Program Development and Delivery

By increasing its study abroad offerings, internationalizing the curriculum, and hosting international students, Santa Fe College has brought the world to the 20,000 students studying on its main campus and six education centers near Gainesville, Florida. Participation in a number of federally funded programs has helped the college build robust partnerships with institutions abroad, leading to student and faculty mobility, virtual exchanges, and institutional collaboration. The community college, which offers both associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs, has also developed an international studies certificate that allows students to showcase their global engagement.

Building On Decades of Global Engagement

Santa Fe College began its internationalization efforts in the early 2000s under the leadership of Jackson Sasser, PhD, its former president. “When we first started this journey, those of us working in academic affairs thought of internationalization as internationalizing the curriculum and study abroad—nothing else,” says Vilma Fuentes, PhD, assistant vice president for academic affairs and senior international officer. Over time, there was a gradual understanding that “internationalization must be seen as a multifaceted process.”

As a department chair in 2002, Ed Bonahue, PhD, who served as provost from 2009 to 2021 and is now president of Suffolk County Community College in New York, was involved in creating Santa Fe’s first plan for international education. The plan had four pillars: (1) boosting international student enrollment; (2) creating globally focused and multicultural programming on campus; (3) internationalizing the curriculum and developing study abroad; and (4) internationalizing workforce and economic development efforts. The plan paved the way for a series of external grants and an internal structure that helped the college become an international education leader.

“Internationalization goes directly to our college mission,” Bonahue says. “When I think about what that mission means, it’s always connected to the idea that we are educating students and educating our community—that we’re part of an interconnected world.”

In 2004, Bonahue also helped author the college’s first Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education that provided funding for international studies and world languages. The college has subsequently received two more grants and expanded its foreign language offerings to include American Sign Language, Chinese, French, and Spanish, as well as Italian, Portuguese, and Swahili periodically.

In addition to a variety of internationally focused campus programming through Fulbright and other initiatives, the college runs six faculty-led study abroad programs per year and hosts approximately 350 international students. Early internationalization focused more on liberal arts and sciences, while more recent efforts have focused on internationalizing the career and technical fields.

In 2018, the college brought together the International Education Office, International Student Services, International Student Support and Advising, and English for Academic Purposes into one physical location, the International Center. Santa Fe invested more than $700,000 to renovate an existing building.

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“We wanted to create a physical space where international students and domestic students interested in the world could interact and mingle, synergies could be created, and opportunities could be developed that maybe we weren’t otherwise seeing,” Fuentes says.

Santa Fe President Paul Broadie II, PhD, joined the college in February 2020. “One of the things that truly attracted me to Santa Fe College was its focus on internationalization of the curriculum and how expansive it was,” he says. “Other institutions, they may do study abroad, and you will have a few faculty members that embrace that global curriculum, but this was widespread across our entire institution.”

Growing Expertise Through the Community College Administrator Program

Santa Fe has co-administered U.S. Department of State-funded Community College Administrator Programs (CCAP) since 2014. Together with Florida State University, a 2017 Simon Award recipient, Santa Fe has hosted 10 CCAP cohorts from 10 different countries: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, and Ukraine.

Visiting administrators spend 2 weeks of a six-week program at Santa Fe seeing the daily operations of a U.S. community college.

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“We’re very happy to be involved with that training program because it brings a lot of know-how that’s unique to [U.S.] higher education to the rest of the world, to other kinds of tertiary educational institutions,” Bonahue says. “The more that we take part in that program, the more that we realize that the transparent governance of [U.S.] community colleges, the way that we collaborate with our workforce community, these are things that we should treasure because they don’t happen all over the world.”

The primary focus of the program is for the visiting administrators to interact with their counterparts at Santa Fe and learn about best practices for community college management. Approximately 50 Santa Fe administrators interact with each visiting cohort from abroad. Conversations quickly shift from practical knowledge about how to run a department to deeper cultural exchange, Fuentes says.

She added that the institution is intentional about having the cohort interact with students, meet with student government leaders, and visit classrooms. The visiting administrators also give public presentations for students.

For example, a group of higher education officials from Pakistan wanted to counter U.S. misconceptions about their country, so they developed a presentation on the hidden beauties of Pakistan that focused on food, music, and culture. Another participant talked about how the educational system in Eastern Ukraine had been disrupted by war with Russia. “It is one thing to read about what is happening in the news, but hearing directly from people who had their university bombed makes it very real,” Fuentes says.

“The Community College Administrator Program has not only impacted administrators, but it’s also directly impacted students, faculty, and staff,” she adds.

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History professor David Price, PhD, has interacted with visiting administrators in his role as president of the faculty senate. He says that participation in the CCAP and Fulbright programs provides excellent opportunities for Santa Fe staff and faculty to learn about other educational systems and interact with colleagues from abroad. “These have been great professional development opportunities for our faculty, given our high teaching load and limited resources provided by the state compared to research universities,” he says.

The CCAP program shifted to virtual operations and suspended in-person travel from April 2020 through July 2021 due to COVID-19. Santa Fe plans to receive delegations from the Caribbean, Egypt, the Philippines, and an additional country in upcoming years.

Fostering Partnerships Abroad Through Federal Programs

Participation in Fulbright, the CCAP, and other federally funded programs has helped spur comprehensive campus internationalization at the college, Fuentes says. All of the international partnerships that Santa Fe College has started began as a result these programs.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, Santa Fe hosted a Fulbright scholar-in-residence through the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright Specialist Program: Direct Access to the Muslim World. Since then, the college has hosted four more Fulbright scholars-in-residence.

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Participation in the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program has led to the creation of faculty and students exchanges with partners in countries such as Brazil, China, Egypt, Indonesia, and Ukraine. Santa Fe has signed cooperation agreements with several visiting scholars’ home institutions that led to further collaboration, Fuentes says. For example, the college developed its first study abroad program to China after hosting a scholar from Beijing Union University in 2006–07.

“All of those [collaborations] came about as an extension of the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program,” Bonahue says. “Often, we’ve worked on shared interests that relate to, for example, a sector of industry. That program has really opened the door not only for students but also to institutional collaboration.”

Another example of partnerships to come out of participation in federal grant programs is the online Certificate for Accessible and Inclusive Practices (CAIP) that Santa Fe professionals created in collaboration with Brazilian counterparts from Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” (UNESP). CAIP is a self-paced online course designed to promote an inclusive pedagogy through the application of universal design principles. Dozens of Santa Fe faculty members have participated in the online training and earned a certificate of completion.

Promoting Internationalization Through Virtual Programming

Another way that Santa Fe is bringing global perspectives to its campus is through the development of virtual programs. Fuentes says the college worked with partners to come up with ways that they could engage students virtually during the pandemic—and many of these innovations will likely persist even when travel fully resumes.

The college pivoted to offer online its International Lecture Series, which began in 2010. Speakers include visiting scholars, Fulbright scholars, and Santa Fe faculty. In 2020–21, the college offered 14 virtual events. “The virtual International Lecture Series has allowed us to make things more accessible to students,” Fuentes says.

Santa Fe also organized a series of four “virtual world tours” in 2020 in collaboration with partner universities. The events connected nearly 400 Santa Fe faculty and students with peers abroad in Bolivia, Brazil, and Ukraine. The tours taught participants about food, music, and culture, but organizers recognized they needed to create opportunities for more robust cultural exchange, says Jessica Surana, LSM, international education coordinator.

One way to do that was through virtual exchanges that allow students to interact with their peers abroad. A few professors had already been doing virtual exchanges for several years, but the pandemic helped spur wider participation across the college. “There have been sprinklings of informally organized virtual exchange for a long time here at Santa Fe, but when the pandemic hit, we really focused our energies on developing programs that students can still participate in,” Surana says. Since 2010, more than 800 Santa Fe students have participated in virtual exchanges.

Fuentes says that the college will develop more comprehensive trainings to teach faculty about how to incorporate virtual activities into their classrooms, starting in fall 2021.

Surana helped arrange a student virtual exchange with the college’s partners in Egypt and Ukraine that paired students to discuss current events and culture. Her unit worked with EDU Africa, a third-party provider based in Africa, to develop exchanges focused on global legacies of racial injustice and street art as a voice for social transformation in South Africa. The college also implemented virtual exchanges with Iraq and Jordan through a program funded by the U.S. Department of State through the Stevens Initiative and implemented by IREX.

“What we’ve realized is that we’re able to access and provide opportunities for so many more students than we have in the past with just offering study abroad and in-person events,” Surana says.

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Professor Michelle Freas, MA, has included virtual exchanges in her American Sign Language (ASL) and deaf culture classes since 2014. She began doing virtual exchanges with a school for deaf students in the West Bank in Palestine. In 2017, she also worked with advanced ASL students and Palestinian students to create an online video dictionary that translates Arabic/ Palestinian Sign Language into ASL/English.

Freas says that the virtual exchange with Palestine was her first international experience. It was challenging at first because the students in Palestine did not know English and the U.S. students did not know Arabic. To overcome the language barrier, they would draw pictures and use props. “What’s interesting with sign language is that it’s very easy to gesture and get your point across,” she says.

Freas has also done virtual exchanges with partners in Sweden and Ukraine.

“Not many colleges with American Sign Language programs have international experiences,” Freas says. “I’ve been very fortunate to be able to have experiences with three different countries and involve my students and have the deaf culture course that’s offered at Santa Fe become part of our international coursework.”

Freas says that virtual exchange has been a significant source of growth for her as an educator. “It keeps me motivated to learn more and to find ways to reach the students and the deaf community in those countries, but [it] also gives my students different outlets to be involved in their college experience.”

Fuentes says that virtual exchanges are a way to provide international opportunities to students who might not be able to study abroad. “Even though we’ve been able to provide funding and scholarships, study abroad is often inaccessible to [community college] students,” Fuentes says. “We realized there might be other ways that we can expose students to the world without actually ever having them leave the country. That prompted us to begin exploring virtual student exchanges.”

Internationalizing The Curriculum Through Grants

In addition to virtual exchanges, Santa Fe has created opportunities for its students to learn about the world by incorporating international perspectives in the classroom. Since 2016, the college has provided internationalizing the curriculum grants to 19 faculty to develop new or modify existing courses with a global perspective.

Several faculty members have also received curriculum enhancement grants through the University of Florida (UF), which received NAFSA’s Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization in 2018. The result has been more than 50 general education and elective courses with significant international content. Many of these classes meet the college’s multicultural and global awareness requirement for all students pursuing associate’s and bachelor’s degrees.

Price has received several grants from UF to enhance his courses. At the time when the United States was implementing the Affordable Care Act, he received a grant from the UF Warrington College of Business to create a module on comparative health care policy for students to learn about how insurance works in different countries.

More recently, he was awarded a grant from the UF Center for European Studies to travel to the United Kingdom to do research in the British National Archives on the country’s first attempts to enter the Europe Union in the 1950s and 1960s. He was able to connect it to contemporary discussions about Brexit.

“Without the college putting the focus on international education, we wouldn’t be able to get these opportunities from other entities to really enhance our course offerings, keep them fresh, make them more vibrant, and tie them to things that are going on in the real world so that students see more of a connection,” Price says.

Showcasing International Experience

Santa Fe has brought together its global curricular and co-curricular initiatives through the International Studies Certificate, which it launched in fall 2013. In addition to completing 12 credit hours of internationally focused courses, recipients are required to participate in international activities, such as study abroad or events on campus. In addition, they must compose an e-portfolio showcasing their global engagement. Many Santa Fe students transfer to the nearby UF, which applies some of the work done for the International Studies Certificate toward its International Scholars Program.

“The International Studies Certificate program is a way for students to codify their international experiences,” Surana says.

Building on the work that has already been done, President Broadie says the next step in internationalization at Santa Fe is to link the college’s global engagement with his goal of creating a college-going culture in the two counties in Santa Fe’s service district. That includes creating more scholarships for students to participate in international activities. “We want to get as many students in the doors as possible to create that college-going culture, and then expose them to our focus on internationalization,” Broadie says.

In order to accomplish this, the college is creating 22 new scholarships to help underrepresented students with financial need participate in study abroad. These will become available beginning in 2022.

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

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

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

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

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

Building A Foundation For Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Launching Global Scholars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Internationalizing The Curriculum Through Globalized Courses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leveraging Grant Programs For International Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Supporting Global Careers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Providing Pathways Abroad

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

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

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

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Building Partnerships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Starting College Abroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Returning Home

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

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

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

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

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University of North Carolina Wilmington

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

“Does it matter if I’m homeless?”

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

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

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

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

Reaching Underrepresented Demographics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding Transformational Opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miami Dade College

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifty Years of Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attracting and Preparing Future Teachers 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maintaining Communication and Connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indiana University Bloomington

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