Women Peacemakers · Publisher Elaina Loveland Editor-in-Chief Lisa Schock In Brief Editor Cheryl D. Collins Production Manager Ken Ceccucci BonoTom Studio, Inc. Art Director ADVERTISING

n Education Abroad for Military Veterans

n International Recruitment in New Zealand

Women like Meenakshi Chhabra are working toward peace and reconciliation in conflict regions

PeacemakersWomen

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N A F S A : A S S O C I A T I O N O F I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D U C A T O R S

n Education Abroad for Military Veterans

n International Recruitment in New Zealand

F E A T U R E S

1 JAN+FE B.16 INTERNATIONAL EDUCATOR

4 In BriefU.S. Department of Education Publishes DACA Resource Guide n Internationalizing the Co-curriculum n Global Trends Revealed in Education-at-a-Glance 2015 n Welcome NAFSA’s New National Member-Leaders n International Students Contribute $30 Billion Annually to the United States n Look No Farther for International Students

14 VoicesEducating Saudi WomenAn interview with Haifa Jamal Al-Lail, president of Effat UniversityBy Elaina Loveland

44 Education AbroadHelping Military Veterans Study AbroadBy Charlotte West

48 View From Out HereCultivating Empathy in University-Peace Corps PartnershipsBy Kari B. Henquinet

52 ForumScales of Global Learning: Prisms, Knots, and a Cup of CoffeeBy Hilary E. Kahn

56 In FocusAcqua AltaSara Ede

18 Women PeacemakersUniversity educators and recent graduates are striving to show that even the deepest rifts have the potential to be healed—these are the stories of four women who are working to promote peace and understanding in

current and former conflict regions. By Susan Ladika

28New Zealand:

Small Country, Big Destination

New Zealand is an Anglophone country with a disproportionate number of universities, eight,

for its small population, 4.3 million, that has transformed its higher education sector

into a major export industry.By David Tobenkin

34 Propelling Internationalization ForwardNorth Central College has made great strides in internationalizing their institution in the last two decades. The college now sends 10 percent of its students abroad and has nearly doubled its international student population since 2012.By Christopher Connell

NAFSA: ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL EDUCATOR VOL. 25 | NO. 1

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D E PA R T M E N T S A N D C O L U M N S

2 INTERNATIONAL EDUCATOR JAN+FE B.16

| FROM THE EDITORS

By Elaina Loveland J A N + F E B . 1 6 n V O L . 2 5 n N O . 1

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARDCheryl Darrup-BoychuckUSJournal of Academics

Geoffrey Bradshaw, PhDMadison Area Technical College

Stephen C. Dunnett, PhDUniversity at Buffalo–SUNY

Patricia I. JonesWestern Illinois University

Simon Marginson, PhDUniversity of London

Paul J. McVeigh, PhDNorthern Virginia Community College

J. Andrew Overman, PhDMacalester College

Susan Buck Sutton, PhDBryn Mawr College

Susan M. ThompsonUniversity of Nevada–Las Vegas

Margaret Wiedenhoeft, PhDKalamazoo College

EDITORIAL STAFFMarlene JohnsonExecutive Publisher

Christopher MurphyPublisher

Elaina LovelandEditor-in-Chief

Lisa SchockIn Brief Editor

Cheryl D. CollinsProduction Manager

Ken CeccucciBonoTom Studio, Inc.Art Director

ADVERTISING SALES REPRESENTATIVEScott OserNAFSA1307 New York Avenue, NWEighth FloorWashington, DC 20005PH: 301.279.0468FX: [email protected]

STAFF EDITORIAL TEAMJudy Judd-PriceLeadership and Professional Development Services

Joann Ng HartmannIES/ISS Services

Kevin HovlandAcademic and Conference Programs

Jill WelchPublic Policy

Caroline Donovan WhiteEA Services

Alan WilliamsCommunications and Organizational Advancement

NAFSA BOARD OF DIRECTORSPRESIDENT AND CHAIRFanta Aw, PhDAmerican University

VICE PRESIDENT, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND ENGAGEMENTRavi ShankarNorthwestern University

VICE PRESIDENT, PUBLIC POLICY AND PRACTICEStephen M. Ferst, EdDCollege of Staten Island

VICE PRESIDENT, SCHOLARSHIP AND INSTITUTIONAL STRATEGYYenbo Wu PhDSan Francisco State University

SECRETARYKavita Pandit, PhDUniversity of Georgia

TREASURERJolene Koester, PhDCalifornia State University, Northridge

MEMBERS AT LARGESimon Adams, PhDGlobal Centre for the Responsibility to Protect

Charles A. S. Bankart, PhDUniversity of Kansas

Britta BaronUniversity of Alberta

Diana Carlin, PhDSt. Louis University

Robert Frost, PhDCentralia College

Joël A. GallegosThe University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Lars Heikensten, PhDNobel Foundation

Arlene JacksonAmerican Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU)

Jesse L. Lutabingwa, PhDAppalachian State University

Meredith M. McQuaid, JDUniversity of Minnesota

Elaine Meyer-Lee, EdDSaint Mary’s College

Barry J. Morris, PhDGeorgia Council of International Visitors

Earl Potter III, PhDSt. Cloud State University

Jeff Riedinger, PhDUniversity of Washington–Seattle

Debra W. Stewart, PhDCouncil of Graduate Schools

EX-OFFICIOMarlene JohnsonExecutive Director and CEONAFSA: Association of International Educators

DISTINGUISHED SENIOR FELLOWHon. Richard W. Riley

Opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of NAFSA: Association of International Educators. International Educator accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of information contained in advertisements.

To submit a manuscript to International Educator: A full description of format requirements and author guidelines can be found at www.nafsa.org. E-mail inquiries may be sent to [email protected].

International Educator is published bimonthly by NAFSA: Association of International Educators, 1307 New York Avenue, NW, Eighth Floor, Washington, D.C. 20005-4701 USA. Phone: 202.737.3699; Fax: 202.737.3657; [email protected]; www.nafsa.org

Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices.

ISSN 1059-4221

Subscription rates: NAFSA members receive International Educator as a benefit of membership. Nonmember subscriptions are $40 per year in the United States. Nonmember subscriptions outside the United States are $55 in Canada and Mexico and $72 elsewhere in the world. Subscriptions are payable in U.S. dollars drawn on a U.S. bank, or by Visa, Mastercard, or American Express. Single issues: $7, plus shipping and handling. To subscribe, call 1.866.538.1927 or 1.240.646.7036. Copyright ©2016 by NAFSA: Association of International Educators. All rights reserved. Postmaster: Send address changes to International Educator, 1307 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20005 USA.

Building a Peaceful World THERE ALWAYS SEEMS TO BE CONFLICT in the world. Since the attacks in Paris in November 2015 just few months ago that killed 130 innocent civilians and recent attacks in Beirut, Iraq, and in San Bernadino, California, I can’t help but think that international education is more important than ever.

As international educators, we all want a peaceful world. We want to understand one another, to be able to communicate our dif-ferences, and find a way to live in harmony and offer every person a chance through education to lead a productive and meaningful life.

It is through mutual understanding that everyone can thrive. In this issue, we focus on women leaders who echo the idea that

it is through intercultural understanding that we can create a better world.

In an interview with Haifa Jamal Al-Lail, PhD, president of Effat University, a women’s university in Saudi Arabia, she explains how she learned that understanding others helped influence her educa-tional philosophy. While studying for her doctorate at the University of Southern California, she says she learned this valuable lesson she now passes on to her students: “although you are different, it does not mean you are not good. I look at difference and diversity from a posi-tive point of view. It brings life. It enriches the experience of teaching and learning in any academic institution and in life, of course.”

“Women Peacemakers,” the cover story of this issue, follows the journeys of four different women—one Rwandan, one Sri Lankan, one Indian, and one American—who have found their own way to help heal areas that are current or former conflict regions and help local communities live in peace. Two of these women are profes-sors who travel back to their homelands, one is nonprofit leader and visiting scholar at a U.S. peacebuilding program, and one is a recent college graduate who is now working abroad. No matter where these women are working toward peace, they are all teaching us through international education efforts, that one person can make a differ-ence. The more we can learn from individuals that take an idea to build peace and take action, the better our world will be.

Other highlights of this issue include an article on New Zealand’s international student recruitment efforts, a column on helping U.S. veterans studying abroad, a first-person essay “Cultivating Empa-thy in University-Peace Corps Partnerships,” and an opinion article about global learning in higher education. IE

4

Internationalizing the Co-curriculum

Anew report from the American Council on Education (ACE), Global and Intercultural Education in the Co-curriculum, explores how some institutions are providing global and inter-

cultural learning through student experiences that are complementary to the curriculum. Focusing internationalization efforts on these types of experiences, also known as the co-curriculum, is essential for trans-formational learning, according to the report:

The experiential nature of the cocurriculum—where students encounter cultural “others,” navigate shared space, learn to manage conflict, calibrate their moral compasses, and test their leadership skills—can offer some of the richest opportunities for students to encounter cultural differences that test their beliefs and assumptions.

Global and Intercultural Education in the Co-curriculum includes a discussion of strategies related to aligning co-curricular programs and activities with institutional learning outcomes for global and intercultural education. The report also provides resources for inter-nationalizing the co-curriculum.

The report is part of ACE’s Internationalization in Action series and is available on the web at http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Intlz-In-Action-Intlz-Co-Curriculum-Part-2.pdf.

U.S. Department of Education Publishes DACA Resource Guide

The U.S. Department of Education has released a resource guide to help educators, school leaders, and community organizations better support

undocumented youth, including individuals who are recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Aimed at high school and college and university students, the guide provides an overview of undocumented students’ rights, tips for educators on supporting undocumented youth in high school and college, information on noncitizen access to federal financial aid, a list of private scholarships for which undocumented youth might be eligible, information on local federally funded adult education programs, and guidance for migrant students seeking to access their education records for DACA.

Resource Guide: Supporting Undocumented Youth— A Guide for Success in Secondary and Postsecondary Settings is available on the web at http://www2.ed.gov/about/ overview/focus/supporting- undocumented-youth.pdf.

INbrief I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D U C A T I O N N E W S , V I E W S & I N S I G H T S

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• Students from 95+ countries• Ranked among the Top 50 “Value-Added”

U.S. institutions by Money Magazine

• Conditional Admission offered through the CEA-accredited American Language Institute

California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), known as The Beach, offers a vibrant, diverse environment for international students. Surrounded by the best Southern California has to offer, CSULB is an ideal place to live, learn, and discover.

Find out more at www.csulb.edu/international .

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY LONG BEACHDiscover a New World at The Beach

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Journal of Studies in International Education

The November 2015 issue of the Journal of Studies in International Education (JSIE) features the following articles:

n “The Potential of a Mobile Group Blog to Support Cultural Learning Among Overseas Students”—Yinjuan Shao of East China Normal Univer-sity and Charles Crook of University of Nottingham explore the potential of using mobile social software for cultural adaptation among overseas stu-dents adapting to the everyday life of studying abroad. n “Internationalization Motivations and Strategies of Israeli Educational

Administration Programs”—Miri Yemini and Aviva Giladi of Tel Aviv Uni-versity focus their study on a comprehensive, in-depth, interview-based analysis of the views and opinions of educational administration program directors in the Israeli higher education system, including large research universities and colleges in the Jewish and Palestinian-Arab sectors.

n “Understanding the Early Career Benefits of Learning Abroad Programs”—Davina Potts of Australian National University ex-amines the connections between a learning abroad experience and early career benefits for recent graduates from Australian higher education, including a look at exploratory conditions that may promote working for an international organization.n “Beyond Host Language Proficiency: Coping Resources Predicting Internation-al Students’ Satisfaction”—Anita S. Mak and Peter Bodycott of the University of Canberra and Prem Ramburuth of the University of New South Wales explore internal coping resources such as host

language proficiency, self-esteem, intercultural social self-efficacy, and academic self-efficacy, and external resources including perceived social support from hosts and nonhosts in a survey participants of Asian-born international students in Australian universities. n “Exploring Intercultural Pedagogy: Evidence From International Fac-

ulty in South Korean Higher Education”—Peter G. Ghazarian and Mia S. Youhne of Keimyung University use survey data to examine the teaching styles of international faculty members in South Korea.

NAFSA is one of several organizations that sponsors the journal. NAF-SA members can subscribe to a full year of access to the online Journal of Studies in International Education at a discounted annual rate of $15 (a $90 value). For subscription information, visit www.nafsa.org/jsie.


INbriefNearly 1 Million International Students in the United States; Number of U.S. Students Studying Abroad Reaches 304,467

THE NUMBER OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS studying in the United States jumped 10 percent in the 2014–15 academic year, reaching an all-time high of 974,926 and experiencing the highest rate of growth in 35 years, according to the 2015 Open Doors report published by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Most of the increase in international students on U.S. campuses can be attributed to the following origin countries: India, China, and Brazil. China, with 304,040 students in the United States—up 11 percent from 2013–14—is again the top country of origin of international students in the United States. However, India, with 132,888 students in the United States, witnessed the highest rate of growth in 2014–15—29.4 percent—and in the 60-year history of the Open Doors project.

China and India now account for nearly 45 percent of all international students in U.S. higher education, according to IIE.

Thanks to government scholarship programs, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Kuwait saw large increases in the number of students coming to the United States to study. Saudi students in the United States now number nearly 60,000. Brazil has more than 23,000 students in the United States and Kuwait has more than 9,000 students in the United States.

The number of U.S. students studying abroad for credit rose 5 percent from 2013–14 to 2014–15 to a total of 304,467. This represents the highest rate of growth since the 2007–08 academic year.

The United Kingdom is still the number one destination for U.S. students. The next most popular destinations are Italy, Spain, France, and China. Of note in 2015 is that U.S. students are studying in increasing numbers in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to IIE data.

Learn more and access additional data at www.iie.org/opendoors.


INbrief

MORE THAN 4 MILLION students were enrolled in postsecondary education

outside of their countries of citizenship in 2013, according to Education-at-a-Glance 2015: OECD Indicators, the latest report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that features information on the state of education around the world.

Students from Asia accounted for 53 percent of international students worldwide, and students from Europe accounted for 25 percent. China is the country that sends the largest number of students abroad, followed by India and Germany.

On the receiving side, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States together welcomed more than 50 per-cent of all international students.

According to the report, the number of students enrolled outside their coun-try of citizenship has risen dramatically over the past three decades, from 0.8 million worldwide in 1975 to 4.5 million in 2012. Student mobility has increased

dramatically in recent years, due in part to high demand for postsecondary edu-cation worldwide, the perceived value of studying abroad at prestigious higher education institutions, and efforts on behalf of various governments and insti-tutions to attract international students.

In an analysis of the number of international students in different fields of study, Education-at-a-Glance 2015 found that more than one-third of inter-national students enrolled in the social sciences, business, and law. Engineering, manufacturing and construction, health and welfare, humanities and arts, and the sciences were also popular fields. The fields of agriculture, education, and services enrolled the smallest propor-tion of international students.

The report notes that “The decision if and where to study abroad is often a complex one, and students base it on a number of other factors such as: recognition of foreign degrees and of workload carried out abroad, including government policies to facilitate the transfer of credits between home and host institutions; the quality and admis-

sion policies of tertiary education in the home country; future opportunities to come back to work in the home coun-try; and cultural aspirations. In addition, geographical, trade or migration links between countries can play a large role.”

Released in fall 2015, Education-at-a-Glance 2015: OECD Indicators features data on education from the 34 OECD member countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Ko-rea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portu-gal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States) as well as several other partner countries (Bra-zil, the Russian Federation, Argentina, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, In-donesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa).

Education-at-a-Glance 2015: OECD Indicators is available online at www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2015_eag-2015-en.

Global Trends Revealed in Education-at-a-Glance 2015

Get ready for summer!w www.ntu.edu.sg/summerNTUe [email protected] www.facebook.com/NTUGEMTrailblazerSummer

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home for global talent @ heart ofglobal-asia

The future’s hot in Asia. For an education that prepares you for the new global reality, spend an enriching summer in Singapore.A bustling cosmopolitan city in Asia, it offers foreign students a world-class living environment and is the fourth leading financial centre in the world.

It is also home to Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) ranked 13th in the world. Renowned faculty and researchers from 80 countries bring their multicultural perspectives and innovative teaching methods, contributing to a holistic learning experience at NTU.

With more than 20 courses offered through Global Education and Mobility (GEM)Trailblazer Summer programmes, you will be part of a truly unique Asian adventure at NTU – a global institution in the heart of Asia.

COMING SOON!


Welcome NAFSA’s Newly Elected Member-Leaders NAFSA welcomes an outstanding group of newly elected volunteer leaders, who took office

on January 1, 2016. Learn more about their backgrounds at www.nafsa.org/2016leaders.

Vice President for Professional Development and Engagement

Ravi Shankar, Director, International Office, Northwestern University

Board of Directors Members-at-Large:

Simon Adams, Executive Director, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect

Britta Baron, Vice Provost and Associate Vice President (International), University of Alberta

Diana Carlin, Associate Vice President of Graduate Education and International Initiatives, St. Louis University

Robert Frost, President, Centralia College

Earl Potter III, President, St. Cloud State University

Jeff Riedinger, Vice Provost for Global Affairs, University of Washington-Seattle

Debra Stewart, President Emerita, Council of Graduate Schools

Chair, Education Abroad Knowledge Community

Margaret Wiedenhoeft, Associate Director of the Center for International Programs, Kalamazoo College

Chair, International Education Leadership Knowledge Community

Sonja Knutson, Director of the International Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Chair, International Enrollment Management Knowledge Community

Amy VanSurksum, International Officer for the USA, University of Glasgow

Chair, Knowledge Community for International Student and Scholar Services

Samuel Brown, Director of International Services, Brigham Young University

Chair, Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship Knowledge Community

Ann Mason, PhD, Executive Director, Fulbright Colombia

Chair, Leadership Development Committee

Frank Merendino, Director of Partner Operations and Marketing, Shorelight Education

INbrief

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Cuba Education Tours for students and teachers

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Our project’s mandate is fair trade travel to build ties

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Cubans and North Americans. We organize itineraries

rich in academic and social content.

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With offices in Canada, Cuba and the States, we

provide comprehensive travel arrangements. We are

eager to help you witness Cuba on an affordable

custom trip tailored to your curriculum requirements.


INbriefAlabama 7,901 $204.8 million 2,297Alaska 533 $15.7 million 145Arizona 20,437 $618.2 million 8,681Arkansas 5,918 $164.1 million 1,411California 135,130 $4.6 billion 52,624Colorado 10,800 $352 million 5,043Connecticut 11,897 $461 million 4,791Delaware 4,051 $123.4 million 1,613District of Columbia 10,556 $407.5 million 4,691Florida 39,377 $1.2 billion 15,086Georgia 19,758 $642.9 million 8,405Hawaii 4,035 $104.5 million 966Idaho 4,592 $116.0 million 1,156Illinois 46,574 $1.4 billion 20,881Indiana 28,104 $919.2 million 11,990Iowa 12,220 $350.9 million 3,630Kansas 12,020 $277.6 million 2,755Kentucky 8,104 $212.8 million 1,876Louisiana 6,872 $182.2 million 2,349Maine 1,354 $50.0 million 488Maryland 16,862 $523.8 million 6,686Massachusetts 55,447 $2.2 billion 29,009Michigan 32,015 $1.0 billion 13,533Minnesota 14,438 $391.0 million 4,045Mississippi 3,101 $65.4 million 708Missouri 21,703 $615.1 million 7,200Montana 2,146 $59.0 million 643Nebraska 5,774 $143.0 million 1,488Nevada 2,556 $69.0 million 809New Hampshire 3,784 $136.9 million 1,710New Jersey 19,196 $599.2 million 7,578New Mexico 3,374 $80.7 million 899New York 106,758 $3.7 billion 43,865North Carolina 17,319 $458.8 million 6,273North Dakota 2,677 $56.8 million 579Ohio 35,761 $1.0 billion 13,518Oklahoma 9,928 $260.2 million 2,836Oregon 14,422 $479.3 million 5,515Pennsylvania 45,704 $1.6 billion 22,565Rhode Island 5,872 $228.3 million 2,474South Carolina 5,895 $156.7 million 1,686South Dakota 1,782 $32.2 million 255Tennessee 9,507 $288.5 million 3,535Texas 75,588 $1.7 billion 21,524Utah 8,622 $202.6 million 2,517Vermont 1,502 $61.0 million 602Virginia 18,220 $543.7 million 7,170Washington 27,051 $789.1 million 7,904West Virginia 3,215 $85.0 million 886Wisconsin 12,751 $340.7 million 4,277Wyoming 1,174 $22.1 million 211

StateEnrollment

2014-15Total

Contribution

# of Jobs Created/

Supported

Benefits from International StudentsTHE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

International students studying at U.S. colleges

and universities contribute $30.5 billion to

the U.S. economy and support 373,381 jobs*.

For every seven international students enrolled, three U.S. jobs are created

and supported by spending occurring in the

higher education, accommodation, dining,

retail, transportation, telecommunications

and health insurance sectors.

Number of Jobs Created or Supported

373,381

Total Contribution

$30.5 billion

CONTACTRachel Banks | Director, Public Policy202.737.3699 × 2556 | [email protected]

The economic contributions of international students are in addition to the immeasurable academic and cultural value these students bring to our campuses and local communities. For a more detailed analysis, access NAFSA’s International Student Economic Value Tool at nafsa.org/economicvalue.

*Sources used in NAFSA’s economic analysis for 2014-2015 Academic Year: U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Open Doors Report.

Alabama 7,901 $204.8 million 2,297Alaska 533 $15.7 million 145Arizona 20,437 $618.2 million 8,681Arkansas 5,918 $164.1 million 1,411California 135,130 $4.6 billion 52,624Colorado 10,800 $352 million 5,043Connecticut 11,897 $461 million 4,791Delaware 4,051 $123.4 million 1,613District of Columbia 10,556 $407.5 million 4,691Florida 39,377 $1.2 billion 15,086Georgia 19,758 $642.9 million 8,405Hawaii 4,035 $104.5 million 966Idaho 4,592 $116.0 million 1,156Illinois 46,574 $1.4 billion 20,881Indiana 28,104 $919.2 million 11,990Iowa 12,220 $350.9 million 3,630Kansas 12,020 $277.6 million 2,755Kentucky 8,104 $212.8 million 1,876Louisiana 6,872 $182.2 million 2,349Maine 1,354 $50.0 million 488Maryland 16,862 $523.8 million 6,686Massachusetts 55,447 $2.2 billion 29,009Michigan 32,015 $1.0 billion 13,533Minnesota 14,438 $391.0 million 4,045Mississippi 3,101 $65.4 million 708Missouri 21,703 $615.1 million 7,200Montana 2,146 $59.0 million 643Nebraska 5,774 $143.0 million 1,488Nevada 2,556 $69.0 million 809New Hampshire 3,784 $136.9 million 1,710New Jersey 19,196 $599.2 million 7,578New Mexico 3,374 $80.7 million 899New York 106,758 $3.7 billion 43,865North Carolina 17,319 $458.8 million 6,273North Dakota 2,677 $56.8 million 579Ohio 35,761 $1.0 billion 13,518Oklahoma 9,928 $260.2 million 2,836Oregon 14,422 $479.3 million 5,515Pennsylvania 45,704 $1.6 billion 22,565Rhode Island 5,872 $228.3 million 2,474South Carolina 5,895 $156.7 million 1,686South Dakota 1,782 $32.2 million 255Tennessee 9,507 $288.5 million 3,535Texas 75,588 $1.7 billion 21,524Utah 8,622 $202.6 million 2,517Vermont 1,502 $61.0 million 602Virginia 18,220 $543.7 million 7,170Washington 27,051 $789.1 million 7,904West Virginia 3,215 $85.0 million 886Wisconsin 12,751 $340.7 million 4,277Wyoming 1,174 $22.1 million 211

StateEnrollment

2014-15Total

Contribution

# of Jobs Created/

Supported

Benefits from International StudentsTHE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

International students studying at U.S. colleges

and universities contribute $30.5 billion to

the U.S. economy and support 373,381 jobs*.

For every seven international students enrolled, three U.S. jobs are created

and supported by spending occurring in the

higher education, accommodation, dining,

retail, transportation, telecommunications

and health insurance sectors.

Number of Jobs Created or Supported

373,381

Total Contribution

$30.5 billion

CONTACTRachel Banks | Director, Public Policy202.737.3699 × 2556 | [email protected]

The economic contributions of international students are in addition to the immeasurable academic and cultural value these students bring to our campuses and local communities. For a more detailed analysis, access NAFSA’s International Student Economic Value Tool at nafsa.org/economicvalue.

*Sources used in NAFSA’s economic analysis for 2014-2015 Academic Year: U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Open Doors Report.

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International Students Contribute $30 Billion Annually to the United States

The record-high 974,926 international students in the United States contributed more than $30 billion to the U.S. economy in 2014–15, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce. This is an increase from the nearly $27 billion contributed by international students to the United States in 2013–14.

Visit NAFSA’s International Student Economic Value Tool on the web at www.nafsa.org/eis for more information on economic impact by state and congressional district, calculated using Open Doors enrollment figures combined with other data.


INbrief

On-campus housing and meal plans are available.

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS AND PARTNERSHIPSCALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

18111 NORDHOFF STREETNORTHRIDGE, CALIFORNIA 91330-8405, USA

Part of the largest public university system in the United States, California State University, Northridge (CSUN) has nearly 42,000 students from various countries and is well-known internationally for its Intensive English, University Pathway, Semester Abroad, and academic programs.

Intensive English Program (IEP)• Year-round sessions, ranging from three to 24 weeks• TOEFL/IELTS preparation courses• Free tutoring and student support services

Semester at CSUN (SAC) Program• Academic advisement on course selections• Registration assistance• Full integration into American campus life/experience

www.csun.edu/go/ipp

Study in Los Angeles

Look No Farther for International Students

It’s a small world after all.The Brookings Institutions

examined F-1 visa data from 2001 to 2012 to determine where most international students in the United State came from.

It discovered that a majority came from just 94 global cities. At the top of the hometown list:1. Seoul, South Korea2. Beijing, China3. Shanghai, China4. Hyderabad, India5. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Seven in the top 20 are in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan and

Shenzhen); five in India (Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi), and one each in Seoul, South Korea; Taipei, Taiwan; Hong Kong; Kathmandu, Nepal; Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam).

In all, more than three dozen of these 94 cities are in China and India; five in Saudi Arabia; four each in South Korea and Canada; three in Taiwan, two each in Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Vietnam, and the capital or single largest city in more than 30 other countries.

Three quarters of these students came from megacities with populations of 5 million or more.

Source: “The Geography of Foreign Students in U.S. Higher Education,” Brookings Institution (August 2014).

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B Y E L A I N A L O V E L A N DB Y E L A I N A L O V E L A N D

voices

Educating Saudi WomenAn interview with Haifa Jamal Al-Lail, president of Effat University,

a women’s university in Saudi Arabia

HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL, a native of Saudi Arabia, joined Effat University in 1998 and began her tenure as presi-dent in May 2008. She was named one of 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005 and is the winner of the Distinguished Arab Woman Award in 2005. A respected author and researcher, she is well known for her exper-tise in privatization and empowerment of women. She is the author of a number of articles and has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on topics such as public administration and public policy.

Before joining Effat University, Al-Lail was the first dean of girls’ campus in King Abdulaziz University. She was a visiting scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2001. She partici-pated in the Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration at Bryn Mawr College in 2000. She received a PhD in public policy from the University of Southern California (USC).

IE: Can you describe Effat University and how you became its president? HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: Effat University is a private nonprofit institution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It started in 1999 with the vision of Queen Effat, the wife of the late King Faisal. She was really a leader in education. She’s the one who established the first female high school in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I’m also a gradu-ate of that. The name of the school is Dar al-Hanan School. It was established in 1955. From that time until 1999, when the govern-ment started to give licensing to the private sector to open higher education institutions, she applied to the king at that time (not her husband). It was another king, King Fahd, who gave her the license.

Effat University was started with only two majors—computer science and information systems. It was established only for women and had 37 students, two faculty, and one dean. I wasn’t the dean at that time. I was a special adviser to Princess Lolowah, the daughter of the queen, who was running and is still running the institution until now. We had only six months to open the whole institution.

My own education in the kingdom and abroad helped me become president of Effat University. I also came to the United States and studied at the University of Southern California, and then came back to Saudi Arabia and taught and did some administrative work at King Abdullah University. The princess and the queen knew about me, and they invited me to be the president. Especially also I’m a graduate of the Dar al-Hanan School, which has the same traditions and culture, same mentality of thinking.

IE: How has Effat University grown since it was first established?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: We began from those two departments and it was a college at that time in 1999, until 2009, then we became a university. Now we’re a university with four colleges, 17 programs, and 3,000 students.

IE: What are the opportunities for education for girls and women in Saudi Arabia and how does Effat University fill this need?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: What we’re famous for is offering wom-en opportunities that were never offered before in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We offer engineering for the first time for Saudi women because the colleges and the universities in the kingdom teach them only the business, the social sciences, but never had the chance to offer engineering as a subject for women. So we’re the first institution to offer that for the Saudi woman.

IE: What makes Effat University unique in Saudi Arabia?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: There are a number of public universities and they do offer education for women. But the women’s campuses are separate campuses. And it’s always the men who are controlling the women’s campus from the administrative point of view.

We are by women, for women, of women. We were founded by a woman. We are run by a woman. The students are women. We do have some male faculty, but it’s unique in that it’s the first women’s university in the purest sense of the word. C

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Even the chairman of the Board of Trustees, she’s a woman. And this is rare to find something like this happening in Saudi Arabia. How do you lead all of these men and women? Because the Board of Trustees are not only women, but are men and women. But the al-Faisal family always gives priority by age and Sara Faisal, the chair of the Board of Trustees, daughter of the Queen, is the eldest.

IE: How did your experiences as an international student in the United States and being a visiting scholar at Harvard Kennedy School of Government influence your philosophy on education and leadership at Effat University?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: Honestly, it shaped my personality, my decisionmaking ability, and skills. It helped a lot really with knowing other ways of doing things. I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. I studied all my life from kindergarten until I finished my bachelor de-gree in Saudi Arabia. I traveled in different places in Europe and here, but I never had the chance to live and experience study or education in any part of the world except when I came to the United States.

I began my studies at USC knowing that there are different ways of thinking. That’s really important to understand life, to understand how to make a decision. I have to understand how to respect the other, how to tolerate the other, how to integrate different things together.

So I learned something very important, that although you’re dif-ferent, that doesn’t mean that you’re not good. I look at difference and diversity from a positive point of view. It brings life. It enriches

the experience of the teaching and learning in any academic institu-tion and in life, of course.

I spent 12 years of my life in the United States pursuing a master’s degree and a PhD, and sometimes I worked here in academia as a TA, and also in some of the business community. I got really to know the flavor of the work and the educational life in the United States.

IE: How did your educational philosophy impact your thinking to get involved in the 1000 Peace Women campaign and what is your advice to other women pursuing higher education?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: If you want to start in your learning journey, how do you start it? With reading. I always base this on the Quran. Because in Quran, the first Arabic word that Prophet Muhammad (sallalahu alaihi wa salam or “peace be upon him”) learned from Allah, was iqra, “to read”. The revelation informed Prophet Muhammad (sallalahu alaihi wa salam) that you need to read to understand everything in life.

I build off of these four letters—IQRA. This became now the core principles, the core values of Effat University. I always say you need to research. The first letter is Ibhath, which is “search” or “re-search.” And the second letter is Qiyam, which is that you need to appreciate the universal principles of ethics and values. The third letter is Riyada, which is “leadership.” You need to learn leadership, it comes from within. It’s not just to lead others but know how you control yourself, how you make sure that you lead yourself and not uncritically let somebody else lead you.

The last letter is At-tawasul, which is about how you always keep communication within yourself first because you want to reflect on what you do or think. So in communicating between you and yourself, it’s very important to start the process of communication. Then how you communicate with others and how you communicate in public.

So these four principles of what we call the core values of Effat, we have in our teaching and learning, in our syllabus, in our way of doing things.

IE: What has been your greatest accomplishment as president of Effat University?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: My greatest accomplishment is taking the university from nothing to a university status, and from a univer-C

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Haifa Jamal Al-Lail, PhD

Effat University’s core values are based on the divine commandment IQRA, “read.” These values include the following:

I Ibhath undertake life-long research [cf. albahth: “life-long research”]

Q Qiyam ethical social and educational values

R Riyada responsible and creative leadership

A At-tawasul effective communication and reaching out to others


sity status to getting full accreditation, and to have this international presence everywhere. So, I think it’s how I see more accom-plishment coming inside. It’s intangible. But these are the most important things that I see and that really everybody can see.

No one knew about Effat University in 2001. But now Effat Uni-versity is everywhere. Now it’s connected to NAFSA. It’s connected to EAIE (the European Association for International Education), and with the ACC&U (American Association of Colleges and Uni-versities). We have contributed to them and they contributed to us.

IE: Does Effat University have international partnerships with other institutions?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: Yes, we have many international partner-ships. We have 17 programs but each of our programs has a partnership. Some of the institutions we partner with in the United States for various programs include Duke University, Georgetown University, the Uni-versity of Miami, and Syracuse University. We also have partnerships with institutions in several other countries such as Tokai University in Japan and Western Sydney University in Australia. So, it’s a lot of col-laboration. The model of collaboration is not built on something fixed. We really believe that small is beautiful. We usually start with these very small kinds of projects together with an institution. For example, they review our problem or develop with us that program or sometimes our students and their students work on a project. We don’t like to put any pressure on the other institution because I know that in academia, hu-man resources are really valuable to each institution and it’s very hard to drain them by getting some of their faculty and to come and teach.

So, we always have our own faculty. We always have our own resources. It’s the collaboration that matters to us. And their pres-ence in our institution and our presence in their institutions—that’s what matters.

IE: Do Effat University students study abroad?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: They do if there is a chance for them to attend one of the classes there or one semester abroad. We have actu-ally a way and we have them do that. Some of our students, after they graduate, they go and study abroad for their graduate studies. And we just created a scholarship for our students to spend the semester abroad. So we’ll be implementing that.

IE: Do international students attend Effat University?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: Bringing other students from any other institutions here is very hard. But that’s something that we’re trying to improve. Even Effat University students say they would like us to increase the number of students coming to visit us.

We offer the Arabic for nonspeakers diploma and some certifi-cates, and with that international students gain insight into Saudi culture, history, and economics. It’s a program that you can take any time, either in the summer or in the academic year. So it’s not necessarily over a specific period of time. But it has levels of studying Arabic: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. And it has some of

the flavor of Saudi Arabia culture and heritage. For Muslim people, they can go to visit Mecca or Medina. For the non-Muslims, for example, they can go diving in the Red Sea and see the coral reef, or they can go to Mada’in Saleh, which is a very old historical site that a lot of people come from all over the world to visit.

IE: What would you like other educators in other parts of the world to know about women’s education in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East in general?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: Higher education in Saudi Arabia has been in existence since 1960, but it has limited opportunities. Now it’s open and the women in Saudi Arabia can study anything inside the country. But since the scholarship program that the King es-tablished in 1970, the women in Saudi Arabia have had the chance also to study abroad; otherwise, I wouldn’t really have been able to do my education.

So at this moment, the thing that’s needed now is the international flavor in it which can connect us globally with the world and increase the quality of education, which is not only for women, but also for men and women.

I would add to that that women in Saudi Arabia are really well known now in research, in contribution to science and technology. I think one of our Saudi women, she is a researcher in San Diego State University. Another woman, is working at Harvard on biotechnol-ogy. They’re in the United Kingdom and in all parts of Europe, and in the United States and Canada. So they’re everywhere suddenly.

And now with their mahram, they love to be with their hijab or with their culture. They’re respecting their culture, but at the same time that is not limiting them from acquiring knowledge and from acquiring a degree or higher education. So now you see a lot of PhD faculty, Saudi faculty who are women.

IE: Why is it important for universities to empower and educate women everywhere?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: Because they need to have equal op-portunities like men. And I think until now it’s not only about Saudi Arabia. It’s all over the world. The higher positions and the presiden-cy, for example, of any country, if you count them, women’s presence is less than the men in every field, in boardrooms everywhere around the world. Educating women is very important to prove to the world that they are equally capable of handling these kinds of jobs . So we want more representation in the different boards, in different country cabinets, and banks. Now most of these boards are men. Yes, we want equal opportunity.

IE: What’s your vision for the future for Effat University?HAIFA JAMAL AL-LAIL: I would love Effat University to be ranked among the first 10 in the world. If you want to dream, you need to dream big because those who dream the most do the most. IE

ELAINA LOVELAND is editor-in-chief of IE.

VOICES


Women PeacemakersWomen PeacemakersMeenakshi Chhabra

on Teachers' Day in India in a

government school for predominantly Muslim students

in Old Delhi.


BY SUSAN LADIKA

University educators, recent graduates,

and current college students are striving

to show that even the deepest rifts have

the potential to be healed.

It may take discussion, dialogue, or

counseling, but peace can come between

communities and within individuals.

And understanding is essential, not only

within the conflict zones themselves, but

also in other parts of the world, which may

be viewing the unrest from afar.

The partition of India, which divided

India and Pakistan nearly 70 years ago; the

genocide in Rwanda two decades ago; and

the Egyptian uprising at the start of this

decade are all focal points for healing.

These are the stories of four women

who are working to promote peace and

understanding in current and former

conflict regions.

Women PeacemakersWomen Peacemakers


Meenakshi ChhabraINDIA

Meenakshi Chhabra uses dialogue and personal connec-tion to help break down barriers.

Chhabra, who grew up in India, is an associate profes-sor in the division of interdisciplinary studies at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also works as coordinator of the school’s peace and conflict studies specialization.

India’s independence from Britain in 1947 also came with the country’s division. It was divided up into Muslim-dominated Paki-stan in the north, and Hindu- and Sikh-dominated India in the south. More than 10 million people were uprooted by the division, including Chhabra’s parents. The ensuing vio-lence that engulfed the land killed at least 1 million people, and countless women were raped.

“The narrative and memories of conflict were always sort of alive in our homes,” Chhabra recalls, and students in India were taught that the Indians were only the victims of the atrocities, not the aggres-sors. With the border between the two countries closed, Chhabra never had experience with Pakistanis, and had no idea what they thought or were taught.

All that changed after she got married and moved to the United States in 1995, and then started graduate school at Lesley University. By living in Massachusetts, she found herself socializing with groups of Southeast Asians and met a Pakistani for the first time.

She became friends with Anila Asghar, now an associ-ate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University in Montréal. Through their friendship, Chhabra quickly learned that they both had been taught the same lessons—that their sides were the victims in the violence that accompanied the partition of India.

The two wanted to puncture the stereotypes people on both sides had of the other, and as a result, in 1998 the two women started an Indian and Pakistani women’s group in

the Boston area to spark a dialogue between the two groups and foster understanding.

“I really felt that this would be an important experience to share with others,” Chhabra says.

“Much that is used to perpetuate conflict can be used to create more connections,” she adds.

In cases such as that which divid-ed Indians and Pakistanis, Chhabra says, it’s important for members of both groups to discuss their experi-ences and respect their differences. “We’re not all the same. We can build humanity based on acknowledging those differences.”

Chhabra graduated with a bachelor’s degree in politi-cal science from Lady Sri Ram College at the University of Delhi in 1983. She then earned a master’s degree in intercultural relations from Lesley University in 2000, fol-lowed by a doctorate in educational studies from Lesley University in 2006. She has also done postdoctoral studies in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

She’s also used her educational and practical skills out-side the country, working as a Fulbright specialist in India in 2013–2014 as well as a Fulbright researcher in India in 2010–2011. She completed a Fulbright Scholar teaching fellowship in India in 2007.

Since 2001 Chhabra has directed her focus to peace and conflict studies, with a particular emphasis on educa-tion and youth development in conflict zones, especially those in South Asia.

Over the years, her role in the dialogue between Indi-ans and Pakistanis expanded beyond the women’s group, and she became involved in Seeds of Peace, which is designed to help teens from conflict regions hone their leadership and peacemaking skills.

Her first work with Seeds of Peace came in 2001, when a group of a dozen high school students from India and a dozen students from Pakistan, along with their teachers, C

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Meenakshi Chhabra at Delhi University with graduate students from the northeast of India

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spent three weeks at camp together in the Maine woods. Chhabra’s work with the program continues on today.

At the camp the two groups room together, participate in camp activities, and take part in sessions on topics such as coexistence.

By spending time together at camp, “it allows them to really see the other side in many different perspec-tives,” Chhabra says. “It redefines who they thought the other was” and many of the students go on to be longtime friends, keeping in touch online.

In 2003 Chhabra accompanied the Indian students who had been involved in Seeds of Peace as they crossed the border to visit their counterparts in Pakistan. Those visits have continued over the years.

She has seen through working with Seeds of Peace that “they’re small steps but they’re very rewarding.”

Chhabra says she’s drawn to working with young peo-ple because of their willingness to be exposed to new ideas

and possibilities. “With kids, they are open to thinking differently when they’re given the opportunity to interact and make friends.”

She believes in the power of people to transform their societies. “I really believe in people power to make a shift. It might not be visible initially,” but eventually it will take root.

Chhabra says she sometimes asks herself why she makes the effort to draw people together. “Maybe it will make a difference and make a difference in my own life.”

“It’s a work in progress. I feel grateful to have the op-portunity to contribute in whatever way I can,” she says, and she doesn’t allow herself time to be complacent or pessimistic about the possibility of eventually attaining peace.

“I’d like to see peace in the region,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ll see it in my lifetime, but I’ll keep taking action and not sit and wait.”

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Meenakshi Chhabra at a government high school in New Delhi, India.C

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Rangira (Béa) GallimoreRWANDA

Rangira (Béa) Gallimore’s research on a book about female survivors of the genocide in Rwanda quickly turned into an effort to directly aid the survivors after she met with them face to face.

“I could not forget the eyes of the people I saw; I could not forget some of those who lost family mem-bers,” Gallimore recalls.

The Rwandan genocide is an issue that’s deeply personal for Gallimore, an associate profes-sor of French at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The native of Rwanda lost her mother, sister and three brothers, as well as extended family members in the killing spree that left an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead in 1994.1

After meeting with genocide survivors, Gallimore shifted her focus from the book to the plight of women and children who survived the geno-cide. In 2004 she founded Step Up! American Association for Rwandan Women. The nonprofit association works to help address the economic and psychological needs of the genocide survivors and their children.

Unrest in Rwanda when she was young had sent a teen-age Gallimore and her family members into exile in Congo in the 1960s. She then received a degree in French litera-ture and education at the National University of Zaire.

She came to the United States, where she continued her education, and earned a master’s degree in linguistics theory from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1982. In 1988 she earned a doctoral degree in Francophone Afri-can literature from the University of Cincinnati.

Gallimore has worked at the University of Missouri-Columbia since 1990, and while she was attending a

conference in Canada in 1994, she received a telephone call that turned her world upside down. She learned that her family members had been slain in Rwanda’s brutal genocide.

Just weeks later, she traveled to the war-ravaged country to try to learn more about what had hap-pened to her family.

After that trip she stayed away from her homeland for nearly a de-cade, finally returning in 2003, when she was invited to speak at a confer-ence in Rwanda on conflict in Africa. While visiting an NGO for genocide survivors as part of the research for a book, a woman told her that a book

wouldn’t help solve the survivors’ problems. Some of their key concerns were a lack of food and anti-AIDS medication.

That conversation propelled her to start Step Up. Ini-tially, mental health professionals from the University of Missouri-Columbia traveled to Rwanda to help train pastors, teachers, and nurses on how to counsel those suf-fering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Talking about genocide in general is very hard,” Gal-limore says. “They don’t have words to express what happened. “If Rwandans don’t talk about their pain and suffering, it’s going to go on for centuries.”

While collecting testimonies of female genocide survivors in 2006 as a fellow at the Institut de Recher-ches Scientifiques et Technologiques (IRST) in Butare, Rwanda, Gallimore interviewed women from ABASA, an association of women who had been raped during the conflict (ABASA means “we are all the same” or “we share the same fate” in the local language, Kinyarwanda). It was founded in 1999 after women were counseled by a nurse who was also a genocide survivor. By meeting together, the women started sharing their experiences. During the genocide, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped, and 20,000 of them had children. In addition, two-thirds became infected with HIV after the rapes.

One of the women spoke of the trauma of not being able to provide for her children, and that’s when Step Up R

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Students from Wesleyan University helping in the construction of Nsanga Counseling Center in Huye, South of Rwanda during a 2014 study abroad trip to Rwanda coordinated by Béa Gallimore. The counseling center was bought and renovated by Step Up, the nonprofit organization that Gallimore founded.

Gallimore


stepped up, providing tangible economic assistance. The organization provided ABASA with 32 cows, which could be used to generate income for the women, as well as pro-viding milk for the women and their children. Some of the women also learned beekeeping so they could sell honey.

More recently, Step Up began providing microloans of $100 to the women. With the money, they could buy goods to sell at the market. The loans were to be paid back within a year, but the repayment came in far quicker than that. “These women can turn stone into gold,” Gallimore says.

To help herself, as well as the women she encounters, through their emotional trauma, Gallimore completed training courses in trauma psychology from the Interna-tional Center for Psychosocial Trauma at the University of Missouri.

Along with helping the women become economically empowered, Step Up has held major fundraising efforts so it could renovate a home that now serves as a counseling center for the genocide victims. The center currently is

staffed by volunteers and Gallimore hopes to eventually be able to hire counselors.

Gallimore also has given University of Missouri stu-dents an opportunity to gain insight into what happened in Rwanda by starting the university’s study abroad program to Rwanda in 2009. The program focuses on postconflict Rwanda and genocide prevention.

Each year about 12 to 15 students take part in the program. They first spend a week in Missouri prepar-ing for the trip, then they spend four weeks in Rwanda. During the first two weeks they take part in classes and visit memorial sites, deepening their insight into what occurred in the country. The students then spend two weeks in an internship that fits with their interests. This could involve working at schools, hospitals, or social service agencies.

From the time they spend in Rwanda, the students see genocide “is not something remote that happened in Rwanda. It can happen anywhere,” Gallimore says.R

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Rangira (Béa) Gallimore and her husband, Tim Gallimore, a former spokesman for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda, who now is associate vice president of academic planning and state authorization at the University of North Carolina, help build a counseling center for victims of the Rwandan genocide.

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Their experiences have a profound impact on the stu-dents who take part in the study abroad program, and they grapple with how to handle all that they have seen and heard when they return home from Rwanda.

As a response, one student who took part in the study abroad trip created a student organization called Step Up Mizzou. The group focuses on tutoring the children of refugees who live in Columbia, and on educating fellow students about genocide and refugee issues.

Having the organization also serves as “a way for them to vent, to get their frustrations out,” she says.

The study abroad experience has changed students’ lives, and they’ve written theses on the genocide in Rwan-da, or continued on with their studies in fields such as medicine and human rights, she says.

Gallimore’s efforts also stretch far beyond the class-room and her work with NGOs. She’s also a researcher at Rwanda’s National Commission for the Fight against Genocide, and serves as a special adviser to its general secretary.

Closer to home, she has served as a consultant for UNESCO in areas such as gender equality and develop-ment, as well as on women’s rights, peace, and security. Gallimore also has worked as a consultant with the U.S. State Department on the assessment and implementation of laws against gender-based violence in Rwanda.

Among her many honors is the 2012 President’s Award for Cross-Cultural Engagement from the University of Missouri system.

Gallimore has just taken early retirement, but won’t be slowing down. She’s moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to be with her husband, Tim Gallimore, a for-mer spokesman for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda, who now is associate vice president of academic planning and state authorization at the University of North Carolina.

She’ll continue on as professor emeritus at the Uni-versity of Missouri-Columbia and will focus her efforts on her NGO work and research in Rwanda, as well as the study abroad program. Since 2014 Gallimore has been coordinating programs going to Rwanda with other U.S. universities. In June 2016 she will be in Rwanda with stu-dents from Nebraska Wesleyan University and Marquette University—and says she is “hoping to work with more universities in the future.”

Despite all she has done and continues to do, Gal-limore doesn’t see herself as a peace advocate, but she knows how important it is for individuals to find peace and reconciliation. “In order to reconcile with another person, you have to reconcile with yourself.”

Emily Crane LinnEGYPT

At a time when most students and tourists were staying far away from Egypt, Emily Crane couldn’t wait to spend time there.

During her freshman year at Miami University in Ox-ford, Ohio, she watched the Egyptian revolution unfold as a part of the Arab Spring that shook the Middle East in 2011.

Although she was born in Minnesota, Crane grew up in Morocco, living there from the ages of 5 to 17. Her fa-ther first moved the family to the country to do research for his PhD and then stayed on to work on various devel-opmental and educational projects.

“Growing up, people liked to remind me how unique my situation was,” Crane recalls. As unrest flared in the Middle East during her time at the university, she found that people would turn to her with their questions about what was happening in the region. “I found I quite liked that—helping people understand.”

That interest in helping people understand has since turned into a passion, and Crane has spent the past year in Cairo working on a book, which she hopes will serve to promote understanding between those who experienced the turmoil and Westerners who read their stories.

Crane graduated from Miami University in 2014 with a double major in journalism and anthropology. While still a student, Crane couldn’t wait to get to Cairo and immerse herself in the country. “There was so much I wanted to understand about the revolution, what prompted it and what had come of it.”

She persuaded the university to allow her to go to Egypt and attend classes at The American University in Cairo for a semester-long study abroad in 2013.

Along with spending time in the classroom, Crane was intent on trying to find an English-language publica-tion that could be persuaded to allow her to work there as an intern.

She managed to land an internship at the Daily News Egypt, working as a political reporter. That’s where her time in Morocco came in handy. Although the Arabic spoken in Mo-rocco is much different than that spoken in Egypt, she was able to use

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her English, Arabic, and French lan-guage skills in her reporting.

During her stint at the news-paper she covered such things as demonstrations, press conferences, and the activities of nongovernmen-tal organizations. “For sure it was the highlight of my study abroad.”

During that semester in Cairo, “one thing I learned about the political situation here is how nuanced it is,” Crane says. In her reporting for the Daily News Egypt, she spoke to people from across the spectrum—from rich to poor and rural to urban Egyptians.

“Everybody had different experiences with what was going on. One person’s good guy was another person’s bad guy,” she says. “One person’s life was going well and another person’s was in shambles.”

She learned that by telling the stories of what individual Egyptians had experienced and were experi-encing, she could help break through misperceptions and preconceptions.

When she returned to Miami University, her goal be-came to head back to Egypt and write a book about the Egyptians and their personal experiences.

Last year she was awarded Miami University’s Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Prize. The $30,000 prize is awarded each year to a Miami University senior and is

intended to give the winner an op-portunity to pursue activities that are designed to enhance his or her future work and career. Crane’s dream was to return to Egypt and write the book, Voices of the Revo-lution: The Untold Narratives of Egypt’s Awakening.

She also was one of 21 seniors who were selected to receive the university’s President’s Distin-guished Service Award, which is presented to those who make an

outstanding contribution to the campus, to the commu-nity and to higher education. Crane was recognized for her “rare combination of academic rigor and use of social science to speak to pressing real-world problems.”

Thanks to the Goldman Prize, Crane returned to Cairo in August 2014 to undertake research for her book. The manuscript is now completed, and she’s working to find a publisher. She plans to spend the rest of the year in Egypt, working as a freelance writer.

Her book tells the story of Egypt since the start of the revolution through the perspectives and experiences of four very different individuals: a housewife; a man with a business located near Tahrir Square, which was ground zero for the 2010 uprising; a lesbian who before the revolution was quite open about her sexual orienta-tion; and a young man from rural Egypt who was drafted

into the army. The book weaves together the stories of

how each person experienced “the same big events that shook the whole nation. The ex-perience is so different, depending on who you are, where you are,” Crane says. “There’s nothing about it (the revolution) that’s black and white.”

In a country with a population of 90 mil-lion, each person went through a unique experience, and she aims to portray the feel-ings and humanity of each of her characters.

Her target audience for the book is West-ern readers, and she hopes that by reading the book, Westerners will find personal con-nections with the people of Egypt. “When you connect or identify with someone, even if they are very different than you, then you care about them,” she says.

“Personal stories are powerful instru-ments for change.”

Emily Crane Linn in Egypt, where she worked on a book about the Egyptian revolution from the perspectives of four different Egyptians

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Dishani JayaweeraSRI LANKA

For Dishani Jayaweera, becoming a leader for peace in her native Sri Lanka was driven by a desire to give back.

“The world has given me so much and I want to give what I can back as my way of showing gratitude,” says Jayaweera, who cofounded and runs the Centre for Peace-Building and Reconciliation (CPBR) outside of Colombo.

She was working in logistics for the National Integra-tion Program Unit, comprised of a group of academics who were studying peace from different perspectives, when she was offered a full scholarship to come to the United States for three weeks in 2001 and participate in the Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (CON-TACT) Summer Peacebuilding Program at the School for International Training (SIT) Graduate Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont. Founded in 1997, the CON-TACT program is a graduate certificate program of the SIT Summer Peacebuilding Institute held annually for peacemakers from around the world. CONTACT takes place in June on SIT’s Vermont campus and in South Asia in December.

There she studied with peacebuilders from around the world. One of the key concepts she learned and embraced was reconciliation. “The reconciliation word was very new to me,” says Jayaweera, who studied law at university and briefly practiced as an attorney. She spent the third week of the program concentrating on the topic of reconcilia-tion with a group of other students.

During her time in Vermont she was encouraged by CONTACT Founder and former Director Paula Green (who retired in June 2015) to take a peace leadership role in her homeland, and Jayaweera returned home and taught a two-hour session to youth about reconciliation.

“I felt a huge social responsibility because so many people gave to help me,” Jayaweera says.

She began working in peace and reconciliation efforts at the grassroots level, in a country scarred by the civil war between Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese population and minority Tamils. To try to help heal the wounds, CPBR has focused its peace and reconciliation efforts on youth and religious leaders.

Jayaweera, who is a Buddhist, says most peacebuilding efforts in Sri Lanka had been led by Muslims and Chris-tians. Buddhists “hadn’t taken a leadership role. This was a vacuum we can fill. If you work with the Buddhist monks

Dishani Jayaweera, a native Sri Lankan, teaches youth in Sri Lanka about peace and reconciliation.

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in a village you can address all the Buddhists in the village,” she says.

CPBR also has opted to focus on youth, which have led uprisings in the country. “Universities were hot-beds for the rebel groups,” she says. Her organization pushes for justice, equality, and power-sharing through the use of nonviolence.

In 2012 Jayaweera re-ceived the Peacemakers in Action Award from the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Under-standing in New York.

One of CPBR’s recent focuses has been on collecting recommendations from the community and religious lead-ers on how to bring about reconciliation in the country. The recommendations call for opportunities for healing of those affected by war; implementing a trilingual policy, in which Sinhala, Tamil, and English will all be used; restructuring the formal education system; establishing an interfaith

council to promote interfaith cul-ture; introducing a media policy that respects diversity; and introducing a constitutional amendment that en-sures equality and equity.

Now CPBR is beginning ad-vocacy work to try to make those goals a reality. “Bringing at least two to three recommendations to the policy level is one of our dreams,” she says. IE

SUSAN LADIKA is a freelance writer in Tampa, Florida. Her last article for IE was “Going Home to Teach” about

former international students returning to their homelands to improve education, which appeared in the September/October 2015 issue.

(Endnotes)1 Estimates of the death are according to the BBC News. See “Rwanda

Genocide: 100 Days of Slaughter,” BBC News, April 7, 2014, online at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506. The United Nations estimated the death toll to be up to one million. See http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/education/rwandagenocide.shtml.

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NEW ZEALAND may have a tiny populayion of only 4.3 million, but it has established itself on the map of popular regions for international students to pursue their degrees. The government of New Zealand is behind the push to internationalize—it established Education New Zealand in 2011, a govern-mental agency charged with working with the education industry to promote

the quality of the New Zealand education system and New Zealand’s expertise in provid-ing education and training products offshore. Education New Zealand, in collaboration with its industry partners, is tasked with growing the economic value of New Zealand’s international education industry to achieve the government’s target of doubling its current value of $2.5 billion (in New Zealand currency) by 2025. In addition, other government goals for international education to be met by 2025 include doubling the number of international postgraduate students to 20,000, increasing the transition rate from study to residence for international graduates, increasing the number of offshore international students from 3,000 to 10,000, and increase New Zealanders’ skills and knowledge to operate effectively across cultures.1

The international student population in New Zealand has increased dramatically in the last 15 years. The num-ber of international students studying in New Zealand grew rapidly from 8,210 international tertiary students in 2000 to 40,854 in 2011, according to UNESCO data. It subsequently ran into strong headwinds of a toughening market for international students at different educational levels before rebounding strongly from 2013 to 2014.

International enrollments declined from 2011 to 2013, with a varied picture by source country and by the sectors within New Zealand receiving students. But in 2013 the number rebounded strongly from 97,107 international students enrolled at a New Zealand education provid-er at all levels of education, to 110,198 international students, a 13 percent year-on-year increase and a 10-year high that was helped in part by strong increases in recruitment of Chinese and Indian students, according to data from Education New Zealand.

Much of that enrollment growth reflected growth in institutes of technology and poly-technics and private training establishments (largely vocational training), rather than the university sector, which had more modest 3 percent year-on-year enrollment growth from 2013 to 2014. Some analysis firms, such as ICEF (and its publication ICEFMonitor), attribute the growth to improved visa processing and improved international education branding.

New Zealand is an

Anglophone country

with a disproportionate

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export industry.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is fourth in an occasional series on international student recruitment strategies in select countries.

InternatIonalIzatIon StrategIeS


BIGDestination

SMALL COUNTRY

N E W Z E A L A N D

BY DAVID TOBENKIN


“The number of first-time students coming to New Zealand is at record levels, demonstrating New Zealand is gaining a profile and momentum in the global internation-al education marketplace as a quality study destination,” says Education New Zealand Chief Executive Grant

McPherson. “The launch and promotion of New Zealand’s ‘Think New’ education brand in 2013 and the delivery of the brand through global market-ing campaigns during 2014 has been a key catalyst for the rise in awareness and active consideration of New Zealand

by international students. I am optimistic that growth will continue. Our Think New brand is continuing to build momentum, and the latest student visa data for August year-to-date shows that total student visas are up 10 per-cent and first-time student visas are up 11 percent.”

Still, McPherson balances that assessment with ac-knowledgment that there are areas in the New Zealand international student program that remain to be ad-dressed. “There are challenges that we and the industry have to manage,” McPherson says. “These include the diversity and sustainability of growth. It is risky for New Zealand to remain strongly reliant on just one or two coun-tries. The future focus for [Education New Zealand] is to ensure sustainable and targeted growth for all sectors.”

Other challenges concern growing competition. “The last few years have been challenging for many with in-creasing competition, changing technologies, and the flow-on effects of the global financial crisis,” says McPher-son. “A proliferation of new Asian and European education institutions, course options, and regional education hubs in or close to some of New Zealand’s traditional markets for international students meant there was less impetus for students to search further abroad.”

And a new challenge may be whether more rigorous English-language proficiency testing requirements could pose a challenge to the acceptance of some non-native English speakers as international students.

While international students have always had to meet English-language entry requirements to receive an offer of place from their New Zealand education provider for a student visa, under rules in effect through September 2015, education providers who had met certain criteria could assess the English proficiency of international stu-dents through internal tests.

However, a national rule change that came into effect in October 2015 means that international students from coun-tries with a student visa approval rate of less than 80 percent will have to sit for an internationally recognized English lan-guage test to demonstrate clearly that they have the level of English required to study successfully in New Zealand.

Long-Term Goals In 2011 the New Zealand government set a variety of goals in its Leadership Statement for International Education for the subsequent 15-year period, including doubling the annual economic value of international education to $5 bil-lion, through increasing international enrollments in higher education institutions, private providers, and schools; in-creasing the number of international students enrolled in providers offshore from 3,000 to 10,000; and doubling the number of international postgraduate students (particularly in programs in addition to those at the PhD level), from 10,000 to 20,000. Education New Zealand was created soon thereafter to assist in realizing those goals.

“Those are certainly aspirational goals that would be achievable through increased enrollments at the post-graduate level and development of acceptable pathway programs offered in collaboration with private partners, individual universities, and/or New Zealand universities

Grant McPherson

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University of Otago Registry

Building with clocktower,

Dunedin, New Zealand



as a group,” says Derek Mc-Cormack, vice-chancellor of the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and chair-man of the international policy committee of Universities New Zealand, which represents the eight New Zealand universi-ties. “The sector would also benefit from improved immi-gration policies and from more international marketing.”

Top priorities for Education New Zealand documented in its Statement of Intent 2013–16 include new and more sophisticated market prioritization, a new suite of sup-port services for the industry, new ways of communicating with the market, and a new brand. It has also been work-ing across the New Zealand government to put in place new policy settings to increase New Zealand’s attractive-ness to international students, such as those concerning immigration and qualification recognition.

Among steps already taken are the redesign and launch of the “Think New” education brand in November 2013. It is being used in all of Education New Zealand’s student marketing campaigns, public relations activities, digital activities, events, and fairs to target students who are look-ing at studying overseas. The Think New brand highlights what makes New Zealand a unique and distinctive study destination and an online toolkit—The Brand Lab—was also created to make the brand materials easy to access—thereby increasing their use and impact.

Other recent achievements include running a four-week brand engagement campaign called “A Day in the Life” that focused on engaging with prospective students through social media, running two student competitions in key South and Southeast Asia (SSEA) countries to raise awareness of New Zealand, conducting virtual fairs in Latin America and the United States, and hosting key education media in New Zealand.

“A Progress Update on the Leadership Statement for International Education” outlined the key changes made across government agencies since 2011 related to immigra-tion. Specific immigration initiatives underway since 2013 include: the roll out of a new IT system and a change to how student visa applications are lodged and processed, which is expected to be complete by the end of 2015; the establishment of an Industry Partnership Pilot to enable selected education providers to nominate offshore student visa applications for streamlined, priority application pro-cessing by issuing them a nomination letter for inclusion

with their visa application; and changes to work rights in December 2013 that allow more English-language students studying at high-quality providers to work part-time, pro-vide full-time work rights during all scheduled holidays to international students who take a course of one academic year or more, and give unlimited work rights to interna-tional PhD and master’s-level research students.

Confronting the ChallengesNew Zealand has a number of competitive disadvantages. The first is the geographic challenge of being a small coun-try located in a remote corner of the world and operating in the shadow of its nearby and much larger neighbor, Australia, a fellow Anglophone country that is one of the largest destination markets for international students. Given New Zealand’s small size, branding and such ex-posure are critical to remaining competitive in the race for international students, says AUT’s McCormack.

On the other hand, there are advantages to being small, McPherson says.

“Being small has shaped several of our unique and distinctive national attributes which are highlighted in our marketing materials,” McPherson says. “Our place in the world has required a focus on innovation and cre-ativity—valuable skills for learning and life—and our close networks and communities makes meeting influ-ential people, standing out from the crowd, and making a big impact in your chosen field a real possibility in New Zealand. Our education system is also increasingly inter-national in character, driven by a well-travelled population of students, teaching staff, and researchers and technol-ogy, trade, and migration.

Derek McCormack

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International students at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand


As noted, increased competition globally for interna-tional students is another challenge.

“There has been intensifying competition for interna-tional students around the world,” says Rob Rabel, pro-vice chancellor for international engagement at Victoria Uni-

versity of Wellington. “The sleeping giant of the U.S. is waking up and not just resting on the laurels of its natural at-tractions. Australia is the most successful player in the inter-national education game and has always been our strongest competitor where we are lo-cated. Its economy is bigger and students from Asia are attracted to its larger cities. Also, more international stu-

dents are going to other parts of Europe and countries like Canada. Source markets like Singapore, Malaysia, and China are also starting to be destinations.”

Currency exchange rates have also had a pernicious ef-fect upon attracting international students, Rabel says. “It’s partly a matter of affordability,” Rabel says. “New Zealand numbers for the university sector have been flat for several years and lower than during the beginning-of-the-century big boom. That reflects in part that the New Zealand dollar has been very strong in recent years—as high as 88 cents [to the U.S. dollar], compared to 40 to 50 cents during the 2001–05 international student boom period. That has changed dramatically over the past year with a drop to 62 cents, which augurs well for growth in international enrollments.”

Given such challenges and the limited resources of a small country like New Zealand, prioritizing source mar-kets that will give the biggest return on international student recruiting efforts and investments is key, McPherson says.

Education New Zealand recently divided up the inter-national target regions into three categories of countries. The first group is termed Rebalance Markets and includes New Zealand’s largest source markets—China and India, which are the source of nearly 40 percent of New Zealand’s international students—and a number of mature markets: Chile, Malaysia, Germany, and South Korea. Education New Zealand explains that in China and India the focus is on retaining current growth in Chinese and Indian student numbers while rebalancing its recruiting efforts to focus on future value and sustainability. Education New Zealand says it is assessing the position of Chile, Malaysia, Germa-

ny, and South Korea, and will, over time, adjust resources accordingly. The second group is Promote Markets: the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, Viet-nam, and Saudi Arabia. In Promote Markets, Education New Zealand is stepping up targeted marketing activity for growth in the short to medium term. The third group, Explore Markets, refers to Pakistan, the Philippines, and Colombia. In Explore Markets Education New Zealand is primarily using research and intelligence-gathering to assess prospects for long-term growth.

New Zealand has also removed some regulations that have reduced the competitiveness of its higher education institutions for international students, Rabel says. “One of our disadvantages has been that we have had limited numbers of one-year professional master’s programs due to regulatory issues,” Rabel adds. “That issue has been addressed. Now we can offer master’s programs of that length, which are very popular in Australia and the UK. That will be an important part of our efforts to reach our international student target.”

University StrategiesAuckland University of Technology (AUT) is one of the few New Zealand universities whose international stu-dent numbers have steadily grown in recent years, with equivalent full-time students growing from 2,506 in 2012 to 2,599 in 2013 to 2,660 in 2014.

“The success that AUT has had in recruiting inter-national students comes from the hard-working and dedicated staff that we have at the senior strategic level as well as our tactical efforts on the ground level,” AUT’s McCormack says. “Our staff have been key in develop-ing AUT’s reputation of providing excellent teaching and research, building and maintaining relationships with overseas agencies, facilitating programs that are relevant to market demand and producing graduates who are highly desirable in the employment market. AUT has introduced English-language pathways to undergraduate and post-graduate programs through the AUT English Language School, which provide seamless transfer to academic study. This is an attractive option for students as it provides an al-ternative to the standard English language tests, IELTS and TOEFL, and better prepares students for academic study.”

Rabel says many New Zealand universities have fo-cused on dual partnership programs with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China higher education bodies. One such partnership involving Victo-ria University of Wellington is a small joint campus with the Vietnamese University of Economics, established in Ho Chi Min City 10 years ago. “It’s a significant flagship

Rob Rabel

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for us there and we also have many other relationships there with Vietnamese institutions,” Rabel says. “We do very well in obtaining students sponsored by the New Zealand or Vietnamese governments and we also provide scholarships for a few hundred students a year. Some pro-grams feature students spending part of the time there and part of the time in New Zealand. Right now we have about 300 Vietnamese students here, 120 to 150 of whom are through partnership programs.”

“With Vietnam, we are always trying to talk to new partners,” Rabel says. “One thing with partner programs is that you need to have a range of them if they are to have serious impact for you, which also helps spread the risk. We are now expanding from Vietnam and trying to develop programs in Indonesia and Malaysia, where we are the lead university in a program in accounting with two other New Zealand universities. There are 300 stu-dents in that program in Malaysia, which is funded by the Malaysian government, 150 of whom transferred to New Zealand this year as part of a four-year program.”

International students have already reached numbers where they are “critical” for the finances of some institu-tions, including Victoria University of Wellington, Rabel says. Victoria University of Wellington charges inter-national students $23,000 to $26,000 dollars a year for undergraduates, compared with $4,000 to $6,000 for do-mestic students.

“New Zealand universities are all public institutions, with constrained budget allocations for students,” Rabel says. “We can’t hike fees for domestic students more than 4 percent per year and our domestic revenue from teach-

ing is restricted. The international area is the one area where we are not restricted. So there is a strong incentive to attract international students and use their fees to fund a range of operations.”

On the other hand, by law since 2005, New Zealand higher education institutions are required to charge do-mestic and international PhD students the same rate, which Rabel says has had a positive effect on international student recruitment at that level.

“It shows the importance of relative price in driving re-cruitment of international students,” Rabel notes. “We had 50 international PhDs [at Victoria University of Welling-ton] in 2005; now there are 500. The PhD tuition regime has enabled New Zealand to attract high-quality students to us. Some stay as academics while others return to their home countries where they will remain networked with our researchers. In terms of value, many see us as a good place to send students: we have well-ranked universities, PhD opportunities, and their money will go farther. The PhD level is the one area where our international student level is proportionally higher than Australia, which wasn’t the case before the domestic fee was introduced.” IE

DAVID TOBENKIN is a freelance journalist based in the Washington, D.C. area. His last article for IE was “On the Rise” about Canada’s international recruitment strategies, which appeared in the May/June 2015 issue.

Endnotes1 Education New Zealand, “Leadership Statement for International

Education,” September 20, 2011, accessed November 11, 2015, http://enz.govt.nz/sites/public_files/Leadership%20Statement%20for%20International%20Education.pdf.V

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Students at Victoria University of Wellington


CAMPUS PROFILE | North CeNtral College | Naperville, Illinois

Text and Photography by Christopher Connell


EDITOR’S NOTE: Profiles of the five winners of the 2015 Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization are being included in IE. The full set of profiles can be seen in Internationalizing the Campus 2015: Profiles of Success at Colleges and Universities. A

WA

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NSENATOR PAUL SIMON

2015

THE MESSAGE IS IMPOSSIBLE TO MISS. One day each fall at North Central College dozens of senior administrators, faculty, and students don maroon T-shirts emblazoned with a three-word imperative: Please go away!

Students are heeding the study abroad pitch, not just because of the human billboards, but because the college has hired more advisers, made study overseas possible at no additional cost beyond airfare, and nearly tripled the number of semester offerings. North Central has come a long way since opening a small Office of International Programs two decades ago at a time when it enrolled fewer than 30 international students and sent only 23 abroad. Now 10 percent of the 3,000 students study in other countries each year. Recruiting efforts

and copious financial aid now bring nearly 100 international stu-dents to the United Methodist–affiliated college in the suburbs of Chicago each year. At an institution where 90 percent of students are from Illinois, North Central is progressing toward a goal of a 5 percent international student population.

The college was founded in 1861 by leaders of what is now the United Methodist Church to serve the families of German immigrants. The 65-acre campus sits in downtown Naperville, an upscale suburb 30 minutes from Chicago’s bustling Loop and lakefront. It changed its name from North-Western College in the 1920s to avoid confusion with much larger Northwestern Univer-sity. Early graduates served as missionaries in Japan and China. “Service and civic engagement are an important part of the culture of this campus,” said President Troy Hammond, who has a PhD in atomic physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but came to academe from the business world.

North Central College has made great strides

in internationalizing their institution in the last two decades.The

college now sends 10 percent of its

students abroad and has nearly doubled its international student

population since 2012.

President Troy Hammond says the college “punches above its weight” on internationalization.

PropellingInternationalization

Forward


C A M P U S P R O F I L E | North CeNtral College | Naperville, Illinois

Nudging a Campus to Internationalize Hammond’s long-serving predecessor, Harold Wilde, set the region-al college on a course to internationalize in 1994 when he tapped English professor Jack Shindler to direct the fledgling international office, a job he still holds today. Shindler wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, but turned early in his career to di-recting the English as a second language program at Texas Southern University before joining the North Central faculty in 1981. When the international office started, it was just Shindler and a part-time secretary but he now runs a heavily trafficked, six-person shop with its own English Language Institute. Framed above the door to Shindler’s den-like office is a poster inspired by a salute from Wilde calling Shindler the campus “nudge” on all things international. “I nudged not just faculty but students out of the nest,” said Shindler,

who as a Williams College student once convinced a chapel board to convert an empty fraternity house into a coffee house and gathering space. “I feel like we’re still doing that. This is a kind of coffee house in the best sense of the word where people come, share talents, talk to each other, network, and make this place more international.”

“We couldn’t have gotten where we are without him,” said Deva-doss Pandian, the now retired vice president and dean of the faculty. Norval Bard, a professor of French, said Shindler “has a disarming way about him. He rarely says no. When you come to him with a new idea, he might say, ‘We’ll look into it,’ but he always leaves the door open to explore new ideas.” Francine Navakas, a humanities professor and associate dean who directs interdisciplinary studies, credited Shindler’s “magical planning” with helping land nearly $1 million in Title VI and foundation grants to build East Asian and

Jack Shindler, the long-serving director of international programs, “nudged” the college to look outward.

Retired Vice President and Dean of Faculty Devadoss Pandian saw both the college and the Naperville community open up to the world during his 30 years on the faculty.

Francine Navakas, an associate dean, says a lack of departmental barriers helped the college land grants to build Asian and Middle East studies programs.



Middle East/North African (MENA) studies. The college’s structure, with four academic divisions but no separate schools dividing liberal arts from business and science, helped, too, said Navakas. “We don’t have the big walls and barriers that some institutions do.”

Broadening Student and Faculty HorizonsNorth Central has marshaled resources to give students and faculty ample opportunities to learn and do research in other countries. The college provided grants to 33 faculty over the past five years for projects overseas. The Office of International Programs arranges lectures, film screenings, and other events on campus focusing on global themes and works closely with faculty to incorporate these topics into courses. It once switched topics yearly, but now spends three years drilling deeper into a single global concern. The current cycle examines globalization and its ramifications. Islam, environ-mental change, and human rights have each been the focus in the past. The college provides stipends for faculty to join a summer read-

ing and discussion group and sends them to a summer institute at the University of Chicago’s Center for International Studies.

Perry Hamalis, professor of religious studies and director of the College Schol-ars Honors Program, has taken part in nine of those seminars. His honors stu-dents are required to study abroad. “We’ve just redone the curriculum and added a new history of ideas minor,” said Hamalis. “The new curriculum now is truly global, pulling from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Asia, South America, as well as European and North American sources. Previously, it should have been called his-tory of Western ideas.”

The college distributes $40,000 to $50,000 each year in Richter Grants for undergraduate research anywhere in the world. These awards up to $5,000 date back to 1977 and for many years were funded by the Paul K. and Elizabeth Cook Richter Trusts, which provided similar opportunities at other colleges. Recently the college has supported the grants with its own funds. Miguel Purgimon Colell, a junior from El Salvador in the honors program, used his award to fly to Rio de

Janeiro during the World Cup in 2014 to study the economic impact of the games on the lives of ordinary Brazilians. His eco-

nomics professor, a Brazilian, put him in touch with academics and a government official in Rio, and he interviewed residents from all walks of life. He also managed to snag a ticket to the Brazil-Colombia match. “North Central has allowed me to do things I never would have imagined I could do,” said Colell, who is president of the Inter-national Club and is studying to become an actuary.

International Students’ Outsize ImpactNorth Central had just 51 international students when Jesús Velasco was hired as international student adviser in 2012. Two autumns later there were 94 from 40 countries. “Our exchanges from partner universities really boomed,” he said. But the college also stepped up recruiting to enroll more four-year students. It once took “an armchair approach,” said Marty Sauer, vice president for enrollment management. “We didn’t do much outreach or travel. It was sim-ply a matter of accommodating international students who found us.” Now Megan Otermat, an assistant admissions director, recruits

Perry Hamalis, professor of religious studies and director of the College Scholars Honors Program, says a new honors curriculum is “truly global.”

Junior Miguel Purgimon Colell used his $4,000 Richter research grant to weigh the impact of the World Cup on the lives of ordinary Brazilians.

International student adviser Jesús Velasco says exchanges with partner universities boosted enrollments.

North Central fit the bill for Uyen Lam, who was recruited at her school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Vice President for Enrollment Management Marty Sauer

Assistant Director for International Admissions Megan Otermat



overseas and devotes full time to working with international applicants and advising those who enroll.

Otermat found Uyen Lam, 20, at a col-lege fair at an international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Lam had spent a year at high schools in Florida and “had a long list of criteria that I wanted for col-lege. North Central fit about 80 of them,” said the finance major. A $20,000-a-year scholarship clinched the deal.

Rosa Moraa received a full scholarship when she transferred from a sister school, United States International University, in Nairobi, Kenya. Now, with a bachelor’s in international business in hand, she is com-pleting a master’s in leadership studies and overseeing student activities as a graduate assistant. Moraa, raised on a farm, said she was once “very introverted” but discovered “it was very easy to make friends. I’d recommend this school to anyone, even those who are scared to come, as I was.”

Exchange student Youssef Balti was among 80 young Tunisians chosen by the U.S. State Department for scholarships and sent to institutions across the United States for a year. “I’m here to learn

about democracy and the American culture and take the best from it and bring it back to Tunisia,” said the 20-year-old finance student. A Thanksgiving feast with a friendship family “was a huge experi-ence for me.”

A new pipeline opened with the launch of the English Language In-stitute in 2014. Applicants are conditionally admitted to the college and already four of the first 15 students have gone on to matriculate. “It will

Director Kimberly Larsson, by a map of student destinations, said studying abroad can be “a fantastic deal” for students financially.

Rosa Moraa, raised on a farm in Kenya, was “scared to come” as an undergraduate, but now helps others adjust to U.S. college life while she completes a master’s.

Experiencing Thanksgiving dinner with a host family was “huge” for Tunisian student Youssef Balti.

Political scientist William Muck says faculty proposals undergo rigorous vetting.



take a little time to measure how many stay and how many go, but the early signs have been very positive,” said Katherine Pope, the director.

Making Study Abroad AffordableNorth Central has put study abroad within the reach of students by charging a flat $3,500 fee on top of tuition regardless of whether a program costs two to three times that much, as some do.

When Kimberly Larsson was hired in 2003 as the sole study abroad adviser (she also advised international students), North Central had only nine exchanges and a half-dozen direct enrollment programs. Now it has 17 and 31. It operates programs of its own—one in Costa Rica, one in England, and a third in which students study in both China and Japan. “Study abroad at North Central is very personal. It’s not an assembly line. When we started, we didn’t have a study abroad fair or even a brochure,” said Larsson, who herself studied and worked in Sweden and taught English in Japan. North Central has three 10-week terms with some classes in December. If students choose a fall program abroad that extends into December, they can earn 15 credits without paying an overload fee. Financial aid also carries over. “It can be a fantastic deal,” said Larsson.

The faculty-led December courses now are more “profes-sionalized,” said William Muck, a political science professor who coordinates global studies. “It used to be the faculty would pitch an idea and say, ‘I’d like to take a group of students here.’ It was very loose in terms of organization. Now the faculty must propose courses a year in advance, submit syllabi, and go through a rigorous academic review process.”

For long-term study abroad programs, students must take a two-credit seminar that meets weekly in the term before departure, write an essay while abroad, and upon return participate in reentry activi-ties and write a capstone essay.

Pushing Students Out of Comfort ZonesKimberly Sluis, vice president for student affairs and dean of students, who coteaches a preparatory class, credits Shindler and Larsson with “busting open the possibilities” for study abroad. Sluis has twice taken students to Ghana, where she was once a Peace Corps volunteer.

International business professor Robert Moussetis has led hun-dreds of students on classes and cultural trips to more than a dozen countries, including Mongolia. “I tell them, ‘That will be the best and

sunapsis_IntlEducator_Nov-Dec_Half-Page-Ad_7.375x4.75.indd 1 9/11/2015 5:25:37 PM



Dean of Students Kimberly Sluis has twice led students to Ghana, where she was once a Peace Corps volunteer.

Students Ben Redmond, Aaron Laskey, and Heidi Nelson

Lessons LearnedBE STRATEGIC. North Central made expanding international learning experiences a central objective of a 2007 strategic plan and then placed even greater emphasis on global learning in a 2012 blueprint that declared itself “a regional, national, and international college in its recruitment, programs and aspirations.” It hired more staff to make those promises happen.

EVEN REJECTION CAN PAY OFF. North Central won several large grants to internationalize its curriculum, including Freeman Foundation support for Asian Studies and a Title VI grant for Middle Eastern and North African studies. It soon will teach Arabic. Twice it was unable to secure funding to overhaul global studies, but “we pushed ahead anyway,” said political scientist William Muck. “Just writing the grant helped.”

STUDY AND SERVICE ABROAD IMPACT RETENTION. Putting international experiences within reach of all students has increased retention and graduation rates, said President Troy Hammond. “It’s more than just an academic endeavor.” It’s also an attraction for transfer students.

ENGAGE STAFF. North Central never sends faculty out alone to teach December term classes. It invites any and all staff, from residence life to secretarial jobs, to assist with logistics overseas. Thirty-six have accompanied classes in the past five years. “It makes a huge difference in campus culture when they come back. You want as many faculty and people from all areas of the campus encouraging students to go,” said Jack Shindler, director of international programs.

FIND A FOCUS. North Central has successfully used a three-year global theme to integrate international elements across campus. Students enroll in designated courses and attend co-curricular events—fulfilling graduation requirements and globalizing their undergraduate degrees at the same time.



most wonderful learning experience you will ever have. You will survive. You will figure it out.’”

Three North Central students were in Nairobi, Kenya, when the Westgate shopping mall mas-sacre occurred in September 2013. Two left, but Ben Redmond resisted entreaties to come home, and kept studying at United States International University and volunteering in an AIDS clinic. A biochemistry major who aspires to work for Méde-cins Sans Frontières, he credits North Central with “sparking my interests by pushing international ex-periences so much.”

Three seniors won Fulbright scholarships in 2014 and two more in 2015, including Heidi Nelson, 21, an education major who’ll teach English in Argentina. She studied in Costa Rica and Peru. “They’ll do anything to support us with our international goals,” she said. “When I had questions on my applications and on my Fulbright, I knew I could go in there any time and they’d stop what they were doing. It’s always an open door.”

Marie Butnariu had a remarkably global up-bringing in Tivoli, Italy, and Chicago. She got U.S. citizenship by virtue of being born on a New York–bound flight from Italy. She spent her first December term studying in France and the second in Israel and Palestine, then took a full semester at the University of Glasgow. The 20-year-old sees international work in her future. “You don’t just get an education here, you build character. It’s special.”

North Central’s enrollment has risen 20 percent over a decade. It opened a $30 million concert hall in 2008 and broke ground in May on a $60 million sci-ence center. When Hammond became president in

2013, he recalled a bit of wisdom he heard from his days as a business consultant in New Zealand: for that small, island nation to prosper in the global economy, it had to “punch above its weight.” That strategy is evident in North Central College’s international programs. IE

CHRISTOPHER CONNELL is a veteran Washington, D.C. education writer and author of NAFSA’s annual Internationalizing the Campus reports.

Marie Butnariu studied in France, Israel, Palestine, and Scotland in her first three years.

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| EDUCATION ABROAD

By Charlotte West

Helping Military Veterans Study AbroadVeterans are a growing population on U.S. college campuses, and education abroad offices are finding ways to better understand how best to help them use their educational benefits to fund study abroad.

MORE VETERANS have started studying on U.S. campuses in the last five years due to the expan-sion of educational benefits outlined in the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which went into full effect in 2009. Veterans who served at least 90 days on active duty after September 10, 2001, or were honorably discharged from active duty for a service-connected disability are eligible for education benefits, which include tuition payments, a housing allowance, and a book stipend.

In 2012 more than 900,000 veterans of the U.S. armed forces used their higher education benefits, an increase from 550,000 in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Both veterans and their dependents (spouses and children) are eligible to use their benefits for education abroad, subject to certain restrictions. Howev-er, no national statistics on the number of veterans using military benefits to study abroad are currently available.

College and university representatives say that veter-ans are a population they are increasingly seeing in their education abroad offices. “I realized we really needed to hone our process last semester after a handful of vet-eran students and veteran-dependent students requested letters detailing program costs so that they could apply their VA benefits. I really wanted to support this popu-lation of students by making the process clear and as easy as possible for them,” says Kayla McNickle, educa-tion abroad program coordinator at the University of Connecticut.

Cross-Campus Communication is KeyHolly Henning, an education abroad adviser at the Uni-versity of Alabama , also became aware of issues related to helping veterans study abroad when she encountered a veteran who wanted to use his federal military benefits. She began collaborating with the university’s Office of Vet-eran and Military Affairs, initially to gather information about benefits. The relationship between the education abroad office and the veterans’ affairs office has grown over the last two years.

“One of the things we’ve learned is that we need open and clear communication between our two offices. We’ve designated a liaison in each office to ask questions and get answers,” she says.

Henning has worked closely with Jason Sellars, as-sistant director of the University of Alabama’s Office of Veteran and Military Affairs. Sellars is also the School Certifying Official (SCO), responsible for keeping the VA informed of the enrollment status of veterans and their dependents and certifying tuition and fees.

SCOs can be an excellent resource for education abroad offices seeking more information on how to best serve vet-erans. Other institutions also advise that education abroad offices reach out to their campus SCO. “I would encour-age the study abroad office to tap into the expertise of the School Certifying Official on their campus. For example as an SCO, I have direct lines of communication with the VA and I might know the right way to ask specific ques-tions about study abroad instead of the student trying to navigate that process with VA,” says Lori York, associate registrar and SCO at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

At the University of Alabama, Sellars and Henning have worked closely to develop joint resources and cross-training for staff in both offices. “We have outlined some procedures that our offices can follow so that everyone in our office has a general understanding of how veterans’ benefits may or may not be applied to study abroad,” Henning says.

They have also added whether or not a student is a veteran to their study abroad pre-advising checklist, which also includes information about financial aid,

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preferred destinations, and scholarships. It has helped advisers better match veterans and their dependents to eligible programs. Sellars also flags a student’s file in Stu-dio Abroad, the web-based software that the University of Alabama uses to manage its study abroad applications, once he has certified a student to receive military benefits.

According to Sellars, one of the challenges for collabora-tion between education abroad and veterans affairs offices is that each unit often has its own shorthand and may not initially understand what the other is talking about.

“One major issue involves study abroad departments’ use of jargon that possess the same names as VA jargon but with different meanings. A simple example is the word ‘program’. To the study abroad world, a ‘program’ is most likely the specific study abroad program that the student participates in. To VA, however, ‘program’ can either be the academic degree program or the benefit program the student is eligible to participate in, such as the Post-9/11 GI Bill program,” he explains.

He said he experienced this firsthand when he first starting working with the University of Alabama educa-tion abroad office. “We didn’t know it, but we were talking apples and oranges until we came to a mutual understand-ing of the term meanings,” he adds.

In addition to helping education abroad offices deal with the financial side of veterans’ benefits, VA offices can also provide guidance on how to address veterans’ unique needs. Sellars notes, for instance, that active duty members of the military must obtain clearance prior to traveling out of the country.

Leah Spinosa de Vega, director of global initiatives and off-campus study at Augsburg College, adds that sometimes it’s necessary to work with other offices on campus. “In some cases veterans with disabilities require accommodations and advising with the disability services adviser, study abroad office and faculty-leader, or program site director to ensure their needs are met,” she says.

Spinosa advises making sure to have a long lead time when working with veterans. “Because they need to work with the SCO, gather all of the supporting documentation on cost and coursework, the study abroad process may take longer (for veterans) than it does for other students,” she says.

One additional factor for education abroad offices to be aware of is that many students using veterans’ benefits may not be veterans themselves, but may be the children or spouses of veterans. At the University of Alabama, in fact, most of the students they work with are dependents, not veterans. C

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Apryl Jackson, a University of Alabama study abroad student, who is a also a veteran.


“Many dependent students may also have parents that are already overseas actively serving and have limited contact with them while they are deployed. This can create communication issues and emotional tugs, especially if situations arise while a depen-dent student is abroad,” Sellars says.

York also recommends that educa-tion abroad offices reach out to graduate schools on campus. “Often graduate study abroad programs are run directly out of the graduate schools instead of through a cen-tral study abroad office. Reach out to those grad programs to be sure they are aware of the restrictions on benefits being applied to study abroad. Encourage them to work with the SCO to make sure that programs are ac-cessible,” she says.

Breaking Down the CostsOne of the main tasks for education abroad offices to help veterans study abroad is to provide a cost breakdown of tuition and as-sociated fees, which is then certified by the SCO. While benefits can be used to cover the cost of tuition, they cannot be applied to certain program fees or extra costs such as airfare.

“Veterans need to have really clear and detailed information about the costs (item-ized cost breakdown that differentiates tuition costs from other program costs) and course work (how is it fitting into their de-gree progress),” says Spinosa de Vega.

McNickle says that she works closely with the VA office at the University of Con-necticut when documenting program costs: “When a student requests a letter from our office with a breakdown of program costs, I send the student to the VA office with a draft before providing them with a final copy in order to ensure that the letter contains all needed information in order for the student to receive their benefits. I also confirm the veteran status of study abroad applicants with the VA office before confirming schol-arship disbursements.”

Arizona State University has developed a cost breakdown form, which allows it to separate out programmatic costs from in-

structional costs, says Mandy Nydegger, international coordinator of faculty-direct-ed programs.

“This enables the Pat Tillman Veterans Center to easily identify and help students understand what portion of the program fee the student’s GI Bill might cover,” she says.

Sellars says that while normal fees that any student would pay can be covered by VA benefits, additional fees that are specific to study abroad cannot be included unless the program is mandatory for the degree program, such as an MBA program requir-ing a study abroad component to complete the degree.

“In addition, regardless of a mandatory requirement, things like airfare or ameni-ties cannot be included and…these charges (need) to be itemized and pulled out of the amount submitted to the VA,” Sellars says.

To help offset the extra costs associated with study abroad that are not covered by military benefits, some institutions offer scholarships to help veterans. The Uni-versity of Connecticut, for example, offers the United States Armed Forces Veteran Scholarship for students who have served in the military and are registered with the university’s Veteran’s Affairs and Military Programs. “Veterans will be automatically awarded $2,500 in scholarship support if they commit to a semester-long study abroad program and $1,000 if committed to a summer program,” says McNickle.

“The vast majority of veterans who study abroad also accrue significant expenses be-yond what they would pay for a normal semester of school that is largely covered by their GI Bill, which is why we started offer-ing our Veterans Scholarship program,” she explains.

McNickle says students just need to in-dicate their veteran status on their study abroad application to be eligible for the scholarship, which can be applied to the costs of any type of University of Connect-icut-approved study abroad program. It can cover program fees, tuition, and other study abroad-related costs as long as they are billed through the university.

Henning says that one of the challeng-es of applying veterans’ benefits to study abroad is that many of the rules issued by the Veterans Benefits Administration are unclear, even to SCOs. “The rules are un-clear and they can be interpreted in a lot of different ways,” she says.

One of the major areas of confusion is in regard to the type of study abroad program that students may participate in. Sellars says that each state has a State Approving Agency that may be able to assist institutions with any new study abroad programs to make sure that they can be approved for VA benefits.

Henning says that at the University of Alabama, the easiest types of programs for students to do are faculty-led or exchange programs. If a student wants to enroll direct-ly in a foreign institution, the host school’s programs must be VA-approved.

One of the other major restrictions is that veterans are not currently allowed to apply their military benefits to pay for pro-grams organized by third-party providers.

“While I see the value that third-party providers provide to the study abroad world, the VA does not allow payment to go to these third-party providers, and as such, students cannot use VA benefits, such as the Post-9/11 GI Bill. This is a legislative situation, as Congress only permitted pay-ments to go toward approved programs at public and private [degree-granting] institu-tions,” Sellars says.

He explains that “third-party provider” usually refers to for-profit companies that support study abroad programs, rather than programs run through degree-granting institutions.

Sellars argues that the current restrictions on third-party providers are at odds with the public diplomacy message currently pro-moted by the U.S. government. “Congress needs to look seriously at the relationships with study abroad and GI Bill benefits as the current legislation does a poor job of adequately capturing all the relationships involved in the study abroad world…Third parties in this area play a pivotal role and there is an argument here that not allowing

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third-party providers who serve as liaisons between institutions and excellent quality programs is a barrier to higher education that can be removed without necessarily incurring exorbitant costs,” he says.

Sellars adds that one of the main prob-lems is that the VA currently lumps all types of programs together, rather than looking at different kinds of programs separately. An example of a program provider that falls into a gray area is the Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) at Butler University. Because it is part of Butler University, IFSA is part of a degree-granting institution, but it also operates as a provider for other institutions.

“We at IFSA have been very keen to de-velop programming and scholarships for veterans and ROTC students, but have found close to zero consistency in the interpreta-tion of benefit transferability to provider programs,” says Michelle Tolan, IFSA field director for diversity access and research.

She adds that the current restrictions on military benefits are not consistent with other federal financial aid programming: “By transferring VA benefits to in-house and exchange programs only, it creates an in-equitable system of restricted choice for veteran students. Students on other types of federal aid normally select from an aggre-gated portfolio of both in-house and affiliate programs…Veterans, conversely, suffer se-verely limited program options by having access to solely faculty-led or exchange programs—and these may not meet their specific academic or personal needs.”

“Ultimately, I think this is going to take advocacy action on our part with the De-partment of Veterans Affairs…Each state has a VA education liaison, and each cam-pus an eligibility specialist, so I think in the lack of explicit language from VA that it’s all up for interpretation. Which is not to say VA is not supportive of international experienc-es—on the contrary—but it’s not a familiar system to them,” Tolan says. IE

CHARLOTTE WEST is a freelance writer based in Peru. Her last article for IE was “Assessing Learning Outcomes for Study Abroad” in the November/December 2015 issue.

Guidelines for Education Abroad Offices Working With Veterans Using Benefits to Fund Study Abroad

JASON SELLARS, assistant director of the Office of Veteran and Military Affairs at the University of Alabama, provides a quick overview of how veterans’ benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) may be applied to study abroad.

The amount VA pays is determined by Active Duty service time of the sponsor and can range from 40 percent to 100 percent of the authorized tuition and fee amount.

VA can pay tuition that is applied to an approved institution and its degree programs so long as the courses apply toward degree progression, but you must factor out any unauthorized charges, such as airfare, etc., in your cost breakdown.

VA cannot currently pay third-party providers, either directly or indirectly using the school as a pass through.

VA can either pay typical academic fees if the student is eligible to use VA benefits, or, if the program is not only applicable toward degree progression, but is also a required part the program that the student must participate in, additional fees may be able to be included.

If a foreign institution is billing the student directly, the foreign institution must have a School Certifying Official and VA approval of its program, and submit the certification to the VA using “guest student” status and with a drop down statement that says “Courses confirmed to apply to a degree program at [the home institution].”

If the student is pursuing a degree program at a foreign school, then that program has to be approved by VA and the foreign school would submit the certification, if a School Certifying Official has been established at that school.

In order for a foreign school to have its degree program approved by the VA, there has to be a VA-eligible student looking to participate in the degree program. VA will not approve a program without an interested student trying to participate in the program.

TO RESEARCH IF AN INSTITUTION ALREADY HAS the program VA approved for foreign study: http://inquiry.vba.va.gov/weamspub/buildSearchCountryCriteria.do

SCHOOL CERTIFYING OFFICIAL HANDBOOK (PG. 60-61 for “Guest Student” situations, PG. 85 for Study Abroad): http://www.benefits.va.gov/GIBILL/docs/job_aids/SCO_Handbook.pdf

FOREIGN SCHOOL INFORMATION FOR STUDENTS: http://www.benefits.va.gov/gibill/foreign_school_information_for_students.asp

FOREIGN PROGRAM APPROVAL INFORMATION: http://www.benefits.va.gov/gibill/foreign_program_approval_information_for_schools.asp

VA STUDY ABROAD FACT SHEET: http://www.benefits.va.gov/GIBILL/docs/factsheets/Post_911_study_abroad_fact_sheet.pdfS

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| VIEW FROM OUT HERE

By Kari B. Henquinet

Cultivating Empathy in University-Peace Corps PartnershipsWITHIN MINUTES OF ARRIVING IN SOKONE, SENEGAL, I saw Brennan walking down the dusty and bustling main street to greet me. It had been more than two years since I last saw him on campus, before he left for Peace Corps. We actually met five years earlier when Brennan enrolled in my first-year seminar on global poverty. Now he was nearing the end of his master’s degree program as a Peace Corps Master’s International (PCMI) student in mechanical engineer-ing at Michigan Technological University. Michigan Tech and more than 90 other universities in the nation offer master’s international programs in which students earn a master’s degree that integrates Peace Corps service into the program.1

Brennan politely grabbed my suitcase, caked in a layer of red Sahelian soils, and led me to a nearby home, where relatives of his host family live. We waited out the heat of the day there before Brennan and the 7-year-old son of his host parents brought around a donkey cart that I would ride 7 kilometers back to the small, rural town where he lives. Beside me on the cart were three boys and a bag of ice that would provide refreshment after sundown during this month of Ramadan.

Brennan had already spent more than a year and a half living at his Peace Corps site and working as a Peace Corps agroforestry volunteer when I arrived. He had five months

left in his Peace Corps service. As the donkey cart rattled down the broken pavement, Brennan road his bike behind me, chatting as we traveled the last leg of the journey to his home. He had been fasting since 5:30 a.m., a personal choice he made to experience the month of Ramadan with all of his friends and neighbors, but he still had energy to pepper me with questions and fill me in on his work with farmers doing tree nurseries, cashew tree grafting and pruning, and dry season gardening.

When we arrived at his site, many introductions in the Sereer language followed, which I muddled through with translations from Brennan and responded to in French.

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Brennan Tymrak, Peace Corps Master’s International student at Michigan Tech, prepares with friends for a late afternoon journey in Senegal from Sokone to his Peace Corps home.


Brennan took me across the family com-pound to drop off my suitcase and show me his house, a one-room hut with a thatched roof. A couple of small tables and trunks contained all of his possessions needed for two years of volunteer service. A hammock hung between two trees in the yard, Bren-nan’s bed for the hot season. He set up a screened tent for me on the other side of the yard, my bed for the next two nights. As the sun set, we moved out into the fam-ily courtyard of the compound where they would break the fast. We were served bread with tea and coffee—finally breakfast for Brennan and his host family at 7:45 p.m.

As I continued my journey through Sen-egal over the next week to visit three other Michigan Tech Peace Corps Master’s Inter-national students, I was struck at each stop by the way that these U.S. students in their twenties had adapted to the rhythms of daily Senegalese life. As Peace Corps volunteers, they were each assigned to live in a small, rural town with a Senegalese host family. Apart from occasional Peace Corps train-ings and meetings, these volunteers rarely saw other Americans. They have each be-come proficient in the dominant language of their area—Sereer, Mandinka, and Pulaar respectively—and live with no electricity,

running water, car, motorcycle, or refrig-erator. The Peace Corps model of complete immersion and living at the level of the peo-ple with whom you are working creates ideal field conditions for these students to develop a deep sense of empathy that can be hard to find among development professionals and in university programs.

Empathy in Higher Education and the Peace Corps Master’s International ProgramEmpathy has become a buzz word in dis-cussions of student outcomes and goals of higher education in recent years. Articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Liberal Education, and others have taken cracks at explaining its relevance in today’s univer-sity curriculum. At Michigan Tech, I’ve been engaged in discussions about cultivating empathy through a global literacy advisory committee and among colleagues in our honors college. The AACU VALUE rubric on Intercultural Knowledge and Competence, one of the sources that we have used to inform our understanding of empathy at Michigan Tech, draws on J. Bennett2 to define empa-thy as “the imaginary participation in another person’s experience, including emotional and intellectual dimensions, by imagining his or

her perspective (not by assuming the person’s position).”3 The challenge is how to create pathways for students to develop empathy both in and out of the classroom.

While not for every student, Peace Corps university programs such as Mas-ter’s International are a way for universities to internationalize curricula by opening pathways for intense, immersive learning ex-periences that can facilitate the development of empathy, one dimension of intercultural competence. Programs that combine ex-perience with appropriate mentoring and reflection see their students gaining inter-cultural competence.4 The Peace Corps Master’s International program allows universities to think creatively and strategi-cally about ways to combine experience and reflection in what can become the ultimate global service learning student experience. As Michigan Tech PCMI students prepare for and experience Peace Corps, they are challenged to recognize their own cultur-al lens and try to view the world through another cultural lens. We start with case studies in required classes. While in Peace Corps, students are required to submit quarterly reports that provide a forum for reflection on their daily experiences and to articulate what they are learning. Their ex-perience culminates in a master’s thesis or report that integrates technical and cultural knowledge from the field. PCMI students also contribute to internationalizing cam-puses by their presence on campus and interactions with students and faculty who do not participate directly in this program.

Cultivating Empathy: Water Kettles, Language, Cattle, and WomenCultivating empathy can be a real challenge, even among Peace Corps volunteers. Dur-ing my Senegal trip, I was reminded of this when one volunteer laughed at a Senegalese man boarding a flight to Europe with a plas-tic water kettle, which she referred to using the derogatory term “poo kettle” because it is often used to clean oneself after using the toilet. “Doesn’t he think there will be some-thing to wipe with in the developed world?” K

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Peace Corps Master’s International student Barb Michel waiting for the minibus to fill

up so she can begin the journey back to her Peace Corps site in Senegal.


she asked. A bit stunned, I wondered if this American had ever, like me, stashed a roll of toilet paper into her luggage when traveling in West Africa, not to mention if she had considered other cultural uses of the kettle, such as ablution for daily prayers? Certainly this kind of derogatory and judgmental man-ner of speaking about cultural difference is commonly found on U.S. college campuses and in American society at-large. I filed this encounter in my mind as another example for students to illustrate lack of empathy and a basic inability to recognize how cultural behaviors invade the most intimate parts of all of our beings. American volunteers can certainly run the spectrum on intercultural sensitivity, and cultural immersion in Peace Corps does not necessarily guarantee that gains will be made.

Yet many volunteers do develop empathy for the people they live and work with over the course of their Peace Corps service. This moves beyond an idealizing or romanticizing of someone else, to a more realistic imagin-ing of what it would be like to see the world through another set of eyes. Let’s take the issue of language as an example. One does not often hear development experts explic-itly call out how language abilities open and close doors of opportunity for people in

African countries. Yet spending time with our four PCMI students, I witnessed first-hand barriers they were experiencing to professional networks because of language. The Senegalese language they are each pro-ficient in is the dominant language of their host town, but none of them spoke the of-ficial language—French—fluently, nor the most commonly spoken language of Senegal, Wolof. Without these languages of power at their disposal, they were often dubious that people in organizations that they would like to network with would be able to talk with them. The discussions I had about language with the volunteers led to an imagining for all of us about how it might be for a rural Sen-egalese farmer to navigate the world without languages of power at his or her disposal.

Another example of developing empa-thy was evident in discussions I had with volunteers about savings in Senegal. In Jef-frey Sach’s bestseller The End of Poverty, he explains that one of the reasons some coun-tries fail to thrive is rooted in the inability of extremely poor households to save capital and invest. Yet Peace Corps volunteers liv-ing with Senegalese families quickly realize that the simple vignettes Sachs provides for increased savings and investment do not rep-resent the whole story. Sachs, thinking from

the perspective of a free-market economist, suggests that households in low-income countries with a little extra capital should invest in a cow for savings and to increase income through improved animal trac-tion, manure, or milk. What Sachs does not mention, but the Peace Corps Master’s In-ternational students noted during my visit, is complexity. What happens when these hun-gry cows eat the crops in a neighboring field? They also noted how challenging it is for an individual to actually save in a society where social obligations are very strong for extend-ed families to care for one another in times of need. They imagined what it might feel like for a struggling farmer in the Sahel—in fact they even know some—to lose much-needed crops to a wandering, hungry cow while also recognizing that purchasing cattle is a common and useful way to invest some capital when it comes along. Through their Peace Corps work, they partner with farmers to build live fences to keep cattle out of the fields. However, creating a live fence requires a significant investment of time and labor. The volunteers recognize that the choice to work on a live fence involves some risk—a farmer could start growing trees for the live fence in a nursery that are eaten by a hungry cow that breaks through the fence. The vol-unteers are developing the ability to see the situation from a number of perspectives and also start to settle into the idea that there are no easy solutions to complex problems.

Sometimes the process by which PCMI students develop empathy is not easily mapped, but the cognitive switch is noted upon return. One of our male engineering students, for example, explained how he had first noticed sexism and harassment of women as an “issue” in his host country when serving in the Peace Corps. In other words, he now saw that the ways in which women are treated in a society are patterned and systemic and not just individual acts of sexism. Upon returning to the United States, he noted that he was starting to notice these patterns in his own country as he follows the news. Seeing patterns of sexism in another culture opened a door for this student to begin to imagine women’s systemic experi-

VIEW FROM OUT HERE


ences in his home culture—to empathize. As our first PCMI degree program reached

its twentieth anniversary this year, we now have alumni working in USAID, EPA, engi-neering firms, humanitarian organizations, and many other leadership positions around the world. Seeing that we are sending out pro-fessionals who have developed empathy gives one hope for better policies, more appropri-ate technologies, and better-thought-out programs in their work. When students like Brennan graduate, they are more contempla-tive of ways in which development policies and programs succeed or fail on the ground. Understanding the perspective of Senegalese farmers, Brennan will be able to ask good questions in other contexts about how science, research, and policy affect people’s lives. He’ll also be cognizant of the ways in which patterns of daily life—eating, drinking, washing, work-ing, praying, socializing—often differ between cultural groups, yet carry great significance in all of our identities as humans. Whether stu-dents pass through a Peace Corps-university partner program or another creative program that combines intercultural experience and re-flection, these are the kinds of professionals we want to be sending out from our universities to tackle the world’s greatest challenges. They can imagine the effects of a new policy, program, or technology from multiple perspectives and seek to better understand and incorporate those perspectives for more positive, inclusive outcomes. IE

KARI B. HENQUINET, PhD, is the director of Michigan Technological University’s Peace Corps Master’s International and Peace Corps Prep Programs. She is also a senior lecturer in anthropology in the Department of Social Sciences.

(Endnotes)1 Michigan Tech has had the largest Master’s International

campus in the nation for nine years in a row. See www.mtu.edu/peacecorps and www.peacecorps.gov/volunteer/graduate/mastersint/ for more information on Peace Corps Master’s International.

2 Janet M. Bennett, “Transition shock: Putting culture shock in perspective,” in Basic concepts of intercultural communication, ed. Milton J. Bennett (Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press., 1998) 215–224.

3 AACU VALUE rubric: https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/intercultural-knowledge.

4 Michael Vande Berg, R. Michael Paige, and Kris Hemming Lou, eds., Student Learning Abroad: What Our Students Are Learning, What They’re Not, and What We Can Do About It (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2012).

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Scales of Global Learning: Prisms, Knots, and a Cup of CoffeeBEING ABLE AND WILLING to recognize oneself as part of a complex and interconnected world is an essential component of global learning. If students are to engage in global challenges, educators must employ pedagogies that prioritize outcomes where students learn to seamlessly view themselves as related to other people, locations, and issues around the world. How do edu-cators create learning environments that not only allow students to learn about the world, but, more importantly, prompt them to see the multifaceted and intersecting undercurrents that give meaning to the world and to their lives within it?

Imagine global pedagogies as a metaphoric prism. Con-sider how a prism splits light into constituent colors or allows you to see an image projected at various angles. A pedagogical prism provides multiple faces through which to dissect the complexity of the subject matter. In a prism formed through global learning pedagogies, these faces include the diverse questions, assumptions, idiosyn-crasies, and disciplinary and professional paradigms that students bring with them to learning environments, as well as angles of interpretation they may newly acquire in the classroom: theories, methodologies, and ways of analyz-ing subjects economically, culturally, nationally, politically, historically, globally, and so forth. Because the faces are personal as well as academic, pedagogical prisms allow students to look out while looking in; they create learning spaces where students can view the world through mul-tiple vantage points assembled through their studies and experiences, thus answering academic questions while also exploring themselves. Pedagogical prisms allow students to see global complexity, whether they are viewing a cup of coffee as a hub of transnational interconnections or seeing their own identities as transcending borders.

To practice these vital skills of global analysis, students need to be able to move fluidly between different vantage points, including disciplinary models, distinctive cultural contexts, and transnational perspectives. They must navi-gate the prisms’ angles of projection by shifting back and forth across various scales of meaning, balancing relativistic and universalistic approaches, and challenging conceptual and physical boundaries. They must come to recognize rela-tionships and connections that stretch far beyond the local.

Highlighting the importance of such connections, Tim Ingold describes the world in terms of processes of knot-ting and series of shifting knots.1 Global learning involves critically examining these knots and uncovering the un-derlying processes that give them meaning. Students can learn to use analytic prisms to follow the lines and threads, tracking connections that stretch far beyond any individ-ual knot. But the pedagogical process of exploring and untying the knots of our world cannot remain solely cog-nitive. Globally engaged students must also look through global prisms at themselves and at the human condition.2 They must not only know about the world, but also have

| FORUM

By Hilary E. Kahn

Students need to

be able to move fluidly

between different vantage

points, including

disciplinary models,

distinctive cultural

contexts, and transnational perspectives.


a sense of human engagement with it. By encouraging students to view the knots of the world through their prisms, educators can instill responsibilities built on students’ transnational senses of self.

Three Key CompetenciesInstitutions of higher education and global educators are responsible for designing learning environments where students can practice and translate, in a variety of contexts, the understanding that emerges as they look through global prisms and untie knots. To understand and solve the challenges facing humanity, whether they initially appear to be local or are clearly transnational in nature, students need to incorporate multiple angles of interpretation and develop responsibilities that extend far beyond the immediate worlds in which we often imagine our lives as anchored.

Global learning has many components, but three integrated competencies are fundamental to it. First, students must be able to dissect knots, or complex situa-tions, that gain meaning through multiple perspectives and processes. Second, to ad-equately explore these knots, students need the ability to shift between various scales of understanding and practice (or see through prisms). And third, students need to be able

to leap from an analytic understanding of our interconnected world, and of the knots and knotting that define it, to a sense of commitment and responsibility to others. Together, these three competencies provide a robust foundation for global learning.

In order to thoroughly and critically ex-plore the knots where human lives intersect, students need to step out of their unques-tioned assumptions, recognizing that they have positions and biases that are guiding their interpretations. Such self-reflection de-mands basic cultural literacy, which allows students to untie the political, historical, economic, religious, and social trajectories that connect and give meaning to phenom-ena and practices. To examine and unpack complex narratives, students need critical thinking skills—skills that allow them to analyze complicated social, political, or envi-ronmental situations. This key analytic skill involves dissecting the knots, but also rec-ognizing how the students themselves are a global knot and how their lives are intersti-tial points that need exploration. Students must thus reflect upon their own knotted lives and histories as well as be able to trans-late this cultural literacy anywhere, whether in a small college town in the United States or a favela in Brazil. Ultimately, students must see relationships and processes (knots

and knotting) rather than static things or products. They must dig below surfaces of our everyday objects of inquiry to make visible the relationships that give things meaning. They need to look around and see a world full of knots; they must recognize themselves as one of those knots.

The ability to shift between scales of understanding is particularly critical to students’ ability to untie knots effectively. By looking holistically through a prism of plural perspectives, students can effectively circumvent one of the many binaries that might prevent a sense of global responsi-bility: the tired dichotomy of relativism/universalism. Questioning this dichotomy is particularly critical, even though there are many other binaries that challenge global engagement (including local/global, self/other, and learning/teaching). Scholars and philosophers have been questioning relativism for thousands of years, but the thought of doing so still makes some in-ternational educators uncomfortable, since few deny that cultural practices and ideas should be understood relatively within spe-cific contexts. Even so, extreme relativistic thinking can be an impasse to global learn-ing. When students think too specifically and geographically about cultures, iden-tities, communities, or nations, without

SHUTTERSTOCK


recognizing them as knots that integrate far-flung phenomena and power, they miss an opportunity to think globally. Students end up seeing only isolated pockets of dif-ference and they lose the chance to see the connections that are embedded in the knots that surround them. While relativism must be part of global learning, it should be con-textualized within a broader understanding of the complex human conditions that lie beneath different cultural practices.

This ability to shift back and forth across and between scales of understanding, par-ticularly between globalized scales and more localized geographies, is critical to developing a sense of global responsibility in students. As students rethink their own geographies, redefining themselves (as not so singular) or challenging their ideas about culture (as not so bounded and static), they rethink the boundaries that define traditional ways of seeing the world. They begin to see how com-plicated, globally connected, and relational their own identities and lives truly are. Do-reen Massey reminds us how our identities are aligned with our senses of responsibility.3 As students come to understand the global aspects of their identities, they become po-sitioned to make the difficult leap to a global sense of responsibility. They become willing and able to dislodge their definition of re-sponsibility from their localized geography and move it to a borderless space where they can learn to care about the world.

Acting on the KnotsTo create learning environments that help students develop the competencies associ-ated with global learning—enabling them to untangle complex knots, navigate different scales, and realize their commitments—educators should envision their classrooms as knots and their students as perpetually engaged in processes of knotting and un-knotting. Faculty can help students discern their commitments, understand the ramifi-cations of those responsibilities in both local and global contexts, and determine effective ways of making an impact. Pedagogies that are effective in this regard include interdis-

ciplinary co-teaching, collaborative work, service learning, problem-based learning, and other practices that encourage active learning. Pedagogies that bring the analytic focus back home are most effective in spur-ring social action and critical understanding.

A powerful pedagogical practice that re-veals global connections, crosses multiple scales of understanding, encourages critical self-reflection, and cultivates responsibility involves taking a common object and trans-forming it into a global knot. As students examine the object critically, they come to see the complex histories, colonial ves-tiges, international inequalities, economies, politics, and cultures that connect through it. Nearly any object—an automobile, an iPhone, a bowl of sugar, a McDonalds ham-burger, a dozen roses, a pair of jeans—can provide a basis for this exercise.

Coffee is a superb everyday item to ex-plore. Many students start their day with a cup of coffee, but few of these students—and few of the over 100 million coffee drinkers in the United States4 (Statistic Brain Research Institute 2015)—see through that cup of joe to the multibillion dollar global econo-my behind it. A small number see through their mugs to the young children picking ripe coffee beans on foggy mountainsides in Guatemala, or to the middleperson who sells these beans or the processed coffee to the ex-porter. Most do not recognize the multitude of brokers, importers, and distributors who get their favorite coffee to their corner cof-fee shop. Coffee drinkers do not see how the entire commodity chain is disjointed by and embedded within unequal power relations, drastically shifting values and meanings, and international policies. They do not see a transnational knot that connects them to Ethiopia, Costa Rica, or Sumatra.

A global educator can help students dissect this knot. In the case of coffee, an educator could help students consider fair trade as one potential form of action that re-sponds to the disjunctions in the commodity chain and aims to level the playing field by setting fairer prices and re-establishing ethi-cal connections to communities and the

environment. An educator can also prompt students to explore the scrutiny that has been applied to fair trade, perhaps explor-ing if profits actually reach the farmers in Guatemala or considering if consumers are misled by fair trade labels. Once an educator has helped untie the knot of coffee, students may begin to understand the need for fairer practices and experience a pedagogical awakening toward action.

Indeed, a global educator can encourage students to take action in response to their new knowledge. For example, educators can divide students into groups to develop social action projects that educate as well as engage others beyond the classroom. In an International Studies class examining human rights and coffee at Indiana Univer-sity, for instance, students created a petition calling for more fair trade offerings in din-ing halls, designed a map of local vendors that sell fair trade coffee, produced a radio advertisement for the campus radio station prompting listeners to learn what is in their morning cup of coffee, and distributed bro-chures and free fair trade coffee on campus. Students participating in such exercises might decide that they can afford to spend more money on their coffee in order to pur-chase fair trade the next time they are in a grocery store, or they could begin to ask their barista which of the day’s coffees are fair trade (or what percentage of the cof-fee is fair trade). They may seek internships with fair trade organizations, study abroad in coffee-producing regions, or design non-profit organizations that aim at balancing the inequalities in the coffee commodity chain. Whatever project students decide to pursue or action they choose to take, they will look through their prism to see coffee as a knot, and they will learn to act on this knowledge. They will become connected to the world through their morning cup of joe.

Processing the ImageGlobal learning pedagogies encourage students and educators to chip away at es-tablished categories and epistemologies. Metaphorically, they require students to

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look at an image and get below its surface. It is not surprising, then, that visual approach-es are extremely effective pedagogical prisms for breaking down the boundaries that often lie in the way of global understanding.

While there are numerous explanations for the efficacy of visual methods, a critical reason is because learners who produce im-ages become part of the knotting process. Consider this phenomenon in the context of students learning about human rights, when they are asked to use art as an impetus for social change. Faculty can ask students to select and research a specific human rights issue and then design a visual art piece as a springboard for action and education. (Some students may hesitate at the thought of creating art, but what they can do and what they will learn is often impressive.)

Most critical to this assignment’s po-tential for enhancing global learning is the process it inspires. In conducting research, considering what symbols will best educate and engage an audience, and actually mak-ing art, students learn that creating artwork is more about the process than the product. The assignment thus not only teaches stu-dents about a human rights issue but reveals how artwork is like a global knot—how while things, like art, may appear stable or cohesive, they are in fact full of cultural and political complexities that are providing them with meaning. The art assignment helps students learn about the social, political, and histori-cal assemblages that comprise human rights, global knots, and students themselves.

Ultimately, visual methods reveal that knowledge is as much about the process of knotting and unknotting as it is about the knot itself.5 Visual methods are thus ex-tremely effective at instilling skills of global and cultural literacy. They encourage learn-ers to step off of their academic verandas and become producers of global knowledge. So-cial action art projects thus directly challenge yet another worn-out binary, that between learning and teaching—a dichotomy that must crumble for classrooms to become spaces where students actively shift their perspectives and produce global knowledge.

Inspiring Global ActionEducational institutions that want to pre-pare students for the global challenges of the twenty-first century need to encour-age pedagogical creativity. They need to prompt students to dissect complicated global knots, whether by creating artwork or by videoconferencing with a class in Ni-caragua to exchange different points of view about U.S. foreign policy or fair trade cof-fee. Assignments can require students to open their refrigerators and trace the global connections through the food inside, or to work with peers to design interdisciplinary solutions to transnational challenges. No matter what pedagogy is most appropri-ate for a particular learning environment, global educators should aim to foster global understanding by helping their students see the entire world—through a plurality of perspectives—as a place to which they are firmly connected. By doing so, students will begin to see themselves as complicated knots whose responsibilities span many contexts, far and near. They will learn how to shift between viewpoints informed by

cultural idiosyncracies and those rooted in transnational trends. In short, students will go global. And once they do, they will never stop seeing knots through their global prisms—or, ideally, caring about the world and their impact on it. IE

HILARY E. KAHN, PhD, is the director of the Center for the Study of Global Change and assistant dean for strategic collaborations in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University.

This article originally appeared in Diversity & Democracy, a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Reprinted with permission from Diversity & Democracy, Volume 18, Number 3. Copyright 2015 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

(Endnotes)1 Tim Ingold, Life of Lines, London: Routledge, 2015.2 W. Duffie Van Balkom, “Educational Transformation

With a New Global Urgency,” Perspectives on Education: Voices of Eminent Canadians 3 no. 2 (2010): 146–155.

3 Doreen Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 no. 1 (2004): 5–18.

4 Statistic Research Brain Institute, “Coffee Drinking Statistics, accessed November 11, 2015, http://www.statisticbrain.com/coffee-drinking-statistics/

5 Ingold, p. 47.

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YOU’RE INVITED! We invite you to submit your photos along with a brief (approximately 200 words) description of why these images are important in your understanding of a person, place, idea, or incident from your experiences in international education. The photos could be of a simple moment on your home campus involving international students, a major event in an exotic location, or anything in between. The editors of International Educator will run selections on this page throughout the year. Please contact us for submission details at [email protected].

INfocus

Acqua AltaTHE WATER FILLING SAN MARCO WAS WARM AND CLEAR. Tourists, identifiable by their selfie sticks and sneakers, began to frolic, enjoying the photographic novelty of the balcony lights reflected in the shallow water. San Marco, though stunning during the day, takes on an otherworldly appearance at night. It becomes a place outside of time where women in gowns stroll past men in extravagant masks, and tourists gawk and dream. Though I, too, could not help but want to savor this remarkable moment, I couldn’t help but remember a conversation I had had with a Venetian student.

“I hate when tourists play in the flood waters,” she told me. “Don’t they understand what it means?” The spectacular scene before me was born in part out of environmental degradation that started with Napoleon, when natural sandbars were removed allowing larger ships into port, and expanded to include the catastrophic effects of massive cruise ships and unsustainable tourism numbers—22 million per year in a city of less than 60,000 inhabitants. I lowered my camera and offered a private moment of silence to mourn all the unique architecture, landscapes, and whole cultures that will be lost if environmental sustainability continues to be a minor consideration in international travel.

SARA EDE

MA candidate, Modern European StudiesColumbia University

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