she explains.

Faculty-Led Programs Revitalize Study Abroad

When Santa Monica College student Ariana Kirsey traveled to South Africa last year, she couldn’t have imagined that sleeping in a tree house in Kruger National Park would be life changing.

Kirsey is one of 25 students who studied abroad through SMC’s faculty-led program to South Africa in January 2017. In addition to South Africa, SMC also runs annual trips to Belize and Guatemala through its Latin America Education program.

Each year, SMC sends more than 80 students abroad through its various study abroad programs, which range from one-week courses over spring break to six-week courses that are offered during winter or summer sessions.

Although SMC has offered study abroad programs since the 1980s, with the Global Citizenship Initiative the college made a conscious effort to switch from third-party providers to developing faculty-led programs that also allow SMC professors an opportunity to travel.

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Every year the college puts out a call for proposals to recruit faculty who are interested in leading trips abroad. Two professors travel with the students on each trip, and both part-time and full-time faculty are eligible to participate.

“We try to have a full-time lead faculty and then have a second faculty who may not have led study abroad before. They colead the first year, and then the second year the idea is that they would take on the lead. We wanted to rotate it so it wasn’t just a select few who could do it,” Brayton says.

SMC also offers a one-credit course, Field Studies Abroad, which launched in 2016. The program was developed specifically to target students who might not be able to travel for longer periods of time. Students travel with a faculty member for seven to 10 days over spring break.

The college approved a one-credit class called Global Studies 35 that can be customized depending on the destination. Brayton says that Field Studies courses have created opportunities for students and faculty alike because of their shorter duration.

Art history major Megan Dobbs says the Field Studies model was quite convenient in terms of time and affordability. She traveled to Denmark in March 2017 as part of a course titled Vikings, Socialism, and Sustainability: Copenhagen Past and Present.

“The trip took me out of my personal bubble and reminded me to think of the world on a much grander scale. This trip continues to remind me that I need to make an effort to step out of my comfort zone and have new experiences,” says Dobbs, who transferred to the University of California-Berkeley in fall 2017.

The college also strives to keep its study abroad programs affordable. “We really work hard on creating very low-cost study abroad. We have become an informal travel agent here at SMC and we work with in-country vendors,” Brayton explains.

The college provides $75,000 in study abroad scholarships every year, and more than half of all students going abroad receive $500 to $2,000 based on need. Many students are first-generation college students, and more than half of SMC’s study abroad participants are minorities. In addition, they are seeing an increased number of international students joining faculty-led programs.

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“A lot of our students have never left LA before. Study abroad is an experience that can really shift their perspectives on what it means to be a global citizen,” says Associate Dean of Student Life Nancy Grass, PhD, who led students to South Africa in 2008 and 2012.

Comprehensive Support for International Students

For the last five years, Santa Monica College has had the second largest international student population of any community college in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors data. SMC attracts students from around the world largely because of its reputation as a top transfer school.

While some students pursue shorter academic certificates, the majority of its 3,500 international students seek admission to nearby four-year institutions such as the various campuses of the University of California (UC). International students receive academic and immigration advising, among other support services, through the International Education Center and the International Education Counseling Center.

Omar Bishr, an economics major from Egypt, plans to transfer to the University of California. “From the moment I applied, the international office responded to all of my concerns. When I came to SMC, I felt like I was really welcomed to the school and that my presence matters. I really liked that I was given a presentation by counselors explaining to me the system of the college and how to choose my classes in order to transfer,” he says.

One initiative that seeks to promote interaction between international and domestic students is a language and culture exchange program run jointly between the modern languages and ESL departments. International students are paired with domestic students studying their language.

“We create an online forum for them and have an orientation. They can meet on that day, but if they don’t then they can go into the forum and introduce themselves and find people for language exchange online,” says Liz Koening, an ESL faculty member.

Approximately 130 students participate per semester. Music major Nahalia Samuels says she took part in order to practice her language skills with a native speaker.

“For me, having a language partner for Korean 1 and Korean 2 made all the difference in my reading, writing and speaking skills. I also wished to learn more about the...culture of the language I’m studying and to offer help as a native English speaker towards my ESL partner. I feel the program helps foreign students to connect with the campus community and expose us domestic students to a seemingly hidden population on campus,” she says.

Professional Development Helps Internationalize the Curriculum

Early on, SMC recognized that it was necessary to internationalize the faculty in order to reach the long-term goal of campus internationalization, especially in the classroom. The Global Citizenship Initiative thus led to the creation of a number of professional development opportunities abroad for faculty and staff.

In 2007, the first group of SMC faculty and staff traveled to Austria to attend the Salzburg Global Seminar, where they learned about topics such as intercultural communication and social justice. Other cohorts have subsequently visited the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies in China and Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey, with the last group traveling in 2015. Over the past 10 years, more than 125 SMC faculty and staff participated in the professional development programs to Austria, China, and Turkey.

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Peggy Kravitz, international education counselor, traveled to Austria, China, and Turkey. “It was a fabulous way to learn about those cultures, which of course I deal with in my work with international students,” she says.

Grass, who traveled to China, adds that one of the greatest benefits of the programs is the fact it was open to all full-time employees on campus.

“It wasn’t just faculty or administrators who could go, but technicians and custodians could apply as well. They really took a cross-section of the college that allowed for people to really get to know each other in a whole new way,” she says.

Brayton says the idea was to help staff who are often on the front line of student services gain a greater appreciation for the international student experience at SMC. “Classified staff are the ones who have a lot of casual interactions with students every day. The more they understand some of the challenges of being abroad, the more they that can connect with our international student population,” she says.

Upon their return to campus, faculty members must develop modules for their courses, and staff are to participate in international activities on campus, such as International Education Week.

In addition to the trips abroad, faculty can apply for a number of Global Grants ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 that fund projects and events, such as speakers, film screenings, and field trips, throughout the year. Harclerode, for example, received a Global Grant to take her ESL classes to various sites around Los Angeles, including the Watts Towers and the Los Angeles River. “The idea was to take them to the parts of LA they might not get to on their own,” she says.

Promoting Global Citizenship Through Student Research

To weave the idea of global citizenship into the fabric of campus life, SMC chooses a theme for each academic year and encourages faculty to develop related course modules. The current theme—“Gender Equity: Is Equity Enough?”—has been running for two years. In 2017–2018, the campus is exploring the topic of “Promise and Peril of a Global Community.” Previous years’ themes have included water, food, poverty and wealth, and peace and security.

The campus also holds an annual research symposium, where students are invited to submit and present academic and creative projects related to the annual academic theme.

Grass, who chaired the first symposium in 2010, says the idea for a campuswide research symposium emerged from the need to better prepare students to transfer to four-year universities: “When students come from the community college, even if they are really well prepared academically, they’re not ready to jump into junior-level research projects. Having the symposium encouraged faculty to have students do original research around this idea of global citizenship.”

“When we put out the call for proposals, it allows students to put forward what global citizenship means to them in the context of their education,” adds Delphine Broccard, communications professor and current symposium chair. “We can really discuss what global citizenship means in the different disciplines.”

Students submit proposals for projects ranging from short films, persuasive speeches, and photography to responses to study abroad experiences and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) research. Students can win cash prizes for the best entries in different categories. In 2016, Kenta Tanaka, an international student from Japan, won the President’s Award and $500 for a design project that explored the theme of gender equity in fashion. “I mixed menswear and womenswear. In fashion, we call it gender blur,” he says.

Global Citizenship Spans the Curriculum

SMC has used funding from one of its two Title VIA grants to develop a global studies major. Global studies at Santa Monica is an interdisciplinary program designed to increase students’ knowledge and understanding of the processes of globalization and their impacts on societies, cultures, and environments around the world. Coursework includes world geography, international political economy, experiential learning, and foreign language.

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The Global Citizenship Initiative has also given impetus to the development of a global citizenship degree requirement for all students receiving an associate’s degree. Students can meet the requirement either by studying abroad or taking an approved global citizenship course.

“The reality is that not a lot of students can participate in study abroad. But where students are going to be the most impacted by global learning is in the classroom. Infusing global perspectives into the general education curriculum is where we can reach a lot of students. Hopefully, that exposure highlights some of the international opportunities for them, not just here at Santa Monica but beyond,” Brayton says.

Florida State University’s (FSU) Global and Multicultural Building, home of the Center for Global Engagement (CGE), is the on-campus embodiment of FSU’s more than 60-year commitment to international education. Bringing together academic and student affairs, the center serves as a hub for international and multicultural programming for all FSU students.

A Campus Home for International Programming

“I think the students named it the Globe the minute they moved in. They really embraced it as a home for themselves,” says Mary Coburn, EdD, vice president for student affairs.

Coburn facilitated the construction of the Globe, which opened in 2010, through state funding earmarked for student services facilities. “I think having a physical home really elevated everything that we were doing. From the Friday coffee hours and the Global Cafés to all of the lectures and student meetings that are hosted there, it just sends a message to our campus that internationalization is important,” she says.

CGE’s predecessor was known as the International Center, which primarily focused on immigration advising for international students. The construction of the Globe marked a campuswide shift in the visibility of intercultural and international programming, ­according to Cindy Green, EdD, director of the Center of Global Engagement.

Green was able to work with the Globe’s architect to customize the building’s design, which includes classrooms, a meditation room, an auditorium, and a ­commercial kitchen.

Four times a semester, student organizations sign up to cook cuisine from a featured country in the kitchen through the Global Café. The student groups are able to fundraise at $7 a plate. The Global Café has been an accessible way to increase awareness and appreciation of the cultural diversity at FSU.

“Food is often the first way we are exposed to other cultures. Not only can students from other countries keep their traditions while they’re here, they can introduce their friends and the rest of the university to those traditions,” Coburn says.

Growing Support for Internationalization

Joining FSU in 2004, Green has witnessed growing support for internationalization across campus over the last decade. While there have always been pockets of international activity, comprehensive internationalization has faced challenges at FSU due to its decentralized structure as a public research university.

CGE’s portfolio currently includes international student and scholar services, a cocurricular certificate, international partnerships and direct exchanges, programs for non-degree-seeking international students, and international programming such as the Global Café.

Other units on campus, such as International Programs (IP) and the Center for Intensive English Studies (CIES), have also contributed to FSU’s internationalization efforts. IP oversees for-credit study abroad, while CIES offers intensive English language classes, a certificate in teaching English as a second language, English training for international teaching assistants, and accelerated language courses for incoming graduate students.

“The FSU campus provides so many opportunities for all of our students to be actively engaged with students from over 130 different countries as well as to take classes with an international focus. We offer a variety of international experiences, from short-term intercultural exchanges to year-long study abroad programs for those students that wish to engage internationally,” says FSU President John Thrasher.

Internationalization was included in FSU’s strategic plan for the first time in 2017 under the larger rubric of academic excellence, with the aim of “expanding [FSU’s] global footprint and fostering a culturally rich learning environment on campus.”

“We really pushed to make sure that internationalization was in the plan moving forward. Making sure that internationalization is part of the experience that all of our students have is an important part of academic excellence,” says Provost Sally E. McRorie, PhD.

Assistant Provost Joe O’Shea sees internationalization as one of the institution’s student success initiatives: “We know international education is a high-impact practice, which helps our students launch successfully from the university into graduate education or a career.”

Promoting International Graduate Student Recruitment

Part of the academic excellence priority also focuses on enhancing the quality of graduate education to become a leader in strategically important areas of research. This includes providing financial support to attract the best graduate students.

Associate Provost Bruce Locke says that the ­strategic plan has given FSU impetus to develop initiatives focused on international graduate student recruitment. FSU’s 1,500 international graduate students currently make up more than 75 percent of its international student population.

“One of our goals [as a university] is to become a top-25 public institution. In order to do that we have to really grow our graduate programs, which includes seeking out and recruiting talented international students,” Green says.

Green and Locke collaborated to develop a “3+1+1” program as a graduate recruitment pipeline. Students from 28 partners in China, India, and Thailand can enroll for two semesters at FSU as non-degree-seeking undergraduate students and then transfer their credits back to their home institutions to complete their bachelor’s degree.

Some of the upper-division credits they take will then count toward FSU master’s programs. Known as the Special Academic Program (SAP), the initiative helps better prepare participants for graduate school at FSU as well as other institutions in the United States. It also allows FSU faculty to identify highly qualified candidates for graduate programs. The majority of participants remain at FSU, with some even continuing into PhD programs.

“It’s been really great because the students have a full year to acclimate to the campus,  and faculty members can take a really close look at their work and their competence in English and can give [participants] extra assistance if they need it,” says Jocelyn Vaughn, PhD, program director for FSU international initiatives.

SAP participants pay a program fee that covers their tuition, room and board, and support services provided by CGE. The program was piloted in chemical engineering, and has subsequently expanded to other engineering disciplines as well as finance, marketing, communication, and public administration.

Yun Chen is a Chinese student who graduated from her home university in June 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in public administration. She spent her senior year at FSU as part of the SAP and will be able to transfer 12 credits into her FSU graduate program in public administration in fall 2017.

“The program staff gave us a lot of helpful suggestions and guidance about how to apply for our master’s program. When I was applying for my MPA program, [the director] not only provided a letter of recommendation but also contacted the admissions office to make sure my application was in process,” she says.

Nondegree Programs Increase Diversity and Promote Opportunities Abroad

Creating opportunities for non-degree-seeking students through SAP, as well as direct exchanges and other short-term programs, has also helped increase the diversity of FSU’s international population. CGE currently serves approximately 380 degree-seeking international undergraduates, the majority of whom are student athletes or transfer students from FSU’s branch campus in Panama.

FSU’s international undergraduates are relatively few due to its role as a state institution. Unlike many of its peer institutions in other states, FSU has not needed to pursue international undergraduate recruitment.

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“FSU’s mission is to serve the people of the state of Florida. We have around 42,000 applications for a freshman class of 6,400 for the 2017–2018 academic year. There are plenty of domestic students to fill the slots,” says Green.

Vaughn has instead focused on expanding the number of bilateral exchange programs, especially those that are open to students from any academic discipline. This allows domestic students to study abroad while paying in-state tuition, and enables FSU to bring in more international undergraduates.

“We’ve been trying to increase the number of university-wide exchanges, rather than department to department. We’re doing these in order to give opportunities to students who haven’t been served before by exchanges, in particular those in STEM,” Vaughn says.

For students who are unable to participate in a full-semester exchange, CGE has also developed a cultural exchange program, Beyond Borders. The program sends 12 students to Jamaica over spring break and 10 students to Germany in the summer. In addition to enrolling in a one-credit applied global experience class, participants also host international students from the two countries.

Casey Johnson, an FSU alumni who graduated in 2016 with a degree in biology, participated in Beyond Borders to Jamaica as a junior transfer student and to Germany as a senior. “I really didn’t have the intention of being this world traveler, but somehow it just fit with the timeline of my life at FSU. I know for a fact I would not be where I am now today had it not been for those experiences,” he says.

Johnson is currently studying for a master’s in radiation biology on a full scholarship to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “During my interview for Oxford, the main talking point was my international experiences and what I took away from them. I could really tell that the interview committee aligned with my desire to immerse myself in diversity and different cultures,” he explains.

Another short-term program serving international undergraduates is a summer program in hospitality management and intercultural communication. ­Students from partner institutions in Korea, Japan, Macau, Mexico, and Canada combine academic classes with an internship (academic training) at Walt Disney World® Resort. After participating in a 10-day intensive academic program on the FSU campus in Tallahassee, students complete a six-month internship at Disney in Orlando while taking classes with FSU professors, both online and face-to-face.

International Experiences for Domestic Students Through Service Abroad

Other units on campus, such as the Center for Leadership & Social Change and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement (CRE), also offer nontraditional opportunities for students to go abroad.

One of CRE’s flagship programs is Global Scholars, which places approximately 40 students in summer internships at nonprofits in Asia, South America, and Africa. Students participate in predeparture training and must complete a capstone research project on an issue facing the overseas community after completing their internship.

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Valeria Rigobon, a junior psychology major, spent the summer of 2016 working at an educational nonprofit in Lima, Peru. “I actually learned a little about this program at my orientation, before my first fall semester even started. I found it interesting because it didn’t seem like the standard study abroad experience. I was also looking for ways to continue my volunteer work that I had been very involved in throughout middle and high school...It didn’t hurt that I might have the opportunity to go somewhere I could improve my Spanish as well!” she says.

While in Peru, Rigobon worked as a music teacher, tutor, and leadership workshop facilitator. She says the Global Scholars program thoroughly prepared her: “[The program] prepares the students so well for what they will face and accomplish once they’re abroad. We are prepared to represent not only FSU, but the United States, when we go abroad.”

O’Shea says the Global Scholars program has been especially successful at creating opportunities for first-generation and low-income students. “We have made great strides through the Global Scholars program in opening up access, developing a model that is sustainable and accessible, but also works through peer support networks, and in other ways to help students overcome the barriers that they face so that they can successfully undertake a very transformative international education experience,” he says.

CRE also runs the FSU Gap Year Fellows program. Admitted freshmen are able to apply for the program and, if accepted, defer their admission for a year. A gap year—which might be spent traveling, volunteering, interning, or working—involves a break in formal education where students focus on cultivating self-awareness and exploring different career options. FSU provides up to $5,000 of support to GAP Year Fellows, who must have a substantial service element in their proposed gap year.

“We are the second public university in the United States to provide a deferment of matriculation and also to subsidize that. We think of this as a student success intervention. The data that we have in the U.S. and from overseas is that if you have a structured educational bridge year, you are more likely to succeed in college and have not only higher retention rates, but also to have higher academic performance,” O’Shea explains.

Developing a Certificate for Global Citizenship

One of the ways in which FSU attempted to streamline its various opportunities for international experience is through its academic and cocurricular Global Citizenship Certificate, run through the Center for Global Engagement. Opportunities such as Beyond Borders and the Global Scholars program fulfill one of the certificate’s main requirements, a sustained international experience. Students can also meet the requirement by completing at least 75 hours of an intercultural experience within the United States.

All students must also attend and submit reflections on at least eight intercultural events and take a pre- and postassessment of intercultural competence. In addition, students must enroll in two required classes, which include a capstone project, and take two approved electives with a cross-cultural theme.

Rayne Neunie, who finished her studies at FSU in family and child science in May 2017, was a Global Scholar who recently completed her Global Citizenship certificate. “The certificate allowed me to gain a better understanding of cross-cultural differences around the world, I learned a plethora about global issues affecting various societies, and I also engaged in a number of intercultural events that I never before knew existed on Florida State’s campus,” she says.

As a Global Scholar, she spent two months working on a maternal health project at a nonprofit in Kenya, which fulfilled her requirement for a sustained international experience. Neunie also received a Boren scholarship to study Swahili in Tanzania in summer and fall 2017.

“This experience deepened my passion for global health, influenced me to participate in FSU’s Global Citizenship certificate, and has made me confident to expand my global capacity by becoming a Boren scholarship recipient. Florida State University has taught me that my journey of achieving intercultural competence does not end here,” Neunie explains.

Sending Students Abroad to Overseas Study Centers

FSU is ranked 12th on the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) list of “Top 25 Institutions Awarding Credit for Study Abroad,” with 2,262 students studying abroad in 2014–2015. Approximately 25 percent of FSU’s undergraduates study abroad, according to the director of international programs, Jim Pitts.

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Much of FSU’s impressive study abroad figures are due to FSU’s large footprint abroad. Starting with a branch campus in Panama in 1957, FSU now has three additional study centers in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain. The Panama campus also hosts FSU faculty-led study abroad programs.

FSU-Panama offers bachelor’s degrees in subjects such as computer science and international affairs, but the majority of its students complete an associate’s degree and transfer to the main campus in Tallahassee. Approximately 100 students transfer from Panama every year.

“The Panama campus really serves as a hub for our outreach in Latin America. We have students from many different countries of the Latin American region that start their program with us in Panama,” Pitts says.

Students who are citizens of a Latin American or Caribbean country enrolled at FSU-Panama are also eligible for a scholarship program that allows them to pay in-state tuition for the last two years of their studies. FSU-Panama also maintains research affiliations with local universities, including Universidad de Panamá, Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, and Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua.

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Students can also participate in the First Year Abroad program, which allows freshmen to spend their first year at one or more of the four sites and complete general education requirements. “At the completion of the 12 months, they can have in-state tuition in Florida for the balance of their undergraduate degree,” Pitts says.

Recent graduate Lauren Romanzak, who majored in English literature and international affairs, spent her first academic year in London followed by a summer in Valencia.

“The opportunity to spend a year abroad was enough to sell me on the program, and the in-state tuition waiver to follow was enough to convince my accountant father,” she says.

“I’m thankful I got the opportunity to study abroad so early in my college career because it directed the remainder of it. Coming from a small town had not exposed me to much diversity, and studying in as huge of a global city as London, learning another language in Valencia, and traveling independently throughout Europe (and even Africa!) definitely changed that.”

In the state that fired the first shot in the property tax revolt with Proposition 13 more than a quarter- century ago, what are the odds that voters in the South Bay of Los Angeles would approve a $394 million bond issue for their community college? 

The odds might be long, but by a margin of 62–38, some 110,000 voters in this ethnically and economically diverse area of southern California did just that in November 2002 by passing “Measure E,” a capital improvement bond, for El Camino College. El Camino is an ambitious institution serving nine cities: El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Lawndale, Hawthorne, Lennox, and Inglewood. It opened its doors in 1947 as El Camino Junior College, with 450 students attending classes in nine renovated barracks from Santa Ana Army Air Base. Today 25,000 students are enrolled on the campus, which offers 2,500 classes in 85 programs and boasts a 12,500-seat football stadium.

Painstaking Pursuit of Grant Funding

El Camino is also a standout in international education, enrolling nearly 700 students from other countries and sending more than 100 each summer to study in England, France, China, and New Zealand. Thanks to an aggressive pursuit of federal grants and exchange opportunities and a spirit of inquisitiveness among its faculty, El Camino College in the past five years has gotten involved in exchanges that took its faculty to Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Lebanon. It was one of two community colleges chosen to participate in the State Department–sponsored Global Experience Through Technology (GETT) initiative that links classrooms in Europe and the Middle East with campuses in the United States. 

“There was a time probably when some folks here thought, ‘Well, why are we doing this? We have the general education curriculum to address,’” said Gloria E. Miranda, the dean of Behavioral and Social Sciences and a historian on family life in Spanish and Mexican California. “But with the world today, and with the tragic series of events in the last several years, we really need to understand the multicultural world we live in. And since much of the world migrates to the United States, we must understand the people who come to this country, as well.”

Bozena (Bo) Morton, acting director of the Center for International Education and a prolific grant writer, said, “With international grants, we’ve been extremely lucky. We got almost everything we applied for with one exception.” The Polish-born Morton immigrated to the United States after a decade living in then-Czechoslovakia and teaching English at University of Silesia in Cieszyn, just over the border in Poland. 

The lives and careers of several El Camino faculty have taken remarkable international turns thanks to Morton’s uncanny grantswomanship, none more so than that of Antoinette Phillips, a professor of childhood education. 

Alumna Leads Child Development Programs Abroad

Phillips is an El Camino success story. She earned her associate’s degree in 1976, then joined the faculty after completing a master’s degree in childhood education. “I was one of those late bloomers. I didn’t go to college until my children started school. I lived right down the street and rode my bike so I didn’t have to worry about parking,” she said. She excelled in the classroom, but was astonished one day when a mentor told her, “You know, you could do this. You could be a professor.”

Phillips volunteered to go to Ukraine for three months in 2001 to teach child development and American instructional techniques to Ukrainian professors and their students. El Camino had secured an $180,000 three-year grant under a State Department program that links U.S. colleges with universities in the newly independent states of East Europe. El Camino’s partner was Dniepropetrovsk National University (DNU) in Dniepropetrovsk, a city of 1 million people on the Dniepro River that was closed for military research during the Soviet era.

“At a faculty meeting Bo asked, ‘Who would like to go to Ukraine?’ and I raised my hand. That’s how it all started,” said Phillips.

While their project partners in DNU’s Educational Psychology Department spoke fluent English, most of the students and many of the professors with whom Phillips interacted in other places did not. She relied on students and the project’s co-director, Tatyana Vvedenska, to translate for her. Vvedenska, a dynamic English professor at DNU, wound up teaching ESL classes at El Camino on a faculty exchange in Spring 2004.

The polyglot Morton calls Phillips “the bravest person” for taking on the assignment. Her dean, Gloria Miranda, accompanied Phillips to Ukraine, but she returned shortly afterwards. “I was there by my lonesome for three months until Bo came over for the last two weeks,” said Phillips. In dozens of classrooms and academies, she demonstrated how classes could be taught in more creative ways than relying solely on lectures.

 “I had to have an interpreter all the time. That was a little uncomfortable, because it takes away some of my spontaneity—I had to wait after each sentence for it to be translated—but we managed,” she said. “I visited a lot of schools from preschool up to universities, went to academies, and spoke to a lot of different classes about the American way of life and American education.”

She’d return to her apartment after a day of classes, and using a dial-up connection, teach two education classes online to her students back in California, sharing with them glimpses of life in Ukraine’s third largest city.

Apart from one trip to England, Phillips had not previously traveled outside North America. “It was such a transforming experience for her. What I find so fascinating is that you have faculty who really have never seen the world,” said Miranda. “Even though they are experts in a discipline—Antoinette is one of our distinguished faculty awardees—they have not tested how their teaching techniques would apply in a global setting.”

Phillips enjoyed the experience so much that she volunteered to do it again two years later when Morton landed a grant from the Fulbright Educational Partnership Program allowing El Camino to partner on teacher training with the Cieszyn branch of the University of Silesia in Poland, where Morton once taught. There Phillips found the classrooms filled with eager future teachers who spoke English fluently.

Expanding Teacher Exchanges, Online Offerings, and Telecourses

El Camino sent six faculty and administrators to DNU over four years, and an equal number from the Ukrainian university journeyed to California to visit El Camino’s landscaped campus a few miles south of Los Angeles International Airport. Most of these exchanges lasted two to three weeks. Phillips made a return visit in April 2003 with Elizabeth Shadish, an El Camino philosophy professor who is a skilled hand at distance education.

At home, El Camino’s distance education courses—both online via computer and through telecourses provided on videos—are especially popular with students who cannot fit regular class hours into their work or family schedule. “They may be working 40 hours a week or they’ve just had a baby or they have two or three children at home,” said Phillips.

In the Ukraine, the university students were traditional age—18 to 21—and technilogically savvy. However, most faculty were lacking in technological literacy, said Shadish, who earned her Ph.D. at Purdue University and taught at California State University at Northridge before joining the El Camino faculty a dozen years ago.

Like Phillips, Gloria Miranda is also a product of one of California’s many two-year colleges, Compton College. She earned her bachelor’s at Cal State University, Dominguez Hills, and her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. She chaired the American Cultures and Chicano Studies programs at Los Angeles Valley  College before taking the dean’s post at El Camino. 

“The fact that Bo came with her unique background has really helped us and our faculty focus on what we can do to expose ourselves and our students to the world around us,” Miranda said. 

“The faculty in my division who’ve participated have been almost re-energized by these opportunities.”

With the Ukrainian project, Morton said, “We found out that sending the same faculty members more than once is really a good practice. They are able to do so much more during their second visit because they don’t have this adjustment period.” 

The success of the Ukrainian exchange convinced El Camino  President Thomas M. Fallo to tap some of El Camino’s own  resources to support the partnership with the University of Silesia in Cieszyn, Poland. It is a city and region with a turbulent and  colorful past and a multicultural mix of identities and ethnicities.

In Poland, Phillips found teacher educators intrigued by her  teaching methods, but loathe to give up their reliance on rote  lectures. The Polish educators were struggling with how to meet a new mandate for more kindergarten teachers.

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GETTing More Opportunities

For it’s next international venture, El Camini was selected to participate in the State Department’s International World Cultures Project using the Global Experience Through Technology (GETT) model pioneered by East Carolina University. Recognizing that fewer than 2 percent of U.S. college students study abroad, this project is designed to expose students to new cultures through virtual classrooms shared with university students in other parts of the world.

This opportunity almost fell into El Camino’s lap.

“After Ukraine we got a good reputation. That project worked well and accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish,” said Morton. “One day I was sitting in my office and I got a call from a new person at the Department of State who told me she was putting together a virtual classroom project. She had heard about the distance education component to our work.”

El Camino partnered again with DNU in this new project, but it also needed to find  two other institutions to work with, including one in the Arab world. “Sometimes it’s not easy to put a partnership together. Sometimes you just have to dig, you have to cold call,” said Morton. “I sent cold e-mails. That’s how I came up with the Italian partner. Somebody on our faculty said the University of Modena at Reggio Emilia was the best in Italy on early childhood education, and I thought, ‘If we are going to connect with somebody, why not the best?’”

El Camino sent Elizabeth Shadish, the professor of philosophy, and Joanna Medawar Nachef, a music professor and choir director, to Europe with bags bulging with videoconference equipment bound for three partner institutions: DNU in Ukraine, the University of Modena at Reggio Emilia, and the Lebanese University in Beirut, Lebanon. Nachef is an accomplished conductor and choir master who was born in Beirut but earned her degrees (including a doctorate from USC) in the United States. She speaks Arabic and still has extensive contacts in the Lebanese capital.

The two El Camino teachers set up a pilot world cultures course in which a single class of students from the four institutions rotated working with each other online for three to four weeks at a time.

“We had to create a schedule that involved coordinating across time lines, semesters starting at different times, and vacations and holidays happening at different times. You just put together a grid and get a schedule down so that nobody has off times, or at least not too many off times,” said Shadish. “At any point, two institutions were working with each other, ideally for three or four weeks. While we’re talking with Italy, Lebanon is talking with Ukraine. Next rotation we’re talking with Ukraine, while Italy and Lebanon are talking.”

For the pilot, Shadish and Nachef selected El Camino honors students from their own classes. They received no credit, “but  they were there the whole semester at 8 in the morning. They saw the value in this,” said Shadish.

They had no trouble finding volunteers, agreed Nachef. “Even [at times] when there is no picture and they are only hearing them on the other end, the electricity in the room is fascinating,” she said. “These students went back to the choirs and my other classes, saying, ‘You can’t believe how exciting it is.’” Students were often disappointed when the allotted hour ran out. “They don’t want to leave the room. They look at their watches. We say we have to end the session and they say, ‘We don’t want to,’” Nachef said.

Nachef laughed as she recalled one incident of strained communication. One student asked a young man in Lebanon if they had rites of passage for special birthdays. She had in mind La Quinceañera, the Latin celebration for a girl’s fifteenth birthday.

The Lebanese student took umbrage, typing back, “Do you think we are barbarians? We dance around fires?”

The panicked American called out for help to her professor,  saying, “Dr. Nachef, I don’t know what to say. He thinks we’re  putting them down.”

Amity prevailed after the cultural reference was explained.

Shadish and Nachef plan to offer the cultural exchange course again and involve new countries and universities in GETT. “Where this program can go is so exciting,” Shadish said. “[GETT] is such a pioneer experience that nothing you do is wrong. We’re creating the standards. We’re very free to explore what works.”

The Possibilities Seem Endless

El Camino also won Fulbright-Hayes funding from the U.S. Department of Education to send 15 teachers—Spanish language teachers and teacher educators from its own faculty and teachers from local elementary schools—on a four-week language and cultural study trip to Guadalajara and Oaxaca, Mexico.

Miranda said El Camino is developing a proposal to partner on an early childhood initiative with two other community colleges in different parts of the United States and three universities overseas.

The possibilities seem endless. “I have a part-time teacher whose father is retired from the University of Ghana,” said Miranda. “And Bo and I have been talking about a grant that includes China. We’re in such a key position here on the Pacific Coast, and we want to infuse our curriculum with more content that pertains to the Asian world.” El Camino has already won backing from the Council for International Exchange of Scholars for its request to have a Middle East scholar spend a semester at the campus as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence.

The faculty and the administrators keep coming up with ideas and Bo Morton, as Miranda put it, “keeps hitting home runs for us.” 

Even before getting a $394 million makeover courtesy of Measure E—it will take years to complete all the new projects and improvements—El Camino has established itself as a college on the move.

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