207. Leveraging Disney Magic

It is easy for students to see academic inquiry as something separate from their daily lives. Learning is enhanced, though, when students can connect what they are learning in their classes to their existing knowledge structures. In this episode, Jill Peterfeso joins us to discuss several classes in which students examine the products of the Disney entertainment empire using a variety of disciplinary lenses. Jill is the Eli Franklin Craven and Minnie Phipps Craven Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Guilford College. Scott Furlong also joins as a guest host. Scott is the Provost and the Vice President for Academic Affairs here at SUNY Oswego.

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Transcript

John: It is easy for students to see academic inquiry as something separate from their daily lives. Learning is enhanced, though, when students can connect what they are learning in their classes to their existing knowledge structures. In this episode, we discuss several classes in which students examine the products of the Disney entertainment empire using a variety of disciplinary lenses.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners..

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John: Our guest today is Jill Peterfeso. Jill is the Eli Franklin Craven and Minnie Phipps Craven Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Guilford College. Scott Furlong is also joining as a guest host today. Scott is the Provost and the Vice President for Academic Affairs here at SUNY Oswego. Both Jill and Scott have been on previous podcasts, so many of you are already familiar with them. Welcome back, Jill, and thank you, Scott.

Scott: My pleasure, John, and I’ll try to fill in admirably for Rebecca. So let’s go around and see what everyone’s drinking. What’s today’s teas?

John: Jill?

Jill: I’ve got water and Coke Zero.

John: Last time you had a really nice peppermint tea.

Jill: I did, and I thought about making that just for the unison of that, but it didn’t happen.

John: It’s a bit warmer there, too.

Jill: It is, it’s too warm for that.

John: And I am drinking pineapple ginger green tea.

Scott: My tea, and I think John knows I’m not a big tea drinker, but for the purposes of our show, I’m drinking a Ginger Snappish tea that I found. It’s very good.

John: So welcome back, Jill. I saw that you had posted on Facebook, that you had just returned from a trip to Disney with your class. And you mentioned at the end of that post on Facebook, that if anyone wanted to talk to you about being able to teach a rigorous class involving Disney to please contact you. And so I did. I think as soon as I saw that post, I asked you if you’d like to come back. I think all three of us are fans of Disney, and both you and Scott have taught classes involving Disney. So, could you tell us a little bit about the class that you just finished and also a little bit about the earlier classes that you’ve offered that have focused on Disney?

Jill: Sure. I will start by admitting, as I admit to my students, that I am a fan of Disney, but I’m also able to be critical of Disney, that’s by necessity. And so it’s a great role modelling for students to love something while critiquing it, whether it’s Disney or American history, or gender politics, things that we care a lot about, but may not 100% agree with. So I am a fan, but I’m also a critic, a critical thinker and critical feeler around Disney. So, yeah, I have taught classes on Disney for about five years now, and my most recent one was called “Fantastic Journeys.” And this was a class… we have this three-week intensive semester at the beginning of the year before a 12-week more traditional semester… and this course was part of that three week and it involved a five-day trip to Walt Disney World, which I was involved in planning. “Fantastic Journeys” is part of the Honors Program curriculum. And the idea is to have an educational experience that focuses on intellectual inquiry, also community building, and the process of becoming a full person in personal and professional ways. And ideally, a group of Honors sophomores would travel together somewhere, either in the US or abroad. And they would be able to focus on bonding and also self-discovery. The directors of the Honors Program asked me to do this about two years ago, because I’ve been teaching classes on Disney, and she believed that an Honors Program “Fantastic Journeys” course to Disney would work beautifully, and I definitely agree. I can talk more about that later. But I will say we were supposed to do this in August/September 2020, and that got cancelled because of COVID. So they did let us go this year, which is really great, but this has been in the works for about 22 months. I started in late October 2020 preparing this trip for this class. Before this previously, I taught an FYS (first-year seminar) on Disney, that one was a multidisciplinary course that uses Disney as a springboard to critical thinking and how college works. And the other course I’ve taught was a joint English-religion course on Disney in narrative and storytelling, and how those narratives and those stories feed into our culture and our own self-understanding as Americans. So that’s a broad overview of my courses in Disney so far.

John: How does Disney fit into religious studies?

Jill: This is something I discovered along with my students while teaching that first-year seminar on Disney, which I did in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Those courses, those first-year seminars, we’re not supposed to make them discipline specific. And so I’m in Religious Studies, I also teach in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. But this course was supposed to be multidisciplinary, again, in introducing students to college and college-level thinking. So I wasn’t focused on religion. But as I went through the class with students, and we’re talking about things like Disney and pedagogy, Disney and messaging, like moral messaging, Disney and Disney-fying a past fairy tale and making it something that’s palatable to the American psyche, Disney’s take on American history, all of these things. It really started to emerge for me that, “Oh, Disney is functioning in the way that religion functions.” Disney is doing a lot of the same things in American culture that, Christianity for instance, the mainstream Christian culture does. So these became questions I started to play with with students. And that has led to my current research project which is on Disney, and American religion, and the intersection of those things. I think, if I had to boil it down, the ways that Disney resembles religion or Disney fits into a class in Religious Studies would really be something as simple as culture and narrative. Those stories that Disney tells, tells us about who we are, becomes part of our culture, becomes part of the pedagogical upbringing that we have as children in the United States. There’s also a creation of, sort of, an ethical system. It’s not just, “When you wish upon a star”, it’s “When you wish upon a star, something good happens to you if you’re a good person.” So, there’s something slightly transactional where you need to be inhabiting ethical and moral ways of being before you can get that reward. So yeah, that’s sort of my starting point with Disney and religion, and it’s been really interesting and fun to have those conversations with students, because initially, they’ll be like, “Disney’s not a religion. Disney is like movies and fun and magic.” And, by midway through the semester, they’re like, “Oh wow, I kind of think about this in the way I kind of think about Christianity, my Christian tradition,” if they’re Christian. It’s just a lot more fun. It’s a lot more effective, it’s more magical. And, just a side note, my research has revealed that there are organizations in this country, and churches, that look to Disney models for customer service to make their product more appealing. So both churches and other institutions, I have a student right now who works for the Boy Scouts, and his boy scout troop has used lessons from “The Mouse,” which is a book on using Disney culture and strategies to really great success to make their scouting camp even more appealing.

Scott: Well, there’s always the simplicity of bowing down to the altar of the castle as well, and for many people, it’s like going to Mecca, right?

Jill: Mm-hm.

Scott: You know, in terms of going to Disney World, or Disneyland.

Jill: The pilgrimage idea is huge. Yeah, that comes up a lot.

Scott: Yeah. And for many, it’s a 15-month planning activity to get there.

Jill: Like the American middle class ultimate pilgrimage.

Scott: Yep.

Jill: Mm-hm.

John: And you also note, in one of your syllabi, that Disney is something that affects not just U.S. culture, but it has a lot of global reach too?

Jill: Yeah, that’s something that I feel less confident speaking about, like, other people’s experience of Disney until I’ve been able to have conversations with those individuals. But when you look at how Disney has taken life on other continents. Like, basically, when they were building Tokyo Disneyland, the Oriental Land Company was like, “We want, we want what you have, and we want it to look exactly like what you have.” There was no conversation about “Let’s make this a Japanese version of Disney.” It’s like, “We want the American version, we want that.” Now, things were a little different in the building of Shanghai. Disney had to do some more, sort of, navigating between Chinese culture and Disney culture. That’s just really fascinating. There are a lot of stories, one of these just came up in my class, like three weeks ago, immigrants to the United States have that drive for that pilgrimage, that Scott was just talking about, to arrive in America as American by going through that rite of passage of going to Disney, there’s just something about that. And so the woman who came to speak to us is one of my colleagues at Guilford, and a great author. And she was saying is an immigrant to the United States going to Disneyland with that moment where they knew they’d made it, like they were American now. And that’s just a very powerful story. So Disney does have this global outreach, I do notice, it sort of always stands out to me when there are international crises, and you can skim and look at clothing, like the immigration crisis, the border and other crises, how often you just sort of skim and you see kids wearing Disney clothing, it just really jumps out. It’s this marker of some sort of, I think aspiring to be part of what is currently a dominant culture, which is American culture.

John: Surely the Disney entertainment industry has global reach?

Jill: Yes.

John: Which I think does help make it become a symbol of our culture.

Jill: Exactly.

Scott: Oh, and the fact that most of their movies are coming out of global stories and fairy tales that are, in some cases, hundreds or thousands of years old.

Jill: Yeah, for sure. One of the assignments we do in my courses is to juxtapose a Disney version of a story and the original. I’ve long used “The Little Mermaid” because Hans Christian Andersen’s version of that story is really, very dark and that is something that’s very surprising to students. “The Little Mermaid” does not have a happy ending per se, but it’s a really great assignment for students to take something that they know well. I mean they’ve all seen “The Little Mermaid,” so we rewatch “The Little Mermaid”, and then we read Hans Christian Andersen’s original version, and it’s a totally different message. But the takeaway from that is not, “Look how Disney has changed the story that’s bad, or that’s good.” Disney is recreating this familiar story, in an idiom that is familiar to Americans, and that sort of checks all the boxes of American culture, but also Disney’s version of American culture. And this assignment comes early in the semester and it allows students to start to think about Disney-fying as an activity that can be done. In one of my classes I asked them to take a story from their own lives and Disney-fy it. What does that then look like? What magical elements are added? What songs are sung? Who gets fun names that didn’t get named before? [LAUGHTER] Who is your sidekick? What is the message? There’s going to be some sort of tidy takeaway. And our desire for those tidy takeaway stories is very human, but Disney’s perpetuated enough that I think it’s also very American, and thus global as those things are spread around the globe, as you guys were just talking about.

John: You’ve each taught first-year courses that were tied to Disney, could you talk a little bit about these courses and why you chose Disney as a focus of your first-year seminar courses?

Jill: Scott, you should go first.

Scott: Okay, sure. For me, we were in the process of creating a first-year seminar program at my previous institution. And we had started that process by using pre-existing general education courses, and trying to first-year-seminar them, if I can use that as a verb. And frankly, it wasn’t working. People felt very strongly tied to their content, and almost a need to cover all 26 chapters of a psychology textbook. So we really navigated toward an interdisciplinary passion course type model. And my, it would be too strong to say academic interests, but our intellectual interest in Disney. But I was literally at Disney one year, I was at one of the water parks, and I was just really taken by the logistics involved in moving their lifeguards around. There’s a whole process there that they go through, and how long they stay at one place and move on to a next place in order to keep them fresh. And it really got me thinking about the different academic career dynamics that are within the Disney Corporation, and really thinking about, if anything is interdisciplinary, it’s the Disney Company in terms of how they create, how they’re using science, engineering, art, creativity, clearly business, religious, storytelling. It’s a very interdisciplinary organization. And so when we had an opportunity to develop a first-year seminar course, a colleague of mine, we are both again, self-professed Disney lovers, but also critics as Jill said earlier, decided to team-teach a course around Disney, and we co-opted the interdisciplinary and called it “inter-Disney-plinary” was the name of our course, and we basically went at it looking at an interdisciplinary view of Disney. I’m a political scientist. We looked at, sort of, the governed structure of Walt Disney World, which is very interesting. My colleague is an environmental psychologist, so she really looked at the use of space and architecture, and really brought in some of the older ideas around land use and planning that Disney has incorporated. We obviously used and looked hard at how gender identity has been shifting, how racial identity is portrayed within Disney, that really gets into some, not at the time I’m sure, but darker elements of how Disney portrayed many characters. We thought, and I still believe, it was a great entree into college-level critical thinking, written communication, opening up the mind to something different, and using the content that students recognized to really get them to think like college students. And that was really the purpose of all of our seminar classes, and this one as well. And we disappointed the students when we told them, “Yeah, we’re not going to sit there watching movies for 15 weeks. That’s not the purpose of this class.” In fact, I think we only showed one movie fully in the class, we showed a lot of clips, but we very rarely went through an entire film. And it was a great way of engaging students in academic content. It was a way of retaining our students, getting them interested in the college, we had other typical elements of first-year seminars in terms of engaging with the larger campus community and things like that. But I think the content was very accessible to the students because, as Jill said earlier, they know this stuff, or at least they think they know this stuff. They haven’t really delved into it. They haven’t thought deeply about it. They haven’t thought about, for example, how Disney’s portrayal of race has really changed in 50 years. It’s still not there yet, but it’s a lot different. They haven’t thought about: Why is the Magic Kingdom laid out the way it is laid out? What is it that they’re trying to do with that? And again, very few students know the governance structure, the idea that Walt Disney World in Orlando is a lot like the Vatican in terms of its governing structure. So for me, it just provided a great opportunity and I really wish we looked into it. I really wish we had the ability to take our students to Disney World for a few days and really experience it as a class environment as well. But that wasn’t in the cards for us, at least initially.

Jill: I’ll just piggyback on some of what Scott was saying. I agree with everything Scott just said. One quick thing, I would encourage all listeners who have any sort of interest in Disney or maybe even a hatred, but some sort of emotional reaction. Think about it as an adult, and not just like your kid self or your, like, early adult self because, what I heard Scott say, like, watching how the lifeguards move, you would never think of that if you’re 10 years old. But, as an adult, when I go now to the parks, I’m in awe of how it’s competent and how it functions. Because I feel like we’re in a world where so often things just don’t work, and things work in Disney, and it’s kind of magical. But I do agree with what Scott was talking about. It’s a great introduction to college, because students come in thinking they know something, so they’ve got that confidence, like, “Yeah, it’s Disney. I mean, I’ve watched ‘The Lion King’ so I’m gonna do okay in this class.” What they don’t know is they’re about to be taken on an adventure, an intellectual adventure, that’s going to be challenging for them because, thinking critically about that which you love can be really hard. So you tend to get the students signing up, at least I have, the students who have signed up for my Disney class are the ones who love Disney. And there comes a moment we’re asking them to think critically, and maybe even to think negatively about some things Disney has done around racial depictions, for instance. They don’t want to do that, it becomes uncomfortable. Moving through that discomfort is one of the gifts of teaching Disney to first-semester students, I think, because you’re really helping them understand what it’s like to do college. So there was a moment in my three first-year seminars on Disney, where at some point, I’d come into the class, and students would be looking just really sad and I’m like, “What’s going on you all? What is it?” And they’re like, “You’re ruining our childhood.” [LAUGHTER] And so we have a conversation about that. What does that mean? And what does it mean to think about something through college-level eyes? What does it mean to love something while you criticize it? How does that apply to other things outside of Disney in this class, in this moment? So the class really becomes sort of like a playground for so many different types of conversations, and you’re able to touch on everything, gender studies, the problems of excessive heteronormativity in Disney stories. You’re able to talk about how Disney depicts Pocahontas and why that’s really problematic. You’re able to talk about Disney’s distorting of American history, and how that feels really good, but it’s also not completely honest. Disney and capitalism and how those things are intertwined. So you can have so many conversations, and it also lays out various maps for students much in the way the Magic Kingdom is laid out with some sort of center with the spokes. This course, I thought of my course as being, sort of the center was Disney inquiry, but it could go off in so many different directions, like students were really given a map to explore that would help them maybe find a path in the future. So yeah, it’s a highly effective first-semester course and I wish I could keep teaching it. Things have changed schedule-wise, the way we do things at Guilford which is too bad for this course, because I think it was very effective.

Scott: I think as we get older, there is an evolution of how one might engage in Disney. As a small child, Mickey Mouse is real. He’s hugging you, he’s signing, at some point, you realize, “Well, maybe not,” right? There’s just different ways of pulling back that curtain. And again, for me, like Jill, I think a lot of it became again, as an adult, even as I’m bringing my own kids, or have brought my own kids to Disney. It’s really interesting how they do this, right? Or how they’re creating the magic. You still like the magic, let’s be clear about that, but the creation, the understanding, and I think Disney’s realizing this themselves. There’s reasons why they do backstage tours, there’s reasons why those of you who have Disney+, they’re doing shows about their attractions and how the attractions were built and why they were built. So Disney understands, going back to capitalism a little bit, they understand their market also that there are different ways of engaging their market. And they’re working that, as a company, to do that.

John: One of the things you did in your first-year class, Jill, was you had students complete an assignment in which they were asked to apply something that they’ve learned to an issue at Guilford College. Could you tell us just a little bit about that? And maybe provide an example of that?

Jill: Yeah, sure. I think Scott was just touching on this so nicely with the way that Disney is very effective, and is always ready to send its messages to a range of audiences using a range of media. So very creative in its problem solving and its creative approaches to pretty much anything. So one of the many things I really admire about how Disney operates and Imagineering especially. So like Guilford, we have this Center for Principle Problem Solving, which, really, as the title suggests, invites students or faculty and staff who are participating in the center, maybe as fellows, to think about how they can creatively address problems that they see in the world. So I tried to make this just a very narrowly focused on-campus assignment that drew on the kinds of innovative problem solving, the Imagineering types of techniques that we were studying in the course. So what I asked students to do was to basically imagine themselves as Imagineers and innovators who’ve identified a problem and want to get past the problem to a solution. And what I asked them to focus on was something they saw on campus. So first-year students don’t often, and first-semester students, don’t often think that they have the power or the voice to make a change. But I wanted them to realize that they, in fact, did. If they could identify something that they wanted to see changed and made better at Guilford that they could make that happen, or they could at least try and fail and see why they failed. So this is the culminating project, it’s a group project. Like I said, I invited them to think about: What’s bothering you at Guilford right now? You’ve been here a couple months, what do you want to see that’s different? How can you make it better? How can you be part of the positive change? I’ve seen a lot of topics over the years, every time I’ve taught it, so it was three times, some groups of athletes would try to increase school spirit. Building campus spirit was a big one: How can you get students who aren’t athletes to want to come to the games and cheer on the student athletes? So that was always a topic that they tackled. Another one that I found really moving, students were observing how hard housekeepers were working, especially in first-year dorms, where, allegedly, students were very prone to trash the dorm. So they had a series of conversations with their housekeepers and tried to strategize ways to encourage their classmates and dorm mates to be more respectful of common spaces. Part of this involved them taking up a collection and buying nice gifts for the housekeepers. This was sort of a more band aid solution than a big picture solution. But they also came up with a series of signs to post around bathrooms and in hallways to invite people to think about how their way of living might impact other people like the housekeepers. So that was heartwarming. Another group had a great proposal, they did so much research, they wanted to see those water fountains placed around campus where you can just put your water bottle in, and it automatically fills. Because we don’t really have a lot of those on campus and they wanted to get them installed in more buildings and dorms. They did a bunch of research about cost, about good location, they asked around about plumbing, and they took their proposal to the Dean of Students, and they saw bureaucracy in action. And they did not get their water fountains, but they did learn a lot about how you can try to be convincing and how decisions are made. I think it’s a really good project for getting students to feel ownership of the school. And how does Disney fit into this? Well, again, we spend the semester talking about innovation, whether it’s technological innovation, storytelling innovation, other problem-solving techniques that are done in the service of creating an experience, that’s what I think of Imagineers as doing. Imagineers want us to feel something and respond to something that they’re doing, and they find the best ways to do that. So inviting students to think of themselves as “Guilford Imagineers” in a way. And yeah, I think it’s an effective way to get them engaged on campus.

John: Especially in a first-year seminar class where you’d like to build that sort of community and bring the students into the college community.

Jill: Exactly.

John: One of the things that I thought of when I heard of each of your classes, and I think you both talked about this a bit is, was how it provided nice connection between students’ prior knowledge, and the types of techniques and skills they need to develop in college, which is a nice sort of bridge to later coursework.

Scott: Well, I think that’s got to be one of the most important roles for first year seminars, particularly depending on the institution you’re at, and the types of students you’re dealing with. But so many of our students here, as John knows, at SUNY Oswego are first generation college students, and we have to start setting those expectations early and getting them ready for the level of work we’re doing. And again, that doesn’t mean that the content is rigorous, right? I know my students, as I mentioned earlier, thought they were going to watch movies for 15 weeks. And there is a perception sometimes everybody gets an A and for sure seminars, but the level of writing the oral presentations, the amount of critical thinking, if these courses are done correctly, I would argue they’re more rigorous than sitting in a again, I taught a large lecture, American government class for years, much more rigorous than that course, because you just can’t do the level of engagement. And the students can’t hide, frankly, in the back of the room, they have to engage with the material, they have to engage with their peers around the material. And again, that’s part of learning what college level work is, as well.

Jill: I often had to tell my students, early on, even in the course description, because students would choose the Disney class beforehand, before they would even arrive on campus. And I tried to make clear, this is not just watching movies, we will watch some movies, but we’ll also read a lot of things and we will unpack a lot of things and it will not just be popcorn and movie night every day. I don’t know that they believed me until they were in class. [LAUGHTER] I think a lot of them were like, “Eh, whatev-s, Disney, what’s this going to be?” But I stand by that as a pedagogical move that works really nicely. Because they have that foundation together and in an ideal seminar, everybody reads what I’ve assigned them and we come together, and that’s our common starting point. And then we have a robust discussion about some readings. Well, you can’t always count on students to do the reading as we know, first-year students especially, but you could always count on first-year students to have some sort of basic knowledge of, again, “The Lion King” or “Aladdin.” They just knew these movies, they know Disney culture. One of the things that came up in my class recently was how few of us have actually seen Mickey Mouse cartoons. The newest Mickey Mouse cartoon is actually awesome. They’re on Disney+ and I couldn’t recommend them more. But in my life, how many Mickey Mouse cartoons have I actually seen? Not that many. But I know Mickey Mouse inside and out because he’s just everywhere. So there’s a shared starting point for discussion. And students can then get involved, even if they haven’t “done the reading.” They can be participants in the intellectual community that I’m trying to build. So the word empowering comes out again, which is something I really aim for in those first semester courses.

John: I think you also do some work on making the workload requirements fairly explicit. Could you talk a little bit about how you convey that to students in your syllabi, for example?

Jill: I can tell you that SACS makes us do this, or did at one point, that’s our accrediting body at Guilford. But yeah, it’s actually become a helpful tool for communicating with students, though it was annoying initially to figure out, “Okay, how many hours actually am I asking students to spend?” But what I do on my syllabi is I break down for them like, “Okay, we’re going to spend this many hours in class over the next 15 to 12 weeks. You should expect to spend six to eight hours a week reading. You should expect to spend 30 minutes on every quiz. You should expect to spend one to two hours on every reading note, you should expect to spend eight to 10 hours preparing your midterm.” I really tried to break it down for them. This is not Disney specific, this is more Jill-at-Guilford specific, but I like this because if a student is struggling, I can say, “Can we, like, spend the next couple of weeks taking note of how much time you’re spending on assignments? Because the fact may be you’re not spending as much time as you need to.” And that might be how we first address issues of performance. Or, I mean, I’ve never had this happen but I always tell students, “If you’re not getting the grades you want, and yet you’re spending this amount of time, please come meet with me because there might be a way to be more efficient. Or maybe I’m giving too much work, and then we can talk about that too.” But I do think being really explicit is helpful in establishing expectations. I find as a female professor, I think students have, for a long time, thought, “Well, she’s not going to be that hard, because she’s a woman” which is far from true. When you’re teaching things like Disney, you also have to just add a little heft. So I tried to communicate my expectations clearly and laying out workload expectations down to the hour, like, “Okay, this might take you five to six hours to do. If it takes you five to six hours, you’re probably doing it correctly. If it takes you 30 minutes, you’re not doing what I want you to do. So let that be a way that you have knowledge that will let you gauge your own work output.”

Scott: As somebody who, for years, ran our orientation program at my previous institution, we would often talk about: how much work can you expect to put into a class? And there’s always that guideline, two to three hours out of class for every one hour in class. And whenever I would say that both, and frankly, this was even for many of the parents that I would talk to about this, I’d get this sort of dumbfounded look of, ‘What can I possibly do for two or three hours outside of class? It just seems so much.’ For many of these students, they’ve flown through high school with barely doing any out of class work at all. But I think breaking it down, Jill, like you’re doing, is a great idea, where they can actually see that expectation. I mean, when I started laying out what I count in those two to three hours, the light bulb goes off. But to think about it even on an assignment-by-assignment basis, and as we know, the level of reading, the amount of reading, that we expect our students to do in college is not just more but at a much higher level. It’s not pulling out a novel and just letting yourself lose yourself in the novel. It’s critically reading, it’s really thinking through that reading and applying it to what you’re hearing in the classroom, bringing it back into that classroom environment. I think that’s a great idea. That and we started also, for our writing assignments, being very clear with our rubrics around grading as well, which helped a lot in terms of students knowing and perhaps accepting the grades that they were getting as a result of those papers.

Jill: And to tie this back to Disney even more. Disney produces so many cultural artifacts, from films to the merchandising, video games, social media, I mean, it’s all over the place. And so this critical thinking piece that we know is so important, we can also help them hone those tools of the critical “reading” that we were just talking about, can also be about critically viewing a film, critically thinking about how social media posts communicate messages, how it builds communities, and also keeps people out of certain communities. You can look at Disney merchandising. One thing that we do in my Disney class is, early on, we go on a little field trip, we walk across the street to the Walmart that’s in walking distance from school. I give them 15 minutes to find Disney on as many things as you can in a Walmart. And, invariably, there are hundreds of items. Disney on waffles, on diapers, on cheese, on soup, on cereal, little toys in aisles, balloons, greeting cards, I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Stopping and thinking, “Okay, what does this actually mean? What is this communicating?” We don’t notice this until we notice it, but it’s probably having an impact. So yeah, the critical thinking, as Scott was saying, which is so important to school, with Disney you can also critically think about so many other, I use the term cultural artifacts, there are so many ways Disney’s imprinting the culture and helping students to find social media literacy, visual media literacy, products-in-stores literacy, that’s really valuable.

John: That’s such a great example of an activity to let students see the impact very directly and very quickly. I want to go back, though, just to that point about the workload, because it does connect to a couple of things we’ve talked about in past podcasts, and I’ll include a link to these in the show notes. When we talked to Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, who both were speakers at our academic affairs retreat at the beginning of the semester, one of the things they’ve researched is the importance of providing structure for students, and that it has a really large impact on reducing achievement gaps or equity gaps in educational outcomes, that first-gen students, in particular, really benefit from those extra directions. Just giving that guidance, telling students they’re expected to work two or three hours for every hour in the class is good, but as Scott said, it doesn’t really tell you what you need to do. But telling students how much time they should expect to spend on each of the activities, provides just that little bit of structure that can do a lot to reduce some of the achievement differentials that we observe, especially between first- and continuing-generation students. The other thing I wanted to point out is that we’ve had Betsy Barre from Wake Forest University on a couple times, and she’s talked about the two versions of the course workload estimator, which is a good place, as a starting point to go, to help formulate some of those expectations to share with your students. It’s a great practice that I think many of us should do much more of. And it’s nice to hear that that’s being, I was going to say encouraged, but I suppose mandated by the accrediting agency there.

Jill: Yes. I think it is helpful, ultimately. It was a frustrating thing to have to do, but now that I’ve done it, I’m glad it’s there.

Scott: Yeah, I’m not going to be pushing our Middle States accreditors to do that.

John: I know in workshops, we do encourage faculty to do that, and we really emphasized that when we made that transition to remote instruction, because it was new for faculty and students, and just giving students some expectations of what they’d be doing when they moved to what, for many students, was a more unfamiliar environment, was really helpful, especially for those people who actually followed through and did that. So that’s a really great practice. Now, when you couldn’t go to Disney last year with that class, you had students do an ethnographic analysis. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Jill: Yes, so as John just indicated, I was supposed to do this trip in September 2020, and that got canceled. So it’s sort of a late shift to an on-campus version of this course. And my two versions of this class that’s not an FYS class, are vastly different, whether we’re going to Disney parks or not. So the Disney park experience changes everything, I’m happy to talk about that later on. But if we weren’t going to the parks, there was so much that I needed to do differently. But one of the things we were going to do in the parks wa, what we did do… is ethnographic research just on the ground, ways of seeing, ways of observing people, having conversations with people when you feel safe doing so given that there’s a pandemic. What we ended up doing in my non-Disney trip version of my 200 level English Religious Studies course was bringing in, I brought in a great friend of mine, who’s a huge Disney fan, and also just has background in higher ed, so very able to talk to college students. We sort of did a mock ethnographic interview with him, talking to him about his love for Disney, and then step back from that interview, talking about themes, talking about ways to unpack what somebody said beyond the words they used, but the tone and how they looked and maybe what was going on in the background. Like he’s a big fan who has Disney stuff going on behind him. So you can also let that fuel your ethnographic analysis. And from there students would, using that as sort of a model, they all had their own interviews with Disney fans, which was something that they did and then wrote papers on. And it was really, really wonderful to see them bring course themes and questions to bear on conversations with real people who want to talk about things that they love. I will also say it’s really hard… this is another thing that I think Disney classes have invited me to think about with students… why we like what we like, why do we love what we love? Like, if we’re Disney fans, can we pinpoint why? And I think that’s actually really hard because I’ve been conducting my own ethnographic interviews with Disney fans as part of my own research. And people have a hard time articulating why they love what they love. And so it takes a special kind of prodding and patience and sometimes you’re not going to get the answer that’s the most honest, you have to read between the lines. So helping students to think about how to look at the multiple levels of what you’ve been given in a conversation or an interview, and they really liked it. I’ll remind you all that this was done in early Fall 2020, and people were stuck on Zoom. We weren’t really in the classroom. It was a really bleak time, we were still many months away from a vaccine, we were coming up on a big election. It was a stressful time. So, one: immersing ourselves in Disney was really a really great way to spend our time, like, I was very happy to have Disney stories and messages, the colors and the characters and the music just sort of buoying me every single day for that semester… that was a three-week intensive. And also then talking to other people about something that makes them happy in a time where it was hard to find stability and certainty. So, I think it had a multi-fold purpose, where it was one: teaching students ethnographic methods that was helping them bring to bear their reading discoveries and critical discoveries onto conversations with others, but also just sort of a respite. There’s a great article by John Hench, who was an Imagineer and then a Disney executive. It’s an interview with John Hench from the late 70s. And he pushes back in that interview against the idea that Disney is an escape. He says, “We aren’t an escape, what we do is we offer reassurance.” And that’s just been something that’s resonated with my students. And I have felt that as an instructor who uses Disney. This is a place I can hang out safely during times that feel really hard, like the past year and a half with the pandemic.

John: So you mentioned this year, you did get to go to Disney this year…

Jill: We did.

John: How did you prepare the students in advance of the trip?

Jill: There were multiple levels of preparation, some of it involved COVID preparation and some of it involved just trip preparation. I have to address COVID first. It was very stressful to think about going to Florida, which was a hotspot, I think still is a hotspot.

Scott: Still is, yep [LAUGHTER]

Jill: …still is a hotspot, for a class with 20 people. Also, the school’s plan for dealing with it if somebody did get COVID, was incredibly scary, it was basically, to mean like, “Okay, you’ve got to quarantine a student in Florida for seven to 10 days.” So they would just sort of be stuck there on their own, and that was something they did not want. So we spent a lot of time talking about how we’re going to not get COVID on this trip. And yeah, we didn’t. We did not get COVID, nobody got COVID. We got tested right before we left and right after we came back and I went with a box of rapid tests and used about half of that box while on the trip. So not getting COVID was our goal, and we did not get COVID, and I’m very happy to say that. I gave them a pizza party as thanks [LAUGHTER] when we got back. We all had negative tests. I’m like, “Alright, you earned pizza and Mickey ice cream bars. In terms of preparing them for the trip, we’ve been talking so much about these other classes I’ve taught on Disney, and being able to go to the park and have that experience changes everything. It’s transformative. There’s no laboratory… I called Disney our laboratory for this course… there’s no laboratory like Disney in every possible interdisciplinary way. You want to study X? You’re going to be able to see it in operation somewhere at Walt Disney World and have conversations about it. Our focus of this class was magic, it really was magical in what we were able to do and accomplish. Getting students ready for Disney, I’ll put aside the logistics, just in terms of pedagogy, was a lot about inviting them to plan what they might want to do there. In no way is the content Disney for my course, like, that’s just the stuff we hang out in, like the real takeaways are elsewhere. So in this class, the way it’s designed, these “Fantastic Journeys,” it’s about building community, and it’s about figuring out who you are… What are my purposes? How do I make plans for my future? How do I navigate challenges when things arise that I’m not ready for? So we spent a lot of time talking about plans, like what do you want to do at the park? And to do that, for instance, I brought in a whole bunch of Disney magazines that I have, and just said “Look through this, find something that looks really cool that you’re going to want to do, some food you’re going to want to eat, some animal you’re going to want to see at Animal Kingdom, some nook and cranny in one of the countries in Epcot that you’re gonna want to visit.” And that just allowed them to start dreaming and planning. And in the parks, they had to keep journals of their own discoveries and also their own ethnographic observations. So we had to do some prep in terms of ethnography beforehand. We did the Walmart trip, for instance, and it wasn’t then just about, “Okay, count the number of items,” but “What do we make of this? What else did you see? What did you see people engaging with these products, for instance, at Walmart? What kinds of conclusions can you draw?” Preparing them for the trip also involved preparing them to be roommates and traveling companions of one another. So there was a lot of bonding going into those first few days before we went on the trip. The way the course was set up, we basically were in class for a week, went to Disney for a week, went back to class. So Disney was like the sandwich between two weeks of class. So just getting them to trust each other, because some of them were going to be traveling on a plane for the first time, and some of them were going to be traveling to Disney World for the first time. So there was a lot of nerves, there was a lot of excitement. A lot of students didn’t know other students, so they didn’t want to be going without friends. So building that community was an important thing. And academically, the foundation that I laid for them before we went was very simple. It was hard for me to simplify this because I tend to make everything more complicated. I think that’s just what we do as academics. But, we talked about story, and we talked about magic, and what those are, and how those very simple concepts can, in fact, be very complicated. And we talked about cast members, and how they’ve been treated during the pandemic, and how cast members are cultivated to create the magic. And we talked about the keys to the kingdom, which are Disney’s philosophy for how it does everything. So there are four keys… now five… and the Disney Keys are: safety, efficiency, courtesy, show, and now inclusion. And we looked in advance at how those five things permeate different aspects of Disney. And then when we were in the park, we were able to see those implemented. There’s a, there’s a lot of foundation laying, but then there was also just a lot of risk, like what’s going to happen when we get there? What are they going to take from this? How are they going to get along? And they did a wonderful job. I feel like I planted a bunch of seeds and I didn’t know what would sprout. But pretty much everything I planted sprouted plus a lot of things I didn’t know would and it was really cool to see them go from kind of nervous to take this trip to being on the trip and exhilarated to, “Wow, this is what happened, this is what I’m taking away from this!” Which is both about Disney and just about my own life, “Who do I want to be? What does it mean to make magic for other people? What does it mean to work for an organization that allows me to be part of something magical? How can I use my voice to make the world a better place?” Like the sorts of conclusions they drew were really very profound, considering we were together for three weeks.

Scott: I’m fascinated by going into a park with sort of an academic mindset and sort of separating out, you know, “I’m going to go on on as many things as possible,” versus trying to be part of something larger and analyzing and writing and journaling, and so on. And I’m just wondering if the students kind of recognize that as they were going through the sort of new way of experiencing, for those who have been there before, let’s say, the park?

Jill: Yeah. I had to take advice from my friend and travel agent, my friend David Zanolla, who’s Out the Door Travel, he basically made this whole trip possible, because he was our travel agent. But he’s also a professor who takes students to Disney every, like every spring break. And he just kept saying to me, “They want more free time than you want to give them.” And so I’m like, “Well, so what, like I should spend like five hours with them a day?” And he’s like, [LAUGHTER] “No, don’t don’t do that.” So I really had to pare it down for myself. And he was absolutely right, I think three hours, structured time, was about what they could handle, because Disney is the ultimate distraction environment. What I learned coming out of it… my fear was: “I’m not giving them the full educational experience, because I’m giving them so much free time…” No, they were learning a ton. And some of the most important stuff they learned was not with me, but when they were on their own having to deal with a problem with their credit card. Or some ride broke down and they had to deal with that or trying to figure out, “Okay, I have X number of dollars to spend on a meal, where are we going to go?” So much learning happened outside of the structured learning. The structured learning was an invaluable anchor, and I had help with that. There’s a great guy who used to work for Disney, now he basically does consulting in education. His name is Jeff Kober, and he lives in Orlando and he joined us in the park on three different days, for like, three to four hours working with different groups of students and helping them with their ethnographic projects. Each student went on the trip with some idea of something they wanted to explore while there, and he sort of helped direct them, like, “You need to go on this ride if you’re going to see this!” or “You need to pay attention to this thing that’s happening on Main Street.” So he was a great guide, sort of like turning their heads to certain things. So the timing spent between time with me structured, or time with me and Jeff structured, and freedom felt wrong to me as a teacher, but in hindsight, it was perfect… about three, four hours a day. And then yeah, go out and be distracted, students, because you’re gonna learn a lot if you have good ethnographic questions and reflection questions, which I think they did. So every day, they had to write certain things in a journal, and so they were constantly just having to take it all in and then reflect. And that was very effective pedagogically, I think.

John: From a logistic standpoint, you mentioned about three to four hours a day, did you do that in one block? Or was it broken up into different time blocks over the day?

Jill: Yeah, it was all in one block, it’s hard to get them back together if they’ve gone [LAUGHTER], so it was mostly all together. On two of the days it was in the morning, like, “Okay, we’re going to get to Animal Kingdom at 7:30, because they open at 8. So we’re going to get moving quickly.” So it’s like, you know, getting everybody up and together on a bus, for instance, and then spending a few hours before saying, “Okay, now you’re free.” But, they were good and they stayed safe, and they listened. So that was really important. I had some great TA’s (teaching assistants) who helped do a lot of those logistics. But, you got to just navigate what works for you and what you’re trying to do in the course. We also did some evenings, some evenings, we were like, “Okay, at five o’clock, we’re gonna all be together for the next few hours and end our day together watching the fireworks,” for instance. But Disney, there’s just so much you can do… anybody who’s been to Disney knows it’s really hard to make decisions, because there’s so many. So having to make decisions for the group was exhilarating for me, but also, like, “Am I making the best choice?”

John: Was cost a barrier to participation for students?

Jill: This is such an important point. So, the college, as part of their agreement with the Honors Program, pays for this trip. So the students did not pay for their own trip, the college paid for the trip… which is huge. I don’t know but, I’d have to guess most of these students would not have been on this trip or in this class if that had not been the case. So it was not a barrier, in fact. The college’s fronting of the bill for this made it possible for many of these students to go to Disney for the first time, on a plane for the first time, etc. I wonder if students in the future would take a trip that they had to pay for? I also know that Disney gets more and more expensive, more rapidly every single year. So already, I feel like the trip we just did would cost more than my budget would have allowed. And that’s from booking it in March, to looking at, if I were to teach this a year from now…there’s no sign that I’m teaching this a year from now, the college has not said we’re giving you this much money to do this again… but if I did, I mean things are changing so quickly at Disney, their prices go up, they’ve introduced new planning systems, like they’ve got, instead of FastPass which used to be free now they have Genie and Genie+ and Lightning Lane, two of which cost… like, I wouldn’t be able to spend $15 for every person on a 20-person trip to jump the line to go on Flight of Passage, for instance. So yeah, I think it would be a really different trip already. That makes me sad, because something like this was so valuable. So yeah, the cost is real, and this is the only trip that Guilford did this fall because it’s sort of like “let’s put our toes back in the water after COVID and see if we can make ‘Study Away’ and ‘Study Abroad’ happen.” And Disney seemed to the college to be close enough and safe enough. Disney had a lot of safety precautions around COVID from like July 2020 till about March/April of this year, and then they backtracked some when people started getting vaccinated. So at the time we booked it, it seemed Disney was a really safe place. So, it was not cost prohibitive, but I worry it would be in the future. But I will say my colleague David, who is also my travel agent from Out The Door travel, he says, when he takes students, they pay for it themselves, and he’s able to bring like 10 a year. So, I know it happens in some places.

John: As I saw your post, one of the first things I did was look up what the costs were for student groups, and it is lower than it is for everybody else…

Jill: Wait, you found a student group rate? I didn’t even know there was a student group rate! [LAUGHTER]

John: There is one, yes [LAUGHTER], for the tickets, they do have group rates that are significantly reduced. It’s still not going to be an inexpensive trip.

Jill: I don’t know if we got that because we were booking a package of hotel and tickets. But we did get some deals because Disney has deals and we were able to take advantage of them. We did not go at a crowded time: late August, early September is a great time to go to the park if you want to be really hot and not around as many people as will be there at Christmas, for instance.

John: Which is probably good during COVID.

Jill: Exactly. That’s what I kept telling the administration, like on a 1 to 10 scale, we’re going at 1-2 time, we’re not going at like 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 time.

Scott: When I was looking at taking a group of students, I actually contacted Disney and they gave me some price that I was like, “Yeah, there’s no way….”

Jill: Right… right.

Scott: …that I can afford it. I think a good travel agent, and/or your own planning… you’ll end up being cheaper than trying to go through a sort of a centralized Disney.

Jill: Yeah, and the travel agen, when we booked the trip for the previous year, what happened was we booked the trip, and then they used to have a dining plan, I think dining’s coming back soon, but it’s not happening right now. So we were going to get a dining plan. But between when we booked in October 2019, and like, January 2020, dining became free on the dates that we went. And our travel agent knew that because he was paying attention. So he caught the window like two or three days when suddenly dining was gonna be free for our dates. So he was able to jump on that and save us, God, four, five, six thousand dollars on dining. But again, that’s the trip that did not happen. Yeah, and Disney’s also paused all behind-the-scenes tours right now. We were supposed to do a “Keys to the Kingdom” tour in the Magic Kingdom, and so you know, it’s not back to what it was, but it still was an incredible trip. It was incredibly fun, and it was a great educational experience, I think I can say. Having spent time reading the students’ final projects and journals, they learned a ton about themselves and what they want to do in the world, and that was really the goal.

John: It sounds wonderful. I’m really envious. We always end by asking: “What’s next?”

Jill:Yeah, I would love to think that I can keep teaching Disney classes. Again, it’s a really happy place to hang out. So, I could see developing either a 100-level or an upper-level course on Disney and Religion. I think that would draw students and, definitely, there’s plenty of material there. Having taught five Disney classes and one that resulted in an actual trip, I have to say I’m completely in love with the idea of taking [LAUGHTER] students to Disney World now. Like, this is cost prohibitive and not logistically possible for me to do on a regular basis, but, it became the best classroom-laboratory space that I could have imagined because there’s just so much going on. And if your students are ready to see and experience, and you’ve got to prepare them for that, but if they’re ready to see and experience, there’s really no better place for that richness. And yeah, in the meantime, when I’m not doing my academic duties, I’m doing my own research on Disney and Religion and hoping to get out to the archives in San Francisco at some point, the Disney Family Archives. That was a trip that was supposed to happen a couple years ago and got cancelled because of COVID. So yeah, I’m really eager to keep thinking about Disney and the role that it’s currently playing in American religious culture.

John: I love Disney too. I first went when I was 10, I believe, then I waited until later and I brought my kids down there. And I took them there every year until they insisted that they were getting tired of going to Disney every year. [LAUGHTER].

Jill: Aw…

John: Then there was a stretch of five years recently, when I went to the Online Learning Consortium there, which was right at the Swan and Dolphin hotels.

Jill: Really?

John: They moved this year. I’m hoping they go back next year. I’m not sure.

Jill: That’s wonderful. I actually have an Honors Program conference in October at the Swan and Dolphin. So it’ll be my first-ever Disney conference, and I’m pretty stoked.

John: It’s a short walk to Epcot or to Hollywood Studios, or…, take the water taxis.

Jill: Yes, or the Skyliner now. They have the Skyliner which I love.

John: I’ve only been on it a couple of times. It was amazing, it was so efficient. And going back to the accessibility you mentioned, one of the things that really struck me is how accessible Disney is and how it’s been doing that for a long time. The Skyliner, in particular, has this nice design where they can move cars in and out of the queue to allow people who need more time to get in or out, people in wheelchairs and so forth, to do that without any pressure or having to slow down the ride.

Jill: Yeah. One of the students who came on the trip uses a wheelchair and she needs the wheelchair. And so watching her experience and how Disney handles that… mostly very positive… there were some things where we would get frustrated with Disney. But watching how that is implemented and integrated into systems so that things still continue to move so smoothly. Yeah, it works! Disney works, and I marvel at that.

John: Well, thank you, Jill. This has been wonderful.

Jill: Thank you so much.

Scott: Jill, glad to meet you.

Jill: Thank you, Scott.

Scott: This has been fun, thanks.

Jill: I hope you get to teach your Disney class again at some point.

Scott: Yeah, me too. I’ve told people I miss the classroom. I don’t miss grading, but I do miss the classroom.

Jill: I will hope. Nice to meet you, thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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114. Dead But Not Buried

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Travel courses can provide an opportunity to experience a different part of the world through the lens of a particular discipline. In this episode, we discuss the rich interdisciplinary learning opportunities that may occur when faculty and students from two different courses and disciplines travel together.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Kathleen Blake, a bioarchaeologist, a forensic anthropologist, and an assistant professor in anthropology at the State University of New York at Oswego. Welcome Kat.

Kat: Thank you

John: Our teas today are:

Kat: I’ve got a ginger tea and a mug from the Czech Republic.

Rebecca: The perfect match for today. I’m drinking my English afternoon tea.

John: …and I’m drinking ginger peach black tea. We invited you here today to talk about your collaboration with Rebecca on an international travel experience for students. This collaboration started with your course “Dead but not Buried” with travel to Prague and Brno in 2017. Can you talk a little bit about this course?

Kat: Sure. This course came about because students were interested in bone churches, which are churches that are found all throughout Europe, but there’s one particular beautiful one in the Czech Republic. And I thought “How can I make this into a course, basically?” And so I was looking at to make it into an anthropological framework and the idea was to see how cultures interact with their dead, how they treat their dead and the different cultural aspects of living with the dead, in particular, if the dead are present and active in your culture, as they are in this case. And the class also examines the framework of the dead over time and burials over time, so we went as far back as Neanderthals up through modern times. So, it covered quite a wide range of different time periods.

John: How did this collaboration between the two of you get started?

Kat: I took the class the first time in 2017. And I went on my own. Rebecca and I had initially talked about doing it together. However, we weren’t able to.

Rebecca: Someone decided to have a baby. [LAUGHTER]

Kat: And so we decided that the second time around we would see if we can make this work, and in particular, I was looking for somebody outside of my area. I didn’t want someone in the social sciences, I wanted somebody outside of anthropology and outside the social sciences, and the more we got to talking, the more it seemed like a good fit.

Rebecca: So first, you started by showing me pictures of things that looked really cool, some interesting design things. So she clearly marketed at me, right? [LAUGHTER]

John: Including some dead things, right?

Rebecca: …including some dead things… that I found unusually interesting and got me enticed to figure out what this place was really about and started discovering and doing some research and finding out that Brno actually is quite a design hub… that I wasn’t aware of.

Kat: Through our discussions, I learned a lot more about art than I ever knew. And finding out that the Czech Republic in general is a really big design hub, right?

Rebecca: um-hmm.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about how the collaboration worked in terms of the two different fields?

Kat: We used the existing structure through International Ed (both the Q3 and Q4 structure), but Rebecca was in the Q3 structure.

Rebecca: So, our Q3 and Q4 classes are a half a semester class that then would have travel either during spring break or in May at our institution. So, I taught a Q3 class but we didn’t travel in spring break. We traveled in May all together as a big group.

Kat: And I taught the Q4, which was from spring break until the end of the semester. And then we traveled together. And we tried to encourage the students to sign up for both classes. So, there was some overlap of students, although not all the students signed up for both classes.

Rebecca: And we did that so that students could have up to six credits for their experience, and it would provide interdisciplinary perspective on a place. And so my class focused on design specifically, and designers in the Czech Republic and art forms in the Czech Republic and the histories of that. And then, obviously, I didn’t deal with the dead at all, actually in my class. [LAUGHTER].

Kat: And then I taught my course as normal. And we kind of found there was a little bit of overlap that we didn’t realize there would be through the course.

Rebecca: We did have some assignments that were in common between the two classes. So, that it would help facilitate students making the connections between the course material because all the students ultimately were exposed to at least some of the course material for both courses, even if they weren’t enrolled in both courses because we all traveled as a group. So we were gone for 12 days, and through that time, we visited a number of different sites, some that were more anthropology focused, some that were more design and art focused. But all students went to all of those places. And then there was a couple of things that they could choose to do on their own or explore on their own. And so that worked out, I think, pretty well. And we had some really surprising experiences. For example, we were in one bone church and Kat had set up the history and understanding of the place but then I had a whole bunch of students come up to me and asked me about analyzing the design aspects of the spaces that we were in, which was really interesting. And I found it bizarre because I was learning about the space… It was the first time I had been in it and certainly didn’t feel like an expert… but students were asking me questions about it. But, then I also heard them talking to each other. So, the design students were asking the anthropology students about what they were seeing, like what the bones were, what parts of the body they were from, I was asking the students the same kinds of questions and then they were asking the science students and anthropology students were asking the design students about visual aspects that we were experiencing

John: For those in our audience who are not familiar with bone churches, could you provide a description of what these are?

Kat: The one main bone church that’s probably the most famous is in Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. And this church was a church that had been consecrated and so it attracted a lot of burials, especially during the black plague. Later on, the graveyard became full and so they dug up all the bones and normally they would put them maybe underneath the church, but in this case in the 1800s, they decided to elaborately decorate the church with the bones creating chandeliers, swag, pyramids of bones, a coat of arms, all kinds of sculptures, so it was a way to elaborately decorate their actual church and they held church services in that location until about eight years ago.

John: Are there are some photos or photo albums that you guys have created that perhaps we could share with our listeners in the show notes.

Kat: Oh, definitely and the students came up with some really good ones, too.

Rebecca: We have a blog the students were contributing to. So, there was some research that happened in my class before we went. The students put together a research guide of contemporary sculptural work that we were going to go to and some building some architecture. But then they also did some reflections about some of the spaces that they had visited once we were there that were more related to Kat’s class.

Kat: And the design students were making comments about how beautiful the bones were… the natural structures, how symmetrical they were… just thinking of the body as more piece of art than it is a piece of anatomy in some way. So it was interesting to hear their comments.

John: You mentioned that students could get up to six hours of credit. Were the two quarter classes three credits or two credits? How did that work?

Kat: Each class was three credits. So a normal quarter class in our institution is three credits,

John: but then did they get additional credits for the travel component?

Kat: that part of the course so we would meet once a week for an hour and then the travel at the end is included in the course.

John: Okay, so that was required it wasn’t an optional component.

Rebecca: Correct. And then the benefit there for students is that it was two different courses, but the travel piece was identical. So, the actual physical going somewhere and the time required for that was only one time. But, there was different coursework for each course. Although we had one reflection journal that was the same across both courses.

John: How did students react to the experience,

Kat: I thought it was positive overall. We got some of the students who had never even heard of anthropology, all of a sudden interested in anthropology. And then we had some of the anthropology students who were interested in things like photography and art. And so were immensely interested in asking Rebecca a lot of questions about both.

Rebecca: I think we have a new photography minor as a result.

Kat: I think so. I think we also have a new art minor.

Rebecca: I think we might, yeah. [LAUGHTER] I think we found it really interesting. And you might think that the art students would band together or the anthropology students would band together, but that didn’t necessarily happen. Partly we were strategic about how we put room assignments and things together. But we had three first-year students that traveled with us that were from different majors. And they bonded really nicely together and were doing all kinds of things together.

Kat: And I think they’re still good friends to this day.

John: Now, we had an earlier podcast in which we talked to two people who had done several trips, and they talked about some of the logistical issues that came up. How did the logistics work with your trip?

Kat:I would say overall, the logistics worked really well. I think the most harried part was the air transport getting there. But once we hit the ground, we had things pretty well organized. We’re very well organized people. I think that’s part of it. We had everything organized down to a tee. And we built in a lot of free time, and that made a big difference.

John: And to be fair, the other people were pretty organized, but there were some airport delays and there were some students who disappeared for a while unexpectedly.

Kat: Thank goodness we didn’t have that.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] In the past, I have had courses with travel that have had things that went awry. I had a flight that was detoured and had to let fuel out. And there were students sitting next to the window and could see the fuel spewing out. And that was kind of concerning for students who had never flown before. So, certainly I had some harried experiences as well. But, I think overall, not so much. The biggest struggle that we’ve had is one that I also had when I took students to India was actually heat. And then students, although we were trying to prepare them and reminding them about hydrating and things just had a really hard time dealing with warmer weather and walking around a lot.

Kat: And in much of Europe, in the Czech Republic, in particular, things are not air conditioned. So, I think that was an adjustment for many students. Part of the reason that I wanted another faculty along was because I think it’s good to have a second person there for support. In case something goes wrong, you’ve got that second person. I think it really makes a difference. When you’re planning a trip like that.

Rebecca: We had a couple students who weren’t feeling well. We had some sinus congestion stuff that seemed to be spreading amongst the group. There were students that weren’t feeling well but you know, we’re checking in… may have picked one of us to check in with It may not even be the faculty member that they knew the best initially.

Kat: I think that was the case, yes.

Rebecca: So, we were able to tag team that a little bit and help support those students when they weren’t feeling well.

Kat: And that’s the thing. The first time I traveled, I did have a student who was ill and I was busy at the hotel tending to her and I couldn’t be with the other students. So, I think having that backup is important

John: Kat, you had traveled before with this class. But, this time you did it with another faculty member. How was it different this time than in your past experience?

Rebecca: He really wants to know how big of a pain in the butt I am to collaborate with.

John: Oh no, that I know. [LAUGHTER] I know all of that. But, in general, how was the joint experience different from individual experiences?

Kat: Well, Rebecca’s probably the best travel buddy I could have picked, so that worked out really, really well. Not only just having a backup in case students need help but having someone that you can have a break with… the students can go off and do their thing and you can have, shall I say grown-up time on your own with another faculty member, I think, makes a huge difference. Before I was having dinner with the students… I was with them 24-7, and it just sometimes gets to be a little bit too much.

Rebecca: We also found that we were able to do some exploring and find some new potential options for students for future trips. So, we were quite busy. I think the students found it surprising how much walking we did after we walked with them all over the place. We did double the walking on a pretty regular basis.

Kat: Yeah, after dinner, we would just go explore. And we also use that to create challenges for the students. So we were using WhatsApp and we would send pictures of where we were, there was a certain art sculpture or something they were supposed to be finding. And we’d say, Hey, we found it. Have you guys found it yet and give them some challenges each day. So it was a good way for us to get out and about together but also to help students explore.

Rebecca: Yeah, to find different places, but also just to see the environments that they actually were in quite a bit because they were in some of those areas frequently, but not really paying attention to their surroundings as much as maybe we wanted them to. It became a little competitive. And I think there was one time that the students made it out to one of the sculptures that we had trouble finding.

Kat: Yes.

Rebecca: they found it before us…

Kat: Yes.

Rebecca: and then it…

Kat: …the Trabi at the German Embassy.

John: So, you had them do a little scavenger hunts after the regularly scheduled program?

Kat: Yes. And they weren’t hard or rigorous in any way. But we would give them challenges almost every day.

Rebecca: Although we started off with a gamified experience the first day. There are the signs above a lot of the buildings that were before there were numbers or a street sign with numbers, there were little pictures.

Kat: Most people weren’t literate. So…

Rebecca: Yeah. So, it’d be like the house of the Golden Bear or whatever. And so a lot of those exist still in the city of Prague. But there’s one street where there’s a lot of them. So we took them to that street the first day and told them how many that were on the street and gave them the challenge to find them and photograph and document them. But then that became a challenge to find more throughout the city during the week. So, Kat and I would find some like, “Oh, did you find this one yet?”

Kat: Yeah, we were often posting all different ones that they’d never seen, and then they wanted to know and we say, “Ah, but you have to go find it yourself.”

John: How did students do in a different language because I assume most of them were probably not fluent before the trip.

Kat: We tried, we had gotten Duolingo and required them to download it and to try to at least say a few phrases. But Czech is a very difficult language. Surprisingly, some of them picked up a few keywords. And I think they were all commenting that if they made even an attempt that the people were very kind to them, and then would switch to English pretty readily.

Rebecca: Yeah. And we had a particular level that we required students to meet in Duolingo for each of our classes. If you took only one class, it was at a certain level. And if you had taken both classes, it was at a slightly higher level. I’m not sure if we would have picked that same exact app next time, because some of the things that it prioritized in the early levels seemed really not that useful. So, I think we would need to explore a different option. I mean, it certainly had like “Hello,” “thank you,” “bathroom,” all those basic things. Yeah, there’s another Czech app through… I think it’s through the Czech embassy, that we also encouraged them to look up and that seemed to have more user friendly type phrases that would be helpful.

John: We have lots of classes that travel overseas, but not many of them involve this type of collaboration between two disciplines. What are the strengths of this model compared to a single disciplinary approach?

Kat: I would think one of the things is you’re drawing students that you would not normally draw… ones that had never even heard of anthropology were drawn to an anthropology class. I think it’s an opportunity to get students in a different discipline or even a different school that would not have been interested before. \

Rebecca: The classes that we offered were also at a higher level, they were like 300 level. So, at that level, I think students tend to navigate towards classes that there may be more familiar with the faculty. So, as the faculty teaching in the art class, I was then able to get those art students to register for Kat’s class and vice versa. We were able to encourage them to try something different. And we sat in on each class so I attended all of Kat’s classes and she attended all of mine and that also helped the students get familiar with both of us so that they would all be comfortable traveling with both of us. I think it enticed students because of the additional credits that they could get out of the experience. But, I think the real valuable part was traveling to all of those different locations with the mix of students and the mix of faculty that we had… because we had science, anthropology, and art…well, really design… design students.

Kat: …and the science students were geology, zoology, and biology. So, they were not all anthropology students. But, I think those anthropology students, and the bio and zoology all said that they learned so much more about art and design that they just weren’t even aware of before. So, I don’t think that would have happened otherwise. We’ve traveled to the same places, but Rebecca talked about the street with the signs. Well, I’ve taken students down that street before but we never noticed the signs. We never noticed the whole kind of street full of signs. So it brought a whole different level that was not there the first time.

Rebecca: And we ended up going to places that weren’t on your original itinerary either. Students expressed an interest in going to the anthropology museum when we were in Brno. And it was such a great connection between art and anthropology, we had no idea. But, in the first floor was an entire art exhibit. That was the whole focus. And then they had full to scale models of cave paintings up in an upper level that was really fascinating for art students who had seen pictures of these things like teeny tiny in their textbooks and things but kind of got to experience something, although it wasn’t like at the site, you could see him at scale and how it went on the contours of the wall, etc.

Kat: Yeah, they’ve made a 3D model of it. And even anthropology students who’ve seen this in pictures as well, to get a sense of the 3D nature of the cave drawings. And you could see how maybe a bison was created on a bump coming out of the wall. I think for all the students that brought a different dimension to it, whether they’re art or anthropology.

Rebecca: …and I think the students pushed us to do some different things too… like we decided, “Okay, we’re gonna figure out this public transportation in Brno” when we had originally thought about only walking and then gave everyone a challenge to take the train somewhere after we all took the train together somewhere.

Kat: We just gave them a day pass, and they used it. One whole group got lost, but they found their way back. And it was quite the adventure from what we heard. But, I think they all had a great time.

John: In upper-level classes, students are often in very narrow silos. And this got them out of those silos.

Kat: Yeah, definitely. And then we did something that I never in a million years would have done, and that was to go to a puppet show.

Rebecca: Which I thought was a terrible idea when we first sat down.

Kat: It was a terrible idea for the first five minutes of the puppet show. And then it turned into the most hilarious thing that we thought the students would hate and they absolutely loved.

Rebecca: Puppetry is an important art form in the Czech Republic. So, I thought it was important to expose students to this. So, I found a puppet show to go to but then we got there and it was this teeny tiny little theater, really hard chairs. And we sat down we’re like, “We’re only going to make them stay until like intermission right?”

Kat: Like, “Okay, they can leave as soon as we get to that intermission“ and I was surprised they all wanted to stay. They enjoyed it. They thought it was different, but interesting.

Rebecca: Well, because It was in Czech puppetry style, which has some interesting humor in it. But it was Don Giovanni… so in Italian.

Kat: So we couldn’t understand anything.

Rebecca: But, you could, actually, you totally could follow the storyline.

Kat: Sure. I don’t think we had any Italian speaking students to help us out, though.

Rebecca: No.

Kat: And this form of puppetry, you see the puppeteers, which made it even more interesting.

Rebecca: Yeah, it was like a behind-the-scenes tour while you were seeing the show. So I think the students found that really interesting.

John: Are you thinking about doing similar trips in the future?

Kat: We are thinking next time maybe of going to places like Spain or Italy or Portugal, which all have different types of bone churches, so ossuaries or different places like that. Maybe we can take this and modify it for a different location.

Rebecca: And I know that you brought some of the reflections that students had at the end to demonstrate the impact that it had on students. Do you want to share what some of those were?

Kat: Well, one of the students had a really interesting reflection that covered both of our topics. This was an anthropology student. But, one of the things he said was that it was how objects were displayed that was important. And I thought you could talk about bones that way. But you could also talk about the artworks. And that that is how you interpreted them and interacted with them. And I guess the first time I went, I didn’t think about interacting as something we were doing in the bone churches or ossuaries, but we were interacting with that space.

Rebecca: We ended up having a lot of conversations about one of them had music playing, and how that impacted the experience of the space versus if it had been quiet. So we ended up talking about all of those as designed experiences, and not just the visuals or the display of the bone.

Kat: Right, interpreting it on multiple levels. And so that got across to the students because they all seem to comment on that. Other students said that they had no idea what Art Nouveau or Cubism was, or even Soviet architecture and now that they did, and that was from a Zoology and Anthropology major, but they learned quite a bit about that. The Soviet architecture was interestingly blended in with everything else. And I think that’s one of the things I love about Prague and the Czech Republic is that mix of old and new and the students commented on that quite a bit. Another student talked about death and grief in clarifying life. She had just recently lost her grandmother and said that no one in her family would talk about the grieving process. And so she found this class very helpful to help her clarify her thoughts about that whole event in her life.

Rebecca: That was a student that took book classes, right?

Kat: Yeah.

Rebecca: One of the challenges that we gave students was to go into a grocery store and purchase something and then to write about that experience. And we found that they were hesitant to do that on their own. We ended up having to physically take them to the grocery store and go in with them.

Kat: Yes, but where they did open up was the farmers’ market. And every day in Brno, there’s a farmers market in the square and they loved that and were able to navigate that easily. So I don’t know what the difference is. If it’s just less threatening. Those people were less likely to speak English… that makes it interesting, but they seemed to enjoy that more.

Rebecca: We had a number of students that were not from a city and so grocery stores in cities are much smaller. And I think that the students were weirded out by that.

Kat: One of the things that was important through this whole class was that we weren’t just in major cities, so Brno’s the second largest city, Prague’s the largest city in the Czech Republic, but we also went to very small cities. So, students got to see all types of communities within the Czech Republic and I think that was important as well.

Rebecca: And Brno is a second largest city, but not a tourist destination by any means.

Kat: Not a tourist destination, no. And Brno, one of the comments that the students were making was the fact that they could see the homeless people… they were out and about near the train station, things like that. In Prague, they didn’t see that. They were probably there, but they just didn’t see it.

Rebecca: One of the things that we also did in Brno and that we didn’t do in Prague, in part because it’s a smaller place, is that we took students to a university there. It happened to be a design school or art school, but we took students inside and met with a faculty member and got a tour of the spaces and saw some student work. And all the students across all the disciplines found that to be really interesting and useful. So, we noted that next time we take students abroad, we need to make sure that we have some sort of opportunity for them to at least see a university space. We had trouble scheduling interactions between students, our students and their students, because of exam schedules and things. They were in exam time and most of the students weren’t around.

Kat: Yeah, we were not able to schedule with the forensic anthropologist or any of the anthropology faculty for that reason. So that’s the only downside of going this time of year is that that’s typically exam time for European schools.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about your preparation for the trip? I think you went there in advance to investigate places.

Kat: Well, Rebecca had never been there. I have been to Prague several times, I had traveled personally. And before I put the class together, I did take advantage of some funding that was available through our international education program to go and scout out locations. And I had looked at other places I’d looked at to Austria, Austria also has some bone churches. But it just seemed like the Czech Republic was a good fit and to stay in a stronger, more confined area, then to broaden it out, and maybe weaken the impact of it. And I had been to Prague, but I had never been to Brno until I scouted it out, I had not been to all of the small towns that I ended up using the first time around. And so for three of the small towns, it was the first time I’d ever been there when I arrived with students. It worked out okay. I don’t know if I would recommend it, but it did work out okay.

Rebecca: I think in general, I wouldn’t normally do an international class unless I had been there before. But because Kat had gone in this case, it worked out fine. I ended up having to do a lot of extra research on art and design. And I connected with a faculty member in Brno actually about art and design just to make sure we were kind of taking students to the right kinds of places and things because I couldn’t quite get a full sense, especially because that particular city is not tourist oriented. And so some stuff wasn’t even available in English. So, I had a little trouble navigating some of that, but it was a lot easier in Prague.

Kat: And what do you think having gone there the first time, what were your impressions that you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t gone as a group?

Rebecca: I think it’s always different when you actually visit a place when you have that kind of three dimensional experience of what that feels like, smells like, tastes like. I was very excited that we found some Czech food that was gluten free that I can eat. I really wanted to be able to eat traditional Czech food, but I’m a celiac, so I can’t eat traditional Czech food. So, we were able to find a couple places that took a little extra hike on our part to get to those places.

Kat: But interestingly enough, the Czech Republic, and Brno in particular, are vegan hubs. Who knew? So, we had a couple of vegans with us, we had no problems at all because there were a lot of choices.

Rebecca: We also did all of our logistics, Kat took care of hotel and some transport in country and I think it’s helpful sometimes when it’s the faculty member that does that if you have an orientation as to where things are and how close they are so you can schedule things appropriately.

John: What have you learned? Or what would you like to try that you weren’t able to do this time?

Kat: I know we want to have a hotel with air conditioning next time in Prague. That’s going to be high on the list.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think the students have just such a difficult time dealing with the heat that they need a place where they get a little reprieve, so that they can be more energetic throughout the day. If you can’t get good sleep because you’re too hot at night, then the day becomes challenging. I think we’ll incorporate more challenges from the start. We know what to do challenges on. We tried some out, we know which ones fall flat. [LAUGHTER]

Kat: But, most of them were well received. And so I think we definitely will include those from the first day.

Rebecca: We talked about a different language app… that also seems very important, man. We didn’t have the anthropology museum on the schedule initially, but we will definitely go back there. That was a really good experience.

Kat: We were pretty good about scheduling free time. But I think there were a couple of days that we made notes that we would want to expand the free time that the students had or switch things around the order of when we went to different places. And we did find out that most of the places we wanted to go to in Brno were closed on Monday. That became an issue because we were there on a Monday. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: We certainly talked about the possible benefits of combining the class and making it just one class that’s the full semester with the travel. But I think the flexibility of having him be two separate classes is really worthwhile and that we’re still able to give all of the students at least some interdisciplinary experience even if they only end up in one of the courses.

Kat: And we’re going to make it more explicit on International Ed’s website next time that the two classes are connected. That seemed to be absent.

Rebecca: So we also talked about we had to use so many stairs…

Kat: Yeah, and many were outside or very narrow. And so claustrophobia and fear of heights need to be mentioned in our warnings. I had disclosed about stairs, but I didn’t consider the claustrophobia or fear of heights. But, it was something it that was not on my radar. The other thing we were talking about doing differently was instead of using a tour guide at the castle to give them a scavenger hunt at the castle, and then just plan to meet back.

John: We always end our podcast with the question, what are you going to do next?

Kat: I think the next is to plan our next trip to the Czech Republic, but also consider other locations, potentially Spain or Portugal or Italy…

Rebecca: …and get those right on the schedule, right?

Kat: That’s right.

Rebecca: I’m on sabbatical studying accessibility, which was also something that we looked at a little bit while we were in the Czech Republic, because there were a lot of places that were very not accessible. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. This was interesting. And it sounds like you’ve got some future interesting trips, just to plan.

Kat: Thank you very much for having me.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

91. International Education

Global education and education abroad has evolved from more traditional semesters abroad to a suite of opportunities including research, internships, and courses with faculty-led travel components. In this episode, Josh McKeown joins us to discuss the variety of international study opportunities and the impact that international travel can have on students.

Josh is the Associate Provost for International Education and Programs at SUNY Oswego and author of a highly regarded book on international education titled, The First Time Effect: The Impact of Study Abroad on College Student Intellectual Development. He is also the author of forthcoming chapter on education abroad, bridging scholarship and practice and other articles, chapters, and presentations.

Transcript

John: Global education and education abroad has evolved from more traditional semesters abroad to a suite of opportunities including research, internships, and courses with faculty-led travel components. In this episode, we discuss the variety of international study opportunities and the impact that international travel can have on students.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Josh McKeown. Josh is the Associate Provost for International Education and Programs at SUNY Oswego and author of a highly regarded book on international education titled, The First Time Effect: The Impact of Study Abroad on College Student Intellectual Development. He is also the author of forthcoming chapter on education abroad, bridging scholarship and practice and other articles, chapters, and presentations. Welcome, Josh.

Josh: Thank you, Rebecca.

John: Welcome.

Josh: Thank you.

John: Today our teas are.

Josh: I’m having black coffee…

John: …again [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I have English Breakfast tea today.

John: I have Bing Cherry Black Tea from Harry and David’s today.

Josh: I did have English Breakfast tea at breakfast this morning at home. So I had some tea today.

Rebecca: Alright.

Josh: I hope I’m in the right place. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: As long as you’re pumping tea through your system, we’re good, yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: It’s still there.[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: SUNY Oswego has been a leader in international education for quite a while and supports a wide range of programs. Can you give our listeners an overview of the range of programs your department supports?

Josh: Sure. And thanks for noticing that as well. I think in the last three years this institution has gotten some long deserved national recognition for that, too. We’ve always been a leader own to ourselves, and I think within the SUNY system, but from several really important international education organizations like the Institute of International Education, out of New York, Diversity Abroad, and the AASCU—the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, all have recognized SUNY Oswego and our departments work in the last three years.

…where to start? I think it was good for me to sort of articulate those recognitions because I like to think that we’re being recognized for all that we do internationally. I think that sometimes it’s one program or one location that may get the headline or the spotlight of the moment, because it’s interesting, or maybe it’s relevant, or the curriculum is something noteworthy or important to the day. But really, I believe we are as comprehensive an international office in international offering as you’ll find. So we have many existing programs abroad that have been running for decades. So we’re talking about semester-length programs to London and Paris and Barcelona. Kind of the more traditional format and traditionally most popular destinations in Western Europe and those still enroll. So, in one case, the Paris Sorbonne program was founded the year before I was even born. And we’re still running it and we’re still running it with pretty much the same model, although the offerings have changed within it. But the structure is really comparable for almost, well, 50 years now. So we have a whole portfolio of standing programs that are traditionally designed and delivered. But the real action in education abroad has been in areas that I would call embedded programs. The word embedded means within the curriculum, and that’s where the growth has been. That’s where the real excitement has been. And it’s not new anymore, but it continues to sort of surprise and astound in some cases, given what we do. So in those cases, individual faculty members lead programs abroad based on the courses they teach on campus. So to give some perspective, we probably now have at least 80 programs that regularly run through my department. And in any given year 400, or this year over 500, students studying abroad or spending some time abroad as part of their academic program this year. That’s just this year.

Rebecca: That’s great.

Josh: Yeah, it’s astounding. One of the recognitions that we’ve gotten was from the Institute of International Education’s Generation Study Abroad project where we achieved our goal of 20% participation rate from SUNY Oswego undergraduates in education abroad, which is just huge for a college…

John: That’s remarkable.

Rebecca: That’s incredible

Josh: … of our size and traditions. When I came here in 2001, I think we were sending abroad 3% of our students and that was considered pretty good at the time. So those faculty-led programs, those embedded programs entail a course delivered on campus in most cases, they can be standalone, like in the summer or January. But typically it’s a course delivered on campus during the semester. And then students take a portion of their time, almost all do it at the end of the course in January after fall semester, in March after quarter three on our campus, and then May/June time-frame after quarter four spring semester. And this year, off the top of my head I can’t even remember the exact number we have, it’s probably around 30 of those, and they’re going to all continents. Our human computer interaction program is going back to Australia. We have numerous programs in Asia this year, faculty-led, including places that you’d be hard pressed to find study abroad, such as Myanmar, Vietnam, we rather go to China, Japan, India. And then we have programs in the Caribbean and Central America, South America, and all over Europe, and two programs in Africa this summer.

Rebecca: Have you hit Antartica yet?

Josh: That still eludes me, Rebecca. [LAUGHTER] You know, I’d love to be able to say all seven continents, but that’s the last place, but I have high hopes actually. And I know the exact program that I would like to go down to Antarctica. [LAUGHTER]

John: We all have programs we’d like to send to Antarctica, but… [LAUGHTER] Or maybe some faculty.

Josh: Ours would be for a good reason. No, it’s true. There’s a new offering this year in South Africa, very challenging program to put together. It’s out of our cinema screen studies program. And the faculty members will take students for several weeks to do environmental filmmaking. And some of the students will be out in the bush filming wildlife and animals. Others will be near the coast filming sea life and things. And so it’s that group that I hope goes to Antarctica to film penguins next year. [LAUGHTER]

John: Now you mentioned Myanmar, was there any concern there about the instability there in recent years?

Josh: Well, that’s a really interesting point, John. A lot of my work, and I’ve been fortunate in the 18-years that I’ve been at SUNY Oswego, I was at Syracuse University before that, we have had tremendously supportive and stable leadership, particularly from the president. And so it’s not to say we don’t care about risk. We do, we care a lot about it. But I operate from a position where I know that our campus leadership believes in international education and we did long before it became really common. I mean, it is not unusual now for institutions to have 10% or more of their students going abroad every year. That’s kind of the norm now… believe that’s the national average, actually. But we’re still quite a bit more than that. But I know that my campus leadership supports this, in principle. What we do from year-to-year, of course, changes but we were running programs to Cuba long before it was easy to do that. Now it’s relatively easy to send a program to Cuba. iI may get harder soon again, but we were doing it when it was a really rare endeavor. We have had programs that involve being on boats, that require competent swimming ability. We have had programs that climbed mountains… literally like Kilimanjaro. So yeah, there are always risks… so the risk can be political, they can be health, they can be personal safety and security. So we’ve never shied away from that. To me, the question is, “What’s our business there? What reason do we have to go?” I like to say to new staff, for example, that I don’t just throw a dart at the world map and decide we’re gonna open a program there. And I think this gets at the organizational power of SUNY Oswego and properly done, how international education anywhere can fit into an institution’s culture. In the case of Myanmar, it was an initial relationship I made through one of my volunteer activities. I was a volunteer mentor to a program, essentially that was providing distance learning tutorials to would be international educators in Myanmar. So these are people who were trying to develop the skills, the abilities that I have, and others have here. But in a country like Myanmar, which was really opening up after many decades of military dictatorship… arguably still is opening… it’s not quite opened all the way, but it’s more open than it was. So they were trying to instill… and there was a grant for this… to instill that ability in Myanmar higher education institutions so they could become more globally connected. And so I volunteered for that. This is what I do in my spare time. [LAUGHTER]

John: It complements it very well.

Josh: I know. I look for interesting activities like that, that do complement what we do. But also that I found interesting because I didn’t know much about Myanmar. And so I was paired up with a medical doctor who had, essentially, a private medical school and then he was trying to become more internationally aware. So, long story short, he eventually visited us here in SUNY Oswego. We hit it off, and I introduced him to several faculty members. And one of them made a good connection there on her own and now she’s leading a program, our first ever, to Myanmar and particularly looking at transitions from dictatorship to democracy. And she teaches in our Political Science and the Global International Studies Department. So you can see right there I’m always looking for that and I hope it’s been successful across the board. I’m open to any faculty member who has any interesting idea and sometimes I try to pair them up if I think there’s an interesting link that I can help make. And if the faculty member is interested… right, Rebecca? … to go to India and look at art and culture there

John:… and in the Czech Republic…

Josh: and soon the Czech Republic. I’m open to almost any good idea, because I know in the end, it benefits our students. That’s what it’s about. It makes Oswego a more interesting campus. It makes our education stronger. And I know from a research standpoint, that all those things contribute to a student’s intellectual and academic abilities in ways that we’re still just beginning to understand, but I think are more and more proven.

John: And we should note that we did record an episode a few months back, where we had two people talking about one of their study abroad experiences. So, two faculty members, Casey and Jeff, and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes if anyone wants to hear about the faculty side of the experience, and will be interviewing Rebecca when she gets back sometime this fall. Do faculty-led programs attract a different mix of students than the full semester abroad programs?

Josh: I would say in all honesty these days, no. Because our student population is, from my standpoint, and they’re all facing similar challenges, similar obstacles, and are excited by similar things. And I think it’s important to say that to the audience who might not be as familiar with education abroad. Because study abroad, as we used to call in the old days, it really used to be an elite activity. And it was something most students didn’t do. I never could have done it, had I not gotten a really good scholarship as a student… and so it used to be a boutique activity. And it really isn’t anymore. And I would say that any institution that wants it to be mainstream can. It’s not that complicated to do. You just have to believe in yourself, have some funding and staffing. But even after a while that can become self sustaining. So we no longer are looking to create a program that students have to really… I want to say… like be selected for but that is how did the industry used to look at study abroad: that you had to be really a special kind of student. You had to be an ambassador… which is a term I reject actually… an ambassador for your institution… ambassador for your country. That used to be the mindset and so, by definition, it was exclusive in the old days. And so the current thinking… and I think anyone who wants to expand it needs to really embrace this is that it’s an activity potentially every student can do. And when you go there, you have to accept who your students are. And our students are bright and they’re ambitious and articulate, and they’re maddening, and they’re naive, and they’re stretched for time, retention and resources, all those things. And if we’re educators, we need to educate them. And education abroad is part of higher education. So I look at it that way. So, in that sense, I think the students who go on faculty-led short-term programs or embedded programs, which is now by far the majority of our education abroad population… I think those are students who might have been introduced to the idea by their professor in that class. And that’s what’s kind of cool about it from my standpoint, by involving so many faculty members, we have the ability not just to have education abroad be promoted out of my office. But now, I think I count over 30 faculty members this year are involved with our work directly, and they all have friends and colleagues and people know what they’re doing. So, I like to think that in all these classes around the campus, professors are talking about study abroad, talking about their program and that, if a student hadn’t been to our study abroad fair or hadn’t been on our website or one of our sessions, they can be introduced to it that way. And so I think potentially, yeah, potentially that student might have not have thought about it before. Whereas a student going for a longer program… a semester program… even summer… might have been thinking about it longer because you have to prepare more. But these days, I really look at them as the same… or very, very similar.

John: I was thinking on the student side, we have a lot of rural students who often haven’t traveled very much and that a one-week experience, say might seem less intimidating or threatening, and it might open the possibility of study abroad to students who might be a little concerned about a…

Josh: Yeah.

John: …longer term experience.

Josh: I think that that student definitely is still out there. Students from predominately upstate New York were the traditional student population of this campus. But as we know, our campus is a lot different than it was 10, 20 years ago. And so I think now the majority of students are from
Metro New York City area. I know in my class, I teach global and international studies on campus, I always asked at the start of the semester, who has traveled abroad before, and I’m astounded how many already have. So, I think it’s becoming more common. And many students have relatives in other countries. They may not think about international travel as part of an education yet… could be just visiting family or a vacation or something like that. So I think, in that sense, we still have the opportunity to reach people with education abroad, even if they’ve traveled before, but to think about it differently to think about their travels as part of their overall academic experience, maybe even as part of a larger campus effort to have them grow and develop into the best students we can. So, I think that’s what I think about study abroad in those terms. And it’s great to come on a show like this because I realize that a lot of people don’t know that, and it’s something which, in our profession, we take for granted now. But it’s important to keep expressing this to larger audiences, that there are regular high school programs that go abroad. I was at the airport not long ago and one of our faculty colleagues was picking up, I think, her middle school age daughter who had just been on a school trip abroad. Kids are doing all kinds of things. By the time we get them, many of them may have had that travel experience, but it’s still up to us to take them where they are and move them forward.

John: I actually had traveled abroad when I was a freshman in high school to France, Germany, Switzerland.

Rebecca: I know that as a student, and I came from a working class family and I never thought of travel abroad as something that could possibly be something that I could do. But as a graduate student, I presented a paper abroad and that was my first international experience… and it opened up so many doors, and now I try to take every opportunity to travel, as you know. But you know, it really changed things for me. And so I think you’re right, that faculty are reaching some of the students by talking about things in the class. I taught a freshman class this year, a first-year student class and we have a couple of first-year students going with us to the Czech Republic, who had never traveled.

Josh: That’s a great story. I love to hear that.

Rebecca: You know, so that’s really exciting, and I think it works. I know in your book, you talk a bit about this first-time effect. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and the power it has on students?

Josh: I would be glad to. And that book came out 10 years ago now… 2009. And the research collectors was a few years before that. And so, yeah, I could probably use a second edition with some updated research samples, actually… because, in a nutshell, the important finding from that book, which it did hit… at least within our profession… it hit the audience that we were seeking pretty well. It spoke to how students change after they study abroad, and through the process of education abroad in general. Because for as long as there has been something called study abroad, or now education abroad… and just real briefly, education abroad includes internships and research and service learning and things like that. So we say typically “education abroad” now, but for decades, people who did this for a living, and professors who saw their students go abroad for a semester and come back, saw something different about them, and no one could put their finger on it. No one could say what is this? They just seem different. And are they more mature? Well, not quite. Are they more focused on their studies?
Yeah, but that’s not quite it. Are they more interesting and smart? Well, not always. But there’s something about them that was different. And I felt that too… Again, I was from a similar background and thankfully the university I went to head to may study abroad really accessible and I had a good scholarship. And when I came back, I remember my friends who were there who had not gone abroad, there was some like gap between us, it was hard for me to put my finger on. So I sought to do some research to try to answer that question. And it’s far from answered, but at least I think I made a contribution. And there’s a scale called intellectual development. And there are other meaningful ways to look at this kind of development in students, but the way I chose was the intellectual development scale, because it really addresses students understanding of complexity. So, it doesn’t test their understanding of world history or language or even culture, actually. It’s not like a sort of an assessment of the study abroad experience in that sense. It really gets at more basic cognitive abilities, and can you, as a student after the experience, can you think of the world in more complex ways? Can you think of knowledge in more complex ways? Can you understand different perspectives? Do you look at your professors and other authority figures in your life, whether it’s parents or a political leader or or any supposed expert, can you look at them, and understand that they’re not all-knowing authorities, they just have been doing this longer and they have different points of view, even from what they have to express. So, it’s that kind of intellectual ability that it measures. And by and large, like a lot of studies, it did not show that all students have that growth. But I did find a subset of my sample that did and it was statistically significant. And it was those students who had either never gone abroad before, or who had gone abroad for such a short time, that it was clear that it was not an in depth experience. And that was really exciting to go into a research project like that. It was also for my doctoral dissertation. You don’t want to assume anything about the outcome if you do it properly. You may have some hunches, but I wasn’t expecting that. At the end. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I thought, Well, yeah, that actually reinforces what a lot of us have been observing in this field for a long time… that that experience is powerful, but it doesn’t have a cumulative effect, I realized… and I coined the term first-time effect. And that’s been cited in quite a few other papers, books, and dissertations. I think it’s stuck. And I think about the students we were just talking about, John… these students who have never been abroad before or students today who, yeah, they’ve gone to the Dominican Republic to visit a family member, but maybe it was for a short time, or maybe it wasn’t something that was part of a structured activity, and maybe it was a place they were already familiar with. That, I think, still holds. I think that individual when they go to a place that’s far different, and for a longer period of time, like an education abroad experience, I think that’s still possible. So yeah, I’m proud of it. Now, the profession is looking… and thanks for mentioning the forthcoming book, Education Abroad: Bridging Scholarship to Practice. I was the lead author of a chapter focusing on academic development. And I got interested in that because there hasn’t been a whole lot of research on this particular topic. There’s been some and that is… by academic development, we mean the student’s capacity as a learner… so much more targeted to learning in a college setting. But you can see how it complements well, the former research that I did: that students who come back from study abroad seem like they’re more focused students… seem like they’re more career oriented… they seem like they have their act together a bit more than before. And so there are some ways to measure that, too. It’s far from proven still, but I think there’s an emerging consensus that education abroad is one of those potentially high impact activities that can, first of all, keep students in school, keep them on track to graduation, and help them in their academic careers and their professional careers in ways that… it’s not the only activity… but in ways that a lot of university experiences can’t say. So I’m hoping to keep pursuing interesting and relevant research areas. But I must say it’s easier than it used to be, Rebecca, to do that, because it’s been a lot of research over the last decade especially about what I was interested in. So I found a lot of sources to pull from… a lot more than before, actually. So that’s gratifying.

Rebecca: You see a lot of students have interest in traveling to places like Western Europe, the standard staple places that you mentioned earlier on. But we also have a lot of programs that we’ve touched upon already, that go to other, maybe more out of the way, places.

Josh: Yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how we get our students to be interested in those places and feel confident to travel in those?

Josh: Yeah, I’m really glad you asked that. And you’re a good example of this. I think the two projects that you and I were working on together, one was to India, the other to the Czech Republic. And both of those are in that category, I would say. The number of countries that we send students to keeps growing, and we already mentioned Myanmar and South Africa. Just this year, we have programs also to Tanzania, and Honduras, and Dominican Republic, and we’ve had students in Russia. And I mentioned Cuba and Vietnam and India. It no longer really is like I don’t want to say noteworthy because it happens so frequently, but you’re right it is… it really is noteworthy. I would say this about that. If we were to promote a semester length program to India… which we do… but not led by a faculty member… not tied to a course… not embedded in the curriculum in such a way that the connection between what that student is doing in a class where their major and that activity weren’t so clear, I don’t think that semester program in India would succeed. In fact, I can say that definitively because we have that, and very few students choose to spend a whole semester in India. However, and I’m just using India as one example, when a faculty member deliberately ties what they’re researching and what they’re teaching about to this trip, and if they’re good professor, and the student looks at them, not only as someone I can learn from for this course, but someone who can teach me something about life…. so we’re talking about mentoring more, actually. And if that professor is willing to put themselves out there and also be a program leader, which involves not just knowing your subject matter well, but getting on buses and subways together, sharing space, being in the same hotel having breakfast every morning, seeing them on good mornings and bad mornings and being willing to say things like, “I don’t know, we’re gonna have to figure this out,” which happens on all of our programs all the time, no matter how well they run… that actually creates the kind of authentic interaction that this generation… they say… craves for and increasingly demands. It’s one of those situations, I think, where if travel itself is now not as difficult as it used to be, for lots of reasons, but yet education abroad is still growing. The value that students see in it, I think, comes from that. It’s learning. Yes, I’m going to India, but I’m going with someone who I really want to learn from and I really see as someone who can help me understand this place. Maybe going there for a semester is too intimidating. Maybe they don’t see the value in it. either. And so the role of faculty in those cases is crucial. They have to be the people who are willing to put themselves on the line really… not just the program. The students say I’m going to India with you. They’re not just going to India, they’re going with you. So I think that really drives the act.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how when we take students abroad, we help them make sure that they’re not reinforcing stereotypes and assumptions, but actually learning about culture and growing.

Josh: I think we should do that in all of our courses, of course, on campus too… and others have done a lot of research on intercultural development, for example. It’s not really my area, but I think it’s incumbent on all of us when we’re in this role to do our homework and make sure that students do see the country authentically… as little things like, I remember one of the programs that we had to Paris, which, again, a generation ago, we would have presented as “Paris, the City of Lights” and really just shown them the beauty, the art, the grandeur, all of which is there. But I remember talking to this professor about the other Paris, the working class Paris, the very racially diverse Paris, the Paris that was the seat of a vast colonial empire at one point. There’s a different Paris too… then the City of Light and Arc. So I helped her construct an intinerary with this in mind. So it could be a small thing like, for example, from the Paris airport from Charle deGaulle airport into the city, rather than take a bus, you can take a train. And when you take that train, you go by neighborhoods, and you see graffiti. And you see things about Paris that are really not beautiful, they’re authentic. And they’re important for different reasons. But they may not have all been what that student had in mind when they first thought of the idea of Paris. So I think if you approach study abroad that way, and make conscious choices, and then deliberate steps that eventually become an itinerary, and you’re thoughtful about it, you should get there, there should not be an opportunity for a student to go someplace and come back and just say, it was awesome, and only be able to talk about fun things that they’d seen in books before and now they see in real life. That’s a tourist trip. And so education abroad really these days, this is what really we should be doing. We should be constructing programs that add to students intellectually and academically and as faculty lead programs to make sure exactly what you said that we are showing them the authentic reality of places even if it differs a little bit from maybe what the student had in mind before. That’s our job.

Rebecca: I think one of the interesting things that happened when we were in India is we went to the Taj Mahal in May when it’s hot. And we were there when mostly Indians were traveling. There was mostly families that were traveling from other parts of India. And so that experience was very different than a touristy kind of experience that you might have had it at a different time of the year. So we ended up having a lot of discussions about the difference between “Oh, we’re like an international group and like we put our shoes here.”

Josh: Yeah.

Rebecca: And really having to break that down. So, that was an interesting learning moment that was far more learning, then one might have thought. We went there because it was an important architectural work, especially for the course content that we were teaching. But it ended up being this much bigger learning moment.

Josh: You’re speaking also to the importance of faculty preparation and credibility in that moment. And again, if this is for an audience of people who work in institutions that maybe are not quite there yet, or you’re aspiring to that. One of the main points I made when I give presentations and talks on this is that it isn’t that hard to get faculty to that level. Some faculty come equipped already, maybe they were from the country where they’re traveling to, or they’ve traveled there already, but most don’t, actually. And so as part of our administration of education abroad, I build into budgeting, and I build into the sustainable operations of the department, funds for faculty development travel, before I ever want a faculty member to go abroad with a group of students, they need to go there themselves and learn those things and chart out for us what is that ideal itinerary? Now, we have to make choices. We have to make good choices about how we use funds like that, and there’s a competition for it and it’s overseen properly. But we do have, in that sense, it’s almost like a company might have a research and development R&D aspect to it. In a way it’s that. It’s making sure our faculty are developed. And I think, at this campus that was not always widely embraced. It is now and I see faculty members who have just been hired, come to me and say “I heard you have some travel funds.” Words getting out even before we actually announce it each year. But if we do that well, we’lll ensure that the program is safe and properly run. Because that professor’s when they’re program leader, they are the institution. No one else is with them in most cases, I’m not there in almost all cases. Other staff usually don’t accompany programs like that. So if you’re halfway around the world, even if you have a good itinerary and good trip connections and things like that, you’re responsible for everything, really. And so we make sure faculty are as prepared as possible for that. And I think that’s a key to the success of it. It’s work. And I think you could attest to that. It’s still work for the faculty member, but you’re not doing all the work, you’re supported and prepared by the institution as much as possible. And together if we do those things well, all of a sudden you go from 3% to 20% participation… you go from having maybe one faculty-led program in the summer to 20 or 30 a year.

Rebecca: That’s incredible.

Josh: Yeah. And you pick up… if you’re lucky too… put yourself out there… one or two national awards that people find, say, “Hey, you’re doing something special,” but I think we’ve been doing something special for a long time and it’s nice to see that

John: …and we should note that about 23 to 25% of our audience is from outside of the US

Josh: Oh, great, great.

John: So if there’s anyone from institutions that might like to establish a relationship we’ll include Josh’s contact information in the show notes.

Josh: My staff are going to kill me though… we have too many programs. No. Yeah, sometimes my staff.. who are great, they’re incredible people, and all true believers, you have to believe in international education. I will say that for faculty who don’t think it’s a lot of work once they get involved and realize… it’s work, but if it’s work you believe in, it doesn’t feel like work. And that’s what we try to do. But sometimes they think I never say no, to a program idea. And I do… I do say no, sometimes. But there are times when I think, “Oh, that just sounds really cool. We got to do this. We gotta try this.” And we have enough experience, I think, and the connections that we make most programs doable and when it’s not, I will pull the plug on something if I have to, for various reasons, but usually we go for it.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about some of the preparedness for faculty in terms of traveling ahead of time, but are there other things that faculty can do if they’re going to take students abroad to make it a really effective experience?

Josh: I think that it’s not totally dissimilar to classroom teaching, in that, I think you have to see yourself as others see you. I think a good teacher does that. I mean, I’m not an actor, but maybe that’s what an actor does… be able to see how students might view you. I think that the difference is, is 24/7s. So imagine that you’re with a group of students all day, every day… and again, not just an hour and a half, twice a week. That’s different. I have gone to the lengths of having a mandatory training with all faculty, I used to do it much more informally. But for lots of reasons, not just the risks abroad. But I think with success and growth comes scrutiny and attention and you have to be prepared for that too. So whether it’s students with disability issues, or Title IX, issues like that, as well as some of these more far-flung locations that involve longer flights and riskier scenarios, we just have to be more aware of the preparation and training and kind of legal compliance for lack of a better term. So I do have a mandatory training session for faculty and I go through those things. And yeah, occasionally we scare some people off, I guess, because the idea doesn’t turn into a proposal and never turns into a program. So I think it’s important to be clear with faculty like that. I will repeat that overall, we are growing and growing strongly, including the number of people who are requesting to lead programs and then leading programs. But it’s not unusual for someone to say to me, “You know, I didn’t realize how much student contact I was going to have.” And it makes me wonder what they did think. Maybe they thought that….

John: …they’d meet for an hour a day and then send them off on their own?

Josh: I don’t know. Yeah, and that’s okay…. rather find that out before they lead a program. But I think maybe they’re thinking about traditional models of education abroad, maybe it would be at a study abroad center where the students would just be hanging out with each other and be supervised by someone else. And they’re really not. In most cases, it’s a traveling type program, students are at a hotel or residents or in the case of a more outdoorsy program that might be at a lodge and they’re together. There is no one else. And so I think that does put off some people and that’s okay. I’d rather know that up front and if someone decides “No, I just don’t want that amount of responsibility.” Because students are demanding… they expect certain things, they still expect you to be a great professor, in fact maybe even more so than on campus. But faculty have to watch out for students’ mental health, their physical health, their interrelationships. They assert things, they have to minister discipline at times, there are aspects to this in a way when I say they are the institution, and imagine all the offices on this campus rolled into one person, that’s kind of what it is. But it’s also super fun. And I think the people who thrive in it, realize it’s a really unique opportunity not just to talk about what you know, but to be the person you are or think you are in a global setting…

Rebecca: …or a lot of the things you don’t know…

John: …and to learn…

Rebecca: Right, yeah, I mean, cuz you learn together when you’re abroad. There’s things that you just don’t expect or whatever and you investigate and you learn together.

Josh: That’s what I meant by authentic. It’s interesting how that word is being used so much. There’s so many ways to travel. You can go online, go on some vacation site… it’s easy, much easier than it used to be there… and there are so many ways to learn about the world. You can watch PBS, you can watch documentaries, you can listen to podcasts. So to be special, it has to be different… has to be something really targeted and led well and interesting. So I think when we do that, students are drawn to it, because the result is something intense. And that’s when the learning happens, right? We wish every class of ours on campus were like that. I wish every class was like that. But usually it’s not. Education abroad, properly constructed, it can be… especially the faculty-led model. It’s a shorter model. If you plan well, it can be really high impact in a short time.

John: As we bring in more students from New York City and from traditionally underrepresented groups, the average income of many of these new students may be relatively low. How can low-income students afford international travel?

Josh: For higher education, in general, this is one of the biggest questions of our time, right? How can we get this incredibly bright and ambitious population of young people in our country educated and prepared for their own futures, but also our future… our collective future. And I do believe education abroad plays a part in that. The growth in it has not come without, I think, some really creative approaches to that very question. So I’ve tried very hard to keep our education abroad programs as affordable as possible. In some cases, a student can choose a semester length program, for example, that doesn’t cost them, when all is said and done, that much more than being here. I try as hard as I can, controlling what I can control, to keep costs as low as possible. And there are various ways to do that. If I can refer to another publication I did. Our main professional organization is called NAFSA and they have a guidebook… a handbook to international education and education abroad in this case, and they asked me to write a chapter on strategic planning for education abroad, and I included this aspect of it in addition to the other things we talked about, and that’s budgeting and financing. I really am a strong advocate that in all endeavors you get what you pay for, you get what you invest in. And so I think many institutions don’t understand fully how important it is that the international office or the people responsible for putting programs together have certain discretion over decision making that differ from other aspects of what the university does. Through my department we deal with vendors all over the world, we deal with their airlines or tour providers, banks and bill-paying services. You have to be able to do that. If you put that in the same structure as folks who are buying copy paper on campus or contracting with with vending machines, it just doesn’t work. It won’t succeed… it flat out will not succeed. So SUNY is a pretty progressive institution actually system wide for this. There are some mechanisms in place… little things like being able to transact in currencies, when the value is favorable to you or being able to shop around for the best airline deals or pre-paying expenses that you know you’re going to have… things like that… that as long as it’s all documentable and able to be reviewed, there’s nothing wrong with that, in my view. But there has to be some, I think, understanding that international education is different. And this institution… I’m quite fortunate, there’s always has been a view that, of course, accountability, but discretion. And so if you look at it that way, and not every program that runs makes a profit, not every program that runs even meets its expensive. If I had to cancel every program just because it might lose $1, we wouldn’t be running a lot of the programs. And so the ones that can are the ones who maybe you’re fortunate that there is some favorable cost outcome, maybe we’re planning on an exchange rate being x and it’s that it’s y…. And then you’re like: “Okay, I didn’t have to spend as much on that. “Well, how about the program that in the end, you had to spend more on? if you approach it holistically like that, and I hope I’m doing that reasonably well, you can price programs in a way that aren’t out of touch for students. I think it really starts there. And also we have to make sure we are running academic programs. And so earlier when I said we’re not running tourist trips, I think that applies to this discussion too. Students can use financial aid for this… they can. If it weren’t tied to a course or if it weren’t part of their academic experience, they couldn’t. So, I think it’s incumbent on us to never forget that. And then I think you have to look for opportunities for scholarships, grants and other rewards for students. And we’ve done that on this campus. We didn’t solve it. But we’ve done a lot. I think there are now 10 different scholarship or other grant award programs that students can apply for. I remember when there was only three, and they were were small. Now, there’s a sizable number we gave away over $100,000 last year in scholarship money to students… a hundred thousand dollars. And so that’s sizable.

John: That’s making an impact.

Josh: It is. 18 years ago I think we probably gave away under $5,000 total. So, it’s a staggering leap. And that has helped a lot. And I know many of my colleagues who do really toil because they can’t get any traction on this at their institutions. My advice is always keep at it and also take charge of your own narrative. Even if you could only afford to run one program, run it really well. And then get as much publicity as you can for that program. Show how it’s changing students lives. Because it is. Make sure you care and devote some time to really processing that. Tell that story. Keep telling that story. Someone’s gonna want to listen eventually and build, build, build. SUNY Oswego didn’t always have this vast an array of programs either. Look at what we have now. It can happen, even at a state institution that is a comprehensive college whose students are struggling economically. We can get there. If we can get there, others can get there too.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking what next?

Josh: My latest research interests are still in international education but are more policy areas. So I did a research study over the winter and I presented it at the International Studies Association Conference in Toronto in March and it was well received. I’m going to expand on it. I’m really looking at how scholars, researchers, faculty members pursue internationalization in their own careers and for their own institutions. And in particular, I looked at China and Chinese scholars and researchers who come, not just to SUNY Oswego in the United States, but go abroad for significant periods of time to do research work. And I’m interested in it because if you look at that example, China is a country that was trying to catch up on a lot of things, and I think has caught up on a lot of things. One of those areas has been higher education and internationalization of higher ed in particular. But what I started noticing here at SUNY Oswego, maybe around 10 years ago, is the number of Chinese visiting scholars, faculty members, researchers who come with full funding, and in many cases with full government funding. And I’m in a position to be able to see that and some of them iare n the business school, I think you had one, the art department, and you say to yoursel…, first of all, where the heck is all this money coming from? And second, there must be some great incentive to push this out. We’re not just seeing it once, we’re seeing it a number of times every year. And so I started doing some research on that, and that’s why I’m pursuing that. I think it’s an area that needs to be looked at, because there’s a lot of interest in China right now to begin with. There’s a lot of interest in whether it’s the current dispute over tariffs and trade, whether it’s over technology transfer, what sort of national security. In our case, it’s over this enormous country that still a lot of Americans just don’t go to when they think about education abroad, but there is a lot of exchange and collaborative academic activity. So I’m kind of looking at what’s going on with that? What is the purpose of it? What’s the funding mechanism of it? What are faculty members who choose not just to go abroad with a group of students for a week or two, but to spend six months… a year… in the middle of their career, and to do so regularly? What kind of impact is that having on them as scholars, but also on the institutions where they work and maybe by the country overall where they live? To my knowledge, there’s nothing comparable like that going on in any other place in the world, given the breadth of it. So I’m curious what’s happening with that. And it also speaks, I think, to the broader subject of internationalization because not that education abroad is old news or conquered. There’s still a lot of challenges with it, but I feel we really have made the case well, that education abroad is important. And I think it’s here to stay no matter what today’s challenges might be, I think it’s here to stay. So what other areas of internationalization really are important. And increasingly, I’m looking at areas of the world that we don’t have as much collaborative activity with and forms of international education that are different than just American students going somewhere, because there’s a lot happening. So I guess, stay tuned on that.

For our work on our campus, we continue to try to expand and diversify our offerings. And so I’m really excited this coming year, I expect our first program out of our new criminal justice major, we have our first program out of the health promotion wellness major this year. So there’s still pockets of our own campus that have not been tapped for education abroad, but slowly and surely, we’re getting to all of them. I think.

Rebecca: That sounds like a lot of exciting things coming down the pike.

Josh: Yeah, we’re working hard. I’ll keep doing it until I can’t anymore.

John: It’s great to hear about all those wonderful things and that expansion.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for sharing.

Josh: Oh, my pleasure. Glad we could do this. It’s a rainy Friday here in Oswego.

John: …which is so unusual.

Josh: I know, right?

Rebecca: Well, thank you again.

Josh: My pleasure. Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.