Program Development and Delivery

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

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

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

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

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

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Leveraging Expertise in Virtual Exchange

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting Faculty for Successful Partnerships

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balancing the Benefits of Virtual and Overseas Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DePaul University

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Like almost all of her classmates at Agnes Scott College, Ximena Guillen spent 1 week of her first year of college immersed in another culture. Guillen, now a junior biology major, visited the Navajo Nation in Tuba City, Arizona, through a first-year study away program. “As someone who has seldom left Georgia, I felt so fortunate to be presented with the possibility of taking an in-depth look into the history and customs of another culture in an environment with individuals who were just as eager to learn as I was,” Guillen says.

Due to this unique campuswide program, more than 90 percent of the students at Agnes Scott College, a private women’s liberal arts college in Decatur, Georgia, have a global experience before the end of their first year of college. Whether they travel outside of the United States, or, like Guillen, travel domestically to places such as the Navajo Nation, Puerto Rico, and New York City, all students gain substantial exposure to other cultures.

Every first-year student at Agnes Scott is required to enroll in a semester-long, four-credit course called Global Journeys, which focuses on cultural, economic, and political issues that link the global with the local. A one-week, faculty-led immersion experience at an off-campus destination in the middle of spring semester is bookended by research and reflection. The first cohort of students, who participated in spring 2016, graduated in May 2020.

The diversity of destinations reflects the identities of the college’s enrollment of around 1,000 students, who Agnes Scott attracts from 28 different countries. “Even though the core of Global Journeys is centered around the global immersion experience, it’s fundamentally about trying to develop global competency in our students,” says Regine O. Jackson, PhD, chair of sociology and anthropology and faculty coordinator for global learning. “And some of that starts just by getting them comfortable talking across differences in the classroom or seeing the difference that’s all around them on our campus.”

“Because global learning at Agnes Scott has been designed as a program that focuses on the global patterns, systems, and structures that shape our lives, we did not want to make global learning synonymous with leaving the country or traveling internationally,” says Gundolf Graml, PhD, associate dean for curriculum and strategic initiatives.

Developing Global Competency

The Global Journeys program is funded through the college’s endowment as part of a strategic repositioning plan that created the transformative SUMMIT curricular initiative for global learning and leadership education.

Global Journeys courses are designed as interdisciplinary introductions to global learning with a focus on community engagement. Agnes Scott offers 14 to 16 sections of Journeys courses every spring. While they are offered in different disciplines across the college, the courses share common readings and focus on one of four themes: “Globalization”; “Imperialism, Colonialism, and Diaspora”; “Identity, Self, Culture, Other”; and “Why Travel? The Ethics of Travel.”

These courses also try to thwart the traditional notion of going to developing countries to do service learning and countries in Europe to study history and culture, Jackson adds.

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All students travel during the same week and then join with other sections to debrief upon return. “I have found this to be an engaging framework to structure a class because students are having parallel experiences and have common ground, but the details of each of the different destinations are so different,” says Tracey Laird, PhD, music professor. “It opens up an opportunity for students to not only learn about our destination and the experiences we share within a class of 20 people, [but] there’s a real energy among the first years where they’re comparing different ways in which concepts like colonialism manifest themselves in their particular destination.”

While the travel component for first-year students participating in spring 2020 has been postponed until 2021 in response to COVID-19, educators are devising innovative ways to continue global learning. In spring 2020, Jackson taught a Global Journeys course focused on race and belonging in Cuba, and she was able to take students to exhibitions at Spelman College and Kennesaw State University focused on Cuban art. She and the students also ate at restaurants in Atlanta that are owned and operated by Cuban immigrants. “We always emphasize things like local-global connections,” she says.

Biology professor Srebrenka Robic, PhD, proposed and taught one of the first Global Journeys courses offered in the STEM disciplines, a course on the ecology and environment of her native country, Croatia. During the weeklong travel component, Robic and her students explored various continental and coastal ecosystems. She took students to visit a nonprofit focused on sustainability in Zagreb and the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries in Split. For the final project of the course, students were asked to pick an environmental topic and explore the issue in both Croatia and the United States.

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Robic says students who have never been able to travel prior to taking a Global Journeys course show the most gains. “The biggest impact I’ve seen is a development of confidence and excitement that [studying abroad] is something that they can do,” she says.

Guillen, who had little travel experience before going to Arizona with Laird’s Global Journeys course, says, “This was my first time riding on a plane as well as being away from my family for so long, so I worried that a possible lack of support would make me not enjoy this experience in its entirety. In the end, this fear of feeling like a stranger in an unknown place quickly modified itself into a personal goal to step out of my usual comfort zone...and to appreciate each encounter.”

Continuing the Global Journey Beyond Year One

The Global Journeys courses lay the foundation for a larger curriculum initiative, SUMMIT, which focuses on providing curricular and cocurricular global learning opportunities throughout students’ 4 years at Agnes Scott. Students are able to study foreign languages or enroll in more than 200 interdisciplinary global elective courses. Students who complete a series of required and elective courses, as well as participate in additional education or internship abroad opportunities, are also able to earn a global specialization certificate.

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Data collected over the past 4 years indicate that Agnes Scott’s global learning curriculum has enhanced comprehensive campus internationalization and significantly increased intercultural and global competencies among students. Intercultural competence is tracked through a multimethod, longitudinal assessment called the Global Pathways Study. Students complete the baseline survey before they arrive on campus and then take follow-up surveys after every year of study, 1 year after graduation, and 5 years after they graduate to examine their change over time. Findings have indicated that students demonstrate a significant increase in the subdomains of intercultural competence, including knowing, affect, social interaction, and social responsibility, from baseline to follow-up.

In the 2018–19 academic year, 92 percent of students listed the first-year Global Journeys immersion as a valuable extension of their learning. Students integrate the cultural competencies acquired by the Journeys experience into their résumés and, assisted by Agnes Scott’s Office for Internships and Career Development, practice how to foreground these experiences in applications for graduate school, internships, and jobs.

Laird says that engaging students through education abroad early on in their college career changes how they approach the rest of their education. “It awakens a kind of energy and excitement that, as a college professor, you hope to awaken in every single student,” she says.

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