A Global American University

Today's higher education institutions are engaged in fierce competition over research dollars, attracting students, and reputation. And the institutions of the Global North have begun to demonstrate a proactive desire to drive the academic exchange occurring on the global stage via the creation of strategic partnerships abroad. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the role played by American universities in the internationalization of higher education as national systems of education respond to globalization. Through a discourse analysis, the authors apply world systems theory to the analysis of a single U.S. institution with several American institutions abroad in multiple periphery societies and ask the following questions: How do U.S. higher education institutions define global education? And in what ways do U.S. higher education institutions contribute to the countries they operate in?

Serious Cooperative Board Games as an Innovative Approach in a Study Abroad Course in Peru

The chapter describes how creating and playing a serious cooperative board game to address energy sustainability in a study abroad course provides an opportunity for students to collaborate in culturally diverse teams and develop intercultural competence. Learning leadership skills through the method of Agile Game Play, including team building, communication, and cooperative interaction for a global benefit, is shown to be effective. The serious cooperative board game can be seen as not merely an interactive support tool, but as a method to generate innovative, people-centered, approaches that can be applied to efforts in global energy sustainability and policy making. Creating and playing a serious cooperative board game offers a new approach for a student in any field of study to learn cooperative leadership skills for global benefit in a short amount of time.

Beyond Lead Generation

International education is rooted in the ideals of diversity, inclusion, and cross-cultural understanding. However, the industry falls short of these ideals during the student recruitment process, which is often concentrated in just a few source markets, with impersonal systems and practices. New technology, notably artificial intelligence, is creating new opportunities for institutions to address this challenge. New platforms can spread the attention and engagement of university recruiters to every corner of the globe, deliver a more personalized experience to prospective applicants that have historically been ignored, improve campus diversity, and lessen the industry's climate impact by reducing the need for travel. Insights can be drawn from the high technology industry to create trust and scale, adequate venture capital is available globally, and organizations such as the Groningen Declaration Network (GDN) can provide the necessary governance. Together, these factors will enable a global electronic marketplace for education with greater diversity and personalization.

Development and Evaluation of Cooperative Healthcare Bidirectional People-to-People Exchanges

Bidirectional, interdisciplinary cultural exchanges result in increased understanding of cultural differences allowing for better international collaboration. The success and sustainability of cooperative agreements depend on regular continued communication with each partner institution, along with a key contact person “on the ground” in each participating country. International efforts represent an exciting beginning of people-to-people involvement in the global quest for improved access to safe surgical, anesthesia, and medical care in developing countries. Academic institutions are uniquely positioned to make a global impact helping others through the bidirectional exchange of education, research, and culture. International efforts can have a recognizable impact on partner locations. All individuals and institutions involved continue to learn from the knowledge and examples of others to further enhance their impact. Continued evaluation and reevaluation are important to improve the experience and achieve the needs and objectives for all involved participants.

Context, Curriculum, and Community Engagement in Social Justice-Focused Study Abroad Programs

The authors present findings from their study of how preservice teachers (PSTs) experienced and conceptualized social justice during two study abroad (SA) programs to Honduras and Tanzania. This study examined instructor intentionality (II), the purposefulness on the part of instructors in designing the goals and objectives of study abroad through a selection of context, curriculum, and community engagement. Intentional programming that sought to unfossilize prejudices by providing non-Western-centric curricula was emphasized. In this case study, authors analyzed and interpreted data using a framework for social justice rooted in three components: redistribution, recognition, and representation. The themes discussed in this chapter address (1) the influence of partnerships with community members in the development of social justice curricula; (2) differences across SA programs indicative of multiple approaches to social justice; and (3) various contexts, experiences, and curricula in cultivating social justice-minded educators.

Infusing Global Perspectives Into Teacher Education

For decades, researchers and educators have called for the internationalization of teacher education and the infusion of global perspectives into preparation programs in order to better serve all children, regardless of citizenship, location, or status. This self-study of the authors' own processes and outcomes describes the transformation of two teacher preparation courses to include global competencies and content. Two key concepts, global competence and global competent teaching, were used to frame the redesigned courses. They aimed at helping candidates develop their own global competence and understand why global competence is an essential skill for their future students to acquire, as well as foster thinking routines and pedagogical practices to become global minded teachers and guide their students to build global competence. Although the university contexts and courses were different, results show commonalities and implications for educators working to internationalize courses in higher education.

Problematizing the Language of Internationalization in Higher Education

Like most aspects of modern higher education, its internationalization is framed by terminology rooted in neoliberal practices. No aspect of academic life is more widely touched than internationalization, where encounters with the broad reach of capitalism and its legacy of inequalities are common place; and where the motivations, processes, and practices of individuals representing institutions of higher education have meaningful opportunities to reframe an increasingly transactional space. This chapter offers an analysis of commonly used terms and an invitation to delinking and re-imagining its vernacular.

Designing Study Abroad With Empathy and Engagement

This chapter describes results from a student-driven partnership between York College of Pennsylvania and governmental/non-governmental health agencies in Liberia. Presented as two parallel case studies, and narrating research processes and outcomes of the project, it argues that by combining the empathy techniques of “human-centered design” (commonly known as Design Thinking) with principles of project-based learning, this people-centered method can produce richer global experiences for students. This method can also produce qualitative data that is useful for intercultural problem-solving, and therefore can inform ongoing and productive partnerships that employ a human-centered approach to interdisciplinary collaboration.

Decolonizing Global Learning and Internationalization

The implications and challenges of critical, responsible internationalization are central to the global learning aspect of Agnes Scott College's SUMMIT initiative, a reinvention of the curriculum and co-curriculars. Partly due to the human-scale size of a small liberal arts college, it has been able to take an unusually bold and integrated approach to internationalization, which includes providing faculty-led global immersion to every student but from a unique angle. This chapter will outline an approach to global learning that centers a critical focus on colonialism/imperialism/diaspora in its curriculum, including in its required, first-year interdisciplinary Journeys course; co-curriculars on the local impacts of globalization and migration; and assessment and research. This approach also manifests in taking into account the intersectional effect of students' multiple identities on these issues. The authors will share sample learning outcomes, activities, assignments, and faculty development strategies, as well as lessons learned for decolonizing global learning.

A Sense of Place

Popular study abroad locations present challenges for faculty seeking to provide opportunities for meaningful engagement with the host community. The authors describe how a medium-sized state college in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. and the Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) partnered to develop a transformative semester-long study abroad program, promoting community engagement, language acquisition, and personal development. They describe how a resident faculty director can create spaces for intercultural learning in both traditional classrooms and off-campus sites through projects that develop an ethos of sustained engagement and deep reflections, thereby empowering students to immerse more deeply in their host community. Insights from Lave and Wenger's social learning community of practice model provide a novel way to frame study abroad praxis. The authors' experiences suggest that a study abroad community of practice, rather than serving to isolate members from the local community, can serve as a safe-space and catalyst for active engagement with it.