Teaching, Learning, and Facilitation

Founded in 1787, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is one of the oldest higher education institutions in the United States. As such, the university has an impressively long tradition of international engagement. From its creation of its first Nationality Rooms nearly 80 years ago, to its consistent efforts to make global engagement a part of every student’s university experience, Pitt has long been a leader in promoting international engagement in new and innovative ways.

Nationality Rooms Connect Local and Global Communities

Perhaps the most visible evidence of Pitt’s commitment to engaging the world are its 30 Nationality Rooms. Housed in a 42-story Gothic skyscraper known as the “Cathedral of Learning,” each Nationality Room celebrates the heritage of an ethnic or cultural group from the Pittsburgh area. The first four rooms—Scottish, Russian, German, and Swedish—were built in 1938, while the newest—the Korean room—was dedicated in 2015. Local organizations that represent the group are responsible for designing and financing the construction of the rooms. After construction, the rooms are governed by committees made up of members of the local community.

Though the Nationality Rooms certainly attract a lot of interest from outside the university, they are primarily used as classrooms, meeting spaces for student organizations, and for other academic purposes. As Associate Director for International Programs Belkys Torres, PhD, explains: “The heritage rooms are a really interesting connection between the university and local and global communities.”

The committees don’t just fund and construct the rooms—they also finance study abroad and research scholarships to their respective country. For example, communications major Noah Coco received the African Heritage Nationality Room Scholarship for a summer program in Cape Town, South Africa, in addition to studying abroad in China. He says, “There are so many sources of funding and opportunities to study abroad at Pitt that I can go to two countries that could not be much further away from where I am right now.”

Creating a Campus Clearinghouse for Global Engagement

The Nationality Rooms represent just one of the many initiatives overseen by the University Center for International Studies (UCIS), founded in 1968. Due to Pitt’s decentralized structure as a comprehensive research university, UCIS plays an important role as the university’s keystone for global engagement. The center supports university-wide international programming, activities, services, and research across Pitt’s 16 schools and four regional campuses throughout western Pennsylvania. Torres says: “We function independently, and that allows us to make connections and collaborate across schools and disciplines with faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, visiting scholars, and administrators across all levels.”

UCIS’s portfolio includes education abroad and international student and scholar services. In addition, UCIS currently hosts six area studies and thematic centers, which award a number of undergraduate and graduate certificates highlighting a world region or transnational theme.

Leading the charge for internationalization at Pitt is Ariel C. Armony, PhD, director of UCIS and senior director of international programs. Armony became the university’s senior international officer in 2015, serving as a senior adviser to both Provost Patricia E. Beeson, PhD, and Chancellor Patrick Gallagher, PhD. Armony jokes, “The chancellor likes to refer to me as his ‘secretary of state.’”

Recognizing the connection between the city of Pittsburgh and the rest of the world is central to Armony’s approach to internationalization at Pitt. “We want the world to enrich what we have here at Pitt, and we want to help enrich the world outside of our region. The interaction between the local and the global is very much at the core of the ways in which we conceptualize our role as a global university,” he says.

Provost Beeson concurs: “We say ‘Bring the world to Pitt.’ That means making connections throughout the city and really developing a strong partnership around global issues with our major partners, such as UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center).”

A Strategic Focus on Embracing the World

Following the adoption of a new strategic plan that included global engagement as an institutional priority for the first time in the university’s history, Gallagher gave Armony the mandate to develop Embracing the World: A Global Plan for Pitt, a strategy to achieve the university’s internationalization goals for 2016–2020.

“Our university is committed to growing a global community. These plans underpin our efforts to grow international partnerships and experiences that will widen our reach—and connect our students and faculty members to opportunities across the world,” says Gallagher.

Jeff Whitehead, a Pitt alumni who worked in the study abroad office for several years before becoming its director in 2009, explains that the global plan offered an opportunity to take stock of the various international activities the university was already pursuing.

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For more than a semester, the UCIS team surveyed staff, students, faculty, and administrators, seeking feedback on where the university should focus its international initiatives. “We made a big point in developing the global plan as a result of a very extensive process of engagement with our campus community,” Armony explains.

Torres adds, “Engagement sessions with faculty, senior leaders, and administrators on all five campuses underscored a need for more robust global operations support, streamlined mechanisms and criteria for developing and tracking strategic international partnerships, and a communication strategy that would connect and inform faculty and administrators across Pitt about their global engagement.”

Students also expressed a need to understand all of the existing opportunities for global engagement on the Pitt campus. The Pitt Global Hub, launching in 2018, will offer students a one-stop-shop for peer mentoring and expert advising about Pitt’s local-global connections.

The ultimate results of the feedback are, according to Torres, “really emblematic of the collective voices and interests of people across our five campuses.” The final global plan has four areas of focus: connecting Pitt’s domestic and international pursuits to create synergies that strengthen its communities, producing globally capable and engaged graduates, creating a global research community that solves global challenges, and developing infrastructure to expand its engagement with the world through global operations support.

In the next year, academic units across Pitt will be asked to align with the global plan as part of their strategic planning process. As part of their annual planning and reporting process, the provost’s office will ask each dean for information on how their school is contributing to the implementation of the global plan.

Many are optimistic that global engagement is now explicitly recognized as part of the institutional mission. “This is the first time in the school’s history where [internationalization] has been a point of focus—for fundraising, programming, recruitment of academics—so it’s a good time for us to be putting a large amount of emphasis on global studies as well as future study abroad and experiential learning pursuits,” adds Whitehead.

Sending Students Abroad With Panther Programs

The Study Abroad Office has also been central to the institution’s internationalization efforts. Pitt currently sends approximately 1,900 undergraduates and graduate students abroad each year. In fact, around 10 percent of the undergraduate class goes abroad at some point in their academic career.

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Over the last decade, Pitt has transitioned from sending the majority of its students abroad with third-party study abroad providers to doing so largely through its own faculty-led programs. “In 2007, about 80 percent of our study abroad participants went through external providers,” Whitehead says. “Now we’ve completely flipped that number on its head.”

Today, only 15 percent of Pitt students ­studying abroad go through third-party providers, with another 5 percent enrolling in direct exchanges with other universities. The rest participate in Pitt’s own faculty-led programs.

Pitt offers around 350 study abroad options, 100 of which are the faculty-led “Panther Programs,” developed in collaboration with Pitt faculty and the Study Abroad Office. “We credit our faculty—their energy, their enthusiasm, and their creativity—with developing our own offerings,” Whitehead says.

Pitt also has dedicated study abroad managers housed in the Swanson School of Engineering and the College of Business Administration. Both schools have significantly increased the number of students studying abroad over the last few years. Currently, around 45 percent of all engineering students and 50 percent of all business undergraduates will have an international experience before they graduate.

Pitt also administers the Vira I. Heinz (VIH) Program for Women in Global Leadership, which targets young women from Pitt’s four regional campuses and 10 other colleges and universities across Pennsylvania. The program provides $5,000 travel scholarships for female undergraduate students who have never traveled internationally. Around 75 percent of participants are Pell-grant eligible. The program has several components: a predeparture retreat, the international experience, a reentry retreat, and a final community engagement project.

Bethany Hallam, who recently finished her master’s in public health at Pitt, studied in France as a participant in the VIH program during her undergraduate days at Pitt-Greensburg. She says the model provided her with much-needed support: “Before the VIH Program, I never believed that I would be able to accomplish my goal of studying abroad, let alone have the confidence to manage three layovers and live on my own in a studio apartment in the heart of Paris. The VIH mentoring program and predeparture retreat gave me the tools to understand myself and the environment that I would soon be entering.”

Hallam adds that, as the first person in her family to have a passport, the reentry retreat gave her the opportunity to process her time abroad.

Supporting International Students and Scholars

In addition to the robust number of students it sends abroad, Pitt also hosts more than 3,100 international students from 100 countries. The Office of International Services (OIS) provides support to all international undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to around 1,800 employees from abroad. The number of international students on campus today is nearly double what it was 10 years ago.

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Two-thirds of Pitt’s international student population are graduate students attracted to Pitt’s high-ranking programs in fields such as nursing, law, engineering, and computer and information sciences. At the undergraduate level, they recruit top high school graduates from around the world. “Currently, the university is working toward diversifying the undergraduate international population to amplify the multiplicity of perspectives and experiences in the classroom and on campus,” says Torres.

OIS’s staff and immigration specialists offer immigration advising, as well as run the university’s international student and scholar orientations. In addition to providing direct support to students, OIS also does a lot of campus outreach. Over time there has been a concerted effort to increase services for international students and scholars across the entire institution, especially as the international population has grown, says Genevieve Cook, OIS director.

For international scholars and their families, OIS runs the Experience America program, which is a series of events and activities designed to help them understand U.S. culture. OIS also hosts a workshop series where participants learn about topics such as U.S. politics, the healthcare system, and recommendations for surviving the winter in Pittsburgh.

International Programming and Cross-Cultural Leadership Through Global Ties

OIS also works closely with student affairs for much of its programming, in particular the Office of Cross Cultural and Leadership Development (CCLD). Students can, for example, volunteer through CCLD to assist with international orientation. According to Summer Rothrock, the director of CCLD, the office works with fraternity and sorority life, leadership development, cross-cultural and diversity programming, and student organizations. CCLD also collaborates with the Study Abroad Office and UCIS on social and educational programs for students.

Global Ties, for example, is a program for incoming international freshmen and transfer students that pairs new students with a mentor who helps them adjust to life at Pitt. “We want the Global Ties program to provide a global experience right here on campus for any student who may want it as well as to help integrate our international and domestic students together,” Rothrock says.

Both domestic and international students serve as mentors. Jiahui Wei, a senior science major from China, notes, “I actually got a mentor from Global Ties when I first came here. We became really close friends and then I joined Global Ties as a way to give back.”

CCLD also brings together 50 international and domestic student leaders for the annual Hesselbein Global Academy for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement. Students participate in a four-day retreat in Pittsburgh that includes mentoring from professionals in the business, government, and nonprofit sectors.

In addition, CCLD works closely with the Office of Residence Life, which oversees Pitt’s 25 Living Learning Communities (LLCs). Several of these communities focus on themes such as diversity or social inclusion, and the Casa Cultural and Global Village LLCs both have an international focus. Students living in Casa Cultural must enroll in Spanish or Portuguese, and Global Village residents participate in programming that explores global issues.

Assistant Director of Residence Life Philip Badaszewski is also in charge of the Pitt to You initiative, which sent 11 student ambassadors to China during the summer of 2017 to run an orientation for incoming Chinese students. “When everybody is back on campus in the fall, the ambassadors will meet with their mentees,” he says.

Promoting International Scholarship Through Interdisciplinary Centers

One of the hallmarks of Pitt’s internationalization is its commitment to multidisciplinary international scholarship. More than 550 faculty members from across the university are affiliated with its various centers, which include four U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers: the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the European Studies Center (ESC), the Global Studies Center (GSC), and the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies (REES). As a Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence, the ESC holds the additional distinction of being one of only eight such centers in the United States funded by the European Union (EU). UCIS also hosts the Asian Studies Center (ASC) and African Studies Program (ASP). While the other centers are focused on area or regional studies, the GSC focuses more on cross-cultural themes related to global health, global security, global economy, and global society.

The various centers also do outreach to the local community. Drawing on resources and expertise from all of UCIS’s centers, the Global Studies Center coordinates the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for Global and International Studies, a four-week summer residential program for high-achieving high school students from around the commonwealth. Another initiative run through the African Studies Program is the Model African Union, which provides opportunities for both Pitt students and local high school students to participate in a four-day conference and take part in simulations.

UCIS has a number of other affiliated programs, including the Center for International Legal Education. Every year, the center’s director, Ronald Brand, JD, takes law students to Vienna, Austria, for the International Commercial Arbitration Moot competition. Pitt law students compete against other teams from around the world. Brand uses the competition to recruit talented lawyers from abroad and build relationships with law schools in other countries. “It has become a platform for legal education. We have used it to build legal curriculum in transition countries,” he says.

Recognizing Academic Excellence With International Certificate Programs

Through UCIS, Pitt also awards 250 undergraduate and graduate certificates each year in area studies or global studies. Students from any major are able to enhance their degree program by taking courses with an international focus. The 11 undergraduate and eight graduate credentials have been designed to complement students’ existing degree requirements. They also offer an interdisciplinary bachelor’s of philosophy degree in international and area studies, in partnership with the University Honors College.

International advisers help students customize their course plan and study abroad opportunities to maximize their impact. Because Pitt’s general education requirements include nine credits with a global focus, students are able to complete their certificates with an additional two or three classes. Khadija Diop, a film studies major who is completing a certificate in African studies, says, “the certificates help you look at your major through a global perspective and integrate the global aspect into every single thing that you’re doing.”

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Environmental studies major Rachel Bukowitz adds that her certificate in global studies has also given her a talking point during job interviews: “As an environmental studies major, being able to say that I learned about sustainable development in the Middle East or water rights in the Gaza Strip has really made me stand out.”

With more than 30,000 students enrolled at its campus in Southern California, including 3,500 international students from more than 110 countries, Santa Monica College (SMC) is one of the most diverse associate’s institutions in the United States. Domestic and international students alike benefit from the college’s Global Citizenship Initiative, which provides a variety of international education opportunities across the SMC campus.

Launched by former college president Chui Tsang, PhD, in 2007, the initiative is a four-pronged strategy that promotes campus internationalization through study abroad, staff and faculty professional development, curriculum development, and international student services. Over the last decade, the initiative has led to the development of several faculty-led programs, an undergraduate research symposium, faculty and staff trips abroad, and a global citizenship requirement for all SMC associate’s degrees.

Global Citizenship Becomes an Institutional Mandate

Dean of International Education Kelley Brayton, who joined SMC in 2008, co-chairs the Global Citizenship Committee with a faculty leader. According to Brayton, “internationalization became a mandate for the institution” under Tsang’s leadership.

The college then convened a task force comprised of faculty and administrators to govern the initiative and to figure out how to make it sustainable beyond the initial funding period. In 2008 the SMC board of trustees adopted the initiative as a strategic priority and committed $200,000 a year for a three-year period. The task force eventually became a permanent standing committee, known as the Global Council, in the faculty senate.

Brayton says the program has been successful due to the support of senior administration, as well as the large amount of financial and human resources dedicated to the initiative. “I have never been at an institution where [internationalization] has had this level of support,” she says.

SMC has continued to provide funding for global citizenship activities, including earmarking $75,000 a year for study abroad scholarships. The college has also successfully pursued two Title VIA grants, which provide federal funding for foreign language, area, and international studies infrastructure-building at U.S. higher education institutions.

Kathryn E. Jeffery, PhD, who became president in 2016, remains committed to the initiative, even in the wake of a state budget crisis. “We are being very guarded around making sure that we continue to support the Global Citizenship Initiative to create opportunities for students. We don’t want that to fall off of the list of priorities,” she says.

Defining Global Citizenship

One of the first steps toward implementing the initiative was defining what “global citizenship” meant for SMC. “Dr. Tsang empowered the campus. He set the direction, but he left it up to us to figure out what exactly global citizenship would look like,” says Gordon Dossett, English professor and one of the original co-chairs of the global citizenship task force.

“Dr. Tsang saw the bigger picture and helped us realize that this was something we could work on as a faculty,” adds Janet Harclerode, chair of the English as a Second Language (ESL) department.

In 2008 SMC adopted its formal definition of global citizenship: “To be a global citizen, one is knowledgeable of peoples, customs and cultures in regions of the world beyond one’s own; understands the interdependence that holds both promise and peril for the future of the global community; and is committed to combining one’s learning with a dedication to foster a livable, sustainable world.”

According to Vice President of Academic Affairs Georgia Lorenz, PhD, the process of defining “global citizenship” eventually led to the adoption of global citizenship as an institutional learning outcome, which has had important implications for accreditation. “For something to become an institutional learning outcome is really significant. At the course and program levels, faculty will map their course outcomes to the competencies related to the institutional learning outcome” she explains.

Faculty-Led Programs Revitalize Study Abroad

When Santa Monica College student Ariana Kirsey traveled to South Africa last year, she couldn’t have imagined that sleeping in a tree house in Kruger National Park would be life changing.

Kirsey is one of 25 students who studied abroad through SMC’s faculty-led program to South Africa in January 2017. In addition to South Africa, SMC also runs annual trips to Belize and Guatemala through its Latin America Education program.

Each year, SMC sends more than 80 students abroad through its various study abroad programs, which range from one-week courses over spring break to six-week courses that are offered during winter or summer sessions.

Although SMC has offered study abroad programs since the 1980s, with the Global Citizenship Initiative the college made a conscious effort to switch from third-party providers to developing faculty-led programs that also allow SMC professors an opportunity to travel.

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Every year the college puts out a call for proposals to recruit faculty who are interested in leading trips abroad. Two professors travel with the students on each trip, and both part-time and full-time faculty are eligible to participate.

“We try to have a full-time lead faculty and then have a second faculty who may not have led study abroad before. They colead the first year, and then the second year the idea is that they would take on the lead. We wanted to rotate it so it wasn’t just a select few who could do it,” Brayton says.

SMC also offers a one-credit course, Field Studies Abroad, which launched in 2016. The program was developed specifically to target students who might not be able to travel for longer periods of time. Students travel with a faculty member for seven to 10 days over spring break.

The college approved a one-credit class called Global Studies 35 that can be customized depending on the destination. Brayton says that Field Studies courses have created opportunities for students and faculty alike because of their shorter duration.

Art history major Megan Dobbs says the Field Studies model was quite convenient in terms of time and affordability. She traveled to Denmark in March 2017 as part of a course titled Vikings, Socialism, and Sustainability: Copenhagen Past and Present.

“The trip took me out of my personal bubble and reminded me to think of the world on a much grander scale. This trip continues to remind me that I need to make an effort to step out of my comfort zone and have new experiences,” says Dobbs, who transferred to the University of California-Berkeley in fall 2017.

The college also strives to keep its study abroad programs affordable. “We really work hard on creating very low-cost study abroad. We have become an informal travel agent here at SMC and we work with in-country vendors,” Brayton explains.

The college provides $75,000 in study abroad scholarships every year, and more than half of all students going abroad receive $500 to $2,000 based on need. Many students are first-generation college students, and more than half of SMC’s study abroad participants are minorities. In addition, they are seeing an increased number of international students joining faculty-led programs.

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“A lot of our students have never left LA before. Study abroad is an experience that can really shift their perspectives on what it means to be a global citizen,” says Associate Dean of Student Life Nancy Grass, PhD, who led students to South Africa in 2008 and 2012.

Comprehensive Support for International Students

For the last five years, Santa Monica College has had the second largest international student population of any community college in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors data. SMC attracts students from around the world largely because of its reputation as a top transfer school.

While some students pursue shorter academic certificates, the majority of its 3,500 international students seek admission to nearby four-year institutions such as the various campuses of the University of California (UC). International students receive academic and immigration advising, among other support services, through the International Education Center and the International Education Counseling Center.

Omar Bishr, an economics major from Egypt, plans to transfer to the University of California. “From the moment I applied, the international office responded to all of my concerns. When I came to SMC, I felt like I was really welcomed to the school and that my presence matters. I really liked that I was given a presentation by counselors explaining to me the system of the college and how to choose my classes in order to transfer,” he says.

One initiative that seeks to promote interaction between international and domestic students is a language and culture exchange program run jointly between the modern languages and ESL departments. International students are paired with domestic students studying their language.

“We create an online forum for them and have an orientation. They can meet on that day, but if they don’t then they can go into the forum and introduce themselves and find people for language exchange online,” says Liz Koening, an ESL faculty member.

Approximately 130 students participate per semester. Music major Nahalia Samuels says she took part in order to practice her language skills with a native speaker.

“For me, having a language partner for Korean 1 and Korean 2 made all the difference in my reading, writing and speaking skills. I also wished to learn more about the...culture of the language I’m studying and to offer help as a native English speaker towards my ESL partner. I feel the program helps foreign students to connect with the campus community and expose us domestic students to a seemingly hidden population on campus,” she says.

Professional Development Helps Internationalize the Curriculum

Early on, SMC recognized that it was necessary to internationalize the faculty in order to reach the long-term goal of campus internationalization, especially in the classroom. The Global Citizenship Initiative thus led to the creation of a number of professional development opportunities abroad for faculty and staff.

In 2007, the first group of SMC faculty and staff traveled to Austria to attend the Salzburg Global Seminar, where they learned about topics such as intercultural communication and social justice. Other cohorts have subsequently visited the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies in China and Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey, with the last group traveling in 2015. Over the past 10 years, more than 125 SMC faculty and staff participated in the professional development programs to Austria, China, and Turkey.

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Peggy Kravitz, international education counselor, traveled to Austria, China, and Turkey. “It was a fabulous way to learn about those cultures, which of course I deal with in my work with international students,” she says.

Grass, who traveled to China, adds that one of the greatest benefits of the programs is the fact it was open to all full-time employees on campus.

“It wasn’t just faculty or administrators who could go, but technicians and custodians could apply as well. They really took a cross-section of the college that allowed for people to really get to know each other in a whole new way,” she says.

Brayton says the idea was to help staff who are often on the front line of student services gain a greater appreciation for the international student experience at SMC. “Classified staff are the ones who have a lot of casual interactions with students every day. The more they understand some of the challenges of being abroad, the more they that can connect with our international student population,” she says.

Upon their return to campus, faculty members must develop modules for their courses, and staff are to participate in international activities on campus, such as International Education Week.

In addition to the trips abroad, faculty can apply for a number of Global Grants ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 that fund projects and events, such as speakers, film screenings, and field trips, throughout the year. Harclerode, for example, received a Global Grant to take her ESL classes to various sites around Los Angeles, including the Watts Towers and the Los Angeles River. “The idea was to take them to the parts of LA they might not get to on their own,” she says.

Promoting Global Citizenship Through Student Research

To weave the idea of global citizenship into the fabric of campus life, SMC chooses a theme for each academic year and encourages faculty to develop related course modules. The current theme—“Gender Equity: Is Equity Enough?”—has been running for two years. In 2017–2018, the campus is exploring the topic of “Promise and Peril of a Global Community.” Previous years’ themes have included water, food, poverty and wealth, and peace and security.

The campus also holds an annual research symposium, where students are invited to submit and present academic and creative projects related to the annual academic theme.

Grass, who chaired the first symposium in 2010, says the idea for a campuswide research symposium emerged from the need to better prepare students to transfer to four-year universities: “When students come from the community college, even if they are really well prepared academically, they’re not ready to jump into junior-level research projects. Having the symposium encouraged faculty to have students do original research around this idea of global citizenship.”

“When we put out the call for proposals, it allows students to put forward what global citizenship means to them in the context of their education,” adds Delphine Broccard, communications professor and current symposium chair. “We can really discuss what global citizenship means in the different disciplines.”

Students submit proposals for projects ranging from short films, persuasive speeches, and photography to responses to study abroad experiences and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) research. Students can win cash prizes for the best entries in different categories. In 2016, Kenta Tanaka, an international student from Japan, won the President’s Award and $500 for a design project that explored the theme of gender equity in fashion. “I mixed menswear and womenswear. In fashion, we call it gender blur,” he says.

Global Citizenship Spans the Curriculum

SMC has used funding from one of its two Title VIA grants to develop a global studies major. Global studies at Santa Monica is an interdisciplinary program designed to increase students’ knowledge and understanding of the processes of globalization and their impacts on societies, cultures, and environments around the world. Coursework includes world geography, international political economy, experiential learning, and foreign language.

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The Global Citizenship Initiative has also given impetus to the development of a global citizenship degree requirement for all students receiving an associate’s degree. Students can meet the requirement either by studying abroad or taking an approved global citizenship course.

“The reality is that not a lot of students can participate in study abroad. But where students are going to be the most impacted by global learning is in the classroom. Infusing global perspectives into the general education curriculum is where we can reach a lot of students. Hopefully, that exposure highlights some of the international opportunities for them, not just here at Santa Monica but beyond,” Brayton says.

Florida State University’s (FSU) Global and Multicultural Building, home of the Center for Global Engagement (CGE), is the on-campus embodiment of FSU’s more than 60-year commitment to international education. Bringing together academic and student affairs, the center serves as a hub for international and multicultural programming for all FSU students.

A Campus Home for International Programming

“I think the students named it the Globe the minute they moved in. They really embraced it as a home for themselves,” says Mary Coburn, EdD, vice president for student affairs.

Coburn facilitated the construction of the Globe, which opened in 2010, through state funding earmarked for student services facilities. “I think having a physical home really elevated everything that we were doing. From the Friday coffee hours and the Global Cafés to all of the lectures and student meetings that are hosted there, it just sends a message to our campus that internationalization is important,” she says.

CGE’s predecessor was known as the International Center, which primarily focused on immigration advising for international students. The construction of the Globe marked a campuswide shift in the visibility of intercultural and international programming, ­according to Cindy Green, EdD, director of the Center of Global Engagement.

Green was able to work with the Globe’s architect to customize the building’s design, which includes classrooms, a meditation room, an auditorium, and a ­commercial kitchen.

Four times a semester, student organizations sign up to cook cuisine from a featured country in the kitchen through the Global Café. The student groups are able to fundraise at $7 a plate. The Global Café has been an accessible way to increase awareness and appreciation of the cultural diversity at FSU.

“Food is often the first way we are exposed to other cultures. Not only can students from other countries keep their traditions while they’re here, they can introduce their friends and the rest of the university to those traditions,” Coburn says.

Growing Support for Internationalization

Joining FSU in 2004, Green has witnessed growing support for internationalization across campus over the last decade. While there have always been pockets of international activity, comprehensive internationalization has faced challenges at FSU due to its decentralized structure as a public research university.

CGE’s portfolio currently includes international student and scholar services, a cocurricular certificate, international partnerships and direct exchanges, programs for non-degree-seeking international students, and international programming such as the Global Café.

Other units on campus, such as International Programs (IP) and the Center for Intensive English Studies (CIES), have also contributed to FSU’s internationalization efforts. IP oversees for-credit study abroad, while CIES offers intensive English language classes, a certificate in teaching English as a second language, English training for international teaching assistants, and accelerated language courses for incoming graduate students.

“The FSU campus provides so many opportunities for all of our students to be actively engaged with students from over 130 different countries as well as to take classes with an international focus. We offer a variety of international experiences, from short-term intercultural exchanges to year-long study abroad programs for those students that wish to engage internationally,” says FSU President John Thrasher.

Internationalization was included in FSU’s strategic plan for the first time in 2017 under the larger rubric of academic excellence, with the aim of “expanding [FSU’s] global footprint and fostering a culturally rich learning environment on campus.”

“We really pushed to make sure that internationalization was in the plan moving forward. Making sure that internationalization is part of the experience that all of our students have is an important part of academic excellence,” says Provost Sally E. McRorie, PhD.

Assistant Provost Joe O’Shea sees internationalization as one of the institution’s student success initiatives: “We know international education is a high-impact practice, which helps our students launch successfully from the university into graduate education or a career.”

Promoting International Graduate Student Recruitment

Part of the academic excellence priority also focuses on enhancing the quality of graduate education to become a leader in strategically important areas of research. This includes providing financial support to attract the best graduate students.

Associate Provost Bruce Locke says that the ­strategic plan has given FSU impetus to develop initiatives focused on international graduate student recruitment. FSU’s 1,500 international graduate students currently make up more than 75 percent of its international student population.

“One of our goals [as a university] is to become a top-25 public institution. In order to do that we have to really grow our graduate programs, which includes seeking out and recruiting talented international students,” Green says.

Green and Locke collaborated to develop a “3+1+1” program as a graduate recruitment pipeline. Students from 28 partners in China, India, and Thailand can enroll for two semesters at FSU as non-degree-seeking undergraduate students and then transfer their credits back to their home institutions to complete their bachelor’s degree.

Some of the upper-division credits they take will then count toward FSU master’s programs. Known as the Special Academic Program (SAP), the initiative helps better prepare participants for graduate school at FSU as well as other institutions in the United States. It also allows FSU faculty to identify highly qualified candidates for graduate programs. The majority of participants remain at FSU, with some even continuing into PhD programs.

“It’s been really great because the students have a full year to acclimate to the campus,  and faculty members can take a really close look at their work and their competence in English and can give [participants] extra assistance if they need it,” says Jocelyn Vaughn, PhD, program director for FSU international initiatives.

SAP participants pay a program fee that covers their tuition, room and board, and support services provided by CGE. The program was piloted in chemical engineering, and has subsequently expanded to other engineering disciplines as well as finance, marketing, communication, and public administration.

Yun Chen is a Chinese student who graduated from her home university in June 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in public administration. She spent her senior year at FSU as part of the SAP and will be able to transfer 12 credits into her FSU graduate program in public administration in fall 2017.

“The program staff gave us a lot of helpful suggestions and guidance about how to apply for our master’s program. When I was applying for my MPA program, [the director] not only provided a letter of recommendation but also contacted the admissions office to make sure my application was in process,” she says.

Nondegree Programs Increase Diversity and Promote Opportunities Abroad

Creating opportunities for non-degree-seeking students through SAP, as well as direct exchanges and other short-term programs, has also helped increase the diversity of FSU’s international population. CGE currently serves approximately 380 degree-seeking international undergraduates, the majority of whom are student athletes or transfer students from FSU’s branch campus in Panama.

FSU’s international undergraduates are relatively few due to its role as a state institution. Unlike many of its peer institutions in other states, FSU has not needed to pursue international undergraduate recruitment.

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“FSU’s mission is to serve the people of the state of Florida. We have around 42,000 applications for a freshman class of 6,400 for the 2017–2018 academic year. There are plenty of domestic students to fill the slots,” says Green.

Vaughn has instead focused on expanding the number of bilateral exchange programs, especially those that are open to students from any academic discipline. This allows domestic students to study abroad while paying in-state tuition, and enables FSU to bring in more international undergraduates.

“We’ve been trying to increase the number of university-wide exchanges, rather than department to department. We’re doing these in order to give opportunities to students who haven’t been served before by exchanges, in particular those in STEM,” Vaughn says.

For students who are unable to participate in a full-semester exchange, CGE has also developed a cultural exchange program, Beyond Borders. The program sends 12 students to Jamaica over spring break and 10 students to Germany in the summer. In addition to enrolling in a one-credit applied global experience class, participants also host international students from the two countries.

Casey Johnson, an FSU alumni who graduated in 2016 with a degree in biology, participated in Beyond Borders to Jamaica as a junior transfer student and to Germany as a senior. “I really didn’t have the intention of being this world traveler, but somehow it just fit with the timeline of my life at FSU. I know for a fact I would not be where I am now today had it not been for those experiences,” he says.

Johnson is currently studying for a master’s in radiation biology on a full scholarship to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “During my interview for Oxford, the main talking point was my international experiences and what I took away from them. I could really tell that the interview committee aligned with my desire to immerse myself in diversity and different cultures,” he explains.

Another short-term program serving international undergraduates is a summer program in hospitality management and intercultural communication. ­Students from partner institutions in Korea, Japan, Macau, Mexico, and Canada combine academic classes with an internship (academic training) at Walt Disney World® Resort. After participating in a 10-day intensive academic program on the FSU campus in Tallahassee, students complete a six-month internship at Disney in Orlando while taking classes with FSU professors, both online and face-to-face.

International Experiences for Domestic Students Through Service Abroad

Other units on campus, such as the Center for Leadership & Social Change and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement (CRE), also offer nontraditional opportunities for students to go abroad.

One of CRE’s flagship programs is Global Scholars, which places approximately 40 students in summer internships at nonprofits in Asia, South America, and Africa. Students participate in predeparture training and must complete a capstone research project on an issue facing the overseas community after completing their internship.

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Valeria Rigobon, a junior psychology major, spent the summer of 2016 working at an educational nonprofit in Lima, Peru. “I actually learned a little about this program at my orientation, before my first fall semester even started. I found it interesting because it didn’t seem like the standard study abroad experience. I was also looking for ways to continue my volunteer work that I had been very involved in throughout middle and high school...It didn’t hurt that I might have the opportunity to go somewhere I could improve my Spanish as well!” she says.

While in Peru, Rigobon worked as a music teacher, tutor, and leadership workshop facilitator. She says the Global Scholars program thoroughly prepared her: “[The program] prepares the students so well for what they will face and accomplish once they’re abroad. We are prepared to represent not only FSU, but the United States, when we go abroad.”

O’Shea says the Global Scholars program has been especially successful at creating opportunities for first-generation and low-income students. “We have made great strides through the Global Scholars program in opening up access, developing a model that is sustainable and accessible, but also works through peer support networks, and in other ways to help students overcome the barriers that they face so that they can successfully undertake a very transformative international education experience,” he says.

CRE also runs the FSU Gap Year Fellows program. Admitted freshmen are able to apply for the program and, if accepted, defer their admission for a year. A gap year—which might be spent traveling, volunteering, interning, or working—involves a break in formal education where students focus on cultivating self-awareness and exploring different career options. FSU provides up to $5,000 of support to GAP Year Fellows, who must have a substantial service element in their proposed gap year.

“We are the second public university in the United States to provide a deferment of matriculation and also to subsidize that. We think of this as a student success intervention. The data that we have in the U.S. and from overseas is that if you have a structured educational bridge year, you are more likely to succeed in college and have not only higher retention rates, but also to have higher academic performance,” O’Shea explains.

Developing a Certificate for Global Citizenship

One of the ways in which FSU attempted to streamline its various opportunities for international experience is through its academic and cocurricular Global Citizenship Certificate, run through the Center for Global Engagement. Opportunities such as Beyond Borders and the Global Scholars program fulfill one of the certificate’s main requirements, a sustained international experience. Students can also meet the requirement by completing at least 75 hours of an intercultural experience within the United States.

All students must also attend and submit reflections on at least eight intercultural events and take a pre- and postassessment of intercultural competence. In addition, students must enroll in two required classes, which include a capstone project, and take two approved electives with a cross-cultural theme.

Rayne Neunie, who finished her studies at FSU in family and child science in May 2017, was a Global Scholar who recently completed her Global Citizenship certificate. “The certificate allowed me to gain a better understanding of cross-cultural differences around the world, I learned a plethora about global issues affecting various societies, and I also engaged in a number of intercultural events that I never before knew existed on Florida State’s campus,” she says.

As a Global Scholar, she spent two months working on a maternal health project at a nonprofit in Kenya, which fulfilled her requirement for a sustained international experience. Neunie also received a Boren scholarship to study Swahili in Tanzania in summer and fall 2017.

“This experience deepened my passion for global health, influenced me to participate in FSU’s Global Citizenship certificate, and has made me confident to expand my global capacity by becoming a Boren scholarship recipient. Florida State University has taught me that my journey of achieving intercultural competence does not end here,” Neunie explains.

Sending Students Abroad to Overseas Study Centers

FSU is ranked 12th on the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) list of “Top 25 Institutions Awarding Credit for Study Abroad,” with 2,262 students studying abroad in 2014–2015. Approximately 25 percent of FSU’s undergraduates study abroad, according to the director of international programs, Jim Pitts.

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Much of FSU’s impressive study abroad figures are due to FSU’s large footprint abroad. Starting with a branch campus in Panama in 1957, FSU now has three additional study centers in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain. The Panama campus also hosts FSU faculty-led study abroad programs.

FSU-Panama offers bachelor’s degrees in subjects such as computer science and international affairs, but the majority of its students complete an associate’s degree and transfer to the main campus in Tallahassee. Approximately 100 students transfer from Panama every year.

“The Panama campus really serves as a hub for our outreach in Latin America. We have students from many different countries of the Latin American region that start their program with us in Panama,” Pitts says.

Students who are citizens of a Latin American or Caribbean country enrolled at FSU-Panama are also eligible for a scholarship program that allows them to pay in-state tuition for the last two years of their studies. FSU-Panama also maintains research affiliations with local universities, including Universidad de Panamá, Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, and Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua.

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Students can also participate in the First Year Abroad program, which allows freshmen to spend their first year at one or more of the four sites and complete general education requirements. “At the completion of the 12 months, they can have in-state tuition in Florida for the balance of their undergraduate degree,” Pitts says.

Recent graduate Lauren Romanzak, who majored in English literature and international affairs, spent her first academic year in London followed by a summer in Valencia.

“The opportunity to spend a year abroad was enough to sell me on the program, and the in-state tuition waiver to follow was enough to convince my accountant father,” she says.

“I’m thankful I got the opportunity to study abroad so early in my college career because it directed the remainder of it. Coming from a small town had not exposed me to much diversity, and studying in as huge of a global city as London, learning another language in Valencia, and traveling independently throughout Europe (and even Africa!) definitely changed that.”

In the state that fired the first shot in the property tax revolt with Proposition 13 more than a quarter- century ago, what are the odds that voters in the South Bay of Los Angeles would approve a $394 million bond issue for their community college? 

The odds might be long, but by a margin of 62–38, some 110,000 voters in this ethnically and economically diverse area of southern California did just that in November 2002 by passing “Measure E,” a capital improvement bond, for El Camino College. El Camino is an ambitious institution serving nine cities: El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Lawndale, Hawthorne, Lennox, and Inglewood. It opened its doors in 1947 as El Camino Junior College, with 450 students attending classes in nine renovated barracks from Santa Ana Army Air Base. Today 25,000 students are enrolled on the campus, which offers 2,500 classes in 85 programs and boasts a 12,500-seat football stadium.

Painstaking Pursuit of Grant Funding

El Camino is also a standout in international education, enrolling nearly 700 students from other countries and sending more than 100 each summer to study in England, France, China, and New Zealand. Thanks to an aggressive pursuit of federal grants and exchange opportunities and a spirit of inquisitiveness among its faculty, El Camino College in the past five years has gotten involved in exchanges that took its faculty to Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Lebanon. It was one of two community colleges chosen to participate in the State Department–sponsored Global Experience Through Technology (GETT) initiative that links classrooms in Europe and the Middle East with campuses in the United States. 

“There was a time probably when some folks here thought, ‘Well, why are we doing this? We have the general education curriculum to address,’” said Gloria E. Miranda, the dean of Behavioral and Social Sciences and a historian on family life in Spanish and Mexican California. “But with the world today, and with the tragic series of events in the last several years, we really need to understand the multicultural world we live in. And since much of the world migrates to the United States, we must understand the people who come to this country, as well.”

Bozena (Bo) Morton, acting director of the Center for International Education and a prolific grant writer, said, “With international grants, we’ve been extremely lucky. We got almost everything we applied for with one exception.” The Polish-born Morton immigrated to the United States after a decade living in then-Czechoslovakia and teaching English at University of Silesia in Cieszyn, just over the border in Poland. 

The lives and careers of several El Camino faculty have taken remarkable international turns thanks to Morton’s uncanny grantswomanship, none more so than that of Antoinette Phillips, a professor of childhood education. 

Alumna Leads Child Development Programs Abroad

Phillips is an El Camino success story. She earned her associate’s degree in 1976, then joined the faculty after completing a master’s degree in childhood education. “I was one of those late bloomers. I didn’t go to college until my children started school. I lived right down the street and rode my bike so I didn’t have to worry about parking,” she said. She excelled in the classroom, but was astonished one day when a mentor told her, “You know, you could do this. You could be a professor.”

Phillips volunteered to go to Ukraine for three months in 2001 to teach child development and American instructional techniques to Ukrainian professors and their students. El Camino had secured an $180,000 three-year grant under a State Department program that links U.S. colleges with universities in the newly independent states of East Europe. El Camino’s partner was Dniepropetrovsk National University (DNU) in Dniepropetrovsk, a city of 1 million people on the Dniepro River that was closed for military research during the Soviet era.

“At a faculty meeting Bo asked, ‘Who would like to go to Ukraine?’ and I raised my hand. That’s how it all started,” said Phillips.

While their project partners in DNU’s Educational Psychology Department spoke fluent English, most of the students and many of the professors with whom Phillips interacted in other places did not. She relied on students and the project’s co-director, Tatyana Vvedenska, to translate for her. Vvedenska, a dynamic English professor at DNU, wound up teaching ESL classes at El Camino on a faculty exchange in Spring 2004.

The polyglot Morton calls Phillips “the bravest person” for taking on the assignment. Her dean, Gloria Miranda, accompanied Phillips to Ukraine, but she returned shortly afterwards. “I was there by my lonesome for three months until Bo came over for the last two weeks,” said Phillips. In dozens of classrooms and academies, she demonstrated how classes could be taught in more creative ways than relying solely on lectures.

 “I had to have an interpreter all the time. That was a little uncomfortable, because it takes away some of my spontaneity—I had to wait after each sentence for it to be translated—but we managed,” she said. “I visited a lot of schools from preschool up to universities, went to academies, and spoke to a lot of different classes about the American way of life and American education.”

She’d return to her apartment after a day of classes, and using a dial-up connection, teach two education classes online to her students back in California, sharing with them glimpses of life in Ukraine’s third largest city.

Apart from one trip to England, Phillips had not previously traveled outside North America. “It was such a transforming experience for her. What I find so fascinating is that you have faculty who really have never seen the world,” said Miranda. “Even though they are experts in a discipline—Antoinette is one of our distinguished faculty awardees—they have not tested how their teaching techniques would apply in a global setting.”

Phillips enjoyed the experience so much that she volunteered to do it again two years later when Morton landed a grant from the Fulbright Educational Partnership Program allowing El Camino to partner on teacher training with the Cieszyn branch of the University of Silesia in Poland, where Morton once taught. There Phillips found the classrooms filled with eager future teachers who spoke English fluently.

Expanding Teacher Exchanges, Online Offerings, and Telecourses

El Camino sent six faculty and administrators to DNU over four years, and an equal number from the Ukrainian university journeyed to California to visit El Camino’s landscaped campus a few miles south of Los Angeles International Airport. Most of these exchanges lasted two to three weeks. Phillips made a return visit in April 2003 with Elizabeth Shadish, an El Camino philosophy professor who is a skilled hand at distance education.

At home, El Camino’s distance education courses—both online via computer and through telecourses provided on videos—are especially popular with students who cannot fit regular class hours into their work or family schedule. “They may be working 40 hours a week or they’ve just had a baby or they have two or three children at home,” said Phillips.

In the Ukraine, the university students were traditional age—18 to 21—and technilogically savvy. However, most faculty were lacking in technological literacy, said Shadish, who earned her Ph.D. at Purdue University and taught at California State University at Northridge before joining the El Camino faculty a dozen years ago.

Like Phillips, Gloria Miranda is also a product of one of California’s many two-year colleges, Compton College. She earned her bachelor’s at Cal State University, Dominguez Hills, and her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. She chaired the American Cultures and Chicano Studies programs at Los Angeles Valley  College before taking the dean’s post at El Camino. 

“The fact that Bo came with her unique background has really helped us and our faculty focus on what we can do to expose ourselves and our students to the world around us,” Miranda said. 

“The faculty in my division who’ve participated have been almost re-energized by these opportunities.”

With the Ukrainian project, Morton said, “We found out that sending the same faculty members more than once is really a good practice. They are able to do so much more during their second visit because they don’t have this adjustment period.” 

The success of the Ukrainian exchange convinced El Camino  President Thomas M. Fallo to tap some of El Camino’s own  resources to support the partnership with the University of Silesia in Cieszyn, Poland. It is a city and region with a turbulent and  colorful past and a multicultural mix of identities and ethnicities.

In Poland, Phillips found teacher educators intrigued by her  teaching methods, but loathe to give up their reliance on rote  lectures. The Polish educators were struggling with how to meet a new mandate for more kindergarten teachers.

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GETTing More Opportunities

For it’s next international venture, El Camini was selected to participate in the State Department’s International World Cultures Project using the Global Experience Through Technology (GETT) model pioneered by East Carolina University. Recognizing that fewer than 2 percent of U.S. college students study abroad, this project is designed to expose students to new cultures through virtual classrooms shared with university students in other parts of the world.

This opportunity almost fell into El Camino’s lap.

“After Ukraine we got a good reputation. That project worked well and accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish,” said Morton. “One day I was sitting in my office and I got a call from a new person at the Department of State who told me she was putting together a virtual classroom project. She had heard about the distance education component to our work.”

El Camino partnered again with DNU in this new project, but it also needed to find  two other institutions to work with, including one in the Arab world. “Sometimes it’s not easy to put a partnership together. Sometimes you just have to dig, you have to cold call,” said Morton. “I sent cold e-mails. That’s how I came up with the Italian partner. Somebody on our faculty said the University of Modena at Reggio Emilia was the best in Italy on early childhood education, and I thought, ‘If we are going to connect with somebody, why not the best?’”

El Camino sent Elizabeth Shadish, the professor of philosophy, and Joanna Medawar Nachef, a music professor and choir director, to Europe with bags bulging with videoconference equipment bound for three partner institutions: DNU in Ukraine, the University of Modena at Reggio Emilia, and the Lebanese University in Beirut, Lebanon. Nachef is an accomplished conductor and choir master who was born in Beirut but earned her degrees (including a doctorate from USC) in the United States. She speaks Arabic and still has extensive contacts in the Lebanese capital.

The two El Camino teachers set up a pilot world cultures course in which a single class of students from the four institutions rotated working with each other online for three to four weeks at a time.

“We had to create a schedule that involved coordinating across time lines, semesters starting at different times, and vacations and holidays happening at different times. You just put together a grid and get a schedule down so that nobody has off times, or at least not too many off times,” said Shadish. “At any point, two institutions were working with each other, ideally for three or four weeks. While we’re talking with Italy, Lebanon is talking with Ukraine. Next rotation we’re talking with Ukraine, while Italy and Lebanon are talking.”

For the pilot, Shadish and Nachef selected El Camino honors students from their own classes. They received no credit, “but  they were there the whole semester at 8 in the morning. They saw the value in this,” said Shadish.

They had no trouble finding volunteers, agreed Nachef. “Even [at times] when there is no picture and they are only hearing them on the other end, the electricity in the room is fascinating,” she said. “These students went back to the choirs and my other classes, saying, ‘You can’t believe how exciting it is.’” Students were often disappointed when the allotted hour ran out. “They don’t want to leave the room. They look at their watches. We say we have to end the session and they say, ‘We don’t want to,’” Nachef said.

Nachef laughed as she recalled one incident of strained communication. One student asked a young man in Lebanon if they had rites of passage for special birthdays. She had in mind La Quinceañera, the Latin celebration for a girl’s fifteenth birthday.

The Lebanese student took umbrage, typing back, “Do you think we are barbarians? We dance around fires?”

The panicked American called out for help to her professor,  saying, “Dr. Nachef, I don’t know what to say. He thinks we’re  putting them down.”

Amity prevailed after the cultural reference was explained.

Shadish and Nachef plan to offer the cultural exchange course again and involve new countries and universities in GETT. “Where this program can go is so exciting,” Shadish said. “[GETT] is such a pioneer experience that nothing you do is wrong. We’re creating the standards. We’re very free to explore what works.”

The Possibilities Seem Endless

El Camino also won Fulbright-Hayes funding from the U.S. Department of Education to send 15 teachers—Spanish language teachers and teacher educators from its own faculty and teachers from local elementary schools—on a four-week language and cultural study trip to Guadalajara and Oaxaca, Mexico.

Miranda said El Camino is developing a proposal to partner on an early childhood initiative with two other community colleges in different parts of the United States and three universities overseas.

The possibilities seem endless. “I have a part-time teacher whose father is retired from the University of Ghana,” said Miranda. “And Bo and I have been talking about a grant that includes China. We’re in such a key position here on the Pacific Coast, and we want to infuse our curriculum with more content that pertains to the Asian world.” El Camino has already won backing from the Council for International Exchange of Scholars for its request to have a Middle East scholar spend a semester at the campus as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence.

The faculty and the administrators keep coming up with ideas and Bo Morton, as Miranda put it, “keeps hitting home runs for us.” 

Even before getting a $394 million makeover courtesy of Measure E—it will take years to complete all the new projects and improvements—El Camino has established itself as a college on the move.

El Camino College

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A few years back, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked college presidents to muse on what they’d do with a $1 billion gift with no strings attached. The University of Denver’s then-Chancellor Daniel L. Ritchie immediately responded: “Send every student abroad for study at no extra cost, including travel.”

But Ritchie wasn’t just wishing. He explained to the Chronicle that the University of Denver already had a plan in the works to send every undergraduate with grades of B or better to study abroad, and it was financing this out of pocket. A $1 billion windfall would just let Denver start doing this sooner. 

Scholarship Program Takes Students Abroad

The University of Denver launched its Cherrington Global Scholars program on schedule in September 2004, sending the first 347 students to spend the fall quarter at more than 60 sites overseas. Many were prominent universities with which DU has painstakingly forged bilateral agreements to ensure that the coursework is compatible with the majors of DU students from programs as diverse as music, engineering, business, and social work. “There simply is no better preparation for the challenges that lie ahead for our students,” said Ritchie, a former corporate CEO who retired as chancellor this past summer after executing a remarkable turnaround in the University of Denver’s fortunes over 16 years.

The Cherrington Global Scholars program—named for a former chancellor and prominent international educator [see box, The Cherrington and Korbel Connections]—has attracted curiosity in academic circles. “People ask all the time: ‘Who is this Cherrington that gave the money?’” said Carol Fairweather, director of the Study Abroad Office. “But it didn’t come that way. It didn’t come with an endowment. It’s written into the university budget.”

As Ritchie wrote in response to the Chronicle’s $1 billion question, “When students immerse themselves in study abroad and constantly use another language, it forever changes their worldview and their potential for growth. It’s even truer now than before September 11.”

The University of Denver long had been sending students to study in other countries, but not in the numbers that Ritchie, then-Provost and now Chancellor Robert Coombe, and legal scholar Ved Nanda, the vice provost for internationalization, had in mind. When Fairweather came on board nine years ago, she was the sole person in the study abroad office. “Now there are six of us,” she said in her Scottish burr. In 2001 the university enlisted George Boyd, a former dean of humanities and study abroad director for Trinity University, to serve as director of international site development, a position from which he traveled the world to forge more than 40 exchange agreements with leading universities. Boyd is now associate vice provost for internationalization.

The university enrolls 9,600 students, including 4,500 undergraduates, 55 percent from outside Colorado. Nearly 700 are international. With the launch of the Cherrington program, the university is aiming for 60 percent of its undergraduates to study abroad for at least a quarter. It’s not surprising why more students are taking DU up on the offer. 

The students pay just a third of their tuition (roughly $9,000) plus a share of room and board, but the university picks up the rests of the costs of their studying abroad. “We pay all their travel expenses, not just the airfare,” said Fairweather. “If they are going to Aix-en-Provence, we pay the airfare to Paris, and then the train or flight down. It’s visas, entry permits, International Student ID card, medical insurance if that’s mandatory, and any additional expense.” Some students spend 15 weeks studying overseas, which is more like a semester than a quarter, but they are still charged only a third of tuition. 

DU still sends students on other study abroad programs as well. All told, the number studying abroad jumped from 221 in fall 2003 to 405 in fall 2004. 

The University of Denver invests heavily in the Cherrington program. Most of the tuition payments are passed on to the partner universities. The program’s costs topped $4 million in the first year, and was projected at more than $5 million for 2005–2006.

Leadership and Campus-Wide Support

“How do we do it? The answer is that Chancellor Ritchie was and is a man of great aspirations for the university and high educational ideals, and he decided this was a very high priority,” said Boyd.

Eric Gould, an English professor and former vice provost who chairs the Cherrington Global Scholars Faculty Board, said, “It’s very much the will of the chancellor and the provost that this  succeed, and it’s not just them. It’s the deans, the departments, and the faculty–we all believe in this as a very important educational exercise.”

The faculty are also deeply involved in making sure these study abroad experiences fit smoothly into students’ majors. “It’s very complicated to do it well,” said Ritchie. “You’ve got to get faculty from each of the disciplines involved. You’ve got to prepare students not only for the logistics of going, but in their studies and disciplines, and making sure that we can give credit for it.”

“It’s unusual for a school with so many professional programs, especially those offered at the undergraduate level, to integrate study abroad as easily as we have done,” said Gould. “Even some of the difficult majors like engineering, music, and art, which have very, very tight curricula, are making special efforts to ensure that their students travel.”

DU is among the largest private universities between Chicago and the West Coast. The study abroad numbers had been growing even before the Cherrington program. Based on the 2002–2003 numbers, it ranked seventh nationally among doctoral/research institutions in Open Doors 2004, the Institute of International Education (IIE) report, with fully half of undergraduates studying abroad by the time they graduated. However, most then were going on short study abroad trips, usually during the summer.

The university made meticulous preparations for the launch of the Cherrington program, canvassing almost every office on campus from housing to the registrar to financial aid that “might be caught in the ripple of Cherrington,” as Fairweather put it. It convened town hall-style meetings to discuss how to deal with the ripple effects.

 “With the advising and the new opportunities available, we are seeing students move into destinations that were not popular before,” said Fairweather. “We’re seeing them spread out. We’ve got many more students interested in Japan and we have students going to India. We started a program with DIS in Denmark.”

While still provost, Coombe offered $30,000 in grants for departments to send faculty overseas to find suitable new academic partners for their majors, in addition to the many that Boyd found.

 “A couple of schools are on our list primarily because I was looking for an engineering fit. The Budapest Institute of Technology is the best example,” said Boyd. “We’re adding Monash University in Australia, partly for engineering and partly for art.”

 “We know students will still want to go to Australia and certain places that have been popular for years. But George has filled in the holes in the wall where the music students and engineers need to go,” said Fairweather.

To ensure that music majors not only received instruction in their instrument, but also got opportunities to play in ensembles and found “just the right course in the music history sequence,” Boyd arranged exchanges with the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) in Vienna and Milan. They also can enroll in a Brisbane, Australia, conservatory.

The engineering department reconfigured requirements to make it possible for majors to study abroad at the start of their senior year. “I thought it quite remarkable that a very technical department like engineering would adjust its curriculum to make a slot where study abroad would fit better,” said Gould.

Nanda, who holds two endowed chairs in addition to serving as vice provost for international programs, calls what has happened at the University of Denver “a miracle.” He continues, “Internationalization and international life and culture have become part of the mainstream of life on this campus. It’s wonderful that it happened, and very, very heartening.”

To understand how Columbus State Community College built its formidable array of international education connections, consider the baggage claim area at Port Columbus International Airport, a gateway to the Midwest that serves more than 6 million passengers each year. A few years back, Robert Queen, an administrator at the community college, noticed that next to the baggage claim area there was a room that served as the airport chapel, and inside that space was an even smaller office with a sign on the door that read, International Visitors Council.

Networking to Key Connections

Queen, the administrator of Columbus State’s International Initiatives and Community Outreach Program and a born networker, did what comes naturally: He knocked on the door and asked the person inside, “What do you all do?”

He learned that the small office belonged to a local nonprofit group that served as a liaison to dignitaries, educators, business executives, political leaders, artists, and others visiting Ohio’s state capital from overseas on trips arranged by the U.S. Department of State. Queen and his boss, Alphonso Simmons, vice president and head of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, wasted no time in suggesting that their busy campus on an 80-acre patch of green in downtown Columbus would make an excellent addition to international visitors’ itineraries. They not only got involved with the council, but Queen went on to become president. While Queen led that group, Simmons was president of the Columbus Compact Corp., an organization working to promote economic development and opportunity in central Columbus. Both men are active participants in the Columbus Council on World Affairs, Sister Cities International, and Columbus International Program, another nonprofit that brings professionals from other countries to central Ohio for a year working on exchange in local businesses and agencies

A Growing Reputation for Internationalization

Columbus is home to The Ohio State University, the largest public university in America, with almost 51,000 students on its main campus. But Columbus State is also a force in the capital and in central Ohio, awarding more associate degrees than any of the state’s 22 other community colleges. Its enrollment grew by more than a third in the past decade, cresting at 23,000 in fall 2003. Last year it purchased a 108-acre site in fast-growing Delaware County that eventually will become a second main location, complementing nine suburban satellites.

Columbus State’s president, M. Valeriana Moeller, a scientist who was born in India and raised in Portugal, serves on the board of the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Commission on International Education. Columbus State was among eight U.S. colleges and universities selected by ACE for a research project examining the links between campus international education strategies and activities and student attitudes and participation in international programs. That study, Forging New Connections: A Study in Linking Internationalization Strategies and Student Learning, is forthcoming.

A sampling of Columbus State’s international activities illustrates why it is considered a paragon of internationalism:

• In cooperation with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Columbus State has partnered with Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and Vicatel, a Tanzanian information services business, to provide IT training to Tanzanian business and government leaders.
• It is conducting a similar training program under the auspices of the World Bank for educators in Hungary.
• It has established several Sister College agreements and is working on more with colleges in Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Australia, Italy, China, and Africa.
• Its connections with the International Visitors Council and the Columbus Council on World Affairs have brought more than 200 visitors from dozens of countries—Togo, Liberia, Ireland, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates among them—to the Spring Street campus.

Columbus State also has been honored by the American Council on International Intercultural Education for its success in internationalizing the curriculum and in opening an English language institute to serve international students, immigrants, and refugees, including some of the 30,000 Somalis who now make their home in the Ohio capital. It offers an array of summer study abroad opportunities for students to learn other languages and cultures.

International Partnerships and Outreach

It was the college’s array of international partnerships and aggressive outreach efforts that caught the eye of the NAFSA selection committee that chose the institutions for this Internationalizing the Campus report.

“We do have that reputation (for strong outreach and partnerships) and let me assure you, there is meat behind that reputation,” said Simmons, a former chair of the social services program who began teaching at Columbus State in 1974.

Queen’s connections to the college go back even further. He was in the first graduating class of what was then the Columbus Area Technician School, which had opened in a wing of Central High School in 1963. It was renamed the Columbus Technical Institute in 1967 and two decades later rechartered as Columbus State Community College. It offers more than 140 associate degree  and certificate programs in business, health, social services,  engineering technology, and other fields. It forged its first articulation agreement with Ohio State in 1989 and now has transfer pacts with Ohio University, Kent State University, the University of Cincinnati, Antioch College and a dozen other four-year campuses across the state.

The drive to internationalize Columbus State came soon after M. Valeriana Moeller, then the executive vice president and provost of Lansing Community College in Michigan, was named president in 1996. “She got us into a new age, a new era. She got us thinking about Internet education and internationalizing the curriculum,” said Simmons. Moeller also recognized a need to serve Columbus’s growing immigrant populations, including the refugees from Somalia and growing numbers of immigrants from Latin America.

Moeller restructured the college administration. As head of the new Office of Multicultural Affairs, Simmons also chaired a Global Initiatives Committee that drafted a strategic plan for internationalization. And Columbus State got into distance education in a large way. Some 8,300 students now take courses online, with a choice of more than 290 distance education courses and five online degrees offered through Columbus State’s Global Campus.

Queen—who had gone to work for Battelle Memorial Institute with his degree in mechanical engineering technology—had returned to the college to teach in 1985 and was chair of its engineering technologies program when asked to run the new Office of International Initiatives and Community Outreach.

“At the time we had very little experience with internationalization or globalization,” he recalled. “We had to define what it meant when you said you wanted to internationalize your curriculum. What does this umbrella look like? What are the components of the curriculum? We had to find out who the players were, who was working in this arena and who was doing what.”

“We became involved,” said Queen, “and anywhere there was an opportunity for us to gain some insight, we were there to learn about it and see how that might fit into our structure.”

Finding Needs and Filling Them

“One of the ways we moved forward in this international work was we found [opportunities] where people were not working,” said Queen. “For example, we found that universities had been working for a long time with the State Department and U.S. AID [Agency for International Development] doing contract training, but community colleges were not really involved. The same was true with the World Bank on some of their programs.

“So we took the initiative to start finding out more about the  World Bank, the Associate Liaison Office of AID, and also the  National Council for International Visitors. We wanted to know, how do we bring dignitaries from other countries into the United States and more important, how do we get them on our campus?” Queen said. 

Simmons, who moved to Ohio from Georgia in 1969 to earn his master’s degree and doctorate at Ohio State, said that once the college began reaching out and expanding its horizons, it found plenty of takers. “It turned out there were lots of people out there in central Ohio who truly wanted to become affiliated with the college in some way,” Simmons said. One connection led to another.

The educators maintain close ties with the city of Columbus’s Office of Community Relations, which works with the region’s immigrants and refugees. “The director has a program on cable television every week in which he talks about what’s going on in our community.  He might be talking with groups that put on a huge Asian festival at one of the local parks each spring, and invariably in that conversation, our name may come up: ‘What about Columbus State? Have you talked with them?’ That’s how we keep becoming more and more involved in lots and lots of activities,” said Simmons.

Workforce Development

Columbus State is very attuned to the needs of major employers in the region, and many companies have enlisted its help for English language classes and workforce training.

“We have a workforce development unit on campus that almost at the drop of a hat can develop programs and youth training for different groups in the community, and we also have a business and industry unit that’s also geared to [outside contract work,]” Simmons said. “We provide ESL courses, we provide training for police officers in different languages, we provide training for social service workers.” 

“We work closely with Ohio State University. We’re fortunate to have them as our neighbor and good friends,” said Queen. Ohio State’s Center for Education, Training and Employment does  contract training around the globe “and they look to us to provide the vocational, technical aspects of a curriculum.” 

A Willingness to “Give It a Try”

A willingness to take risks has also served Columbus State well. For example, Columbus State learned from the international liaison at the American Association of Community Colleges that it was having difficulty finding a college willing to provide curriculum development training for a World Bank project in Hungary.

“Well, we know curriculum development and workforce education very well. We decided to give it a try,” said Queen. FAS International, the subcontractor on the World Bank contract, brought three groups of 21 educators from Hungary to Columbus State  for instruction on curriculum development and how to validate a curriculum with industry.

“We’ve done several more since,” said Queen. After figuring out how to provide such training in Columbus, Queen said, they realized they could also “take our faculty across the water to their place.”

With Tanzania, Columbus State first did a pilot distance education project, and then exchanged faculty members. When the American Association of Community Colleges arranged a match-making session with Chinese institutions in Beijing in 2004, Columbus State was there. It has since hosted a training session for Chinese business executives who needed to learn about the World Trade Organization.

“It’s all really about people-to-people,” said Queen.

Helping Students Find Opportunities

Columbus State currently enrolls 465 international students. Helvi Itenge, a computer technology student from Windhoek, Namibia, marvels that the computer labs are open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Bola Jinadu of Lagos, Nigeria, said, “The environment, the teachers, the students, they make you feel welcome. They make you feel like they actually want you to be here and they are out there to listen to you and to help you in any way they can.”

Itenge, Jinadu and Sophie Metaferia from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, all serve as Student Ambassadors, a program that provides scholarships for top students to serve as goodwill emissaries for the college with prospective students and community groups.

Metaferia’s father was a physician who died when she was 3. She still remembers people back home talking about how much good he did. “This college has opened a lot of choices for me,” said Metaferia. “Now, I want to be a medical doctor… I want to do my part to help my people.”