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

“Does it matter if I’m homeless?”

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

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

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

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

Reaching Underrepresented Demographics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding Transformational Opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miami Dade College

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifty Years of Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attracting and Preparing Future Teachers 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maintaining Communication and Connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indiana University Bloomington

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