Cedar Crest College (CCC) is a private college, primarily for women, with 1,300 total students located in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Since 2018, the Carmen Twillie Ambar Sophomore Expedition has provided a no-cost, guaranteed study-abroad opportunity for second-year students, who participate in a global service-learning experience together as a class. The program, which meets the college’s global studies requirement, has significantly boosted the number of education abroad participants and increased the diversity of students going overseas. Today, more than two-thirds of the college’s undergraduates have studied abroad.
For students at Cedar Crest College, first-year orientation in August isn’t just about getting to know their campus and classmates. It’s also the day of the big reveal: where they’ll be going for spring break their sophomore year. Amid an explosion of confetti and screaming students, President Elizabeth Meade announces the destination, which has in past years included Brazil, Greece, England, Costa Rica, Morocco, and—most recently—Italy. The 2024 expedition will take students to Ireland.
"It has a high level of anticipation," says Kelly Hall, director of global initiatives and international programs. Hall is also the director of the program that sends second-year students abroad—the Carmen Twillie Ambar Sophomore Expedition—and leads students while they are overseas.
Professors find out the destination of the Sophomore Expedition the same day as the students. “It’s very hush-hush,” says Jill Purdy, a professor of education who is also a seminar director for the program. Then, she says, faculty have two or three months to develop and submit course proposals based on the location and common themes. Previous courses have included a Jack the Ripper forensic science class in London, England, and a history of the spice trade in Marrakesh, Morocco.
The Sophomore Expedition began as part of an effort to enhance internationalization on Cedar Crest’s campus. As part of the college’s 2016–22 strategic plan, the college committed to providing additional support for programming that prepares students to be global leaders. College leaders knew that students who study abroad maintain higher GPAs and are more likely to go to graduate school, but they also knew that there are several barriers to studying abroad, ranging from costs to family concerns.
“In order to combat all of those challenges, as well as really being a part of the growing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts of the college, this program was conceived so that all undergraduate students coming in would have the ability to have a study abroad experience,” Hall says.
Cedar Crest covers the cost of all flights, transportation, meals, academic excursions, and additional programming for participants. For those who need extra support to pay for their passport and incidentals, the college has additional emergency funds available. All students fly with a designated professor and fellow classmates, and the entire group stays at the same hotel. Classes typically go in separate directions during the day for their academic visits, but sometimes classes are combined. While the program is currently financed partially through general operating funds, the college is conducting a capital campaign to raise an additional $2 million for the Sophomore Expedition endowment. The college intends to have the program fully funded by donors within the next 10 years.
The Sophomore Expedition generally takes place over spring break, allowing students to pay full attention to their experience abroad. The exception was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the 2021 expedition was moved to December and the 2022 expedition to May.
Students must have a 2.5 grade point average to participate in the expedition. Those who don’t meet the academic requirement can participate in a recovery program where they work with their adviser and professors to raise their grades. The college has also recently expanded opportunities for transfer students to participate. In addition, the director does personal outreach to students who decline to participate to see if they can alleviate any concerns of the students or their families. Students who don’t participate with their class can in some instances defer to another year or take other courses to fulfill the college’s global studies requirement.
To prepare for the Sophomore Expedition, students participate in a semester-long global seminar in the spring that is focused on a special topic related to the expedition destination. Students can choose from six to 10 different courses in a variety of disciplines. Professors teach content related to their specific discipline, and predeparture information on issues such as travel security, mental health while abroad, and logistics are embedded into the course to prepare students for the experience abroad.
One of the highlights of the Sophomore Expedition program is the service-learning project that students complete abroad that complements their academic coursework.
In Athens, Greece, Purdy’s class visited a Syrian refugee camp, where they worked with children. Other projects have included planting trees in Brazil and picking coffee for a small cooperative in Costa Rica.
Suzanne Weaver, professor of social work, taught a course on migration when the program went to Athens. Like Purdy’s, her class also visited a refugee shelter. “I'm very careful about the ethics of service in a country. We can sometimes not really honor those who we are trying to serve,” she says. “So, we spend a lot of time in class talking about that.”
After students return to campus, the director of career services presents information to help students learn how to talk about their time abroad with prospective employers or to find international postgraduate opportunities.
CCC tracks its abroad engagement, noting a strong increase after the implementation of the Sophomore Expedition. In the decade before the program started, about 40 students would study abroad each year. After the program started in 2018, that number grew to 132. More than 600 students have participated in the program. As a result, the number of Cedar Crest students who have been able to have an international experience has tripled.
It also has also encouraged many students to study abroad again after the Sophomore Expedition. Around one-fifth of students who participated in the first program to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2018 went abroad again, and 67 percent of students who responded to surveys conducted after the trip said they would like to study abroad again.
Cedar Crest senior Carolyn Weiss isn’t sure if she would have gone abroad without the opportunity offered by the Sophomore Expedition program. “I don't know if I would have personally carved out time to study abroad,” she says.
As a business administration major with a concentration in health care management, she decided to take a course focused on holistic medicine in Morocco. “They did an incredible job building a trip that you couldn’t do by yourself,” she says. “I would have never chosen to go to Morocco, to go to a village in the Atlas Mountains, and meet with a midwife and a shaman. I would not be as open-minded of a person and as a student if it weren’t for the Sophomore Expedition.”
Located in Tempe, Arizona, Arizona State University (ASU) is a public research university with more than 125,000 students. Through its Education for Humanity (E4H) program, the university has been supporting refugees by offering online courses with support from community partners abroad for the last six years. In partnership with the resettlement organization the International Rescue Committee (IRC), ASU created the Afghan Women’s Education Project in 2021 to host refugee students on campus for the first time as part of a campuswide initiative.
When Zakia Muhammadi fled Afghanistan two years ago, it was just the start of her journey. She had been a student at the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Chittagong, Bangladesh, until the COVID-19 pandemic forced the college to temporarily close and she had to return to Afghanistan. When the United States pulled its troops out of Afghanistan in summer 2021, the Taliban quickly took over the country.
Muhammadi was one of 148 AUW students who fled Afghanistan by a plane from Kabul, traveling to Saudi Arabia, then Spain, Virginia, and, finally, Wisconsin, where they were among 13,000 Afghan refugees being processed for resettlement at U.S. Army Fort McCoy. After arriving to Wisconsin, Muhammadi wasn’t sure if or when she’d be able to continue her education. So it was unexpected but welcome news when she found out she had been admitted to Arizona State University. “To be honest, we didn't have any idea that we would get a scholarship,” she says.
Muhammadi was one of 64 young Afghan women who had previously been at the AUW who were able to enroll at ASU. The group arrived in Tempe in December 2021. ASU officially cosponsored the students alongside the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and a local organization, Welcome to America. Arizona State also partnered with local nongovernmental organizations and volunteer groups, which donated clothing and household goods. Brown University, Cornell University, the University of Delaware, DePaul University, Georgia State University, the University of North Texas, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of West Virginia enrolled the other AUW refugee students.
ASU was able to host the largest group of Afghan students because ASU President Michael Crow supported the Afghan Women’s Education Project from its inception, says Pamela DeLargy, executive director of the Education for Humanity (E4H) program and a professor of practice in global studies. Crow’s early support also helped mobilize the rest of the campus community.
“This was the first cosponsorship between a higher education institution and a resettlement agency,” DeLargy says. “We worked for many months ahead of time to coordinate how we were going to handle things like health care and getting Social Security numbers.”
ASU was well positioned to develop the Afghan Women's Education Project, building on the work the university had already been doing through E4H. Since 2017, the program has supported more than 5,700 learners in 15 countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East. Previously, E4H focused primarily on serving refugees abroad by offering blended learning opportunities in collaboration with partners such as the United Nations’ refugee agency—UNHCR—and the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Two years prior to the arrival of the Afghan students in 2021, ASU launched a concerted effort to make its campuses more “refugee friendly.” This effort grew out of the desire to better serve the resettled refugee communities in Arizona and to sensitize a wider community of ASU faculty, staff, and students about forced migration and the educational challenges faced by refugees.
ASU had also started working with resettlement agencies during the pandemic when the university began offering online English classes to local refugee communities. The university reached out to the IRC about cosponsoring the Afghan students when it knew they were coming to campus.
“We already had some experience with trying to think about what kind of special services needed to be arranged for those coming from this background,” DeLargy says. “This was kind of a shock to the system, but [it] also helped us in many ways to build out the system so we can be more supportive of those others who are coming. We had Ukrainian students who were already at ASU who became refugees. We also have large Congolese, Sudanese, Somali, Iraqi, and Syrian communities in Phoenix.”
Hosting refugee students is different from serving the general international student population, DeLargy says. “The difference is that the students are with us 24/7, 365 days a year,” she says. “Most universities have moved away from in loco parentis status. But with this population of students, you actually become responsible if somebody gets hurt or sick. They don't have parents or family in the country.” The university becomes the students’ local support system, she adds.
To bring the Afghan students to campus, ASU mobilized a university-wide set of resources and, in some cases, changed institutional policies and procedures to provide full-time and full-year care for the students. ASU's Global Launch program provided intensive English courses, social support, and cultural orientation throughout their introduction to the United States. “We got the chance to explore more about the university and learn about the system here,” Muhammadi says.
Admission procedures were adapted to handle the lack of transcripts and other documentation. Special housing considerations were put in place to ensure access to kitchens so that students could prepare their own meals, especially during Ramadan, since cafeterias are not accessible before dawn or after dusk.
Because of the unique needs of trauma-affected refugees, ASU Counseling Services engaged in targeted outreach and employed a Dari-speaking counselor. Faculty and staff, including resident assistants in the dorms, were also trained to provide trauma-informed instruction and include more culturally sensitive support. ASU's Project Humanities worked with an Honors College student who conducted participatory research on refugee mental health needs and analyzed campus resources to aid these efforts. “We all have a need to talk about these traumas we went through, because we didn't have normal lives for six months,” Muhammadi says. “When we went to counseling, there were some people who could not share their feelings in their second language.”
ASU also had a number of student organizations that were already working with refugee communities in various capacities and so were equipped to jump into supporting the new students. In addition, the incoming students revived the Afghan Student Association, which has hosted a number of well-attended educational and social events on campus. “These have raised awareness of the current Afghan situation and also of the challenges of Afghans awaiting regularization of their immigration status,” DeLargy says.
ASU also increased its involvement with local and national groups focusing on refugee education and employment. ASU now serves as a partner to Arizona resettlement programs and has engaged in a multifaceted national research collaboration with the IRC. The university is also an active participant in the Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, Welcome Corps on Campus, and Every Campus a Refuge, all of which are groups of universities that share lessons they have learned hosting refugee students.
DeLargy recommends that higher education institutions that host refugee students work closely with resettlement agencies and their state arm of the Office of Refugee Resettlement because they have expertise in all the processes that refugees need to go through to complete necessary federal and state registrations and be eligible for various benefits.
As of October 2022, seven of the refugee students were enrolled in graduate programs at ASU and 42 in undergraduate programs. In January 2023, another 18 had completed their English studies and moved onto their degree programs. As for Muhammadi, the move to Arizona gave her the opportunity to realize a childhood dream she had long given up on. “This is not the first time I'm a refugee,” she says. “I'm originally from Afghanistan, but I grew up in Pakistan as a refugee. And there, I didn't have an opportunity to get an education.”
She was thankful to eventually receive a scholarship to the AUW, where she studied politics, philosophy, and economics because her preferred major was unavailable. “It was my childhood dream to be a computer scientist,” she says. Now she’s taking prerequisites to double major in politics and computer science. She’s also doing an internship at a tech company, and she gives credit to ASU for her new path. “Because of all the support, they gave me this confidence to be who I am now,” she says.
Albany State University is a public institution and HBCU in Albany, Georgia, with more than 6,000 students. Because few of its students study abroad, the university has successfully launched a professional development program that trains faculty across multiple colleges and disciplines to internationalize their courses. As a result, thousands of students have had access to global learning opportunities
When Christian Andrade Herrera traveled back to his native Mexico during the winter break of his first year at Albany State University to visit his family, he decided to take a six-hour trip to the village of Real de Catorce in the Sierra Madre mountain range. It’s a pilgrimage site for the indigenous Huichol people.
Even though he grew up in the same region as the Huichol, Herrera had never heard of the group before he took an introduction to anthropology class at Albany State. That class inspired him to travel to meet the people he studied about. “It was a great experience to see the things I learned in the classroom outside in the real world,” says Herrera, a biochemistry major who graduated in spring 2023. “I was able to immerse myself in the rich culture of the city and meet some of the Huicholes who owned a folk-art store in the city.”
That anthropology class was just one of around 100 classes at Albany State that have been infused with global content through a curriculum internationalization initiative. When Professor of English Nneka Nora Osakwe started at Albany State in 2004, she joined the ongoing curriculum internationalization initiative, assisting to train other faculty members on how to globalize their courses. Six years later, she became the director of the university’s Office of International Education, a position she held until 2021 before transitioning to her current role as an English professor and the provost’s special assistant for internationalization and global engagement.
Over the years, support for curriculum internationalization waned under different university administrations, Osakwe said. When it became clear that it was difficult to recruit students to study abroad, Osakwe sought the support of a new president and renewed the focus on curriculum internationalization as a way to promote global learning in 2016. This trend accelerated in 2018, when President Marion Ross Fedrick enrolled Albany State in the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Internationalization Laboratory, which expanded global learning awareness on campus. Since then, external grants from organizations such as the U.S. Department of Education have helped institutionalize Albany State’s curriculum internationalization framework.
At the beginning of every semester, during the faculty-staff conference, the Center for Faculty Excellence schedules professional development sessions, which include curriculum internationalization. The Office of International Education partners with a select team of faculty internationalization mentors to train a new cohort of faculty to internationalize their courses and earn the designation of curriculum internationalization fellows. These faculty development projects and workshops also continue each summer. The Office of International Education has also collaborated with the Distance and Online Learning Department to develop an internationalization training portal in the University System of Georgia’s GeorgiaView learning management system for faculty who want to complete the training online. Faculty members are incentivized to participate through additional pay, publication opportunities, and favorable consideration during the tenure and promotion process.
Additionally, the Office of International Education organizes regular faculty forums where fellows share creative teaching and evidence-based approaches used in their internationalized courses at home and abroad. The forums serve as venues to train the cohort as they work toward becoming curriculum internationalization fellows. The faculty members become fellows after they submit proposals, go through the internationalization professional development, revise their syllabi to include six critical global learning elements, implement their revised course, and share their implementation outcomes in any of the forums.
One of the key components of Albany State’s approach to curriculum internationalization is through experienced faculty sharing best practices as curriculum internationalization fellows. Over the past two decades, more than 100 faculty members have earned this designation, leading to the internationalization of more than 100 courses. In addition, 24 of the fellows have published articles and book chapters that are used as models for training new and existing faculty members who also infuse global learning into their courses.
Thousands of students like Herrera have taken Albany State's internationalized courses. The College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Business, Education, and Professional Studies both require all their students to take at least one internationalized social science or humanities course, and the Darton College of Health Professions also requires first-year bachelor's degree students to take a cultural diversity course that has been internationalized. Having these policies in place signals buy-in at an institutional level, which sets the tone for faculty.
Albany State’s professional development opportunities make it much easier for faculty to take on the challenge of internationalization, says Andrea Dozier, the interim chair of Albany State’s Department of Nursing and a curriculum internationalization fellow.
It wasn’t until Dozier accompanied nursing students on a study abroad trip to Jamaica in 2019 that she began to understand the importance of curriculum internationalization. “I hadn’t ever been outside of the United States,” says Dozier. “I had to internationalize myself before I could internationalize the course.”
Dozier realized how important having a global perspective was for anyone working in the health care field. She chose to internationalize Conceptual Basis for Professional Nursing, a class taken by students who have received their nursing license and are already working in the field.
She was teaching online and wanted to create opportunities for those studying remotely to participate in internationalization. The assignments of the internationalized version of the course ask students to reflect on situations where nurses might not speak the same language as their patients and think about stereotypes they might hold about certain groups of people.
Now, nursing is becoming a model for the other health sciences. Sarah Brinson, dean of the Darton College, says that it’s her goal for all 13 of the health science programs to have at least one internationalized course. The introductory course taken by all physical therapy students, for example, now includes content related to how patients might need to be treated differently depending on their cultural background.
Some faculty were initially skeptical about internationalization, either because it would be too much work or because they didn’t understand why it was important. “I think that from a faculty standpoint, we get bogged down into the weeds and have so many other duties that the thought of doing something different is just overwhelming,” says Dozier.
Patrick Whitehead, associate professor of psychology, joined a faculty learning community sponsored by Osakwe because he was interested in taking students abroad. He was surprised when he suddenly had several new ideas for his classes. He spent three semesters refining an internationalized course on human development, which covers topics such as the transition from childhood to adulthood. He added international content, such as looking at childbirth and child-rearing in indigenous Canadian cultures.
When he first launched his new course, he tried to incorporate global material on top of the content he was already teaching. “I had 100 things that I wanted to cover,” he says. “And about halfway through that semester, I was like, ‘I don't think they're getting it.’”
He quickly cut down on the number of activities he was trying to do and found the students responded much better. “I understood that less can be more beneficial,” Whitehead says.
Whitehead says that curriculum internationalization is particularly important for a university like Albany State, where around two-thirds of the students are eligible for Pell Grants and may not be able to pursue study abroad opportunities.
“It’s really accessible, and that, in my opinion, makes internationalization probably more powerful at our school than studying abroad,” he says. “Even though study abroad is life changing, it still has limits in terms of who can do it just by the price tag. I see curriculum internationalization as even more valuable for our school as a whole.”
