People Development

As an ecologist studying vector-borne diseases, Courtney Murdock had long been interested in conducting research in Brazil, which made headlines around the world in 2015 due to the Zika virus epidemic. Her opportunity to travel to Brazil came in 2016 due to an innovative partnership between the University of Georgia (UGA), where Murdock is an assistant professor, and the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. After participating in a university-sponsored faculty workshop designed to foster research collaboration with several Brazilian institutions, Murdock and faculty from Brazil’s Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) received a $15,000 seed grant. The project, which will include the training of Brazilian and U.S. PhD students, explores how temperature variations affect the mosquito-Zika virus interaction. 

Murdock’s grant was part of UGA’s strategic, data-driven approach to building international partnerships in Brazil. UGA has combined targeted use of incentive funding with facilitated faculty mobility to enhance research collaboration with five institutions in Minas Gerais. The partnership aims to not only strengthen faculty involvement in campus internationalization, but also focus resources on complementary research areas. 

Balancing Individual Initiative and Centralized Coordination

As a comprehensive land- and sea-grant institution made up of 17 schools and colleges, UGA faces many of the same challenges that other large public universities encounter when it comes to international research collaboration. Many areas of the university are actively engaged in international research, but opportunities for synergies are often lost. While centralized coordination is essential, collaborative research is ultimately driven by the faculty. 

“Particularly if you move beyond student mobility, you have this challenge of relying on individual faculty initiative to generate lasting research and service interactions,” says Brian Watkins, director for international partnerships. When Noel Fallows became the associate provost for international education and senior international officer in 2016, he wanted to address this issue by strengthening the role of the UGA Office of International Education in establishing research partnerships. “I wanted to position the international office as a major nexus for international research on campus,” he says. 

Fallows and Watkins worked together to pinpoint where they wanted to focus their efforts. “We wanted to figure out where in the world we have an existing critical mass of relationships where there is also potential for further collaboration in priority research areas,” Watkins says.  

Using Data Analysis to Identify Strategic Partners

Using an internal faculty database and Clarivate Analytics’s InCites platform, Watkins performed a bibliometric analysis to identify the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais as a region where UGA already had substantial engagement. While the university had always viewed Brazil as a strategically important partner, the analysis showed that an outsized portion of UGA’s collaborations in Brazil could be traced to several institutions in Minas Gerais. Furthermore, there was significant overlap in several priority areas—such as human and animal health, life sciences, agriculture, and environmental sciences—that suggested possibilities for future research collaboration.

Image

One of the outcomes of Watkins’s analysis was the UGA-Minas Gerais Joint Research Accelerator, which offers a four-year, $240,000 seed grant program in collaboration with the Minas Gerais State Agency for Research and Development (FAPEMIG). UGA quickly established, or refocused, institutional partnerships with three universities in that region that had overlapping strengths across one or more strategic research areas. 

The next step was to bring faculty from UGA together with their Brazilian counterparts for a two-day faculty workshop in Tiradentes, Brazil. The UGA Office of the Provost and the Office of Research, among other units on campus, provided financial support for the workshop. Twenty-four participants were tasked with developing new joint research proposals to be presented to their peers. Faculty developed 12 new joint research proposals, half of which were refined into applications for the UGA-FAPEMIG seed funding program, and two of which were ultimately selected for funding.

Planting the Seeds for Future Collaboration

Murdock expects that the seed funding she, her UGA colleague Melinda Brindley, and their Brazilian collaborators received from UGA-FAPEMIG will lead to larger external grant opportunities. The initial investment will result in two or three collaborative publications, and the preliminary data from the project will form the backbone of a National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant (R01) application.

“In order to successfully obtain funding for large-scale international collaborations, teams need to be in place with a sufficient track record of research,” Murdock says. “This is incredibly difficult to initially set up without seed grant opportunities. Initiatives such as this one [are] hugely helpful in facilitating the formation of these international teams and building the groundwork for future, larger-scale research collaborations.” 

Image

The seed funding was not limited to faculty who participated in the workshop in Tiradentes. UGA linguistics professor Pilar Chamorro Fernandez and Fabio Bonfim Duarte, a linguist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), received funding to build on their previous work on indigenous languages in Brazil. “Given that these languages are normally in remote areas, we need funding to do this kind of research,” Fernandez says. “It’s made me feel like the research we do as linguists has finally been acknowledged.”

The project has also created opportunities for graduate student research on both sides. Brazilian graduate students from UFMG worked with Fernandez and Duarte to document endangered languages in Brazil’s Tenetehara communities. Three graduate students at UGA will begin working on the project in fall 2018. 

In addition to the institutional relationships built upon the seed funding, UGA has developed strong ties to Minas Gerais through its Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute (LACSI). LACSI is a Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. According to LACSI Director Richard Gordon, they were able to use NRC funds to help support the partnership between FAPEMIG and UGA. 

Image

LACSI hosts the Portuguese Flagship program, the only Flagship program in the United States that is dedicated to Portuguese. The Flagship is funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Education program, with the goal of teaching critical languages to undergraduate students. UGA expects that the Portuguese Flagship program, and its close partnership with the Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ), will eventually lead to increased student and faculty mobility as well as joint research. 

A Model for Engagement Around the World

The UGA-Minas Gerais partnership serves as a model for joint research collaboration in other regions. Watkins cautions, however, that the approach is not applicable in all countries. “It’s a compelling model to follow in terms of building out research collaboration with peers abroad, but it presupposes a group of partners in geographic proximity where there are congruent research interests and capacity,” he says.  

Watkins says that while seed funding is not unique, what is innovative is the combination of data-driven analysis and faculty incentives. “We use the available data to target seed funding and combine both of those with face-to-face meetings to generate organic yet directed faculty interest,” he says. 

UGA will be utilizing the same data-driven approach in its engagement in other world regions, particularly in China. “We view the UGA-Minas model as an essential first step in projecting a physical presence that builds [the] institution’s international profile and leads to additional research and student mobility opportunities in a way not otherwise possible through ad hoc collaborations,” Watkins says.

University of Georgia

Read more about University of Georgia

The mission of Babson College is to educate entrepreneurial leaders who create great economic and social value—everywhere. Recognized as one of the top entrepreneurship schools in the United States, Babson draws more than 1,000 international students from around the world to its campus in Wellesley, Massachusetts, every year. Nearly 27 percent of the undergraduate students and more than 70 percent of the graduate students come from abroad, with a total student body of just over 3,000.

Internationalization has been at the heart of Babson’s mission as a private business college since entrepreneur Roger Babson founded the institution in 1919. “Roger Babson took away the lesson from World War I that the world needed to come together,” says President Kerry Healey. “The way that he thought that could best be done was through business, executed in the interest of humanity. Roger Babson’s original vision is still applicable for us almost 100 years later.”  

Spreading Entrepreneurship Education Around the World

Babson seeks to share its approach to entrepreneurship education beyond the borders of its Wellesley campus. “We want to be the preeminent institution for entrepreneurship education everywhere,” says Amir Reza, vice provost for international and multicultural education and senior international officer (SIO). “The opportunities for internationalization sit within the ‘everywhere’ context. We want to create access to our methodology, which we call entrepreneurial thought and action.” 

Heidi Neck, professor of entrepreneurship, oversees the Global Symposia for Entrepreneurship Educators (SEE) program, which is delivered twice a year on the Babson campus and available on demand internationally. “We train other educators from around the world in how Babson teaches entrepreneurship,” Neck says.

Neck also directs the Babson Collaborative for Entrepreneurship Education, an institutional membership organization under Babson’s leadership made up of 23 institutions around the world. “We’re trying to build a better entrepreneurship education ecosystem by collaborating, helping one another, sharing best practices, but also imagining future possibilities,” Neck says. “Babson is very small, but we want to bring what we do with respect to entrepreneurship education to the world.”

Babson has used technology to increase access to its entrepreneurship expertise. The college has contributed six entrepreneurship courses to edX, the platform created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that provides online learning and massive online open courses (MOOCs). More than 100,000 people in 220 countries and territories have participated in Babson’s entrepreneurship MOOCs, according to Healey. 

Bringing Together International and Multicultural Education

The Glavin Office of Multicultural & International Education is at the heart of Babson’s internationalization efforts. It is home to international education, multicultural, service-learning, and multifaith programs. In an innovative approach to internationalization, the Glavin Office aims to foster conversations about identity, diversity, inclusion, and equity on campus. 

When Reza became SIO in 2010, he brought together international education—which includes education abroad and international student and scholar services—and multicultural education under the larger umbrella of the Glavin Office. In 2014, the office also assumed responsibility for service-learning and multifaith programs, which provided more intersectionality. 

“We have experimented with intentional strategies to bridge the gap between these areas to benefit our students’ education,” Reza says. “Each area continues to have professionals with expertise in their respective fields, and we have seen both organic and intentional programming that has helped us further the mission and goals of each area through the lens of the other.” 

Much of the Glavin Office’s programming consequently revolves around encouraging students to explore their cultural identities and how that impacts the ways in which they interact with the world. Glavin’s predeparture orientations for education abroad, for example, take an inclusive approach to the subject of identity. Students are asked to list five to 10 aspects of their identities and are guided through a set of reflection questions that ask them to explore the ways that identities like LGBTQ, gender, and race are seen in their host country and to consider how they will interact on those issues.

“What we are doing is talking about the relationship between identity and place for everybody, using several different examples,” explains Reza. “If I’m an African American student and I’m going to a predominantly white environment, what does that mean? Or if I am a Muslim and I want to practice my faith, what does Islamophobia mean for me?”

Image

Another example of the collaboration between the international and multicultural education teams was the development of a three-part workshop titled “Understanding Race and Racism in the U.S. for International Students.” Designed by arts and humanities professor Elizabeth Swanson, the first workshop gives students an understanding of language and terminology and the idea of race as a social construct. The second segment focuses on slavery and historical race relations in the United States, and the final workshop helps students process current events and issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the actions and policies of the Trump administration. 

The goal of the workshop series is to help international students gain a better perspective on current events and historical precedents that shape many of the discussions on today’s college campuses.

Salome Mosehle, a senior from South Africa, says that although her country has its own history of racism, she grew up in a predominantly black society. “I came to the United States and was told that there was a struggle that comes with being black,” she says. “It was a tough thing to grasp.”

She says the racism workshop helped her understand the new cultural context in which she found herself. “The [workshop] really helped open my eyes about what it means to be black in America,” Mosehle says. 

Recruiting International Students Through the Global Scholars Program

When Kerry Healey took office as Babson’s president in July 2013, one of the first things she did was to establish the Global Scholars program, a need-based scholarship for talented international students. She created the program because she wanted to diversify the international student population, both economically and geographically. “I thought that we were missing a great opportunity to bring some of the most talented students from around the world who aspire to be entrepreneurs to Babson,” Healey says. 

In 2014, when she offered the first 10 need-based scholarships for international students, more than 900 students applied. Since then, the college has committed more than $1 million a year to fund 10 scholarships, which cover tuition, room and board, airfare, and books, depending on the individual student’s level of need. There are currently 45 Global Scholars on the Babson campus.

A faculty mentor works with each cohort of Global Scholars, and the international student advising team designs a special orientation and plans retreats and cultural events throughout the year. 

“Having this group of scholars on campus has been transformative. We have the sense that each and every one of them are going to go back to their countries and become profound change makers,” Healey says. 

Lizaveta (Lisa) Litvinava, who earned a dual concentration in global business management and diversity and identity, is an international student from Belarus. Litvinava is among the first cohort of Global Scholars who graduated in May 2018. Her fellow Global Scholars came from Afghanistan, Brazil, Rwanda, and South Africa. 

Litvinava says that her experience as a Global Scholar has “meant everything.” “If it weren’t for [this program], I would have never been able to speak about the world in the way that I speak about it right now. I would never have been able to become the person I am right now without the experience and education that Babson gave me,” she says.

Creating a Welcoming Environment for International Students

With a third of its student body coming from abroad, Babson goes out of its way to make sure that international students such as Litvinava feel at home. Babson intentionally avoids separating international students from domestic students throughout their college experience. Many universities offer separate welcome programs for international students, but Babson holds a single orientation for all incoming students. While international students might attend specific sessions on topics such as immigration and work authorization, they are integrated with domestic students for the majority of the orientation. 

Image

The college has also taken specific steps to make sure that international students feel welcome in light of recent political developments. “We take our lead from students. When something happens in the world, such as the [travel] ban and attacks against DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], we reach out to students to find out what they need and what’s meaningful to them,” says Jamie Kendrioski, director of international services and multicultural education. “I don’t make any decision about how to react to a crisis or issue without talking to students first and seeing what matters to them,” adds Kendrioski. 

International students concur that Babson goes the extra mile to make sure that they feel comfortable. “From emails coming out from the president directly [to students] to teachers speaking about things in class, I think it gave us a sense of comfort and assurance that we are accepted here,” says Ashutosh Pandit, an MBA student from India.

Fostering Global Awareness Through Glavin Global Fellows

In order to bring together all of the various international opportunities available on campus, Babson launched the Glavin Global Fellows program, a cohort-based program for undergraduate students. The program includes a first-year living learning community, a certificate program, and internationally themed events throughout the year. The Glavin Office also sponsors students to take part in international and language case competitions, and it awards more than $12,000 in grants for students to conduct independent research abroad. 

According to Lorien Romito, director of education abroad and the Global Fellows program adviser, each year, approximately 250 students are Glavin Global Fellows and around 25 students graduate with the certificate. Romito also serves as the campus Fulbright adviser because students who demonstrate an early interest in international issues are prime candidates to apply for the Fulbright program.

To earn a Glavin Global Fellows certificate, students need to take two or more courses in a foreign language and three advanced classes with international content. Additionally, students need to participate in an international experience abroad or a multicultural experience in the United States. 

Image

Aidan Dennis, who is doing a dual concentration in global business management and social and cultural studies, first became interested in the Glavin Global Fellows program as a first-year student. He says that half of the 20 students living on his floor in the residence hall that first year were international. He describes the Glavin Global Fellows program as “a community of students who are very interested in global issues.” 

Dennis, who will graduate in 2019, has had three international experiences on three different continents. He studied abroad in Argentina and Chile, and he did a short-term elective abroad in Thailand and Laos. He also applied for and received a grant to spend a week in Amsterdam conducting interviews as part of a Glavin Global Fellows project on consumer behavior in the Netherlands. 

He says that spending time abroad helped him understand the challenges that international students at Babson face: “From the Glavin Global Fellows program, I really learned about myself through interacting with all these other people from different countries, and then going abroad myself and coming back is like stepping into their shoes.” 

Education Abroad for Global Entrepreneurs

Dennis is among the 547 Babson students who went abroad in 2016–17. In 2018, 52 percent of Babson’s graduating undergraduate class participated in a credit-bearing education abroad experience. This is an average increase of 10 percent year-over-year since 2005. 

Babson is intentional about its education abroad advising, with a particular focus on early outreach during students’ required first-year seminars. In addition to providing specialized workshops on finances for study abroad, the college awarded more than $368,000 in internal need-based education abroad grants to undergraduate students during the 2016–17 academic year. 

Babson offers a variety of programs of different lengths, ranging from short-term electives abroad to semester and academic year programs. Each year, approximately 150 undergraduate and 155 graduate students participate in faculty-led electives abroad that run during academic breaks. These courses combine classroom instruction on campus in Massachusetts with in-country lectures, company visits, and cultural excursions. Examples include a humanities course on postmodernism in the United Arab Emirates, a theater course in England, and an economics course in Argentina and Uruguay. 

Through Babson’s International Consulting Experience program, student teams work on project assignments with international corporate sponsors. The program includes predeparture sessions in the fall that are focused on consulting methodologies and intercultural competencies, with travel to the company site taking place during winter break. The 33 projects that were carried out over the past 5 years included 126 Babson students, 15 Babson faculty, and engaged partner schools and businesses in 12 countries. Participating companies during this period include Bosch in Germany, the Mariinsky Theatre in Russia, and Care&Share in India.

The college’s flagship education abroad program is a multidestination faculty-led program known as Babson - Russia, India, China: The Cornerstone of the New Global Economy (BRIC). Every fall semester, a cohort of 24 students spend a month each in St. Petersburg, Russia; Shanghai, China; and New Delhi, India. Babson faculty lead each segment of the program, offering a full courseload combined with business visits, cultural excursions, and service-learning opportunities. 

Bill Coyle, professor of accounting and law, has been taking students to Russia since the early 1990s. His relationships with partners there, along with commitment from other faculty and the Glavin Office, laid the foundation for the BRIC program, which launched in 2009. The program was created with a desire to give students a comparative framework within which to understand developing economies. 

Before departing for Russia, students attend an intensive predeparture orientation on the Babson campus that provides guidance on thinking comparatively across cultures. Students also take a two-credit intercultural communications course that spans the entire semester that allows them to reflect on their experiences in different cultural contexts. According to history professor Katherine Platt, the orientation and the communications course help students reflect on their identities as individuals and as a group. 

Notably, participation in BRIC has resulted in significant intercultural development demonstrated by pre- and post-Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) results. On average, participants’ IDI scores increase more than 20 percent. 

Image

Students benefit from simultaneously taking business and liberal arts classes. “The whole semester is a balance of business and liberal arts courses—entrepreneurship, management, history, and philosophy,” says Platt, who teaches in the India portion of the program. 

Coyle says the liberal arts courses provide a foundation for students to understand the three countries’ business environments. “As a business professor, I have a real appreciation for the fact that you can’t be serious about doing international business if you do not understand the liberal arts aspects of the country you are considering doing business in,” he says. “The way [Russians] do business is based on their history and politics and economics and the literature they have grown up with.”

Alumni Outreach Around the World

With 40,000 alumni in 125 countries, Babson has recently focused on finding innovative ways to build up its alumni network. In 2015, President Healey launched Babson Connect: Worldwide, a three-day alumni conference and networking platform that is held in a different region each year. The inaugural conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, followed by Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Bangkok, Thailand; and Madrid, Spain. Approximately 400 alumni attended each conference. 

Babson has been able to get significant press coverage prior to the events, which in turn has boosted the number of student applications from that region. “We saw immediately that bringing the conference to the region [gave us a return in investment] in alumni support [that was] many times [more valuable than] the cost of the event,” Healey says. “There are benefits to enrollment, fundraising, and just general reputational benefits. We have the opportunity to rally all of our local alumni in the planning stage to make sure that we have local engagement.” 

The 2019 Babson Connect: Worldwide will return to Boston, Massachusetts, to celebrate Babson’s 100th birthday, giving its international alumni a chance to reconnect at their alma mater. “I’m proud to say we are coming home for our centennial,” Healey says. 

While Harrison Bontrager had certain goals in mind as he traveled to Sydney, Australia, as part of a study abroad program at Kirkwood Community College, he had no idea it would lead to an international career in architecture and design. The study abroad program, led by Kirkwood professor Jillissa Moorman, took students on a two-week tour of architecture and design firms across Australia. 

During the program development stage, Bontrager contacted Moorman and asked if she could include a visit to Alexander & CO., Bontrager’s favorite architecture firm, on the itinerary. This outing had significant outcomes for Bontrager. “After touring their space and getting to chat with their principal, I was offered an internship, which has turned into a position as a designer,” he explains.

Bontrager returned to Iowa to finish one more semester at Kirkwood and then completed his associate’s degree by working with Moorman remotely. “I’m not going to say he can’t continue because he’s around the world,” says Moorman, who coordinates Kirkwood’s interior design program. 

It is the passion and support of faculty members like Moorman that have helped Kirkwood earn its reputation for study abroad programming for community college students. Each year, Kirkwood offers approximately 20 faculty-led programs across multiple disciplines. The Institute of International Education ranks the college fifth nationally in the number of community college students it sends abroad.

Offering a Central Hub for Global Experiences

Kirkwood’s study abroad programs are run through its International Programs (IP) Department, located on the college’s main campus in Cedar Rapids. The department also manages international enrollment management, international student services, English language acquisition, international partnerships, international grants and projects, and faculty and staff development. IP offers a centralized office for global engagement and is intentionally situated within academic affairs to facilitate interaction with all areas of the college. The department’s mission is to have “every faculty, staff, and student at Kirkwood engage in an intercultural experience."

Dawn Wood, dean of international programs, says that this mission is particularly important for Kirkwood as a community college because the vast majority of students stay in eastern Iowa after graduation. Thus, the college takes a broad, long-term outlook on its internationalization efforts. “These are people who are going to live in our community and give us the advantage we need to be globally competitive,” she says. 

When President Lori Sundberg joined Kirkwood in 2018, one of the first things she noticed was how internationalized the college was compared with her previous institutions. “It really is pervasive across the campus, from individual courses to opportunities for students and faculty outside of the classroom,” she says. 

John Henik, associate vice president for academic affairs, says that the college has been engaged internationally since he started at Kirkwood more than 30 years ago. Kirkwood was the fiscal agent and host for Community Colleges for International Development— an association made up of community, technical, and vocational institutions dedicated to creating globally engaged learning environments—from the late 1980s until 2013 and remains a member of the organization’s board. 

To support Kirkwood’s global efforts, the International Programs Department has always had its own budget allocated out of the college’s general fund. Dedicated funding for international activities is essential because new programs at community colleges are often seen as taking away scarce resources, according to Henik. While some specific projects are grant funded, the majority of the department’s budget comes from general funds. 

“There is a commitment to international programs, just like another department like allied health or business,” he says. “That is a really important move for the sustainability of the department.”

Enhancing Professional Development with the Global Service Award

Another aspect of Kirkwood’s internationalization strategy has been to engage stakeholders throughout the institution. Kirkwood has created professional development opportunities for staff, faculty, and administrators through the Global Service Award (GSA), which provides funding for staff to join students on international service-learning trips. The GSA was created in 2012 after former college president Mick Starcevich participated in a service-learning program to Guatemala with dental hygiene professor Lisa Hebl. Starcevich was so moved by the experience that the two sat down at dinner one night and sketched out on a napkin what the GSA might entail. “He didn’t expect [that the experience] was going to impact him as much as it did, and he wanted to make it possible for more people on campus to do it,” Hebl says. 

Full-time faculty and staff who are employed at Kirkwood for at least 3 years are eligible to apply for the award, which is competitive and provides full funding for the trip. While abroad, they participate alongside the students and support the lead faculty. Upon return to campus, the awardees complete an assessment, take part in events where they share their experience with colleagues, and develop projects to integrate what they learned into the classroom or their daily work.

Wood says it is important to give staff a chance to travel because they then become champions for education abroad. “Our students talk more to the people who are sitting at the front—that’s our office assistant, our admissions team, our counselors,” she says.

Five to six faculty and staff receive the GSA each year. Since the program was launched, more than 40 Kirkwood faculty and staff have engaged in service-learning programs in 10 different countries. 

International programs office coordinator Maria Moore traveled to Lima, Peru, as a GSA recipient where she and the students volunteered at an elder care facility and at a school. Moore says the experience gave her a new perspective on her work for the International Programs Department. “I really learned the value of students going abroad, because I think too many people get too entrenched in their own culture and they don’t want to venture out to see what else is out there in the world,” she says.

Making Study Abroad Accessible

Kirkwood’s enrollment is made up of many nontraditional students: older students returning to college, first-generation students, part-time students, low-income students, technical students, rural students, and students from underrepresented backgrounds. Approximately 34 percent of its students were Pell-eligible in the 2017–18 academic year. For many of these populations, education abroad poses particular challenges, but the International Programs Department does everything it can to make education abroad a possibility for anyone who wants to take advantage of it. In 2017–18, Kirkwood sent 151 students overseas out of a total full-time undergraduate population of approximately 15,000.

Image

By developing its own study abroad programs, the college is able to keep the costs down. All program fees, including the flight, are built into the cost of the program. “When all of us are designing these study abroad programs, it’s about quality, but also looking at cost-effective measures to make sure that students can afford it,” says study abroad adviser Ken Nesbett. “Even when faculty are proposing programs, we have the mindset of, ‘How will this be accessible for students without sacrificing quality?’”

Kirkwood works to break down some of the financial barriers by offering more than 90 percent of its study abroad participants $1,000 to $2,000 each as part of its Global Advantage Scholarships for faculty-led programs, totaling more than $150,000 in funding. Kirkwood is also a top producer of Gilman Awards, which are available to Pell-eligible students, among associate’s colleges. Six Kirkwood students received Gilman Awards in 2017–18.

Kayla Acosta, an early childhood education major, was one of Kirkwood’s recent Gilman awardees and a recipient of the Global Advantage Scholarship. She was able to study abroad in Australia and participate in a service-learning program to Cambodia. “There’s no way financially I’d be able to ever study abroad without a scholarship. It’s just not doable with working and being able to just up and leave everything,” she says.

In Australia, Acosta toured early childhood education centers and learned how they incorporate indoor and outdoor play into the curriculum. “I was able to bring a lot of that back here. I already work at a preschool currently, so I did a lot of training with my staff on how to better incorporate play,” she says.

Image

Collaborating Through the Global Education Network

For both of her education abroad programs, Acosta joined other students from Australia, Canada, and Singapore who attend institutions that are part of the Global Education Network (GEN), a consortium of four schools that Kirkwood has been a part of since 2001. Acosta and her peers had the chance to interact through established channels prior to departure, allowing for some relationship building among the participants. “We had met prior through Zoom, and when we got off the plane we saw giant groups of us that all looked lost,” she explains. Students from across the GEN consortium have the opportunity to not only learn from their host community, but each other as well.

GEN is a partnership between Kirkwood and the Box Hill Institute in Australia, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Canada, and Institute of Technical Education (ITE) in Singapore. GEN partners share similarities in their vocational and technical curricula, such as auto technology, welding, graphic design, veterinary technician, and early childhood education. The collaboration of these four institutions has resulted in hundreds of student, faculty, and staff exchanges; virtual exchanges; global learning programs focused on diverse curriculum areas; and joint faculty and staff professional development. 

Henik acts as the representative for the GEN consortium at the World Federation of Colleges and Polytechnics, an international network of colleges delivering workforce education. He says that while each institution brings its own strengths to GEN, they collaborate on the curriculum and plan joint servicelearning programs. “One of the parts of our strategic plan is that we’re sharing best practices and learning from each other,” Wood says. Kirkwood has, for example, developed medical simulation labs modeled after those at ITE.

Together, the four institutions contribute to the network’s operating budget, develop a strategic plan, and determine and assess key performance indicators. Every other year, one partner institution hosts a planning conference that includes the campus presidents. Kirkwood hosted the planning conference in June 2019. 

Image

Each institution hosts students and faculty from the other partners every year. Kirkwood alumnus Travis Riggan and other students from GEN took a project management course focused on the Jones County Fair, an annual event in Iowa that showcases local agricultural products and livestock. Students worked in multicultural teams and presented their projects to the fair board at the end of the class. 

Riggan says it was a unique experience to be able to take the visiting students to a county fair: “We got to show international students from Canada, Australia, and Singapore our culture. They’ve never been to a fair where people bash demo cars, showcase cows, and [have] fried food galore.” 

Internationalizing Career and Technical Education

Participation in the Global Education Network has helped Kirkwood internationalize its career and technical disciplines through its various student exchanges and other collaborations. At Kirkwood, around 50 percent of students are studying with the intent to transfer to a four-year institution. The remaining half complete a one- or two-year degree before entering the local workforce.

To meet students’ needs, Kirkwood has developed faculty-led programs in fields such as agriculture, construction management, and culinary arts. The architectural technology program takes students to Germany to learn about green building practices, and nursing and allied health students have participated in service programs in Belize, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. Kirkwood’s culinary arts program runs a three-week course at Florence University of the Arts in Italy that allows students to take lab courses or intern at a restaurant. 

Students enrolled in Kirkwood’s agricultural sciences program get the chance to visit Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) in Lavras, Brazil, over spring break. Professor Scott Ermer says that the program balances between academic and cultural activities. “The majority of the students that we have taken have never been outside the country before,” he says. “To immerse them in another, non-English-speaking culture is a game changer for them. You can just see the growth in 12 days.”

The program explores issues related to small-scale agriculture and encourages students to compare and contrast farming practices between Iowa and Brazil. “We spend a day on coffee production, so we drive through miles and miles of coffee. Just like you drive through miles and miles of corn here in Iowa. So, coffee is our corn. Our students learn to look at that as a cash commodity and gain a different perspective when they’re drinking that cup of coffee,” Ermer says. 

Justin Shields, who graduated from Kirkwood in May 2019, says Brazil was the first place he traveled to outside of the United States. The experience was so eyeopening that he plans to study abroad again after he transfers to Iowa State University in fall 2019. 
“Brazil has developed into an agriculture stronghold, and they’re one of our biggest competitors from the global trading standpoint,” Shields says. “It was just incredible to see the mountainous regions and the cattle. You could see them planting crops on such steep slopes that I never imagined was even possible.” 

While the group was in Lavras, students from UFLA served as the tour guides. “When we were getting ready to leave Lavras to head to Rio, there were people who were almost in tears because we were leaving such good friends. And it was just incredible to me that you could build a relationship that strong that quickly,” Shields says.

Diversifying the Campus Through International Student Recruitment

In addition to its efforts to send students abroad, Kirkwood has focused on welcoming international students to its campuses. From 2005 to 2015, Kirkwood’s international student enrollment increased from 174 to 399. Since then, Kirkwood has experienced a decline in international enrollment, forcing a reexamination of its enrollment strategies. Kirkwood’s recruitment efforts now target partnerships in Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries. 

To diversify its international student population, the college has also concentrated on recruiting more sponsored students from programs such as the Community College Initiative Program, the Thomas Jefferson Scholarship Program, the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission, and Science Without Borders. 

Still, one of the benefits of having a relatively small international student population is that Kirkwood has been able to personalize the support it provides each student. “I came from an institution where we had 4,000 international students,” says international student adviser Shannon Ingleby. “I couldn’t tell you a single name of any student, compared to Kirkwood where I know all the students. I get to interact with them all the time and spend a ton of time with them.”

Many international students at Kirkwood are active members of the campus community. Mathlida Mola came to the United States from Kenya in 2016 to pursue her associate’s degree in accounting. She was selected as the commencement speaker for the 2019 graduating class because of her work on the international student leadership team, which helps with orientation and organizes activities for international students. 

“I was extremely happy to represent my international student family as the commencement speaker,” Mola says. “It was an honor to share about my experience at Kirkwood as an international student.”

The English Language Acquisition (ELA) Department has provided an important service to the Cedar Rapids area over the years. More than 600 students are involved in the intensive English course sequence targeted at English language learners. While some students are on F-1 visas, the majority are immigrants and refugees who live in Cedar Rapids and the surrounding communities. “We have a five-level English course sequence. They are all courses that prepare students for college-level coursework or whatever certificate coursework they want to take at Kirkwood,” says instructor Betsy Baertlein. “All of our students have some sort of academic goal when they come to us.”

Kirkwood has also been able to leverage its distance learning technology to teach ELA courses to high school students in Brazil by using the same online platform it uses to offer dual enrollment classes to Iowa high school students. “There’s no difference between us communicating between here and Chicago or here and Brazil,” says Todd Prusha, executive dean of distance learning. “It’s been a great partnership.”

Kirkwood ELA instructors have been offering online English courses to Brazilian high school students for the last 7 years. In the course of the partnership, an ELA instructor did a site visit in Brazil and trained local community members on how to administer an oral proficiency exam. Kirkwood instructors have also been able to travel with agriculture students to Brazil over spring break and meet their online students in person. 

Renewing the Commitment to Comprehensive Internationalization

Kirkwood is currently in the process of constructing a new $60 million student center. “The college really wanted us front and center in our new student center because of its focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion,” Wood says. “We want all groups to feel welcomed and have a space to interact and engage.”

Once the building is completed in 2020, the International Programs Department will occupy a prominent location in the new space, along with other student resource centers. The goal is to better integrate international students and other groups into the larger campus community.

Image