With about 35,000 undergraduate and graduate students across eight campuses, Kent State University (Kent State) is a major public research institution located in Northeast Ohio. Internationalization is embedded in the university’s strategic plan, with the goal of establishing Kent State as a leading international university. The institution accomplishes this through global research, comprehensive study abroad programs, international curriculum, and robust international student and scholar programs. The university is also a popular destination for international students and has a global reach with educational centers in Italy and Brazil.

Kent State has a long history of international engagement. “As early as the early 1960s, Kent State was hosting delegations of educators from the Soviet Union through the Gerald R. Reed Center in our College of Education, Health and Human Services,” says President Todd Diacon. “So there’s a really long history of active internationalization at Kent State. And then we’ve had exceptional leadership throughout the years and expansion into the university writ large.”

Marcello Fantoni, vice president for global education, says that over the last 10 years Kent State has fostered a strong culture of internationalization that built on the institution’s long history of global engagement.

Internationalization was solidified as one of the institution’s five priorities in its 2015–2021 plan, “A Strategic Roadmap to a Distinctive Kent State.” The priority focuses on enhancing the university’s global competitiveness by advancing Kent State’s impact and reach as a leading international university.

The strategic plan was developed under the leadership of Diacon’s predecessor, former Kent State president Beverly J. Warren. She launched a “listening tour” that asked different parts of the institution to weigh in as the plan was developed.

“The strategic plan is a way of keeping us mindful of and accountable for the importance of being comprehensive in our internationalization,” adds Melody Tankersley, senior vice president and provost.

Every student at Kent State has the opportunity to engage globally, whether that’s through interacting with the 1,400 international students from nearly 100 countries, studying abroad through one of 200 education abroad programs, participating in international research opportunities, or engaging with international faculty.

Students encounter global perspectives in the classroom. As part of the requirements for any bachelor’s degree at Kent State, all students have had to take a global diversity course that focuses on global issues since 1999.

In 2017, Kent State’s senior leadership also supported the university’s participation in the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Internationalization Laboratory. About two-thirds of faculty who responded to an ACE survey reported that curriculum in their academic program exposed students to international perspectives.

In addition to individual courses, the university offers 18 undergraduate majors and 14 graduate programs with an international focus. Several programs, such as the university’s top-ranked fashion major, require study abroad (or away) or foreign language coursework.

Integrating International Operations

The Office of Global Education (OGE) includes international recruitment and admissions, international student and scholar services, education abroad, and global partnerships.

“We’re a big university and having us all together under one banner helps keep us from being siloed and facilitates the communication process so we have a really smooth transition from the time a student is admitted to the time they arrive on campus,” says Sarah Malcolm, executive director of the OGE.

The model allows education abroad, international student services, and international admissions to work closely together. “We can make sure that we take care of the student holistically from the time we meet them on the road in their home country to the time that they’re graduating from Kent State,” says Salma Benhaida, director of international recruitment and admissions.

One of the mechanisms to ensure that international students have the support they need is the International Student Integration Committee, a campus-wide body that includes representatives from across the university such as faculty from all colleges and regional campuses, and staff from academic, administrative and student support units.

“It’s there so that we can keep abreast of what kinds of issues are happening with international students and scholars and also help to make sure that they’re acclimating to our campus community,” Malcolm says. “That committee does a lot of work to make sure that international students are included in the normal things that happen in the university.”

A Flagship Program in Florence

In the 2019–20 academic year, Kent State sent nearly 1,500 students abroad through more than 200 education abroad programs. Since resuming its international programming in July 2021, Kent State has returned to its full operations abroad and is already projected to surpass its previous enrollment in education abroad programs by fall 2022.

The development of articulated pathway programs in business, arts and sciences, and architecture and environmental design has allowed students in these disciplines to study abroad while staying on track for graduation. “The curriculum has been designed to be integrated into the students’ roadmap here at Kent State,” says Amber Cruxton, director of education abroad.

The university’s flagship education abroad program is Kent State Florence, currently the largest U.S. program in Florence, Italy. Staff are currently in the process of organizing an anniversary celebration of its 50-year presence in Italy.

“It started with 11 architecture students going to Florence for one week in the summer in 1972,” Fantoni says. “Now fast forward 50 years later, we are leasing one of the most beautiful historic buildings in downtown Florence and we host about 850 students a year from every single Kent State college.”

Fantoni started his own career in Florence, first as an adjunct faculty member teaching a course in the architecture program and later becoming academic director of the Florence center. In 2012, he was invited to come to the campus in Kent, Ohio, to serve as the institution’s senior international officer.

All 11 of Kent State’s colleges offer coursework in Florence with programs custom designed to meet their needs. The center even hosts programs such as the College of Podiatric Medicine’s Clerkship. Podiatry students can complete one of their training rounds in Italy, working in local hospitals and honing their intercultural communication skills, while learning how different countries approach medicine.

Through specially funded and designed programming, Kent State Florence also provides traditional study abroad experiences to underserved students, such as those enrolled at Kent State’s regional campuses, and boasts a successful past program for the TRIO Upward Bound program for high school students.

The center employs several dozen local faculty who are vetted by their departments at the campus in Kent, Ohio, and hosts visiting professors from its U.S. campuses. In summer 2022, 26 Kent State faculty members traveled to Florence.

Fantoni says the Kent State Florence program offers all the same resources and services that are available in Ohio, ranging from mental health counseling to IT support. In addition, the venue serves as a research center, regularly hosting lectures and conferences.

More recently, Florence has served as a host location for international students who are interested in studying abroad. The center hosts students from various partners around the world. In summer 2022, for example, Kent State Florence hosted 20 students from a women’s college in Saudi Arabia.

Creating Innovative Partnerships Abroad

Kent State has also found ways to serve more international students through innovative partnerships abroad. The institution is currently in the process of developing new educational centers in Rwanda and France and recently signed an agreement with the Paris American Academy. This partnership will offer degrees in subjects such as fashion, art, and writing. Students will spend their first 2 years in the United States at Kent State and will complete their degrees in Paris, Fantoni says.

Since 2018, Kent State has offered the American Academy, a joint degree program with the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), located in Curitiba, Brazil. The program allows students to complete their first 2 years of undergraduate study in Brazil at the PUCPR campus, taking classes in English taught by Kent State faculty members who travel to Brazil to teach.

The students earn academic credit from both institutions simultaneously and can choose either university for degree completion at the end of the two-year associate degree program. Approximately 150 students are enrolled each semester, with more than half, on average, choosing to continue their studies at Kent State.

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Malcolm says the American Academy in Brazil has been successful because of the strong commitment of both partners in terms of resources, staff, and time. An administrator from PUCPR spent a year at Kent State as a visiting scholar. And prior to the pandemic, Kent State sent faculty to PUCPR every semester. “People have a lot of ideas for great international programs, but without that kind of commitment from the top down, it doesn’t happen,” Malcolm says.

As a public community college and Hispanic-Serving Institution, the College of Lake County (CLC) focuses on creating equitable international engagement opportunities for its 14,000 undergraduate students through strategic partnerships, study abroad programs, and curriculum internationalization. A new physical space and revamped governance structure for global engagement have helped put internationalization at the center of campus culture at CLC, located in Grayslake, Illinois.

A renovated student center in the heart of the College of Lake County’s campus in Grayslake, Illinois, gave international programs more visibility, complete with a Global Community Hall that was dedicated in 2020. The hall is adorned with flags representing the home countries of the student population.

“The physical presence has really helped to solidify our transition from two people working really hard in an office to help international students and study abroad students to a full-fledged center with four full-time staff guiding strategic initiatives for the college,” says Jacob Cushing, director of student records and global engagement.

The physical renovation has gone hand in hand with a strategic focus on internationalization. “We’ve thought strategically and purposefully over the past 7 to 8 years about how best to ensure that we are graduating students to be productive members in a global society,” Cushing says.

Doyoung Kim, an engineering major from South Korea, first came to CLC in 2014 to study English as a second language. Part way through his education, he had to return to Korea to complete his required military service. When he started at the college, there were a lot of international students but little sense of community among them.

When he returned to Illinois in 2020, he immediately noticed the change that resulted due to the international office’s new location. “We have a really large space to connect and get to know each other,” he says.

Even though he had already been at the college for several years, Kim took ELI 125: Introduction to American College Culture, an international student success course. He says it helps international students to understand the resources the college has to offer and how to be successful in higher education at CLC. Topics include the U.S. grading system, Western learning and teaching styles, personal and academic support structures within the college, differences in academic requirements and expectations, appropriate classroom behavior, and healthy and safe acclimation to the academic and social college environment.

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In July 2021, all international program units were officially consolidated into the Department of Global Engagement (DGE). Erin Fowles, dean of enrollment services, oversees the DGE along with five other departments. Cushing, who was hired in 2014 as an international student adviser, was the right person to lead the new department, she says.

Creating the director position was instrumental in pushing comprehensive internationalization on campus, Fowles says, because “you’ve then got someone who can demonstrate on a regular basis the value of internationalization to the campus.”

Prior to the creation of the new department, study abroad was 25 percent of a role for an administrator in another division and there were no initiatives focused on curriculum internationalization. Now DGE oversees education abroad, international student services, curriculum internationalization, international partnerships, and globally focused campus and community programming.

"The support from our leadership to reorganize the Department of Global Engagement as the central hub has allowed us to really build on that momentum to push us forward,” Cushing says.

Another effort to coordinate CLC’s internationalization efforts is the Global Engagement Committee (GEC), which meets regularly to advise and promote projects and programs of the DGE. The committee is comprised of representatives from all academic divisions and more than 10 different administrative units, including the college foundation, financial aid, academic advising, the diversity office, and student life. The committee also includes an international student representative.

Members of the GEC make presentations to the faculty senate, propose new initiatives and garner feedback from the Board of Trustees, ensuring all divisions and departments can participate in driving the college’s internationalization efforts.

Engaging Faculty Internationally

Using the Community Colleges for International Development’s Framework for Comprehensive Internationalization, CLC identified faculty engagement as one of the immediate goals for the new department. Cushing worked with the educational affairs department and human resources to secure course release time for two faculty members to collaborate with the DGE. They are helping to recruit, train, and support faculty members to lead study abroad programs, as well as working to identify and add more courses with international content.

The two faculty leaders helped develop the Global Citizenship Milestone program as a way to internationalize the curriculum. If students complete 12 credits of international or multicultural courses, they receive a Global Citizenship Milestone notation on their transcript. While study abroad can account for half of the required credits, the goal was to design a program that was accessible to all students.

“In terms of equity, we realize not everyone’s going to be able to study abroad,” Cushing says. “This program touches that equity piece so that all students have the opportunity to engage and develop a global citizenship mindset.”

Most of CLC’s degree programs require students to take at least one course that is designated as international or multicultural. But students didn’t always know which courses met that requirement. Now students use a regularly updated list of all approved courses.

“I would call this a strategic repurposing of what was already being offered at CLC,” Cushing says. “Instead of reinventing the wheel and putting a lot of work into building something new, we’ve repurposed those classes that are already offered. And it’s now used as a recruitment tool to get students into those courses.”

One of the new faculty leaders is English Language Instruction (Academic ESL) professor Jill Bruellman. She says that her team reaches out to every student who is eligible to receive the global citizenship notation to help them learn how to leverage it in professional contexts.

Since 2019, 396 students have earned the Global Citizenship Milestone, which is noted on their transcript so employers can acknowledge their competency.

Bruellman adds that one of the next steps is to figure out how more students in applied fields like phlebotomy or dental hygiene might be able to complete the program. Because of the type of courses that have the international or multicultural designation, “right now, it’s really heavily favored toward transfer students,” she says.

Leveraging International Leadership

While education abroad was suspended for the last 2 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CLC sent approximately 100 students abroad prior to the start of the pandemic. Many of the college’s education abroad programs are facilitated through partnerships with other institutions in countries such as Austria, China, Costa Rica, England, France, Ireland, Japan, the Philippines, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates.

In September 2019, CLC hosted His Highness Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Nuaimi, a member of the Ajman royal family in the United Arab Emirates, for a day of collaboration and a public speaking engagement. Abdul Aziz, better known as the “Green Sheikh,” is an environmental advocate and an expert in youth leadership development. The Sheikh’s visit to CLC resulted in a study abroad program in which CLC students actively engage with him and other community service leaders in the United Arab Emirates. The introduction to the Green Sheikh also led to the development of a formal memoranda of understanding with Ajman University. That relationship will be focused on sustainability.

“One of the key things that we’re trying to do with our partnerships is to establish a strong program around a singular curricular objective,” Cushing says.

Bruellman, who lived and worked in Japan, used her personal relationships to cultivate a study abroad and exchange partnership in Japan. She and an economics professor take domestic students to Japan, and CLC hosts graduate students studying education who participate in the college’s teacher training and take a class in U.S. culture.

Opening Access to the World

CLC’s internationalization efforts have come together through the coordination and leadership of the Department of Global Engagement, engagement of faculty through study abroad and the Global Citizenship Milestone program, and strategic partnerships around the world.

President Lori Suddick sees internationalization as critical to CLC’s role as an open-access institution. “We have such an imperative role in creating this access to international experiences,” she says. “We see comprehensive internationalization as a core function of who we need to be.”

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Located about 250 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is a comprehensive research institution that serves more than 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students. In 2016, the institution’s president expressed a renewed commitment to comprehensive campus internationalization. In 2019, UT Austin developed Texas Global, a centralized unit that coordinates global initiatives across campus. Through efforts to map global engagement and identify regions and partners of strategic interest, UT Austin has developed opportunities for student internships abroad, seed grants for faculty to pursue research with partners abroad, and virtual exchange and other curricular programming for students on the UT Austin campus.

On the first day of his new job as vice president for research at UT Austin in 2016, Dan Jaffe, PhD, met with his counterpart at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [UNAM]). They discussed which researchers at their respective institutions were collaborating, and Jaffe was unable to pinpoint with whom his faculty were working.

“At that point, we had really not put together the machinery for understanding even what our faculty were up to,” says Jaffe, who served as interim executive vice president and provost until mid-July. “And now, by gathering those threads together and building a strategy around certain people and target countries, we’re able to be much more effective with our [approach to internationalization].”

That same year, senior leadership at UT Austin announced a renewed commitment to global engagement and convened a task force charged with looking at models to strengthen internationalization at the large, highly decentralized research institution with approximately 80 academic departments across 18 schools and colleges. The task force identified the need to bring on a leader dedicated to championing international education.

Sonia Feigenbaum, PhD, senior vice provost for global engagement, was appointed UT Austin’s first chief international officer in 2018. “It became abundantly clear that there had been lots of activity but no mapping and no communication between the various parts of the university,” she says.

Since Feigenbaum came on board, comprehensive campus internationalization at UT Austin has involved taking a strategic and coordinated approach to global engagement. She wanted to bring together the various areas that contribute to the university’s global mission.

The result was the creation of Texas Global, which advances UT Austin’s global mission and includes a centralized division composed of Education Abroad, the English Language Center, Global Engagement and Strategy, Global Programs and Innovation, Global Risk and Safety, International Student and Scholar Services, and Special Initiatives.

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 “We’ve created programs that respond to the various aspects of internationalization where we’re advancing the mission of the university with research, with partnerships, with student and faculty mobility, and with global engagement on campus that is also informed by our visiting scholars, and a host of events and activities that take place on campus,” Feigenbaum says.

“All of these various units are contributing to the efforts of what is happening throughout the campus,” she adds. “Texas Global is the nucleus, and there are various spokes across the institution that allow us to advance the mission of internationalization.”

Texas Global used a mapping exercise to identify countries where the institution has numerous alumni or a large number of institutional, corporate, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) partnerships, Feigenbaum says. Working with other offices on campus such as the Business Contracts Office, the Office of Sponsored Projects, Texas Admissions, and Enrollment Management and Student Success, Texas Global developed a database that identifies faculty’s research and other international activities. Texas Global also has hired a dedicated director of global alumni relations to enhance engagement in key regions of the world.

Launching Experiential Learning Opportunities Abroad

In 2019, Texas Global created Global Career Launch, an initiative that leverages faculty connections at universities, research centers, companies, and nonprofit organizations around the world. Students can take part in partially funded internships and research abroad under the guidance of a UT professor and an international partner. This initiative advances internationalization, supports student mobility, and encourages faculty collaborations abroad, Feigenbaum says. Thirty students and five faculty members participated in the inaugural internships with partners in Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Mexico, and Thailand.

“Global Career Launch is designed to launch students into experiential learning opportunities that are career focused,” says Heather Thompson, director of education abroad.

Faculty receive seed grant funds, and students are awarded scholarships of up to $4,000 to help offset the cost of the internships, she says. The internship model varies depending on the program. In some cases, faculty travel with students to help them get settled, and then the students work with an in-country supervisor. In other cases, the professor remains abroad with the students the entire time. For summer 2021, Texas Global sent three cohorts of students abroad, and two other cohorts completed their internships virtually.

Kinesiology professor Hirofumi Tanaka, PhD, took students to Bangkok, Thailand, to complete a six-week internship in the exercise physiology laboratory at Chulalongkorn University. The students tested the physical fitness and performance of transgender adults and compared them with cisgender males and females. The internship offered an opportunity to inform policy as international bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee, have not yet issued final guidance on whether or not transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sporting events, Tanaka says.

Funding Interdisciplinary Projects

As part of UT Austin’s efforts to renew its focus on global engagement, former president Gregory Fenves, PhD, established the International Board of Advisors (IBA) in 2017. The group, composed of individuals representing multiple countries with connections to UT Austin, makes recommendations on how the university can expand its global network and enhance its presence around the world. David Wolcott, PhD, assistant vice provost for global engagement, says that the IBA was part of a much broader strategy to engage alumni in comprehensive internationalization efforts.

One of the board’s initial priorities was to increase experiential learning for UT students. This led to the development of a signature program, the President’s Award for Global Learning. The program provides seed funding for interdisciplinary, credit-bearing projects conducted by up to four students and three faculty members. “It brings together interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students to work on these projects abroad,” Wolcott says. “And it is a very rigorous proposal process where faculty teams must work with international partners to submit proposals that identify a topic that can be addressed in a global context.”

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Since 2018, the program has supported 17 projects in 13 countries. The teams have included 48 undergraduate students, 19 graduate students, and 45 faculty members. For summer 2021, programs to Denmark, Jamaica, Jordan, and Mexico were allowed to run after a rigorous risk and safety approval process.

“This award [supports] faculty who go out and help deepen and strengthen our partnerships and find new ways to collaborate and really push the development of inquiry and leadership skills for our students,” says UT Austin President Jay C. Hartzell, PhD.

Tim Mercer, MD, director of the global health program at Dell Medical School, was the lead faculty on a team that received the award in 2018. He took a group of students to Puebla, Mexico, to conduct a community health needs assessment. “It really helped galvanize our partnership with our partners there in Mexico,” he says. “Working together on this project really laid the groundwork for our global health partnership going forward, so it was tremendously catalytic in that sense.”

“I was able to learn a lot of skills that have followed me into the clinic,” says Veronica Remmert, a current medical student who participated in the program as an undergraduate at UT Austin. “The project has greatly impacted the way that I view patient encounters and how I seek to be as a physician.”

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Meeting Community Needs Through Service Learning

Another interdisciplinary program is Projects with Underserved Communities (PUC), which the university has run since 2009. The program consists of a three-course sequence that pairs social work and engineering students with NGOs abroad. In the fall, the students work with their NGO partner on a community needs assessment and examine the feasibility of different projects. They also fundraise to cover the cost of implementation. Over the course of the year, the teams design their projects in collaboration with the community and the NGO, says Kirsten Hagen, MA, program coordinator. The student teams also present their projects to a service learning advisory board composed of representatives from UT Austin and industry leaders in fields such as engineering, social work, international education, and regional planning.

“There is a really strong focus on community-based development and building those partnerships with communities,” Hagen says. “Both the community and the students are contributing, and they’re both benefiting from the project.”

Nina Lobo, a civil engineering major who graduated from UT Austin in 2017, worked on a project constructing a learning and resource center for a community in south India. It allowed different religious groups in the community to come together in a neutral space to take classes, access the internet, and learn English. “We wanted them to have a kind of a space where they could get together on a more level playing field,” she says.

Since then, Lobo has helped create a PUC alumni group that advises current students on their projects. She says that participating in the program was a turning point in her engineering studies at UT Austin. “I think the whole time that I was at UT, I had been searching for a way to connect my degree back to social impact,” says Lobo, who now works at a nonprofit focused on equitable access to solar power. “And the PUC program was one of the first times that I found an ability to do that and really take ownership of a project from start to finish that really affected and reached people.”

Planting The Seeds For Sustainable Research

Another effort to encourage faculty to conduct global research is a competitive $10,000 seed grant program. “Funded by Texas Global, the program was initiated in November 2020 and provides financial support to faculty in order to develop and strengthen new or existing partnerships with global universities or organizations,” Wolcott says.

The first round of funding went to nine proposals involving 11 UT Austin faculty who are collaborating with 10 partners in Australia, Chile, Egypt, France, Israel, Pakistan, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain. Topics include urban housing in Egypt (in collaboration with the American University of Cairo) and the future of work in the age of the pandemic (with partners at the University of Cape Town). The second round of funding went to eight proposals involving 11 UT Austin faculty who are collaborating with nine partners in Ecuador, England, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Scotland, and South Korea. Topics include next-generation tropical ecology (in collaboration with Universidad San Francisco de Quito) and developing smart energy neighborhoods (with partners at Seoul National University).

Wolcott says that while the goal is to facilitate peer-to peer collaboration, UT Austin will also look at possible institutional partnerships if there are multiple faculty members working together.

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Speech pathology professor Stephanie Grasso, PhD, received one of the seed grants for her research on bilingual individuals who present with primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia that affects speech and language. “There’s a growing body of evidence showing that speech language intervention coming from the field of speech language pathology can actually benefit specific communication skills and even slow the progression of the loss of communication abilities,” she says.

The challenge is that the majority of research in this area has focused on monolingual, English-speaking participants. “Very little is known about how bilingual speakers respond to these types of tailored intervention approaches,” Grasso says. Grasso is collaborating with researchers at the Sant Pau Biomedical Research Institute, a research consortium under the leadership of Sant Pau Hospital and affiliated with the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. The team is examining the effects of a tailored speech and language teletherapy program that is being administered to bilingual individuals who speak Spanish and Catalan.

The seed grant funds the work of a staff member at Sant Pau who is administering the therapy in Catalan, Grasso says. Wolcott says that one of the goals of the seed grant funding is to help faculty collect preliminary data that will allow them to apply for larger grants.

Promoting Entrepreneurship Around The World

Texas Global oversees the Global Innovation Lab (GIL), which is focused on entrepreneurship and helping international companies launch products across the globe. “We train entrepreneurs on how to effectively assess target markets, build their company infrastructure, and plan commercialization strategies for global market entry. We also assist them with access to prospective customers, partners, and sources of capital,” says Glenn Robinson, MA, GIL assistant director.

The team primarily works with entrepreneurs who are testing their prototypes. In addition, Robinson and his colleagues have helped establish incubator networks in India and other countries and technology transfer processes that help entrepreneurs deal with issues such as intellectual property rights.

While their work has historically dealt with technology, they have started focusing more on social enterprise innovations in countries like Bhutan, Chile, and Colombia. As a result, GIL has launched an initiative focused on women entrepreneurs in emerging markets.

Robinson says that GIL builds awareness of UT Austin’s academic programs in order to recruit talented international students to the institution. In addition, GIL has taken a group of female students from UT Austin to meet their counterparts at the Indian Institutes of Technology to share their experiences as future entrepreneurs.

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Engaging Alumni Through Texas Global Dialogues

Prior to the pandemic, Texas Global launched several initiatives to engage international alumni, including hosting events abroad. But after March 2020, the unit had to rethink how it approached international alumni programming. “Rather than being able to bring live events to alumni, we switched to a virtual mode,” says Thuy Nguyen, MA, global strategies officer.

One of the initiatives Texas Global launched in partnership with Texas Exes, UT Austin’s nonprofit alumni association, was Texas Global Dialogues, which brought together panels of faculty and alumni to discuss the latest trends in certain fields and regions. The first event, held in August 2020, focused on journalism in Latin America. Subsequent dialogues revolved around sustainable energy and artificial intelligence.

Lisa Anaya, MA, global strategies officer, says that virtual programming has helped expand UT Austin’s international alumni outreach. “We’re making all of these inroads with alumni that we would have never been able to see or speak to before,” she says. In the future, the institution can use those connections to invite alumni to regional events.

Creating A Sustained Physical Presence Around The World

President Hartzell says that an expanded physical presence in key locations is the next step in UT’s internationalization efforts.

UT Austin’s ongoing engagement with Mexico has led to the establishment of a physical presence there. In 2017, the institution opened its first Global Gateway office at UNAM in Mexico City, which will serve as a focal point for UT Austin’s activities in Mexico. While some efforts were delayed due to the pandemic, Texas Global is currently recruiting to fill the director position.

Jaffe says that the office is the first of several Global Gateways that UT Austin will open over the next few years—a direct result of the mapping and data collection exercises that Texas Global recently completed.

“Opening these Global Gateways within the major regions of the world is going to be really important to us so that our alumni, our faculty partners, and our corporate partners in those regions feel that we are a sustained presence,” Wolcott says.

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

Building On Decades of Global Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Expertise Through the Community College Administrator Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fostering Partnerships Abroad Through Federal Programs

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

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

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

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

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

Promoting Internationalization Through Virtual Programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalizing The Curriculum Through Grants

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

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

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

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

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

Showcasing International Experience

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

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

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

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