Category: study abroad

354. International College Students

Posted in diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, international education, international students, learning, study abroad, support network
August 14, 2024

International college students face cultural and financial challenges in addition to those all new college students face. In this episode, Peter Ghazarian and Hayley Weiner join us to discuss strategies institutions might use to support international students.  Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. Hayley is a graduate student in the Higher Education Leadership program at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John:International college students face cultural and financial challenges in addition to those all new college students face. In this episode, we discuss strategies institutions might use to support international 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: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Peter Ghazarian and Hayley Weiner. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. Peter has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. His work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. Hayley is a graduate student in the Higher Education Leadership program at SUNY Oswego. Welcome Peter and Haley.

Peter: Hi.

Hayley: Hi.

John:Our teas today are: … Peter, are you drinking any tea?

Peter: I actually am currently drinking some tea. For the summer, I would say my go to is unsweetened black tea, and that’s what I have right now. It’s hard to get away from it.

Rebecca: It’s perfect.

John:And Haley?

Hayley: I’m drinking chai today.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: …and Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am drinking a Scottish afternoon in anticipation of my upcoming trip in two days.

Peter: That’s exciting.

John:And I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea, which is in the same general neighborhood.

Rebecca: I’m going there too. We invited you here today to discuss your research on the experience of international students in US education. Can you start by helping us understand the current landscape of international students studying abroad in the United States? Like, who are the students? Are they from particular regions, levels of affluence, et cetera?

Peter: Yeah. So I’d say there’s been kind of a sea change in the international student population in the United States since COVID. Prior to COVID, I would say it was predominantly dominated by middle- and upper-class students from China. But then with the trade war, and then with the COVID outbreak and the zero-COVID policy in mainland China, it led to a lot of diversification of international students coming to the United States after COVID. And so we are starting to see a lot more students from India in particular, and also from Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Nigeria. A lot of students coming to the United States from Nigeria.

John:And could you talk a little bit about the research project that you’ve both been working on?

Hayley: Yes, so Peter and I were intrigued by this idea of why international students come to the United States and what their experiences are in terms of seeking employment. A lot of international students express this notion of wanting to gain either internship experiences or post-graduation employment, normally in the form of CPT or OPT and Peter and I are very intrigued, as these students often express positive and negative experiences that are unique compared to what their domestic peers may experience when trying to gain employment of that kind.

Peter: And we’re also kind of interested in these competing personal versus professional elements or aspects to their experience, where they have kind of this imagined experience that they’re going to have as international students. And then there’s this reality and these economic demands that come upon them that they might not have anticipated. And so there’s almost a direct kind of butting of heads there between those two aspects of their time abroad.

John:You mentioned OPT and CPT. Could you define those terms for our listeners?

Hayley: Yeah, so CPT stands for Curricular Practical Training, and this is a work authorization for international students while they’re maintaining their student status, so they can only participate in CPT for employment that is directly related to their major, and while they are in a current student status. OPT, on the other hand, stands for optional practical training, and this is specifically for students after they graduate. And traditionally, students will go for a full-time job, but students can do either part time or full time or even internship. But OPT is specifically for their post-graduation employment.

Peter: And so for a lot of students, that becomes this period where the clock is ticking down if they want to find visa sponsorship through an employer. And so many students see this almost as kind of this grace period after they finish their program to try out with an employer or employers, and hopefully be able to win their support to stay in the United States as a full-time employee there.

Hayley: Yeah, and to add on to what Peter said with this idea of a clock, specifically with OPT, with students finding their post-graduation employment, there’s a lot of federal rules. For example, the latest date that they can start their OPT is 60 days after their graduation date. And as we know, navigating the job market in the current way it is, it’s very difficult for domestic students, international students, or any student in general, to find a job within a specific, constrained timeframe. And international students don’t get the privilege of looking for jobs outside of their major or maybe just taking a job that can earn them a little bit of money while they seek something that is more up to what they’re looking for in the long run. So keeping in mind that there are these federal regulations about the days and there’s this constant pressure sitting on them to find the jobs, even while they’re a student and post graduation.

Peter: Once students become aware of that, it’s almost like the specter that’s haunting them in all of their experiences, whether or not they’re in class or whether they’re building personal relationships with their peers, there’s this creeping dread of this clock ticking down and this need to find some security in life.

Rebecca: Those federal regulations impact the front end of the experience as well. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges international students face in even coming to the United States to study?

Peter: So international students… I would say the biggest struggle is to get that student visa on the front end. So past work that I’ve done related to destination choice among international students has primarily focused on country image and how that influences individual students’ choices. And what I’ve found in the past is that actually much more important than individual perceptions of a destination are the country-level relationships between a student’s home country and the destination, and so they’re much more likely to choose a place that has a good, constructive, positive relationship with wherever it is they’re trying to go. That plays more of a dominant role in deciding whether they go or don’t go to a particular destination. But then there are also other issues that they consider, such as financial barriers and regulations that can get in the way of them easily being able to access higher education within a particular destination. And for the United States, the big barrier, I would say, is demonstrating the ability to financially pay for the study in the United States. It’s for those who’ve had the experience, it’s a bit like applying for a mortgage, but instead of being asked to show that you can pay for it in the future, that you can already pay for the entire house before. [LAUGHTER] And so there’s a lot of financial gymnastics that people go through to try and demonstrate that, even though it is a big ask for them and it can be very difficult for them.

Hayley: Yeah, to jump onto what Peter was mentioning about the financial aspect, I currently work as a DSO in SUNY Oswego’s international student office, and a DSO is a designated school official. So I help students when they’re preparing for their visa interviews or when they’re getting their initial documents, such as a form I-20 to apply for their visa interview. And a very common occurrence is international students needing additional time or having struggles in terms of demonstrating the financial ability, and specifically, international students don’t get the privilege of applying for FAFSA or other United States federal aid programs that their domestic counterparts may get the opportunity to apply for. And so as a result, they have a larger sum of money that they may need to come up with up front, like Peter mentioned. And sometimes, even if they don’t receive the visa on its own, they still needed to come up with that money just to get the visa interview appointment.

Rebecca: And then my understanding is that, depending on where you’re coming from, getting a visa appointment is also a challenge …just scheduling it and making it happen in a time frame that makes sense to start school.

Peter: I’ve had many applicants, for example, from Ghana, who are really struggling with that. It’s just booked out so far in advance, it’s so difficult for them to get an appointment, and the students feel as though they’re very unlikely to be awarded a visa unless they’ve been given some form of scholarship or some sort of financial assistance with the offer. And so students are pretty desperate in that situation.

Hayley: A lot of preparation goes into it as well. Peter mentioned Ghana. I know India is a country where sometimes students are waiting one year or more. I’ve seen students wait years …plural… just to get their visa interview booked. And sometimes students are more eager and they want to have it sooner. And this does result in a different perception of whether they decide to come to the United States specifically to pursue their degrees, or maybe what degree they’re going to pursue, because they’re looking for that longer benefit in terms of financial benefits.

John:Implicit in this discussion is the notion, I think, that most of the students who are coming from abroad are interested in staying here after it, or at least staying long enough to get some training. What proportion of students are coming with the intention of staying in the U.S. after they complete their schooling, and what proportion are planning to return to their countries?

Peter: I don’t have hard numbers for that, but the sense that I get is that a lot of students are pretty fluid in their view of whether they stay in the United States. A lot of students are also willing to go to other third destinations that are English speaking, for example, like Singapore or Hong Kong, or places where English is the lingua franca, and they feel like they’d still be competitive in the job market, but they would be making what we might call a global middle-class wage, although some of the students we spoke to were interested in going back home after getting a bit of experience here, believing it would allow them to move into kind of an elite position back in their home country. In particular, I believe one student was interested in moving for a global energy company that was active within their home country. They believed if they had some energy industry experience in the United States, it would be pretty easy for them to transition into that type of position back in their home country, which is a position for an elite individual there.

John:Given the additional financial requirements for students coming from abroad, it would seem like most of the students who come in would be coming in from above average incomes in many of the countries of origin, which means we’re mostly providing some additional benefits to those who are already relatively privileged in their countries. Is that accurate?

Peter: And that is absolutely accurate. I have actually done a study that looked at whether or not international higher education exacerbates income inequality. In any case, it depends on the host or the sending destination. In some places, it is something that is seen for the elite, and it is almost something that’s required for them to return back to their home and get a position within a large corporation or within the government. It’s seen as kind of a stamp of approval having that international qualification. But in other places, what we’ve started to see is that when we do have people who are from a lower income background who participate in international higher education, it does contribute to intergenerational mobility, and that tends to be an improvement in their social class as a result of their participation. And it just depends on the place. And so in a lot of East Asians countries that are sending students, it is contributing to the inequality, whereas in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, that’s where it’s having more of a positive impact and contributing to economic mobility there.

John:So you’re working on the study of international students in the US. Where’s the sample drawn from?

Hayley: We focus on a phenomenological study where we focused on the shared lived experiences of international students. And just due to our resources, we did use a population of SUNY Oswego students specifically, and these students were a mix of both current students and recent graduated students. And to my knowledge, all of our students were a undergraduate degree level or recent undergraduate alumni.

Peter: There were students from India, Malaysia, Nepal, Bahamas, and Senegal. We did reach out to other institutions in central New York, to their offices of international students and scholars, to ask them to kind of spread the word and help to recruit but we got only a few responses to those initial entreaties, and then when we tried to schedule interviews with those folks, there was no response.

Rebecca: What are some of the challenges that international students face while studying in the US and adapting to the US educational system?

Hayley: I think a big overlooked challenge that international students face, that maybe others may not acknowledge, is they’re kind of starting over in a brand new setting. They not only have to get adjusted to the culture, but there’s some things that maybe people who live in the United States for their whole lives take kind of for granted. So, for example, international students, they’re permitted to have an on-campus job, but they don’t have a social security number. They have to go through the process of applying for a social security number. International Students don’t have bank accounts in the United States, and they can’t even pay for food their first couple days here because they don’t have maybe a card or anything to use at, like the grocery store, or they don’t have a SIM card for their phones to call their families back home. And I think there’s a lot of cultural adjustment that takes place, and students are kind of rushed into being acquainted with United States higher education settings, because not only do they have to deal with all of these cultural adjustments, but they have their schoolwork that piles up almost immediately after they arrive.

Peter: Yeah, and in terms of what we learned just in speaking to participants in the research study, what was kind of surprising or jumped out to us was that they are going through a lot of the same identity development phases that domestic students or local students go through but there’s these additional layers on top of those experiences that they’re having with having to navigate a new cultural environment and dealing with some of this economic pressure that they have on them. For some folks, they’re able to navigate that successfully, and they’re alright, even though it is very stressful. But for others, it is very difficult. For them. There’s always something to worry about, and it makes it very difficult for them to just relax and enjoy the moment, because there’s always some issue or concern that’s kind of lingering in the back of their minds.

John:In terms of cultural differences that they have to navigate, one of those, I think, would be differences in the way in which instruction takes place in US classrooms. Could you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that students face in adjusting to a college environment in the U.S.

Peter: I would say, from our participants, we heard mostly positive things. So the students themselves, coming from a younger generation, felt happy and excited for maybe more of a student-focused approach to instruction and more active learning in the classroom. They appreciated the opportunity to be able to interact with their peers, and felt that it really strengthened their communicative abilities. And so it seemed to be a very positive thing for the vast majority of students. They did mention that it was strange at first and a little difficult to adjust to it, but that overall, it’s something they enjoyed. It’s something they saw valuable as part of this attractiveness of US higher education in general.

Rebecca: Some of the conversations that I had with some international students recently in terms of the kind of classroom setting was the expectation of scaffolding, or the steps to complete assignments that maybe they had an experience in their home country, and not understanding that those things were required, or that those were different kinds of expectations that we have here. So it’s made me as an instructor much more aware of being explicit about what some of those differences might be. Are there other ways that instructors can support this transition into the US system?

Peter: I would say, looking at it almost from kind of this universal design for learning perspective, would be the best way to think about it is that the more explicit and clear you are in general about your expectations, it’s going to benefit not just international students, it’s going to benefit all of the students that are in your course. So making sure that you’re communicating your expectations about assignments in multiple ways, so that the most people can get it or can understand it is going to be really key here in just improving instruction for everyone. And international students will, of course, also benefit from this, but I think everyone can benefit.

Rebecca: So in addition to adjusting to the classroom and some of the adjustments to the U.S., what are some other changes that international students describe?

Peter: So, one of the big things that we heard about was personal change. So students weren’t just adapting to a new cultural environment, it was also having an impact on how they saw themselves and their idea of themselves. And so a few of the students talked about internalizing ways of thinking that they had originally felt were foreign or different or that they were uncomfortable with, but now they saw it as part of who they were, and that they had this interesting experience of moving between selves. So there was their home country culture self, and then there was their US culture self, and depending on the context, they had to be a little bit fluid in their identity and how they behaved and the way that they thought, but that that was an important part of adapting and excelling within a cultural environment is having that flexibility to be able to reinterpret yourself according to the rules of a different game you might be playing according to which culture you’re operating in.

Hayley: And it seemed like when the students kind of described this personal change or transition, like Peter mentioned, it wasn’t really a superficial change that they were describing. They were describing more of like a deeper engagement with the new culture that they were experiencing, and how this deeper engagement worked to reshape their thought processes and their perspectives, and how it was very transformative within their cultural immersion into US higher education institutions,

Peter: There were times when they were able to achieve that imagined or idealized experience of studying abroad that they originally had before they came to the United States. So I think one participant in particular talked about walking home late at night from a part-time job that they held on campus, and how they would never be able to do that in their home country, because it would have been unsafe for them to be walking alone by themselves, and just how they felt so free and they felt so independent that they started crying on the walk home, because they felt like they had achieved what they had dreamed or hoped for by coming to the United States.

Hayley: And that kind of ties on to this, like aspirational kind of rationale that Peter and I focused on on our research as well, where both personal and professional international students have this motivation to come to the United States because there’s dreams that they have. And like Peter mentioned, there was that student who just felt this sense of relief, or just a sense of satisfaction of being where they were at that point, being in the United States, and they felt like they were living what they were dreaming of when they were a child. And then we have the professional side, where they’re international students. I remember one student describing to us how she was thinking of being a doctor, and how in her home country, she knew that being a doctor and being a female doctor didn’t have as much room or level for success. And then another student from the same country mentioned wanting to be a geologist and how, in her home country, geology is not a very popular science, and that more engineering and doctors are from that home country, and how coming to the United States allowed them to have this diversified curriculum that allowed them to fit into these dream roles that they imagined when they were younger.

Peter: And so what we were trying to make sense of these different rationales for studying abroad. We weren’t just doing this like on our own or pulling this out of the thin air. We came into this with a theoretical framework that we adapted from a researcher called Fakunle, who’s based in the United Kingdom at the University of Edinburgh and Fakunle has put together a model for the different types of rationales that international students have for studying abroad. And it’s something that she put together speaking primarily to international students in Europe. And we wanted to see how well it held up while we were speaking to international students here in the United States. And we found that the model applied very well. And those four rationales are an aspirational rationale, an educational rationale, an economic rationale, and then an experiential rationale.

Rebecca: That transitions nicely into thinking about international students for an F1 visa and that OPT or that optional practical training that we talked a little bit about earlier in trying to find a job in their field or discipline immediately following graduation. What is the experience like for students trying to find these opportunities? I know from my own conversations with international students, it can be a struggle. Can you share what some of those barriers are that they might face in this job hunt?

Hayley: I think a very major barrier is that sometimes employers don’t comprehend or understand what it means to be an international student, and believe it or not, with OPT, if a student plans to use their one year of OPT, or in STEM students’ case, they get an additional 24 months of OPT, an employer does not need to provide sponsorship of any kind, and the student is eligible to work for that given employer, so long as that employment is directly related to their major. And sometimes employers get scared or worried about the idea of hiring an international student, either just they don’t have the resources to know what it means, or they’ve never done it before, and that acts as a significant hinder for international students. Now I know when we were interviewing students, there were a few students who mentioned that they were able to easily acquire a job, and it took a few tries, but they were able to get one before they graduated. And we’ve had other students who mentioned that it was much more difficult to get post-graduation employment, and after graduating, it became their full-time job to apply for a job, but keeping in mind that they only had that limited number of days to seek that employment added this extra stress that was very troublesome for the students.

Peter: Yeah, and I would say that it’s not just the employers that are ignorant of the rules that surround OPT, there’s also a concern that support services on campus beyond the international student office, aren’t always aware of these regulations or how they impact a student’s employability, and so students felt like they had to take anything that they heard from Career Services or an internship opportunity that they heard about with a grain of salt, because those are almost always developed or they’re communicated in a way that’s targeted towards local students, and it might not play out the same way for an international student. That opportunity might not exist for them. And they also talked a lot about how they avoided medium or smaller companies as a result of those companies’ lack of awareness or knowledge of OPD or CPT, and the belief that they would just kind of not even consider them seriously because they weren’t aware of how OPT or CPT worked. And so this was a source of pressure for a lot of students. They felt like they were supposed to be the expert of these policies, but they’re very complicated, and for somebody, for example, who’s communicating in a foreign language, trying to express this in a way that calms the nerves of a potential employer is not something that’s easy to do.

John:Might part of that be due to concern that when many new employees are taken on, particularly in technical fields, there’s a lot of on-the-job training that’s provided, which is costly to the firm. And might there be concern on the firm’s part that they might invest in workers who will not be able to get a change in visa status?

Peter: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely a legitimate concern on the part of a company. Interestingly though, it seems like those technical positions are the ones where the students tend to have more success in applying for the positions. And so students, for example, who are going into mining or into IT roles, those are the students who often have the most success in their applications for OPT even though those tend to be the positions that have a lot of on-the-job training that they are going to receive. And I wonder whether or not that’s because those are industries that are traditionally more open to recruiting from abroad, and so perhaps they feel more comfortable with working with these students who might need some sort of sponsorship in the future,

John:And also the fact that there are not that many students in the U.S. majoring in those fields, so that a very large share of employees in those areas are coming from overseas … fortunately, or we’d be in much worse trouble in our country.

Rebecca: It might also be tied to the potential three years of OPT rather than one that is often tied with those particular fields which are STEM designated

Hayley: Based on our interviews with students, as well as just my work in general, I noticed that students who are in STEM designated majors, even for their first year of OPT, before their STEM extension is even granted, they have a much easier time just getting their foot in the door or getting an interview, compared to students who are maybe in the field of like business or communications, and I think that longer extension of OPT could possibly have an impact on an employer making the initial investment into an international student as a first-time employee.

Peter: Right, because one year isn’t really enough time to know for sure whether or not you would want to keep somebody on, but three years, you know then, you know for sure whether or not this is somebody you want to sponsor or not. And so, actually one of our participants made a comment like, “I just don’t think a year is enough for me to prove myself to an employer. And so I don’t think I’ll be able to stay. I’m glad that I have the opportunity to gain that experience here.” But, that person, in particular, really regretted not being in a field that offered the longer OPT because she felt like that would have given her a better chance to be able to stay in the United States in the future. An interesting sort of side effect of that that I’ve seen, is that a lot of institutions are coming up with ways to get their programs designated as being in the STEM fields, in order to make it more attractive for international students. So I I’ve seen, for example, like a business analytics program, that they really focused heavily on data visualization and those types of things in order to promote it and get it approved as a STEM field degree program. But is it actually a STEM field degree program? I don’t know.

Hayley: It is actually, yeah, business analytics was recently added to the list of STEM designated degrees.

Rebecca: What could institutions do or advocate for to minimize some of the challenges for students as they pursue work opportunities?

Hayley: I think, while it may not be the sole solution, a really great solution could be showing international students how to market themselves. I noticed a lot of international students worry that maybe because of their international background, they may not line up with a domestic peer who studied in the United States their entire lives. But that’s not always the case. International students have specific traits such as being able to easily adapt to new cultural settings, or a lot of times they speak even multiple languages, and this is something that their domestic counterparts who are applying for the same jobs, they don’t often have that same trait. And so by being able to market themselves in the current or modern workplace or in the job market itself, I think that would be one way to minimize some of the challenges. I don’t see that as being one of the ways to get rid of all challenges, but it could allow international students to have an upper hand.

Peter: And I think a lot of student support services that are available on campuses now are in this sort of one-size-fits-all approach to supporting students, and that that can be to the detriment of students who are coming from non-traditional backgrounds who are participating in higher education here in the United States. So international students, for example, suffer from this. Non-traditional students might suffer from this. First-generation students might suffer from maybe an older approach to providing support services to students that in the past did serve well, but now maybe we need to be thinking a little bit more carefully about how do we individualize these services that we’re providing, so that we are at least aware of the different types of support that different students are going to need if they’re going to be successful transitioning from higher education into the workplace, and so international students would absolutely benefit from this. And I think that, in order to make this work, there needs to be a little bit more communication across offices on university campuses, because now a lot of these things are very siloed off from one another, and so it prevents, for example, an understanding of students who are receiving accessibility support in their work: searching for a job, for example, or students who are international, who are looking for a job, might have specific needs that they would benefit from if those offices were aware of what one another were doing and they were sharing information a little bit more openly with one another.

John:A while back, we did an interview with someone from the University of Miami who was talking about a program they had there to help prepare students from China for American classrooms in terms of the difference in structure and the difference in expectations, in terms of active participation and discussion. Is that something that perhaps more colleges could do to ease some of the transitions?>

Peter: So there was kind of a boom in those types of programs, in those gateway programs, they were often called, and they met with mixed success. In some cases, they were really helpful, and it helped students to adapt by giving them a soft transition period when they could adapt to the expectations of the U.S. university, before they went into a more high-stakes environment where they were getting graded for their actual content area coursework. However, some people were critical of this. They saw it almost as a money grab by the institutions who were asking these students to complete maybe 24 credits of coursework that wasn’t really going to apply towards a degree, and a lot of the times it was a conditional part of their acceptance into that institution. And so they got kind of a bad rap by especially international students who saw it as just paying for two more semesters but not really receiving a tangible benefit.

John:That particular program was a very short course, just more of an orientation to the differences in the culture of American college education. It was just a short program to reduce some of the shock and to help prepare people for the difference so they could hit the ground running without getting a bit behind in their work.

Peter: Yeah, I think that approach is absolutely positive and something that would be of great benefit to the international students, but again, if it has no credits, and then the funding for that type of program becomes very difficult, because it’s not sustainable in the long run, a lot of the time,

Rebecca: Is there a role that institutions could… should… play in establishing relationships with potential employers or regional companies that might make it easier for students to find placements after graduation.

Hayley: Working in an international office, it’s not traditional for international advisors to maybe reach out to employers on behalf of students, but if an employer were to ask a student a question related to their visa status, or maybe related to OPT or CPT, that would be somewhere where an immigration advisor on a campus can step in. Something recently that the SUNY Oswego International Office did, was we actually heard about students receiving lots of questions from their employers about what it means to be an employer of somebody who is working under CPT authorization or OPT authorization. And so our office actually took the initiative to make a specific web page for those employers for these basic kind of Q&A, frequently asked questions, that we do receive, and it’s actually had a very positive impact. And we’ve received a few compliments from some employers about how this did assist them, and they learned some new information about really what it meant to be a student on OPT or a student on CPT from the perspective of an employer.

Peter: And that more broadly, with all of these workforce development initiatives that we’re seeing take root across the United States, I would say that there’s an increasing expectation that higher education institutions are more directly involved in the transition of their graduates into the workforce, and that they are playing a role in making sure that students, regardless of what major they’re choosing, are being prepared for some sort of future within the economy. And I think that there is some resistance to that, because it challenges some of the foundational ideas about what higher education is about, or the purpose of a higher education institution. But I don’t think it’s something that higher education institutions are going to be able to escape. With the huge amount of money that people are investing in a degree there is an expectation that there’s going to be a return on the money that students put into that and higher education institutions are going to be held accountable if students are not able to be successful after pursuing their degree.

John:Are there any other things that you’d like to share about your study with our listeners?

Peter: The thing that really jumped out to me is as someone in the past who has done primarily quantitative research focused on international students, it was nice and refreshing to focus more on the individual lived experiences. And what really stood out to me was how similar the experiences were between international students and what is recorded in the theory about local domestic students in the United States, and so they’re having these same sort of identity development phases, or they’re going through a lot of these same sort of experiences. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s layered with these other things that are going on that really add a little bit of depth and complexity to the types of things that are happening to the international students here in the United States.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Peter: I would say this study focused on Central New York in particular and so the next logical step would be expanding it out further to other regions of New York State, or to other regions of the United States in general, to make sure that my model holds up according to other experiences in other regions of the country and in private and public and even parochial higher education institutions within the United States. So grasping at the diversity of experiences that exist within U.S. higher education, and making sure that that’s captured in the work, and then moving beyond just defining the problems and the experiences towards highlighting or spotlighting solutions to these issues or concerns that we’re learning about as we’re studying the experiences of international students here.

Hayley: Yeah, and to kind of add on to what Peter was saying, by bringing to light or highlighting or making awareness of the shared experiences of international students, because I think it’s very important to acknowledge that international students still touch just about every office on the campus the same way that domestic counterpart students would. And so this is not just something that maybe international student advisors or individuals who work with international students on a daily basis should focus on, this is something that kind of has stakeholders on all ends of a campus. And so by spreading the awareness or making others known of these challenges that international students face, I think solutions would become more prominent.

Rebecca: Well, thank you both for getting us to think a little bit more about our international student population.

Peter: Oh, thank you so much for having us, and we really appreciate the opportunity.

Hayley: Yeah, thank you so much.

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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.

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323. Explore First Study Abroad Program

Posted in access, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation students, higher education, inclusion, international education, learning, pedagogy, study abroad, support network, teaching
January 10, 2024

Compared to continuing-generation students, first-gen students experience a higher risk of not completing a college degree. In this episode, Sue Roberts, Marianne Young, and Beth Hanneman join us discuss a study-abroad program for first-gen students that is designed to build their confidence, sense of belonging, and help them understand the connection between their education and their career goals. Sue is the Associate Provost for Internationalization at the University of Kentucky. Marianne is the Assistant Vice President for Smart Campus Initiatives at the University of Kentucky. And Beth Hanneman is the Associate Director of Career Advising and Career Education, also at the University of Kentucky.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Compared to continuing-generation students, first-gen students experience a higher risk of not completing a college degree. In this episode, we discuss a study abroad program for first-gen students that is designed to build their confidence, sense of belonging, and help them understand the connection between their education and their career goals.

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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 guests today are Sue Roberts, Marianne Young, and Beth Hanneman. Sue is the Associate Provost for Internationalization at the University of Kentucky. Marianne is the Assistant Vice President for Smart Campus Initiatives at the University of Kentucky. And Beth Hanneman is the Associate Director of Career Advising and Career Education, also at the University of Kentucky. Welcome, Sue, Marianne, and Beth.

Sue: Thank you, we’re glad to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Sue, are you drinking any tea?

Sue: I am not drinking tea right now. But if I were in my normal space, I would be drinking tea. Yes.

Rebecca: Do you have a favorite kind?

Sue: I do. It’s a rooibos tea, a red bush tea.

Rebecca: Wonderful. Marianme, how about you?

Marianne: I’m not currently drinking too, but I have one on the ready. It is a lovely wild sweet orange.

Rebecca: Nice. What about you Beth?

Beth: So I went to Montana this past summer for a yoga retreat and fell in love with Huckleberry. So I now drink a wild Huckleberry tea at least once a week. And that’s what I’m having this morning.

Rebecca: I have never had that. I think it’s a first on the podcast.

John: It is. I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: And I have a Jasmine Dragon Pearl this morning.

John: Dragon pearls?

Rebecca: Dragon pearls. [LAUGHTER]

John: Ok, so we have a mythical tea. [LAUGHTER] We read about the Explore First Study Abroad program in an article in the Chronicle recently. And so we invited you here to talk about that. Could you give us an overview of this program?

Sue: Sure. It’s a new program for the University of Kentucky, run for the first time in summer 2023. We took 60 students, 60 undergraduate students, all of them first-generation students to either London or Dublin for a three- week Education Abroad program focused on career readiness.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about this program came about?

Sue: It came about in many different ways, actually. There were conversations happening on our campus for probably two or three years before COVID, even, among different colleagues, some in the Career Center wondering how they could produce really good career readiness, education abroad programming. So I’m in the office of first-generation student success thinking about how we could do a better job in introducing first-generation students to education abroad. And then in the International Center, in the Education Abroad office itself, there were lots of conversations about how we could partner with colleagues across campus to develop programs that would reach this demographic.

John: One of the things we were really intrigued about was a program that was designed to benefit first-gen students as well as providing those career readiness skills. Could you describe a little bit how this program integrates that career focus?

Beth: Yeah, I’ll take that one. So over in the Career Center, we have the national association called NACE and they have NACE Competencies. And so when you start thinking about any major that a student has, you want them to make sure that they have those skill sets. So when they actually get into the workforce, they’re able to be analytical, they’re able to have communication skills. And what I love about the first-gen program and Explore fFrst within that, is the idea of how do you do that in a global setting. And so when you start thinking about designing this curriculum, and me and Marianne had the privilege of helping to work on that. It was this idea of, we had at least find out what the foundation is that the students had. And so sort of thinking about block scheduling, where a lot of times professors may say we’re going to do one topic and then go to another, I did more of what we call spiral curriculum, where you introduce a topic, and we brought it in here in the United States before we left, so maybe it was resumes where they had to create a resume and work on a resume ahead of time. And then when we’re overseas, we re-introduced resumes to say, “How would you put this Explore First experience on your actual resume? …kind of the same when it came to networking. What does it look like to navigate, to connect with people? Okay, great. We do that here in the United States. But then how do you do that in a global setting. So it was one of those things where you can actually see that reinforced. I also thought that was really cool when it came to interviewing as well, of having that prep for the students within that area.

Rebecca: We have a couple of other episodes of tea for teaching that also talk about the NACE competencies that we’ll link in our show notes for folks that are interested in that particular detail. So we just talked about NACE. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits that students get from it being a study abroad experience?

Beth: Yeah, at least for myself, the world is definitely interconnected. And so what I loved about how we interacted with employers is that we first looked at those that were connected here to Kentucky, and then we reached out with those that would be overseas. So for example, we have a company named Alltech that’s located here in Lexington. And so our students on the Dublin trip was able to actually go see their location. So it wasn’t one of those things that “Oh, hey, we’re just randomly seeing a company.” We’re very methodical about how that connection is. Another company, Compass, for example, does food services for our University of Kentucky health care system. So it wasn’t one of those things of just like, “Oh, we’re just gonna go see a company.” It was one of those elements of not only is making this connection abroad, but how does this actually impact me back home. And we would actually talk about that. Students would be like, “Alright, yes, you see this in another country, how does cultural awareness make a difference? How does being able to navigate and learn about yourself influence who you’re going to be back at UK?” And one of my favorite questions we asked in the interviews that they had to do for one of the assignments was: “If you’re back on the college campus, and you run into the university president, what are two things you tell them about the program?” And it was really cool to hear from the students that like, “I didn’t think I could learn so much about myself in three weeks, let alone three months about a career,” and others have never been on a plane before to navigate what that looks like. So even if you go into the job market, most likely somewhere along the line, you’re probably going to have to travel somewhere and do connections, but to have that support to have other people with them, when they did it for the first time was really impactful.

Rebecca: I love that reflection question. [LAUGHTER] So many benefits to that.

Marianne: I think the global stage also provides a really unique opportunity to just boost confidence with these students, as Beth was talking about, some of our students had never been on a plane. And not only did they navigate getting on a plane, they navigated getting into and past customs and immigration and all of that. And then the most surprising piece to me, in terms of what this looked like in terms of that confidence boost is at the beginning of our core sessions with the students, they put together kind of a: “these are what my goals are currently.” And by the end of the program, not only physically the confidence that you saw as they stood in front of the class, and they were presenting what their new goals were, for some of the students it expanded the opportunities that they were considering. They had never considered what it might be like to be in a leadership position in a global organization, or for the other students, it solidified what it was that they were wanting to do. And that confidence that they had of “Yes, I’m on the right path,” I think came from them navigating situations that they hadn’t been in before. And then being able to connect with different companies and different leadership individuals within the company, who they could see like, “Oh, my gosh, they were first generation as well, and now they’ve moved abroad, and they have this position in the company,” and the confidence that came from being able to navigate an international city as well as “I have confidence in how I’m going to navigate my career pathway,” that was so amazing to see in the sestudents.

Sue: I will agree with that. I visited, I think, three of the four programs. The program was split into four different groups, two went to Dublin two to London. So there were 15 students in each and I think I’ve visited three of them over the course of the summer, and to see that confidence grow, almost hourly, was incredible. And I will say that I think it translates, we’re hoping anyway, that it will translate, into greater understanding and kind of sense of purpose as a student. So you can see the point of your degree, you can see the point of why you’re struggling through this or that course to make it through to graduation. And of course, we want to see good results in terms of retention rates and graduation rates.

Rebecca: I’ve had the opportunity to teach a couple of travel courses where I’ve had students who had never traveled before, some within the US and some travel abroad. And I agree that seeing the confidence growth in students is such a rewarding experience for the instructors as well as for the students. It’s a really powerful experience. But one of the things that I really love that you’re describing is this connection to alumni, and those really specific intentional connections between the businesses locally as well as abroad. That’s a really beautiful component of your program.

John: And one of the challenges that all colleges face is the relatively high DFW rates generally experienced by first-gen students. And by making clear to the students the salience and the relevance of the material that they’re learning, and how this can open up these possibilities to them in a very obvious manner that they may not naturally see, I can imagine this could be really transformative.

Marianne: I think one of the great moments we had as we were visiting one of our employer partners, as Beth was talking about the spiral curriculum, he had talked about LinkedIn profiles and been helping them and then we get to this employer visit. And they start talking about LinkedIn profiles. And it is almost the exact lecture we had given that morning. And students are turning around and saying, “Oh, my gosh, you told us that this morning, and here’s this employer saying this exact same stuff. You were right.” And so we revisited again, and then the next employer, and so it was the aha moment of “Oh my gosh, this is actually something that I’m going to need and I’m going to use as I navigate my career.”

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what a typical day for a student looks like in this program.

Marianne: There was no typical day, but this will kind of give you some activities they may have been shuffled around a bit. We’d start off with maybe some class time reviewing the visit. Maybe we’d have the day before talking about the experiences that the students had, answering any questions they may have had, how they navigated a challenge, just really taking time to connect and then help them build on the information that we were presenting. Once we kind of move through class time, we might have visited an employer in the afternoon and done a site visit where we not only learned about the company but also some of our employers took us through exercises like design thinking at some of our tech companies, or walking us through interviews and resume reviews in terms of a mock opportunity if you’re applying to their company. And then we may also have a cultural visit in the afternoon, visiting a significant landmark in the area or learning about the history and the culture of the particular space that the students were in. And then in the evenings, our students would maybe get together and cook in the residence hall, or they might go out to dinner together. And so generally we had class time and some cultural visits or an employer visit.

Beth: Yeah, exactly what Marianne said, and when you think about over the three weeks, because we were there for three weeks with these students, the beginning part of the classes were more kind of prep and foundation to get them to know what to expect. And so we broke teams of three, and so we would have one person would be the person who was in charge of introducing the group, we had one person that was the photographer, one person that was in charge of the “Thank you” at the end for each site visit. And that was really cool to see him learn collaboration, but also kind of change up and like, “Oh, well, this person is really interested in architecture, so we’re gonna have him be the speaker for this one, and then I’ll do the photography. And this one over here, we as a group, we actually wrote the thank you note together of what that means to follow up within it, kind of expectations within it.” So that was really cool in terms of curriculum, and kind of how we set that beginning. And then closer to the end like Marianne said, was more like review: “What did you learn from it and reflection?”

John: Do students travel with faculty or staff from the University of Kentucky?

Sue: We structured this program so that each group of students was accompanied and led by two professional staff members from the campus. Typically, it was a person from the Career Center, and a person from the Office of First-Generation Student Support. So it gave the students oftentimes very familiar people who understood where they’re coming from, and the skills they brought to the table, but also a person with the career advice ready for them kind of as needed. So it worked really well, I think, to have those program leaders on the ground with the students. And we weren’t hosted by a university, although we did visit universities in both locations. But we worked with a education abroad partner provider called AIFS. And they have provided the classrooms, they assisted us find student accommodation, and they worked on us with the cultural visits.

Rebecca: I think I remember also reading that you did some work prior to going abroad and some coursework there. Can you talk a little bit about what that looked like?

Marianne: We had an opportunity and clusters with the students, we broke them into smaller groups to help prepare them for what to expect as they were preparing for their education abroad experience. And so we covered a variety of topics of what about your luggage? What is a carry on? What is it checked bag? How do you move through security? What can you expect in an airport? What can you expect in terms of customs and immigration? We talked about how to prepare for the weather, how to think about budgeting, and being prepared for different costs of things, or how you might be able to consider all of the different pieces and parts of preparing for souvenirs that you want to get… all those different things, a variety of cluster topics to make sure that our students not only had a connection with the person that they were going to be traveling with, but also the other students. And then it gave us space for any of the questions that students may have had, as they were preparing for this experience.

Beth: It’s just a great way, because a lot of times when I’ve done education abroad, you might meet at the airport for the first time. But what I loved about this program is that we literally got to know each other prior, to at least kind of understand maybe some of the things that they were concerned about as a student. And so then as a staff member, we can be like, “Okay, let me give you some extra resources.” I remember one particular student, I ended up calling her mom and her was on the phone, because she’s like, “Okay, Beth, I know you went through the whole situation of what we need to do for the airport, but my mom has questions.” And I was like, “Sure, no problem. Let’s talk.” And so her mom was like, “Oh, nice to meet you Beth. Her mom dropped her off at the airport, gave me the biggest hug. When her mom picked us up. She was like giving everybody in the group a hug, because we were extended family for them for three weeks.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the timing of the program?

Sue: So last year, it was the first time through, so I think we had to do things very quickly. We had to assemble a team, we had to get these clusters stood up. We had to recruit students, we had to find the scholarships for them and all the rest of it in kind of a hurry. So this year, we’re spacing it out a bit more. So we’re recruiting for summer 24 right now. And we’re going to repeat the program, we’re going to take 30 students in two groups to London and 30 to Dublin in two groups. So we’re excited about that. And then their travel occurs during the summer vacation, early in the summer vacation, so May and June this year.

Marianne: The interesting piece of the timing as well was I was on the first group that went to Dublin, and we were actually able to connect with the group that was coming after us in the airport as they were preparing to go out, so my students were able to pass along some words of wisdom and some thoughts to the group that was coming after them. And so that was a really fun piece with the timing to be able to catch up with each other in the airport.

Beth: In terms of curriculum, the way it was set up, there was one class that everybody was part of. So we actually met as a group virtually, with all 60 students ahead time. So everyone had that basic foundation. And then when we’re actually over there, that was when we did the actual classes for the individual pieces. So I did Dublin two and London one. And so at the same time, we’re having curriculum in terms of giving feedback for the next group coming over.

John: Now, you mentioned that there was some time spent acquiring funding, could you talk a little bit about the funding that was used for this program?

Sue: Sure. And this is a little unusual, I think. It was a surprise to us when the Kentucky State legislature or general assembly awarded some funding to all Kentucky institutions of higher education to support displaced students, so refugee students primarily. As part of that program, they allocated a certain amount of funding also to support education abroad and exchanges. So when we realized that, which was only in the summer before, so summer 22, we thought, “Aha, we could finally make this happen. This thing we’ve all been talking about in different ways about connecting careers, connecting first-generation students with education abroad, and making a real difference for those students, and we could do it at a actually a quite a big scale for education abroad, 60 students is quite significant.” So we seized the opportunity. The trick, then, of course, was to find matching money, because it didn’t cover everything. So we found some money internally at the university, we used education abroad scholarships, our administration at the very highest levels awarded us some funding to kind of back us up if we needed it. So it was a team effort. And this upcoming year, we don’t have the state money. That was a one time deal, so we’re funding it all from our university funds.

Rebecca: So cost is always a concern, I think, for first-gen students, and may be one of the reasons why they don’t even think they might ever go abroad. I know that was the case for me, as a student. I didn’t think I was ever going to get a chance to go abroad, but I got to when I was in graduate school. So can you talk a little bit about what this meant to the first-gen students or if you had trouble initially even getting them to think that they could really actually participate in this program?

Beth: Yes, one of our students on Dublin two got the email about applying and that the program was going to be there when we started doing the recruitment. And he was like, “Is this a scam? Is this true?” We went over to the first-gen office to verify because he’s like, “it sounded too good to be true.” And so once we got the word out that it was, of course, students applied and said, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Sue: You’re absolutely right that it’s the number one barrier of first-generation students is finances. And I think it was the majority of our students on this program are Pell recipients. So first-gen is a very big category. But we did try and make a difference, particularly for students whose financial means were limited. So it was a tremendous opportunity for them. And as Beth said, some of them were very disbelieving at first of the opportunity, they couldn’t understand how this was happening, because they hadn’t thought that this was something that they could ever achieve. And that was another reason why we kept it to three weeks, because many of these students… well, in fact, I would say all of them… were working during the summer. So three weeks away from your summer job and earning is a big deal, and others had family obligations as caregivers, and so on. So that’s the reason why we ended up with a three-week timeframe was partly to be sensitive to those needs. And then in terms of the financing, London is an expensive city, and Dublin is an expensive city. And these are young people, these are primarily first- and second-year university undergraduates. So budgeting to shop, to eat, to go out is difficult, and especially when it’s a different currency and options are different, and the prices are different. So that was a big element that we’ve reflected on since this first time through, and I think we’ll be maybe just a little bit more supportive. We were supportive, but maybe just a little bit more supportive of how to budget when overseas because they were responsible for their own spending money on this program.

Rebecca: What about things like food or other personal costs for travel, was that included in the program?

Sue: So there were a few meals included. There were a few like welcome dinners and things like that included, but by and large students were responsible for their own catering as it were for their own food. And it turned out that was kind of an issue because it takes a bit of knowledge of the stores and what’s available and what’s affordable. It takes a bit of knowledge of how to cook in a budget conscious way and not just grab the processed thing. And of course these supermarkets are unfamiliar and I would say one thing we did think a lot about upon return and when we debriefed this was giving the students a bit more time to adjust to that situation and to learn their options and to cook because sometimes we were so busy with all these things we were doing every day that they didn’t have much time to plan their suppers, or to go shopping and cook so I’ll let Beth and Marianne chime in because they were on the ground, they know more, but that was the kind of impression I got.

Marianne: So, we had some bargain shoppers in my group that found meal deals at like close Tescos, things like that. And so it was always kind of a competition of “Did you know that the sandwich was included in the meal deal?” And so it was a pretty inexpensive breakfast and lunch and sometimes dinner opportunity for students that became somewhat of a game, to figure out, like, what are you going to put in your meal deal this time? And so a lot of our students were supportive in terms of sharing different deals that restaurants were doing. Did you know that on Tuesday, they have a student special where you can get this, this, and this. And so they were really great about sharing some of the tips and tricks and things that they picked up along the way. And then also sharing meals. So going to the grocery, and he brought me to purchase something, while I may not eat this whole thing, but if you split it with me, then I’ll get the next one. And so they were really great, that was really fun to see them kind of helping and sharing deals that they found along the way.

Beth: And one of the things that we did is we actually offered a time if someone wanted to come with me to the grocery store. We did a local one so they could see how close something was if they by chance needed something quick to eat. But then we actually went with them, which was one was a little bit farther away have more of the discount kind of larger what they would think of a supermarket type of thing here in the United States, just because, over there, you kind of buy more what you need, versus “I’m going to have lots in the refrigerator and freezer within it.” And we actually had a couple of times where we had meals together because it was someone’s birthday and we wanted to celebrate. And very similar to what Marianne said that they would be like, “here’s a deal,” or “hey, I’m going to make soup anybody else want?” And we had one student who loved to cook, and others are like, hey, awesome, I will help clean up, or pitch in for some money if you would be willing to be the person that actually wanted to make the meal, and they actually collaborated teamwork that way too. So it was really cool to see.

Beth: One thing I wanted to share is the fact I think people think that education abroad is three weeks, and then you’re done. For us, this is a lifetime connection for these students. So we actually had dinner with both groups separately, so they could get together and meet each other and see each other, I’ll get messages being like “Guess who I saw on campus?” and they have a competition of how many times they see a certain student, be like “I saw them three times this week, Beth, I saw this one four,” but even moreso is this confidence coming back to have to go after the dreams that they want. We had a student who, I’ll be very honest, had a really rough home life and had a lot of confidence issues and got over there had a chance to start talking, had a really good conversation with a couple employers. And we did a networking night where we invited all the employers back and they could come and network with the students. And she had a really good conversation with some of our staff that we actually had come over from UK to kind of see the program as well. And she followed up, wrote a note back to say thank you for this conversation, I appreciate it. This is what I’m looking for in terms of career or job, and that person connected her with to somebody back here in Lexington, she then goes and reached out to that person, met with them, interviewed, and now has an IT position that she never thought possible a year ago. So that’s really cool to actually see them do this steps, it’s one thing for us to say go do, it’s another for them to actually gain the confidence to go and actually obtain it.

Rebecca: What a great story.

John: One of the things that I think you’ve all mentioned is that this creates a really tight bond among the students as well as the connections to the staff members they traveled with. And that sense of belonging has been shown in a lot of studies to be a major factor in student retention. And I think programs like this can create really strong bonds that can help students be more likely to succeed.

Sue: I will agree with that. There were two young women on one of the programs who became fast friends. And I assumed they had been friends forever, and I just was chatting with them, and I said, “You know, you must have known each other a long time.” They said “no, we just met.” And one of them said that she was so excited to come back to UK in the fall… so this semester… and I said “well, weren’t you excited anyway?” And she said, No, she wasn’t, that her freshman year had been a little lonely, and she had not made a good connection with her roommate and was struggling a little bit to fit in. And she said “Now I have a best friend on campus, and we’re gonna have fun the next few years together. And I thought that was awesome.

Marianne: And I’ll brag on our students. They were phenomenal. I mean, when I told people that I was going to go to a foreign country with 15 college students, and we were going to travel the city and we were going to do all of the things they looked at me like, “Why would you take college students to an international city?” They were fantastic. They were supportive. They were curious. They were beyond what you could even imagine in terms of the questions that they were asking and the way that they engaged with the curriculum. We have phenomenal students here at the University of Kentucky and I was lucky to get to take 15 and I have them running across campus yelling my name saying “Oh my gosh, this is the first time that I’ve seen you since you’ve been back on campus” or seeing each other on campus is such an honor to be a part of just that family that we now have. And, like I said, they were the best students you could ever imagine traveling with. I do it again in a heartbeat.

Sue: So one thing that really impressed me about these students, actually taught me a lot about this category “first-generation” which is kind of thrown around is that these students are really amazing. I mean to get to the University of Kentucky, to be studying their majors, to be making good academic progress is an accomplishment for these students and they have the resilience, they have the resourcefulness, they have the curiosity, as Marianne said, to make the most out of education abroad. So these are not students who took this for granted. When they were in London or Dublin, their eyes and ears were open all the time. And they were busy taking it all in, reflecting on it, and they absolutely were some of the very best students I’ve ever seen on an education abroad program.

Rebecca: So do you have plans to evaluate the success of this program?

Sue: So yes, we built assessment into this program from the beginning. So we had a researcher from the College of Education who helped us and administered pre- and then during, and then post-surveys of each student. So she collected information about their responses and reflections to the assignments and to their learning, and also something about their intercultural learning as it were. So we’re going to also track these students and see how they do compared to the peers who didn’t get the opportunity to study abroad in terms of their academic progress and their graduation.

John: Excellent. We look forward to hearing more about how well this program works. We always end by asking, what’s next?

Sue: Well, we want to do this again. [LAUGHTER] So we think it’s working. We’ve got good results so far, assuming that the next summer is also successful. We hope to just keep tweaking it, making it better and better for the students and maybe building it in as kind of a signature program for first-generation students here at the University of Kentucky.

Rebecca: An incredible thing to invest in and offer first-gen students. Thanks so much for sharing the details of your program.

Sue: Thank you for having us. And thanks for your interest in this endeavor.

John: It sounds like a wonderful program.

Sue: Yeah, it’s been a blast to develop and to be part of I must say. It’s been fantastic. And I don’t think we mentioned but perhaps we should that over one quarter of our undergraduate students identify as first generation. So this is a significant population at our university which serves students of all sorts from the state of Kentucky and outside.

John: Excellent.

Sue: Thank you both.

Marianne: Thank you all

John: Thank you for taking the time to join us and to share this wonderful program.

Sue: Yeah, appreciate it.

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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.

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91. International Education

Posted in authentic learning, faculty-led travel, higher education, international education, learning, pedagogy, study abroad, teaching, travel
July 24, 2019

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.

[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.

76. Courses with travel

Posted in pedagogy, STEM, study abroad, teaching, travel
April 10, 2019

International travel can be intimidating, but it provides invaluable learning opportunities. In this episode, Jeffery Schneider and Casey Raymond join us to discuss their course in which students travel with them to study the science of fermentation in a global city.

Jeffery Schneider and Casey Raymond are associate professors in the chemistry department at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Show Notes

Show Notes

Rebecca: International travel can be intimidating, but it provides invaluable learning opportunities. In this episode, we’ll examine a course in which students travel with faculty members to study the science of fermentation in a global city.

[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.

John: Today our guests are Jeffery Schneider and Casey Raymond, associate professors in the chemistry department at the State University of New York at Oswego. Welcome, Jeff, and welcome back, Casey.

Jeff: Thank you.

Casey: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today our teas are…

Jeff: I’ve got no tea, they wouldn’t let me bring in anything more stronger than that.

Casey: I’ve got Earl Grey.

John: And I’m drinking Ginger Peach Green tea.

Rebecca: I have my standard issue English Afternoon.

Casey: It is afternoon.

Jeff: Pip, pip, cheerio.

John: We invited here to talk about your course Fermentation Science in a Global Society. Can you tell us a little bit about the course and how you got away with… uh… how it started?

Jeff: So back in 2005, I think, I was a member of the International Education Advisory Board and we had a big board meeting and they were talking about a way to get more quarter courses and get students interested and I was being kind of a smartass at the time, and I said…

Rebecca: You? [LAUGHTER]

Jeff: Right?

John: At the time.

Jeff: Right? And I said, “Oh, I could teach a course on scotch” and the D ean at the time—I won’t name any names in case she’s listening—but she said, “Oh, that’d be great, because then I can help you guys, I could teach about some of the history,” and everybody at the table is like “Ha ha ha ha ha,” and nobody took it seriously. And I was kind of mad that nobody took it seriously. And so then I went over to Casey and I said, “You know, I just had this talk, and I thought we could do a thing on scotch,” and Casey says, “Well I don’t really know too much about scotch, but I bet we could do something on Belgian beer,” and being easy as I am, I said, “Oh, okay.” [LAUGHTER] And so we proposed the course and, you know, they said, “Okay,” and so we did. They gave us money to go explore and so we ended up taking a little exploratory trip to Belgium in the middle of January.

Casey: In 2006.

Jeff: 2006, yeah.

Rebecca: That sounds really awful.

Jeff: You know, it wasn’t actually that bad. [LAUGHTER]

Casey: I think she was being sarcastic. [LAUGHTER] It was really an opportunity to spin a hobby—I’ve been home brewing about eight years at that point and had started getting Jeff interested in home brewing—to spin the hobby into a class. And so we did that exploration trip in January to work out a few details and then that May took fourteen students to Belgium for, I guess it worked out, nine days at that point in May.

John: And how many times have you done this?

Jeff: Since 2006 we’ve only…

Casey: Only not done three years.

JEF: …not done three years, I think. It was because we couldn’t get enough students. It was really strange for whatever reason, there was one point—I hate to say it—but I think it was around that time when terrorism was kind of a big thing and parents were a little reluctant to send their kids and so we did see a dip then, but then all of a sudden, it’s like, “I guess everything’s okay.” We’ve only never done it three times but we’ve tried every year since.

Casey: And I think in one case, we were proposing to go back to the Czech Republic, we had done one trip there. And I think that wasn’t just maybe not as a high-interest location for some students as others. But we’ve done Belgium, we’ve done Scotland—which is where we’re going back to this year—we’ve done a trip to Munich, Germany, and we’ve done a trip to Amsterdam and the surrounding areas in the Netherlands.

Rebecca: So SUNY Oswego has a number of quarter courses, which you mentioned that this is one of. Why does this particular format work so well for a class like this?

Casey: So the format is: it ’s seven weeks of instruction on campus and then travel over spring break or in the case of the second half of spring semester, travel in May after graduation, and it really gives the students a chance to have a study abroad experience without committing to a whole semester. And in some majors, it’s hard to commit a semester without falling a whole year behind. And there’s also students that are hesitant to go that far for a whole semester. And we have always said that, “Yeah, we’re interested in this. We know students are interested,” and it’s more about giving those students the opportunity to experience something abroad than the actual content that we’re covering.

Jeff: And we’ve always taken quite a few students and a lot of them have never been out of the country before and a lot of them have never been outside of New York State before, and so it’s a good opportunity for them because it really is a different clientele between the quarter course students and the whole semester students. It’s the kids that haven’t traveled before, they’re a little afraid, they don’t know if it’s for them, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to learn a language. Do I have to learn a language?” and so it just gives them an opportunity. But then we’ve had kids after that, we’ve kind of given them the travel bug and they just go off and travel and I know one student in particular now she’s actually living in France.

Rebecca: That’s been my experience too, teaching the quarter classes with travel. I think that’s who those classes are really designed for. What have you found the balance of course content is in terms of helping students learn to travel, the subject matter you’re covering, and then also the country you’re traveling to? Because you’ve gone to different places.

Jeff: In our course we tried to have science just about every course period. You got to teach them about money, you got to teach them about what they’re going to expect, you got to teach them what not to do because that’s always important. And if it’s a place where English is not the native language, then we got to teach them a little bit of language as well. And if you take them to someplace like Scotland, where English is the native language, you still have to teach them a little bit as well, because you can’t understand a word they say.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the science that you cover?

Casey: So one of the things that we try to focus on is how broad fermentation is and how long we’ve been doing it and it was only relatively recently that we really understood what was happening in fermentation in making bread, in making beer, in making wine, in making cheese.

Jeff: When Casey says “we” he means it as “we” as a society.

Rebecca: Not you? You’re not making cheese in your basement? [LAUGHTER]

John: Not for centuries.

Jeff: Not right now, but we have.

Casey: Not right now. We have made cheese and that’s one of the things as well that we do with students in terms of getting them a sense of the science outside the classroom. We usually do a demonstration day where in the past we’ve had a couple people maybe brewing beer, we’ve done a session where we’ve actually gone through the cheese- making process so they can kind of see how that works. The very first time we did it, it was an absolute disaster.

Jeff: It was terrible.

Casey: But we’ve learned.

Rebecca: You’re going to tell us about that then, right?

Casey: The simple fact of the matter is, we squeezed too much of the liquid out of it and it became a hard rock. [LAUGHTER]

Jeff: But I tell you what, we took that cheese to Belgium with us and we did a day trip to Amsterdam and we all sat down—there was construction outside of Centennial at the time—but we sat down outside the little barrier and everybody…

Casey: …tried…

Jeff: got that cheese down. [LAUGHTER]

Casey: It was bad. But we’ve learned. It really is to give them a sense of appreciation of the science behind it all, not to make them experts, so that when we’re visiting breweries, or cheese production, or distilleries, they have a sense of the science behind it. We’re not trying to make them experts in it and so that’s really the balance. And we’ve had everywhere from first- year students to graduating seniors and art, english, history majors, chemistry, biochemistry, so we just kind of have to take each class as a group and figure out what the balance is.

Rebecca: Do you tend to have many science students as part of your student body?

Jeff: We have, but that also fluctuates. There will be some years when a chemistry major says, “Oh, hey, so and so, do you want to take this course? I’m taking it…” and then all of a sudden you’ve got a mass of chemistry majors or science majors taking the course. Other times you get maybe one or two, so it’s varied.

John: How many hours does a class meet if it’s a quarter course?

Casey: Most of the quarter courses on our campus meet one hour a week and then have the rest of the content delivered when they’re abroad. Our course, we meet two hours a week just to be sure we get the science covered as well as the travel… the location information… covered. And so we meet two hours a week on campus, and then we go abroad for in general eight to ten days.

Rebecca: You hinted a little bit at some of the kinds of places that you visit when you travel. Can you talk a little bit more about what your in-country experience is like?

Casey: It is pretty varied, and it certainly depends a little bit on where we go. Besides visiting things specific to fermentation, we try and also visit things that are historical or cultural. Many times, but not always, we will be in a couple different destinations, cities, instead of just staying in one location the whole time. And all of the transportation that we do, we try to do on local buses and trains. We very rarely have a charter service. Part of the reasoning for that is one it’s easy and two it gets the students a little more experience of what Europe’s like.

Jeff: And it also keeps the cost down.

Casey: Yup.

John: How do you prepare students for the trip in terms of preparing them for the culture and the experiences in advance?

Casey: I think part of it is getting them a few common phrases, if it’s a foreign language, getting them a sense of what the customs are, but likewise, letting them know that it’s not that different. Sometimes it’s a case of, “I need to pack absolutely everything.”

Jeff: Right, they think that we’re going to a third-world country and so we have to remind them: “You know, Belgium is a first-world country. The Netherlands is a first-world country. You can buy toothpaste, it’s okay. You don’t have to pack it. Or if you forget it, it’s not the end of the world.”

Casey: And sometimes it’s a fun experience to have to go, “Okay, what am I trying to find?”

Jeff: Of course, if a student gets sick, and they have to go to a pharmacy, that’s also an interesting time.

Casey: Which we have had occur.

Jeff: Our inaugural experience, we had a young lady terribly sick and she went to a pharmacy. She got some cough medicine and we said, “That’s great,” until Casey read the bottle and it said it was loaded with codeine. [LAUGHTER] And so she was taking it easy after we said, “Hey, don’t chug that.” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: The benefit of having a scientist with you on a trip. [LAUGHTER]

Casey: Yeah.

Jeff: Well, yeah.

Casey: Partly. But I also know in many European countries, the pharmacists have a lot more leeway. You still have to talk to them to get ibuprofen or aspirin, but they also have the ability to sell you hydrocodone cough syrup, if that’s what they think you need. So things like that in terms of preparing students.

Jeff: You know, how to deal with money, right? That’s always the hard part. We’ve had kids lose their debit card, we’ve had kids bring traveler’s checks, and over the years we’ve built up a list of no’s and we just tell them, “Bring your debit card, that’s all you need.” Make sure though that it’s current because the one kid’s was not current and that’s why his card was eaten by the machine. And so then, of course, that was on a weekend and so we had to loan him a little cash. I don’t remember if it was me or Casey, but one of us floated him some cash. So we also have to be a bank while we’re over there. [LAUGHTER] My son went on that first trip with us, and everybody started calling me the international bank of dad.

John: What were some of the best experiences you had during the travel component?

Jeff: Personally I love traveling so I think all of the experiences are good. A kid will say something funny or whatever and everybody has a good time because even the kid who said it realizes, “Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make sense, does it?” I think it’s just fun being with the kids. There have been some probably not so great times, but…

Casey: …only a couple.

Jeff: …but only a couple.

Casey: Only a couple of situations where we’ve traveled that have been, let’s say, taxing and not ideal.

Rebecca: Like? [LAUGHTER]

Jeff: I can think of one in particular.

Casey: Basically, students thinking they knew what they were doing and deciding they were going to go off on their own and got themselves stuck in a different city overnight. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Oops.

Casey: Because they basically decided to do things on their own without consulting with anybody that actually knew what was going on. And it happened to be a day that was a holiday in Europe.

Jeff: And they just left us a note. And finally somebody came and knocked on my door late and said, “Uhh so-and-so and so-and-so and s o-and-so are nowhere to be found.” I said, “Oh boy,” “But they left us this note.” I said, “Oh, what does the note say?” And it said, “Went off to discover mother Europe,” and they ended up not returning til the next morning.

John: You brought most of them back to Oswego, right?

Jeff: We’ve never lost a student. We’ve wanted to. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Actively tried.

John: They’ve always found their way back.

Jeff: But we’ve never lost a student. We’ve never had to send anybody home early.

Casey: No.

Jeff: Although it certainly, we may have…

Casey: That incident was close.

Jeff: That was close. And we probably wanted to, but honestly—and hopefully no future students are listening—honestly, we didn’t want to deal with the hassle.

Rebecca: It’s too much work, right?

Jeff: It’s a lot of work.

John: Yeah.

Casey: It’s a case, though, that by and large, it’s gone really well.

Jeff: Yeah I’d say overall, we’ve done well. I think the students always give us glowing reports back as well. They have a great time and they learn a lot. And I think sometimes they don’t realize it until after they’ve come back that they’ve actually learned a lot.

Casey: We make them keep a journal. We have six, seven, eight specific assignments we want them to write about, but we really stress, “Use it as a log,” so that you can look back on it and remember. And that’s, I think, where they really start to realize how much they’ve learned if they take it serious and write everything. In terms of losing students—and trying to lose students—one of the challenges we sometimes have is getting the students to go off on their own. They want to stay right with us all the time and as part of their experience they need to, in small groups—not alone, but small groups—go do your own thing.

Jeff: Yeah, some of them like to be glued to you at the hip and it’s because as I said before, not everybody has traveled. They’re afraid, it’s a new place, the language might be different, they just don’t know. And you really see a difference between whether or not you’re taking a freshman versus whether or not you’re taking a senior.

Rebecca: What have been some of the challenges and opportunities of co-developing and co-teaching this class?

Casey: One of the situations we encountered is we developed this and even the very, very first year we did it, there were people on campus that were incredibly uncomfortable of us teaching this class. They were very concerned that we were teaching a class all about drinking and that’s not the case at all. And Josh in International Ed…

Jeff: This is not a “how-to” course in how to drink.

Casey: No, and we’ve heard it several times that in many respects because it’s a course that involves alcohol and it’s all about appreciating alcohol and understanding it, we have less problems with drunkenness than some of the other study abroad classes that don’t really address it. But that very first year or two that we did teach the class there was a lot of skepticism and concern by several people on campus about what we were actually doing.

Jeff: Well, and even if somebody would mention the fact, “Oh, you teach the beer course, hahaha,” right, and they kind of give you this kind of snide look like, “You’re a joke” kind of thing. Say what you will, but we know what we do and we do it well and kids get an understanding of fermentation and all the processes that go into it and an appreciation.

John: And it is applied chemistry.

Casey: It is.

Jeff: It is applied chemistry, applied biology, it’s applied science. One of the things that people have to keep perspective of is that alcohol is a multibillion dollar industry, right? …a multibillion dollar global industry. And people don’t appreciate that.

Casey: Sometimes it’s juggling who’s scheduling what because we do almost all of our own planning and organization for the study abroad component.

Jeff: I would agree. Just even this latest trip, Casey and I are both trying to plan hotel accommodations and it’s like, “Hold it. Did you talk to someone?” “No, wait, I thought you were,” “Oh? No I didn’t.” So that’s probably one of the challenges. Opportunity, I don’t know, we get to work together.

Casey: Yeah. And it provides…

Jeff: Doing something we like.

Casey: Yeah. It provides a little extra coverage in those times when it’s like, “Oh, I can’t quite get to class tonight. Can you cover?” and it gives us that balance as well. It gives us a little more balance when we’re abroad. Kind of keeping track of students especially in the trip’s locations where we’re moving destinations and hopping between trains.

Jeff: Right. One of us will be in the front, one of us will be in the back, Casey will do a count, I’ll do a count, hopefully they’re the same. [LAUGHTER] So it does make it a little easier.

Casey: Thinking about trains, challenging instances. When we went to Munich, we took the train from the airport to the city.

Jeff: Yeah, we did.

Casey: Two of the students didn’t realize we were serious when we said, “When the doors open at the next stop, get off,” because the doors closed before they got off. We were able to signal to try and get turned around.

Jeff: If this was visual, you could see me waving like they did, because as they’re going they’re just “Ugh.”

Casey: Now what? [LAUGHTER] And it happened to be two students that year that didn’t have a cell phone that would work in-country. So that’s something that’s changed a lot since we first taught courses, the wireless and cell phone and technology. But you know, 40 minutes later, they’d find their way back to that.

Jeff: They had the presence of mind to get off at the next stop, cross the tracks, get back on, and come back to where we were. We didn’t move, we waited, and not having cell phones when we went to Belgium—must have been 2011—we took my daughter with us. I took all of my kids when they were 16-years-old, with my daughters. And it just happened that it was always to Belgium. Well this time we took a day trip to Amsterdam and…

Casey: No, we stayed in Amsterdam.

Jeff: Oh we did. That’s right we did.

Casey: We landed in Amsterdam to stay there.

Jeff: And we’re wandering around and…

Casey: Introducing them to the city that first day.

Jeff: And all of a sudden…

Casey: We sent everybody to ATMs to get money because we just got in the country.

Jeff: And it’s like, “Hold it. Where’s my daughter?” She was only 16. I said to my wife, “Where is she?” so we’re going one direction and I think somebody told me where they had seen her and we went that way and turns out, Casey and his wife and my daughter are going a different way looking for us and I was just…

Casey: You had like, two students with you and I had the other 10 with me.

Jeff: …round and round and round. And yeah, so cell phones would have been helpful. But I mean, you think about it even seven, eight years ago, cell phone technology is vastly different. So that can be a challenge sometimes. And the lesson I took away with that is don’t take my own kids with me. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: The lesson of the 40 minute wait is nobody else wants to be that kid next time, so it’s like, lesson learned the first 40 minutes we’re here.

Casey: And it’s something we tell classes now. We’re serious when we say get off the train, get off the train.

Rebecca: This is why you don’t take too much luggage with you. [LAUGHTER]

Jeff: We do tell them to pack light. I will admit that as I’ve gotten older I tend to check a bag rather than carry it on but Casey will get there, he just doesn’t know it yet.

John: What would a typical day be like while you’re in-country?

Casey: Usually see everybody at breakfast, it’s kind of a standard.

Jeff: We tell them, we want to see, we don’t care if you eat—even though breakfast is probably included—but we got to see you at 9 o’clock or whatever it is.

Casey: And then usually we’ll have half of the day planned… programmed… scheduled. There’s cases where it’s a whole-day situation but usually we’ll have half-day things planned so we’ll do that and then they’ll have a chunk of open time to explore things that they’re particularly interested in. We certainly make recommendations and suggestions. But we found it’s really valuable to have the free-time for them to do things they want and do their own exploring.

Rebecca: But I bet the free time is really good for you.

Casey: It is. [LAUGHTER]

Jeff: Maybe…

Casey: It is. And it also gives us the flexibility to adjust our schedule in some cases. If we’ve had something planned outdoors and it’s a really cruddy day and we know the next day is going to be better, we’ve been known to flip things around to make it work. The very first year, our flight was six hours late leaving New York City which then affected things we were going to do that first day in the country. And we just started flip flopping things and we made it all work, but it was a lesson immediately: Build in that flexibility.

Rebecca: I can imagine that by students taking this class if they weren’t interested in science or didn’t know that much about it, that when you see how it’s applied and have a practical application that maybe they didn’t experience in high school that they might actually develop an interest in an area that they didn’t know they had an interest in.

Casey: I’ve spoken with people, some parents but others and they asked what I teach, and I say chemistry. “Oh, my student will never have you for class,” or, “I would have never had you for chemistry,” I said, “Well, you might take the fermentation science course.”

Jeff: “What?”

Casey: Wuh…. huh… what? And it’s really about—I said many times—it’s sort of enticing students into a course based on the topic. I usually actually say, “Sucker them into a course,” because they think it’s going to be about something, but it really is: give them that basic science that appreciation, but really give them a chance to experience something different, something very eye opening.

Jeff: And we’ve had kids actually go on and work in the industry, and being brewers and distillers.

Casey: Yeah.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Jeff: What’s next? Well I know come spring break, Casey’s taking a bunch of kids to Paris.

Casey: It’s an honors course, related to food science.

Jeff: And I’ll be taking a dozen kids to Dublin for spring break. That course is not about drinking.

Casey: You talk about challenges. This year has been a different challenge because Jeff’s planning Dublin, I’ve been planning France for spring break, and then we’re planning Scotland in May. And so I’m trying to keep things straight.

Jeff: It was hectic. It was hectic.

Rebecca: I made that mistake. The first year I took students abroad I planned another U.S. travel class in the same year, so like Q3 was a travel and then Q4 was. I hear you, I learned my lesson. [LAUGHTER]

Jeff: Well, no, the lesson is you just have to keep practicing.

Rebecca: O, oh, oh yeah.

Casey: Thankfully Jeff’s done Dublin several times.

Jeff: I’ve done Dublin several times now and I basically plan it as soon as I get back after spring break. This year I’ll have the next year planned already or pretty close.

Casey: And we’ve been to Scotland so most of that was set. At least, we knew what we wanted to do, it’s just a matter of finalizing things. And we’ll do the same thing, end of May we’ll come back and we’ll start strategizing, “Okay, what’s the location for May ‘20?”

Jeff: I mean even before that, we’ve already talked a little bit about the location for May ‘20.

Rebecca: Which is going to be?

Jeff: Well, we haven’t decided yet.

Casey: It may be the Netherlands, it may be Munich.

Jeff: I love Amsterdam and I love Munich as well.

Casey: I haven’t put on his radar that we could go to Cologne.

Jeff: Well, we could go to Cologne… ah…Decisions.

John: And what is your class in Ireland?

Jeff: The class in Ireland, that’s GLS 100. It’s a Global Cities course and so there’s always some question as to, you know, is Dublin really a global city? Because there’s some kind of fancy-pancy definition of what a global city is and I’m not quite sure if Dublin actually fits but I think it’s a global enough city. It’s cosmopolitan, it’s got a lot of political problems, especially now with Brexit coming up. It’s a fun course. We talk about culture of Ireland and Dublin and the history and we spend a lot of time on the 1916 revolution and things like that and so kids get a lot of information. I only meet one night a week, like most global courses, and then we’ll be gone for all of spring break. In fact, we’re going to leave the Friday before spring break, and we’ll be coming back midnight or one Monday morning.

John: Well, thank you. This has been fascinating.

Jeff: Thank you.

Casey: You’re welcome.

John: It sounds like an interesting class.

Rebecca: Thank you.

Jeff: Thank you.

John: We’ve recorded this podcast a couple weeks early, which is somewhat new to us because we’re often recording these within a week of their release. But as we were completing editing on the podcast, we got an email from Casey who noted that perhaps some things can go wrong on trips that they had not yet experienced. So Casey, would you like to tell us a little bit about what happened?

Casey: Yeah, John. I led the spring break class to France, as I indicated at the end in the last podcast. And I recalled you asking about challenging or difficult situations that occur. And in our case, it reminded me that I probably needed to do this little addendum. Specifically, we were scheduled to leave Syracuse Friday afternoon and we had all 13 students at the airport on time. We actually even boarded the plane Friday afternoon, and the pilot came on and made an announcement that during his walkthrough, he noticed a small leak. He wasn’t sure what it was, they were bringing mechanics over to look at it. A couple minutes later, he comes back on and says, “They’re not sure, we need to de-plane so they can figure it out.” And so everybody’s off, everybody gets in line to the ticket counter for fear of missing connections and rebooking and lo and behold, they weren’t sure what the problem was. When they finally did find the leaking part, they didn’t have a replacement, and it wouldn’t come in until maybe six o’clock Friday night, in which case we would have missed our international flights. And so I contacted our travel agent, she couldn’t really do anything because it was all airport control. I ended up working with a supervisor, just by chance, he pulled me out of line to try and rebook 15 of us on a single ticket. And so as he was working with corporate trying to map this out and come up with a plan, we ended up needing to split our group to come up with options because there just weren’t seats available leading into spring break, dealing with some weather issues that were happening, and the fact that the 737 Max grounding had limited some of the airlines—not ours—but there just weren’t seats available. And so I agreed to split the group, my wife would go with one part, I would go with another part and we came back with our new itinerary, instead of a direct flight from Washington D.C. to Paris, the first group of us was going to fly from Washington D.C. to Chicago, to Frankfurt, and then to Paris. The second group was going to fly from Washington D.C. to Zurich to Paris. So we get in a couple hours apart… day late… which would affect our train travel to Lyons because our first four days was going to be there. And so it’s like, “Well, it’s the best we can do, that’s what we’ll do.” And so we stayed in a hotel Friday night as a group, got to the airport Saturday morning, and by about 9:30…10 a.m. Saturday morning, they had completely canceled our flight because they still didn’t have the right repair part and they couldn’t bus us to Washington D.C. So the next thing we knew they were going to bus us to New York City so we could have a direct flight from JFK, but they couldn’t find busing to get us to JFK. And so then they rerouted us on a Sunday night like from Washington D.C. to Paris, with the promise they would get us to Washington D.C. Saturday night. So now we’ve spent all of Friday afternoon sitting in the airport. Now we’re going to spend all day Saturday sitting in the airport. And some of the students got together with parents that were local, some of the students hopped an Uber and ran to the mall to kill some time. But we finally got out of Syracuse on the fixed plane. Saturday night about 8:30 got to Washington D.C. about 10pm, got into a hotel there—the airline put us up—and then Sunday morning, students studied, did various things, but we all got to the airport Sunday afternoon, and finally got on our flight to Paris. So we arrived in Paris Monday morning instead of Saturday morning. by Saturday afternoon, when I knew we’re going to miss two days and that the things we had planned on Monday were not going to be possible, we just weren’t going to make it, and that was a key reason for going to Lyons, I all of a sudden was in the mode of, I need to completely reconfigure the whole front end of my class. And so I started working with International Ed and the person on the ground in Paris. We have to try and get two additional nights of lodging in Paris, just cancel the whole Lyons part of it, try and recruit rail ticket expenses, cancel the hotel there—which did cost us two nights of lodging, but not all four—and then try and figure out what am I going to do in Paris with this group food related in the two days now that I have? So it really wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that I finally started to feel comfortable and relaxed on this trip just because of all the upheaval. The crew at the Syracuse airport that was trying to help us… the person there… was outstanding. He was doing everything he possibly could to help the class. The students were really pretty good. They understood that was not a lot we could do other than keep pushing along. Some were concerned, some were upset, there were certainly frustration and disappointment for all of us, especially as we had to cancel things we were planning to do. But it was a situation that you hope you never really encounter. But it’s a case of, you really have to be ready for almost anything. And as Jeff and I indicated before, you’ve got to be ready to be flexible. And this was really an extreme case of it because all of a sudden, I’m rescheduling basically half of our overseas experience completely on the fly and largely with an internet connection through a cell phone.

John: Flexibility is important. There are a lot of moving parts there. And if one of them stops moving, it affects all the others.

Casey: Yeah.

John: Overall, how did it work?

Casey: Overall, it worked out really as best as it could under those situations. Once we got into France, everything went fine on the ground there. It actually worked out amazingly well that the extra two hotel nights were in the same hotel we originally going to be in. And I discovered at least one activity in Paris as a substitute… a cheese tasting that worked out outstandingly for the students and it was a great experience. So in the grand scheme of things, I think it all worked. We’re disappointed to have missed a few things that we had originally planned, but I think the students still benefited from what happened and the stress that I experienced didn’t really negatively impact the class.

John: Great. Well, thank you for the update.

Casey: You’re welcome.

John: And we look forward to hearing more stories about more pleasant travel experiences in the future.

Casey: Me too.

[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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fisher, Chris Wallace, Kelly Knight, Joseph Bandru, Jacob Alverson, Brittany Jones, and Gabriella Perez.

22. Transhumanism

Posted in authentic learning, coil, collaboration, higher education, interdisciplinary projects, learning, study abroad
March 28, 2018

Does teaching a course with a team of three instructors across two continents seem like an impossible task? Now imagine that same course examining how the boundaries between humans and machines are increasingly blurred? In this episode, Damian Schofield joins us to discuss an interdisciplinary intercontinental collaboration in which students from opposite sides of the globe examine what it means to be human.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Does teaching a course with a team of three instructors across two continents seem like an impossible task? Now imagine that same course examining how the boundaries between humans and machines are increasingly blurred? In this episode, we’ll look at one interdisciplinary intercontinental collaboration.

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.

John: Our guest today is Damian Schofield, who is a Professor in the Computer Science department at SUNY Oswego, and he is also the Director of the Master’s Program in Human Computer Interaction here. Welcome, Damian.

Damian: Thank you.

John: Ginger peach white tea.

Damian: I’m drinking Yorkshire Tea (because I’m English) with milk.

Rebecca: Of course. [LAUGHTER] There’s no other way, right? I’m drinking a turmeric ginger green tea.

Damian: See, I would argue that those aren’t teas. They’re warm fruit beverages.

Rebecca: Yeah… Well, you know, that’s sometimes what you need.

John: A few times now, you’ve offered a course in transhumanism, which involved collaboration across departments and across continents. Could you tell us a little bit about that course?

Damian: Well, first what most people ask me is what is transhumanism?

John: …and I suppose that’s a good place to start.

Damian: So, transhumanism is the study of how, in the future, humans will merge with technology. It’s already happening to some degree. We often use the word cyborgs. I would argue that most of us are already cyborgs. Wearing glasses, you’re augmenting one of your senses, and it changes fundamentally who you are as a human being having that augmentation. Having a device in your hand that connects you to all the knowledge in the world, changes who you are. But in this class, we look into the future. With the ever accelerating rate of technology development, how we are going to merge with that technology and each other, and actually change from being human to what we call post-human. Humans are going to evolve into another species through technology eventually, and very few people are talking about this. So, that’s what the course involves.

I’ve been obsessed with this technology for a long time. I even have a computer chip implanted in my hand, so I wanted to do this course and when I tried to set it up I came up with this idea to do something a little bit special by interacting with multiple departments, with other universities, with international collaborators, and to run a course that was probably something different to anything we’ve seen on this campus before. Patrick Murphy, from the English department here at SUNY Oswego, did some lecturing on the course and he mainly dealt with philosophical aspects of transhumanism. We also linked with Lisa Dethridge from RMIT University in Australia, and she mainly dealt a lot with the media aspects of the technology.

John: What was the mix of students in terms of their backgrounds?

Damian: The first year we ran it, there was a mix of students from the English department and from the Computer Science department, and they were predominantly graduate students. Over the years we’ve evolved the program, and last time I ran it, they were predominantly from Computer Science, but we allowed undergraduates to take it as well, as an advanced topics course.

John: …and what were some of the things you did in the course? I seem to remember something about robots?

[LAUGHTER]

Damian: …a lot about robots. It was a fun course to teach because we make the students read science fiction. We watch a lot of science fiction movies. We use episodes from Black Mirror, before it was on Netflix and famous. We do a lot of teaching computer science theory about artificial intelligence and robots, but we also teach a lot about philosophy… media…. So, it’s a truly multidisciplinary course, with different aspects taught by different professors.

John: …and it pulled all the students out of their comfort zones at some of the times.

Damian: Absolutely… way beyond. It receives some of the highest feedback we’ve ever got for any class in the department. The students… the way the response of the class… One of them came up to see me the day after a class, and said: “I left the building and walked straight past my car, and carried on walking. I walked halfway across campus before I realized, because I was too in depth, thinking about what we’ve done in the class.” …and there was another student who was very quiet in the class and I remembered talking to her towards the end of the semester, asking if she was enjoying the course, and she said my mind is blown seven times every class. I just don’t feel I can say anything. I’m thinking too much. So, it really got them. They always told me that after each class they thought: “Well, he can’t beat that one…” [LAUGHTER] …and doing something else in every class… we’d take them somewhere further into this topic.

John: So, it was probably a bit of a stretch for people who were majoring in Computer Science or Human Computer Interaction to study philosophy, and then that reversed a little bit later, from what I remember.

Damian: I love taking students out of their comfort zones. In my introduction to HCI class, when I’m teaching colour, I teach it using art theory… which all the Computer Science students having to study paintings…. It’s a challenge for them. It’s something they’re not used to. It takes them out of that comfort zone, but I like that kind of bringing in these other disciplines. So what surprised me with the philosophy was how much the Computer Science students embraced it, and when Patrick would come in and and talk philosophy, the students would surround him at the end of class full of questions…. and we’d give them extra readings and they would read it all, and then come back with questions every time. A lot of the course ran through a kind of flipped classroom mechanic, where we were handing out readings and then discussing them in class. It runs in a graduate seminar format and it always amazed me that everyone in the class read every reading, and even the undergraduates. I’m used to it with grad students, but undergrads sometimes don’t always do the readings, but in this class they did.

Rebecca: In addition to discussions in class, what else did students do? …with the information? What were their outputs?

Damian: The traditional research paper was part of it, but one of the interesting things we started doing in this class, especially working with Lisa, is working on film scripts. So the students take some of the issues that they’ve been dealing with in the class, and have to write intelligent thoughtful narratives that deal with those issues that can be filmed… and we set different topics every year… and that’s where they work with the Australian students… on generating these scripts. …and then, in a number of years, we’ve actually made the films. Mostly the films involve our robots, and we use the robots as actors. One of the interesting kind of research outputs from this that we’ve published on quite a bit, it’s that if I talk about the play Romeo and Juliet, most people immediately imagine young, white, teenagers… male and female. If we remove the race.. remove the gender… remove the age… remove all of those cultural factors and you’re left with two non gender nonspecific robots, what happens to the play? Does it change? …and we challenge those questions a lot in this course.

John: So, the students had to learn (at least some of them had to learn) how to program the robots, and how to write scripts, and how to produce videos.

Damian: Exactly. Some of the students had to learn how to program the robots. Fortunately, there’s an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that they can learn rather than a programming language… and we don’t ask them to do too much of that, because this is not a programming course this is a theory… philosophical course… thinking about the nature of humanity and how it’s going to change. But, being able to do something practical as well is always an interesting thing for the students to experience.

Rebecca: You spark some people’s fancy about what transhumanism is, like what would you encourage them to read?

Damian: I’m a little biased because I have my favourites. So, the work of William Gibson, which is old now… but things like Mona Lisa Overdrive, Neuromancer, and were the ones that started everything… and Neal Stephenson Snow Crash. They’re the classic novels in this area. The film The Matrix was completely based on the works of William Gibson. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, those would be the ones to look up.

John: We’ll include links to these in the show notes, as well as some of those papers that you mentioned. Now, one aspect of this was that international collaboration. How did you manage a collaboration across the globe?

Damian: Well, I used to live in Australia and I used to work with Lisa Dethridge, our collaborator, so we have a good personal relationship. We know each other and trust each other, which always helps when you’re doing these sort of international collaborations. The kind of problems we encounter though, are… the main one being Australia is 16 hours time difference ahead… anywhere between 14 and 16 hours depending on daylight saving. So, it’s very hard to schedule synchronous time for Lisa to talk to my students or for the students to talk to each other. The students here at SUNY Oswego have been great, though. What we normally do is we schedule additional evening classes around 6:00 [or] 7:00 at night, which is early morning in Australia, and the majority of the students turn up to those classes to talk to the Australians. A few obviously can’t due to family commitments, but there’s no real way around this… that’s the only way to do it. Also getting the students to work together is very difficult, because I can’t just add the Australian students on BlackBoard or into some collaborative environment, so I personally use Canvas which means I can control who is within the learning management system. So, we can put the Australian students and the American students together. During each semester we do four or five video conference calls between the students, where the students talk to each other. It’s always worthwhile having two or three options in case some technology doesn’t work. So, we use Skype sometimes… we use the Canvas collaboration tool… and sometimes we use GoToMeeting. It’s always good when the students have that kind of ice breaking session where they meet each other and talk about their respective cultures, and we try and get them to do some… even on the video conferencing… some discussion of their culture as well as the academic activities… and to get to know each other a little bit, which becomes important later on when we run the study abroads.

John: So do the students collaborate in small groups, or individually in addition to the group collaboration or?

Damian: Absolutely, that’s how you the group assignments work. They’re assigned into teams with some Australian students and some US students, and they’re given assignments… and different years we’ve done different assignments. One year was working on film scripts. Actually the last time I run it… was writing robot scripts together to do little robot performances, and collaboratively, which the Australians being media students, really enjoyed that they were working on these robots. …and then, of course, once the robots perform the actions that they created, we had a video conference where they could watch the robots performing the scripts they’d written together.

John: …and, I think you recorded some of those too, didn’t you?

Damian: Yeah, we have a number of little robot films and videos, we also have little documentaries we’ve made about the collaboration, and so there’s a whole set of those we can…

John: So, if it’s okay, we’ll include the links to those in the show notes as well.

Rebecca: Is Lisa’s class the same subject matter? What is her class actually studying?

Damian: Her class is a design class, but it’s focused towards technology and culture, technology and society, and particularly looking at designing for the future. It fits in very well. However, it’s very difficult in these situations to co-teach with an international collaborator for a full semester, because the curriculums have to line up enough for you to do that. With something like this just over two or three weeks, four or five videoconferences, it can be just a small chunk of your semester, where you can still get through all your other curricula during the semester.

John: …and you mentioned some travel…have you generally run travel at the end as an option for students?

Damian: Three times we’ve run this course, and every time at the of that, we run a study abroad to Australia. We usually have a group, between seven and ten students, who go on that. All three trips have been very successful. The students have really enjoyed themselves.

John: I’ve seen some other photos.

Damian: You’ve seen the photos… Yeah, I’ve put all the photos on Facebook. The students generally go for two weeks although some students choose to stay longer and explore other parts of Australia. The way I run it, I’m under no illusions, I mean we call it a study abroad but the students are going because they want to see kangaroos and koalas. So, we do around three four days work with the Australian students, and what’s really important is that the American students get to spend time with the Australian students. The work they do in three or four days is fairly trivial. It’s more important that they have the experience of spending time with the Australian students… and we then give them three or four days of what we call cultural activities, which are the kangaroos and the koalas. We take them on the world’s greatest drive, the Great Ocean Road, and we go and see some Aboriginal sculpture, and things like that. …and they also get around a week of their own time to explore and go around. And what has been really good is the American students make friends with the Australian students and in that week spend time getting to know the Australians and exploring the city and the culture with people who live there… which has been really good. This last time, a group of students went surfing, which the Australians thought was crazy because it was nearly the winter there, but of course these kids are from New York… [LAUGHTER]… they can handle the weather.

John: Didn’t some of the students do some later collaborations with Lisa Dethridge?

Damian: Yeah, we’ve worked on a number of projects with Lisa. Probably one of the most interesting ones was her dark luminance project. She created a set of digital two-dimensional and three-dimensional art works in an art gallery in Melbourne, Australia… in the city itself, in a physical gallery. …and people were going in and these artworks were interactive. You could touch them and they’d change. She then flew to New York City and an art gallery in Manhattan put the same artworks… where you could interact and switch them. …and then, she had an online virtual gallery where you could go in and interact with the artworks and touch them. And the interesting thing was if you were in Australia and touched a painting it changed in New York City and on the virtual world as well. And what my students did was they basically watched what people did in these galleries… and which artworks they interacted with… and why they interacted with some, and not others… and what did they do with the artworks… and how did they experience them in a different way virtually to the physical artworks. And we published a couple of books chapters and two journal articles on that, I think. It was a very successful project for the students who worked on that.

John: …an interesting form of human-computer interaction.

Damian: ….very interesting form…. It was a fascinating project. The actual idea for this project actually came from Lisa and I sitting in a bar in Australia, discussing the dimensionality of vision which then led us into this idea of the dimensionality of interaction with artworks and that’s what most of the papers talked about.

John: So, this course was offered as one of the COIL courses in the SUNY system (and COIL stands for Collaborative Online International Learning).

Damian: Yeah, the SUNY system, through SUNY Global, has this initiative for promoting collaboration with international colleagues in teaching. And we’ve started a number of COIL courses here at SUNY Oswego. I believe this was one of the first ones we did. And the COIL Center has this whole set of resources to help you set these up, and also to meet international partners, and help you get through the mechanics of physically doing something like this. However, I’ll reiterate again that if you are going to do something like a COIL course, you’d need to get to know the person you’re working with. It’s kind of crucial that you have a good relationship with the person overseas for this to work. The other thing I’d recommend by international collaboration, which made things a lot simpler, was separating assessments, so that I don’t assess the Australian students… Lisa doesn’t assess all students. From a administrative point of view, it just keeps everything a lot simpler.

John: When I taught a COIL course a couple of years ago, I did the same sort of thing. It’s much easier if you grade your own students, because each program. each institution, each department has their own grading standards. And it’s much simpler for you to apply those individually . I’d also like to re-emphasize the importance of having that good relationship. When I was working with my partner we were working on this course, we meet online for at least an hour every week to talk about how things were going, what we needed to change, and how to adapt things based on what was happening in the course. It’s really important to have that discussion because I know we’ve had some other COIL courses where those communications broke down and it didn’t go quite as well.

Rebecca: So we usually wrap up with questions about what you might be doing next. So do you have any new plans related to this class or other international collaborations?

Damian: What we’re trying to do at the moment… we run the trip to Australia every second year. It’s not something you can run every year because the same students are still in the system. So, in the year in-between we run different collaborations… couple of years ago, students went to Spain. This year we’re taking students to work with Jolanda Tromp, who used to work here in Computer Science, and we’re taking them to work in her virtual reality lab in Vietnam. So, we’ll be going over there in May with a group of students and we’ll be working on medical VR systems over in Vietnam this summer.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

Damian: Yeah, it should be fun.

John: Jolanda is still working with a lot of people, she’s part of a SUNY task group on mixed reality and she’s been very active in that.. despite the time difference.

Damian: Yes, Jolanda’s still very involved in our department. She’s still supervising research students, and even delivering some summer courses for us.

John: Excellent.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing your experience and hopefully inspiring other faculty to think about international collaborations.

Damian: You’re welcome.

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.