Leadership

As a campus situated in a community where almost one in four residents are immigrants, the University of Maryland-College Park (UMD) dedicated the 2018–19 academic year to exploring immigration, global migration, and the refugee experience. The Year of Immigration initiative led to more than 75 campus events, nearly 60 academic courses related to immigration, and extensive community engagement with local nonprofits, high schools, and community service groups. The initiative was jointly implemented by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) and the College of Arts & Humanities.

Against a backdrop of rising nationalism and a wave of anti-immigrant policies, international educators at UMD wanted to raise awareness of the issues affecting immigrants and refugees. In 2017, more than 300 international students and scholars at UMD were affected by travel bans implemented by the Trump administration. “That elevated my consciousness,” says Ross Lewin, PhD, associate vice president for international affairs. “I thought we needed to be more cognizant in recognizing that our international community is an extraordinary asset to the well-being of the university community.”

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Creating A More Inclusive Campus

With a focus on issues such as immigration, forced migration, and the experiences of refugees, the Year of Immigration was created with a goal of expanding the notion of internationalization to cultivate a more welcoming and inclusive community. “Not only do we have 6,000 international students at the University of Maryland, and more than 1,300 international faculty members, we have countless numbers of international staff members who are working on our campuses every single day,” Lewin says.

After initially partnering with the School of Music in the College of Arts & Humanities, the OIA reached out to academic departments, other university-wide units, and undergraduate and graduate student governments. “The advantage of working with OIA was that because it is a central, campuswide unit, it could really give [the initiative] broad publicity and invite other colleges to participate in different ways,” says Bonnie Thornton Dill, PhD, dean of the College of Arts & Humanities.

The Year of Immigration boasted educational, cultural, and community engagement events and activities. For example, all first-year students read The Refugees by Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen was invited to campus to speak as part of the College of Arts & Humanities Dean’s Lecture Series and also visited with students in individual Department of English classes. The School of Music also sponsored a yearlong festival featuring music and performances from around the world, such as the work of German American composer Kurt Weill. On-campus dining facilities also developed menus that included international cuisine.

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Graduate student Anne Marie Shimko Corwith, who recently defended her PhD dissertation in international education, coordinated a three-hour Human Rights Day event in November 2018, with speakers who discussed efforts to support refugees abroad, barriers for refugees integrating into the United States, and the experiences of undocumented students at UMD. Corwith says that she personally has been able to continue working with several of the organizations that were involved in the event.

Professor Shibley Telhami, PhD, organized several events during the year that built on his own expertise as the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development. He organized a panel in March 2019, “The Global Response to the Refugee Crisis,” featuring Nancy Lindborg, MA, president and CEO of the United States Institute of Peace; Eric Schwartz, JD, president of Refugees International; and Her Excellency Dina Kawar, MA, the Jordanian ambassador to the United States. In addition, Telhami moderated a panel, “Immigrant Stories,” sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, during which several immigrants shared their stories of coming to the United States. The panel included former UMD President Wallace Loh, PhD, who was born in China and then sought political asylum with his family in Lima, Peru, before coming to the United States to attend college.

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Engaging the Local Community

The Office of Community Engagement focuses on connecting the university to the surrounding community. The office organized events for the Year of Immigration initiative, such as “Be Seen, Be Counted.” This event brought together nearly 60 nonprofit leaders, elected officials, government entities, business owners, designers, and members of the UMD community to learn how to apply a design thinking process to address hard-to-reach and undercounted populations in Prince George’s County and surrounding neighborhoods in advance of the 2020 U.S. census. The goal was to help stakeholders brainstorm ways in which they might better solicit participation from underrepresented populations in the census so that the resulting data would better reflect the county’s needs for public resources.

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The Office of Community Engagement also launched Terps Translate, a project that recruited multilingual student volunteers to provide free interpretation and translation services of nonlegal materials at campus and community events. “The Year of Immigration gave us this outlet to highlight the importance of who our neighbors are,” says Gloria Aparicio Blackwell, MS, director of community engagement. “We don’t have to travel abroad just to learn about other cultures—we have [that opportunity] across the street.”

Dill says the Year of Immigration brought new focus to much of the work that was already being done in the College of Arts & Humanities. It also gave new impetus to the college’s global engagement requirement. All majors in the college must meet the requirement through language study, semester study abroad, or an individually designed experience that achieves the learning outcomes of the global engagement requirement. A number of courses from UMD’s Global Classrooms Initiative—virtual, project-based courses offered through OIA in collaboration with partner universities abroad—were also developed around themes related to the initiative. “The impact of the Year of Immigration on the college was to amplify the work we do, encourage its expansion, and build community connections and make them part of our ongoing curriculum,” Dill says.

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Internationalizing With the Sustainable Development Goals

Since the Year of Immigration, there has been a renewed focus on expanding internationalization on the UMD campus. The OIA is currently developing a new international strategic plan that will be framed around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In 2021–22, OIA is planning a themed year centered on SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities. This next themed year dovetails with the intended focus on inclusivity at UMD, emphasized by President Darryll J. Pines, PhD.

Reflecting back and looking ahead, Lewin says, “The Year of Immigration put wind at our backs and really distilled our own vision of how we want to advance internationalization at the University of Maryland moving forward.”

University of Maryland-College Park

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When DePaul University, a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, switched to remote instruction in March 2020 in response to COVID-19, public policy professor Kelly Tzoumis, PhD, did not bat an eye. She was already prepared to teach the majority of her classes online, including a Global Learning Experience (GLE) course on environmental management in partnership with Henry Fowler, EdD, dean of graduate studies at Navajo Technical University (NTU) in New Mexico.

GLE courses are virtual exchanges between DePaul and partners in 29 countries. Tzoumis’s collaboration with the Navajo Nation is the first GLE course at DePaul that involves working together with another culture in the United States. During this course, all students took the New Ecological Paradigm survey, which explores how attitudes about the environment are shaped by underlying values, then compared and contrasted their results. The DePaul and NTU students’ answers differed significantly on questions about attitudes toward nature. DePaul students said they were first taught about nature in school before it became important to them. NTU students, in contrast, grew up with nature as part of their culture.

Because Tzoumis is training her students to become environmental managers, her goal is to guide them to think about issues such as environmental justice and culture. “I want them to step back and learn that how they view the environment impacts how they behave as managers,” she says.

Kassidy Simmons—a public service major at DePaul who says she did not even know Tzoumis’s class was a GLE course until she signed up for it—primarily interacted with NTU students through Zoom and email. “It was so interesting to hear about their lives, backgrounds, and educational journeys in comparison to ours,” Simmons says. “This is such a crucial time in history as well, and it was so eye-opening to hear how the Navajo Nation is handling everything with COVID-19 in comparison to how we are here in Illinois.”

While Tzoumis and Fowler initially considered canceling the course when the impact of the pandemic became clear, they ultimately decided to continue because of the unique opportunity it afforded students to collaborate cross-culturally despite the distance between New Mexico and Illinois. 

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Leveraging Expertise in Virtual Exchange

DePaul’s Office of Global Engagement, in collaboration with the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and with the support of the Comprehensive Internationalization Committee (CIC), launched GLE as a university-wide virtual exchange initiative in 2013. The program has since been featured in the university’s strategic plan, “Grounded in Mission,” as part of the institution’s goal to “excel in preparing all students for global citizenship and success.”

Only around 4 percent of DePaul’s student body study abroad each year, so GianMario Besana, PhD, associate provost for global engagement and online learning, wanted to create more opportunities for global learning for students who do not participate in education abroad. 

Since 2013, more than 2,400 DePaul students have enrolled in 155 GLE courses. Almost 300 faculty in nearly every discipline have participated in GLE training. Faculty members whose course proposals are approved by the CIC receive a $3,500 grant intended to facilitate travel for the DePaul faculty and their partner to collaborate in person.

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Besana says he first heard about pedagogy for virtual exchanges around 2010 from Jon Rubin and his team at the State University of New York. It was a natural fit for Besana since he oversees both international education and online learning. Working with the CTL, Besana and his staff crafted a development program to train faculty in virtual exchange pedagogy. It supported DePaul’s missions of internationalizing the curriculum and creating international opportunities for students who are unable to travel. Now, DePaul has become a leader in the field of virtual international exchange, training not only its own professors but also faculty from other institutions.

The idea of virtual exchange has taken on more prominence this year since COVID-19 shut down most study abroad programs in March 2020. “I can’t tell you how many different institutions have reached out in the last 2 months saying, ‘How do you do this?’” Besana says.

But it is not just a matter of finding a partner and starting a collaboration. Faculty normally spend 6 months designing and preparing a GLE course, according to Besana. Professors at DePaul and the partner institutions work together to plan joint learning experiences for their students around specific learning outcomes through a variety of synchronous and asynchronous technologies. “It’s not something you can improvise,” he says.

Supporting Faculty for Successful Partnerships

During the first week of a GLE course, students engage in activities to get to know each other, followed by a content-focused phase typically centered around a collaborative project and a final period of reflection.

Each GLE course is developed in close collaboration between the faculty member and an instructional designer assigned through the CTL. “The support starts with faculty training followed by course-based instructional design support where we connect instructional designers with faculty to help integrate these global learning elements into courses,” says Sharon Guan, PhD, assistant vice president of the CTL.

The CTL trains faculty on topics such as intercultural collaboration and how to use English as a bridge across different cultures. The instructional designers then help faculty make sure they are creating assignments that are aligned with their learning outcomes and assess the global learning that takes place in the class. They also advise on the appropriate technology based on the needs of the partner institution. For example, Chinese partners have limited options due to government restrictions, while others might need to rely on low-bandwidth technologies, such as WhatsApp.

As director of virtual exchange and online learning, Rositsa (Rosi) Leon provides management and support for various aspects of DePaul’s GLE program across 10 colleges. In particular, she manages all GLE faculty grants and data reporting, as well as the quarterly project assessment process. She also facilitates the process of matching DePaul faculty with international counterparts and collects proposals from faculty who want to develop a new GLE course.

Leon says that pairing faculty for a GLE course has also been a way to deepen relationships with partners abroad. For instance, one long-standing partnership with São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil has supported GLE courses, such as a robotics class in which students participated in online competitions via Zoom. DePaul has not only helped train UNESP faculty in virtual exchange pedagogy, but this GLE collaboration has also led to faculty visits and joint research. “This has really made the relationship stronger,” says Ana Cristina B. Salomão, virtual exchange coordinator at UNESP.

Leon adds that while the biggest benefit is for students, GLE courses promote ample professional development for faculty. “It provides opportunities for faculty to enrich their course content by including intercultural perspectives in their classes,” she says. “They are also learning new technological tools. We ultimately do it for the students, but there’s also a lot of support and growth for faculty.”

Balancing the Benefits of Virtual and Overseas Learning

Beyond the on-campus innovations sparked by GLE courses, a few faculty have also leveraged GLE components to enhance traditional faculty-led study abroad. In 2019, a DePaul professor who teaches a course on moral and ethical issues related to the bombings of Japan during World War II used a GLE course to connect with a partner at Nagasaki University before leading a program to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Inversely, study abroad programs have originated from existing GLE courses. A study abroad program on religion and globalization grew out of a GLE with Symbiosis International University in Pune, India.

Besana stresses that GLE courses are not intended to be identical to education abroad, despite their success in augmenting one another. In fact, GLE courses also offer opportunities to develop skills that students may not gain through traditional mobility. “Virtual exchange has some distinctive characteristics, including the fact that it helps students acquire virtual, global collaboration skills,” he says.

Associate professor Robert Steel, MA, who teaches postproduction film, has taught GLE courses with partners in Australia and Scotland. He says that the GLE courses are a perfect way to teach students how to work in the film industry, which frequently requires remote communication across borders. “I really want my students to have this experience because the film industry is so collaborative from beginning to delivery,” he says. “These global learning experiences teach students what it’s like to work in film production and postproduction.”

Media and cinema studies associate professor Luisela Alvaray, PhD, coteaches a GLE course on the history of cinema with a partner at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. “I want my students to have an awareness of other cultures,” she says. “Films are themselves carriers of cultural values. This has offered me an additional way to give my students that intercultural component.”

GLE courses also count toward some of the academic requirements for a new Global Fluency Certificate that enables students to demonstrate their achievements in global learning.

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A survey administered at the end of each GLE course has consistently shown that students self-report growth in intercultural competence and virtual collaboration skills. For example, data collected from 92 GLE courses over 12 terms show that 70 percent of students agree or strongly agree that their GLE experience changed their perception of another culture or country, and 64 percent agree or strongly agree that the GLE course provided skills and knowledge that they would use in the future.

DePaul University

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