Innovation Through Partnerships

Mention “innovation” on many campuses today and eyes may start to glaze over. At some institutions, talk about the need for change is so ubiquitous that the mere mention of a new project triggers instant symptoms of initiative fatigue. Conversations about defining the term can take the oxygen out of change efforts.

Despite such impediments, today’s reality is that institutions need to innovate in big and small ways to evolve, improve, and ensure the success of faculty and students. If colleges and universities are going to flourish in a landscape for higher education that is being buffeted by unprecedented forces of change, innovation is essential across every campus unit. International offices are no exception.

While there is no prescribed strategy, innovation in international education programs often springs from partnerships—among multiple departments across a campus or between institutions in different countries. Both paths benefit from an environment that fosters and rewards creative thinking and leadership that acknowledges innovation’s role in keeping a competitive edge.

Collaborating Across Campus

Sometimes the best innovations come from the joint efforts of once-siloed departments on the same campus. At the University of Texas-Austin (UT), for example, one spark for innovation came from a panel of prominent influencers who regularly advise UT’s top leadership on strategies to build its global presence and impact. UT’s International Board of Advisors created and helped fund a new initiative called the President’s Award for Global Learning, a highly selective program that funds student projects in seven regions of the world.

Focused on social impact, entrepreneurship, or expanding research, these projects enable teams of students to work across disciplines with faculty mentors and international partners to find solutions to pressing global challenges. Each team—comprised of two to four students, one faculty leader, up to two faculty partners, and an international partner—spends 6 to 10 weeks in-country and receives $25,000 per project to cover expenses.

Seven teams were chosen in the program’s inaugural year, with projects that include work to distribute low-cost sensors to measure air pollution in India, perform research on housing conditions in Mexico, study perceptions of skin color in Ghana, and investigate women’s hygiene in refugee camps in Lebanon.

“This is the only [program] that incorporates interdiciplinary faculty and students. ... You need various perspectives to be able to work with an international partner toward solutions.” —Laurie Young

Laurie Young, the director of special projects in UT’s International Office, points to several factors that make the President’s Award for Global Learning program both unique and innovative.

“Similar programs exist within specific colleges or specific departments or faculty initiatives,” she says. “But this is the only one that incorporates interdisciplinary faculty and students,” drawing on expertise from multiple areas of campus.

Young says that the interdisciplinarity element is fundamentally important because international problems are inherently interdisciplinary.

“You need various perspectives to be able to work with an international partner toward solutions,” she says.

UT also takes a novel approach to the actual coordination of the program, which involves a cross-campus collaboration between the offices of UT’s president and provost, the international office, and several other units. In addition, Young notes that the program is longer in length than other similar initiatives, spanning 18 months from when the project is first pitched to when participants reflect on lessons learned in a reflection course. The longer-term nature of the program gives students the opportunity to earn 10 academic credits while building on their existing coursework.

Another institution demonstrating innovative interdisciplinary programs is Harper College, one of the largest community colleges in the United States. Harper was a recipient of NAFSA’s 2018 Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for Campus Internationalization, which highlights innovative internationalization programs and initiatives. The college’s Global Region of Focus (GRF) initiative brings together many departments across campus, has spawned 75 programs, and has impacted more than 3,200 students since its inception in 2014.

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Harper’s GRF is a three-year cycle centered around a particular region of the world—East Africa in 2014 and Latin America in 2017. During the first year, Harper faculty from different departments, English and geography professors alike, travel to the region, participate in coursework and field seminars, and incorporate their learnings and experiences into class curricula upon returning. In year two, scholars from the region of focus visit Harper’s campus in Palatine, Illinois, and the college begins study abroad programs to the region. The third year continues to emphasize study abroad, as well as developing programs on Harper’s campus that relate to the chosen region.

Because the GRF’s holistic structure encompasses many departments at Harper, students experience a unique culture of internationalization beyond what many other colleges offer. Its interdisciplinary nature streamlines internationalization efforts across campus, from encouraging student mobility to providing professional development for faculty.

“We are putting all of our efforts and resources into the GRF,” says Associate Provost Brian Knetl. “It extends everywhere, from the faculty to the curriculum to the students to the programming. What we hope happens over those 3 years is that the campus becomes infused with a flavor of that region.”

Leveraging International Partnerships

In addition to collaboration among departments on the same campus, building new partnerships between institutions in different countries brings opportunities to innovate. By leveraging the strengths of both institutions, programs can meet students’ needs on two campuses.

At Kapi‘olani Community College in Hawaii, biology and ecology associate professor Wendy Kuntz and her colleagues capitalized on personal connections with faculty at Kansai University’s campus in Takatsuki, Japan, to create a partnership program called Kai Yama. (The program name derives from the Hawaiian word for ocean, kai, and the Japanese word for mountain, which is yama.)

Integrating environmental science research, community service, and cultural exchange, the program includes online collaborative technologies and student site visits to the respective institutions. Kai Yama is innovative, in part, because it gives access to study abroad opportunities to students who likely would not have had such experiences; travel between the two countries is funded by a grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission.

“Our students are not your traditional international education students,” Kuntz says, noting that study abroad “wasn’t really on their radar.” Were it not for Kai Yama, she says, “they probably would not have been participating in international travel or an international collaboration. That’s been one great thing about the program.”

Kuntz adds that focusing on specific projects with a local angle—like studying environmental challenges by removing algae from Hawaii’s Maunalua Bay and researching the impacts of invasive algae on species composition—helped keep the innovation on track. Working on projects that were intentionally embedded in the local community helped students move from being just tourists abroad to being “real international education learners,” she says.

“Our students are not your traditional international education students. [Study abroad] wasn’t really on their radar. They probably would not have been participating in international travel or an international collaboration. That’s been one great thing about the program.” —Wend Kuntz

Many innovative programs—ranging in focus from local needs to research to solve global problems—often take shape through existing personal connections. International educators must remain open and aware to possible new partnerships and advanced ideas to maximize their potential outputs.

From contacts made at a presentation in Pakistan, James Witte, a professor of sociology and anthropology at George Mason University (GMU), and colleagues eventually secured $1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of State for a partnership between GMU and the University of Karachi in Pakistan. Between 2014 and 2016, the partnership pursued academic and cultural goals to benefit students and faculty at both institutions and culminated in an international conference in Karachi in 2016, organized around a joint research project about managing megacities.

“You really should keep your eyes open for opportunities,” says Witte, because personal connections can often be the catalyst for innovative ideas and their outcomes, such as the megacities research he and his colleagues at the University of Karachi produced.

The research findings derived from a new partnership between the University of Georgia (UGA) and the Minas Gerais State Research Foundation in Brazil have potentially life-saving implications. Based on the success of existing partnerships in Brazil, UGA faculty made the strategic move to work with colleagues from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and the Federal University of Vicosa to develop research initiatives that tackle the challenges of Zika and other infectious diseases.

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“Brazil is already home to more of UGA’s international partnerships than any other country in the world,” says Brian Watkins, UGA’s director of international partnerships. “Given our shared areas of research, ranging from biomaterials to infectious diseases to agriculture and bioinformatics, Minas Gerais is an ideal strategic target for collaboration.”

The UGA-Minas Gerais Joint Research Partnership was recently named a 2018 winner of the NAFSA Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award.

Creating an Environment for Innovative Thinking

The practice of innovation embodies qualities and factors that can be ineffable and idiosyncratic. Still, experts in higher education and practitioners of innovation can offer helpful perspectives on what it takes to innovate in international education.

From his position as president of the professional development firm Academic Impressions, a professional development organization and resource for higher education, Amit Mrig studies change and change management up close through the eyes of administrators and faculty. On campuses, he says, the critical imperatives for innovation reside in the mindsets of staff and faculty, as well as supportive leadership.

Individuals are often too passive to take concrete steps toward change, or they default to thinking that they could do more if only they had more funding or staff. Reframing that mindset to one that assumes “there’s more within your control than outside of your control” is a good start, Mrig says. “It’s your responsibility to shape the outcomes that you’re looking for. You have to be able to control your own destiny.”

Another vital quality for innovation is listening to and leveraging the experience and expertise of others.

“Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum,” says Mrig. “It’s usually the combination of different ideas and different perspectives, and it’s the way those combine—somewhat unexpectedly—that really produces interesting and novel ideas or approaches.”

Successful innovators look broadly for multiple perspectives. To feed the innovator’s mindset, Mrig says, “you need to think laterally and broadly, outside of your department, outside of your division, and even, really, outside your institution, sometimes even outside the industry.”

The State of Innovation in Higher Education: A Survey of Academic Administrators report, a joint project of The Learning House, Inc. and the Online Learning Consortium, notes that because “innovation often relies on interdepartmental collaboration, structural issues and cultural factors are the most common barriers to success.”

Among the administrators surveyed, 80 percent named these problems as the top challenges to their institution’s innovation efforts. To remedy these challenges, campuses need “strong leadership-shaping processes to better promote collaboration, as well as rewards and incentives to encourage shifts in culture,” according to the report.

At UT, for example, support from the top has been essential for nurturing innovation. Young says that “having the President’s Award be supported by the president and provost was a game changer,” in part because their endorsement for the awards program led faculty to pay more attention than they might have otherwise.

“Supervisors, leaders, and managers are really at the heart of this,” Mrig says. It’s up to them to create a space for the experimentation, testing, and even initial failures that are part of the process of innovation, as well as to provide the necessary financial and human resources.

Experts advise administrators who are looking for opportunities to spark innovation to foster strong relationships across campus. Kuntz, for example, urges senior international officers and other leaders to build bridges with professors. “Support your faculty that are looking for innovative ways to engage students,” she says, adding that instructors can make sure that innovative programs have pedagogical integrity and clear learning outcomes.

Young says that international educators are uniquely positioned to build cross-campus alliances that often lead to innovation. In UT’s case, she says, the international office is “well-aligned to create international innovations across campus” and its representatives can check their egos at the door and not worry about who gets credit for new initiatives.

“Our goal is to help internationalize the campus. Period. Whatever your definition of internationalize is,” Young says. “Having that be our goal makes it really easy to work with other people and to see where they’re coming from and what their needs are and to be open to that.” An atmosphere that encourages and rewards innovative thinking is critical to ideas taking root and flourishing, on campus and beyond.

Incentivizing Innovation

A plethora of national and international awards programs help drive, scale, and publicize innovation in international education. Not only do awards and grants incentivize innovation, but award-winning ideas and programs can spark inspiration among international educators at different institutions.

Each year, NAFSA awards the Senator Paul Simon Awards for Campus Internationalization, which recognize U.S. colleges and universities for their significant, well-planned, well-executed, and well-documented progress toward comprehensive internationalization. The Spotlight Awards especially acknowledge institutions using innovative and creative approaches, including, in 2018, Harper College, University of Georgia, and Baldwin Wallace College. Learn more about the Simon Awards, including the annual Internationalizing the Campus report that profiles each year’s winners.