All language colleagues currently teaching in one of our GLCA institutions who have an interest in or are curious about the Crossroads Shared Languages Program, its purpose, pedagogy, and technology are invited to join our SLP workshop offered at Denison University from May 22 to 26, 2017.

Colleagues from all levels of employment are welcome to attend.

If you cannot attend for the entire workshop, part-time stipends are available. The stipend for the entire workshop is $500 or $125 per day. All travel, meals, and accommodation costs are covered by the grant for our pilot program.

Please see here for detailed information on the schedule, accommodations, and REGISTRATION.

Please contact Gabriele Dillmann at dillmann@GLCA.org for questions and/or to express your interest.

Course Sharing for Sustainable Programs Symposium

Friday and Saturday, April 14 and 15, 2017 at Columbia University in New York City

Everybody is welcome to attend for free! Please  RSVP here.

Course Sharing for Sustainable Programs Webpage

Course Sharing for Sustainable Programs is a two-day symposium that brings together administrators and language professionals from across the country to discuss emerging models of course sharing and curricular collaboration. These models offer expanded learning opportunities to students, as well new paths to institutional viability and sustainability for a wide range of programs. Although the symposium focuses primarily on the teaching of languages, it also showcases a number of projects that promote multi-institutional collaborative partnerships in other disciplines. In every case, due consideration will be accorded to the full range of administrative, pedagogical, and technological factors that shape each particular collaborative environment, as there are specific benefits and challenges that must be considered in order to select an appropriate model for a given context (from the CS webpage).

The symposium website also provides links to the various institutions in course sharing partnerships and their initiatives. For example, you will learn about the Columbia, Yale, Cornell partnership and how together they can offer many lesser-taught languages with new technologies that one institution alone could not provide.

As director of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Crossroads Shared Languages Program for GLCA’s 13 consortial institutions, I will be presenting on our four-year long pilot project that aims to address the issue of upper-level under-enrolled language courses as well as broadening the course offerings for lesser-taught languages. We currently have courses in Arabic and German in collaboration with Allegheny, Hope, Earlham, and Denison. This fall, we will offer another palette of engaging courses.

This symposium is supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Trump’s immigration ban: Will it undercut American soft power?

Jason Lane, University at Albany, State University of New York

The Trump administration moved over the weekend to ban all immigration from seven Muslim nations, including stopping the entry of students and scholars with valid study and work visas from those countries.

A large number of students come to study in the United States from these nations: Iran ranks 11th on the list of countries that send students to the United States. Iraq and Syria participate in a student leaders program supported by the US-Middle East Partnership Initiative. The program brings students to the U.S. to “expand their understanding of civil society, as well as the democratic process and how both may be applied in their home communities.”

Iraq also has an active Fulbright program – an international exchange program meant to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange.”

As a scholar of international education, I have seen the impact of American higher education abroad. While conducting field research in the United Arab Emirates on development of American branch campuses in the Middle East, I was struck by the response of the residents after George Mason University closed its UAE-based campus in 2009.

The setting up of the university campus was heralded as an expansion of American values overseas, and its closure was viewed as an example of “America withdrawing its support” for the region. I was asked, “Why did America choose to pull out of the region?”

In a region where higher education institutions are largely controlled by the government, it was difficult to explain that it was a decision of a single institution, not of the American government.

The fact is that over the decades America has made considerable investments in building goodwill around the world through higher education exchange efforts. Evident in the responses of the people in UAE was how the action of a single institution could erode those sentiments.

So, what might Trump’s ban mean for the U.S. role in international education? And will it undermine the use of international higher education as a soft power tool for the United States?

A soft power tool?

First, let’s look at the role higher education has played in expanding American influence and in building stronger relationships between nations.

In 1945, Senator William Fulbright from Arkansas sponsored a bill to fund a program to support “international good will through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture and science.”

Today, the Fulbright program is probably the most widely recognized initiative in the world supporting international exchange, facilitating the movement of more than 360,000 students and scholars across more than 160 countries during its history. Its value is more symbolic – it represents the United States’ view about how international education can support democracy and encourage positive relationships between nations.

The free flow of students and scholars has served well the interests of the United States, including students from those with differing ideologies.

One of the most famous alumni of the Fulbright program was Russian student Alexander Yakovlev, who came to the U.S. to study at Columbia University in 1958 – the period of the Cold War. That same person would return to the USSR to become a close ally of Mikhail Gorbachev and eventually become the “father of glasnost,” the political philosophy (along with “Perestroika”) that eventually brought down the Iron Curtain.

More recently, during a standoff between the United States and China over the future of blind Chinese political dissident Chen Guangcheng, New York University stepped in to offer him a visiting scholar position in New York, thereby diffusing a tense situation.

Time and again international education has been a critically important soft power tool.

Students from banned nations

Coming back to international exchange –– it has played a significant role in promoting peaceful relations between nations for decades.

For most of the 1970s, Iran sent more students to the U.S. than any other country. The peak year was 1979-1980, when more than 50,000 Iranian students came to study in the U.S.

After relations between the two nations deteriorated following the fall of the shah of Iran, the number of students coming to the U.S. dropped dramatically, until there were fewer than 1,700 students in 1998-1999. However, in the 2000s, as relations with the two nations began to warm, the trend finally began to turn around, with the number of students more than doubling from 2010 to 2015.

The other nations on the banned list do not have nearly as robust numbers as Iran, yet they do send students to the U.S. Those numbers are growing overall. Both Iraq and Libya have more than 1,000 students currently studying in the U.S. Although other nations send fewer (there are only 35 Somali students) in total, there were more than 17,300 students from the banned countries studying in the U.S. last year.

What is noteworthy is that was a 7 percent increase over the previous year and a more than 300 percent increase from 15 years ago, when there were only about 4,000 students from those same nations. Iran led with more than 1,800 students, and Syria was number two with more than 700.

In fact, more than 10 percent (about 108,000) of the international students in the U.S. come from the Middle East and North Africa regions, the home to most of the banned countries. When they return home, these students serve as ambassadors of the U.S. and, while here, help us gain a greater appreciation for their culture.

Declining enrollments?

How these actions will impact the students is not clear, but we do know that major events can have lasting impact on international education numbers.

For about five years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the total number of international students studying in the U.S. declined. Much of this decline came from students in Muslim majority nations, who could either not obtain a visa or chose not apply for it. They also feared they would not be welcomed in the United States.

And this was at a time when the American president, George W. Bush, argued that “Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith. But ours is a war against individuals who absolutely hate what America stands for.”

Data have already suggested that the rhetoric of the current administration has weighed on the minds of students considering where to study abroad. A study by international student recruiting companies prior to the election found that 60 percent of the 40,000 students surveyed in 118 countries would be less inclined to come to the U.S. if Trump won the election (compared to only 3.8 percent who would be less inclined if Clinton won). And that was before the rhetoric turned into reality.

Even though the U.S. still retains the largest global market share of international students, that market share has been declining gradually. This is due to the increased competition from other nations and international student concerns about safety, cost and hospitality in the United States: In 2000, about one quarter of all international students globally came to the United States. Within a decade, that number had shrunk to 19 percent, and by 2012, the number had dropped to 16 percent.

Where is this all going?

An early policy paper by the Trump team seemingly called for the elimination of J-1 visas, which allow for international youth to pursue temporary work in the U.S. And the current administration has sent signals indicating that it would make it more difficult for immigrants to receive H-1B visas, awarded to individuals with specialized skills.

Both of these programs are used by universities to support student and scholar exchanges. It is not yet clear if the current administration will pursue policies in these area that will affect universities in the same way the ban has done.

What is clear is that the recent ban has already sent a chilling effect across colleges near and far. Within one day, there were reports of students being trapped overseas and in the U.S. An Iranian Ph.D. student at SUNY Stony Brook was detained at JFK and almost deported.

Another Iranian, pursuing his Ph.D. at Yale, was traveling internationally to conduct research, and feared that he might not be able to return to his studies even though he was a green card holder (the administration subsequently reversed its ban on permanent residents from those nations). There is no telling how many others are blocked from returning having been away on break between semesters.

Protecting our nation is one of the most important roles of the federal government, and we do need to be thoughtful about how to establish effective immigration polices. However, the broad-based nature of the ban flies in the face of decades of support for the power of international exchange. Even a foreign policy hard line approach would typically be softened by an ongoing support of international exchange.

As Senator Fulbright said,

“Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations.”

The motivation for this ban is the concern that we might let in a terrorist. But what if we turn away the next great scientist or peacemaker?

Jason Lane, Chair and Professor of Educational Policy and Leadership & Co-Director of the Cross-Border Education Research Team, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Denison University’s President Adam Weinberg very generously made it possible for five Denison faculty members to attend and to present at the Cultures and Languages across the Curriculum (CLAC) conference hosted by Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa this October 20th and 21st.

This year’s conference was organized by our very talented and generous colleague Marc Pinheiro-Cadd.

Thank you, Marc!

Nausica Marcos-Miguel, Assistant Professor of Spanish in Linguistics, Charly St-Georges, Assistant Professor of Spanish in Literature and Cultural Studies, Lori Radall, Coordinator of Multilingual Learning, Hanada Al-Masri, Assistant Professor of Arabic, and Gabriele Dillmann, Associate Professor of German had the opportunity to further learn about CLAC pedagogy and internationalizing our campus community and curriculum after they had explored CLAC at the 9th annual conference hosted by Denison University in 2015. President Weinberg was introduced to and spoke in support of CLAC practitioners during that conference as he gave a very well-received keynote address. Gabriele Dillmann then offered 2 follow-up workshops in the summer of 2015 for colleagues across the Denison campus (DIG – Denison Interest Group) to engage faculty members further with CLAC pedagogies and strategies to internationalize their courses.

The CLAC conference in DesMoines with its very sophisticated conference program, informative sessions and compelling discussions by seasoned CLAC practitioners and CLAC founding members was a very positive experience for our Denison colleagues. Denison colleagues also had the opportunity to meet colleagues across the country, across institution types, and across disciplines to exchange ideas and strategies to embed CLAC components in their own courses.

Keynote speakers Dawn Michele Whitehead, Senior Director for Global Learning and Curricular Change in the Office of Integrative Liberal Learning and the Global Commons at Association of American Colleges and Universities and Richard Kiely, Senior Fellow, Office of Engagement Initiatives, Engaged Cornell, rounded off the program with their inspiring presentations on global and local social challenges and suggested possible approaches to think about alleviating some of the most pressing problems. Richard Kiely shared many of his insights that he is further reflecting on in his forthcoming co-authored book Building a Better World: The Pedagogy and Practice of Global Service-Learning.  

A special event of the conference was the unveiling of the CLAC Clearinghouse by Dan Soneson, Director of the College of Liberal Arts Language Center, University of Minnesota and Caleb Zilmer, Ph.D. Student in Second Languages and Cultures Education, University of Minnesota. The Clearinghouse is an interactive collection of CLAC-related materials curated by CARLA and the Consortium for Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum. We are all strongly encouraged to contribute to and make use of this valuable resource.

Arabic professor Hanada Al-Masri and German professor Gabriele Dillmann gave a joint-presentation on the benefits of global course connections both for students and faculty: “Fostering a Global Mindset through Globally Connected Courses: Lessons from the German and Arabic Classroom,” which conference participants appeared to find very useful in their own thinking about employing new digital technologies and pedagogies to make an international experience possible in general and especially for those students for whom study-abroad is not an option for various personal and economic reasons.

With Ann Warner-Ault

One presentation that I would personally like to highlight – among other things because it warmed my heart – was “El Puente Entre Dos Mundos: Spanish Companion Courses for Nursing Majors” by Elizabeth Fouts, Associate Professor of Spanish Studies at St. Anselm College. With much enthusiasm and passion, Elizabeth shared with the audience “how her professional and personal life has changed since she discovered CLAC”, which was reinforced when she came to the CLAC conference at Denison in 2015 and “left with a ton of ideas.” These have since culminated in a rather fast-growing, very impressive Spanish language nursing option program at her college.

Following are some of the impressions and experiences that our Denison colleagues walked away with in their own words.

Hanada Al-Masri

After attending the CLAC conference for the first time at Denison, I was very motivated to attend the second one at Drake University, Iowa and I am truly appreciative of our president’s support. Of a particular interest to me was to learn about how different colleges proposed different approaches and different perspectives to globalizing their curricula. Some presentations encouraged community service learning on the local level, others worked more on the global level. It was a good learning experience to learn more about the incorporation of culture and how to be prepared to deal with unforeseen challenges. The keynote speakers provided great insights into how to incorporate global and international perspectives into our curriculum offerings. It was interesting to hear the challenges they faced during their process of internationalization.

Charly St-Georges

The CLAC Conference provided a unique and valuable space for reflecting not only on the importance of global perspectives and experiences in higher education, but on its possibilities. So many different institutions were represented, each with their own contexts and challenges, and it was precisely this diversity in experiences wrestling with a shared goal that I found to be so fruitful. This coming together of ideas, philosophies, and experiences facilitated a cross pollination that have gotten the wheels turning in my head—and in my pedagogy—in a way that would not have been possible without carving out a space to sit down with colleagues and reflecting on the role of cultures and languages across the curriculum.

Nausica Marcos-Miguel

The CLAC conference at Drake University has been a great opportunity to see different approaches to incorporate language and culture across the curriculum. Since I teach language courses, for me, it is a matter of including culture and content in a language class, so it was a new perspective seeing how faculty from different disciplines incorporates language in their content courses. This is clearly a path towards recognizing the fundamental need of learning a second language and becoming aware of different cultures, different perspectives. For example, Kate Yang, from Stockton University, showed how she searched for “cross-cultural awareness and global engagement in a developmental psychology course” by, for example, making learners reflect on the different connotations that the word “adolescent” has for speakers of different languages. Her colleague Laura Zucconi explained how history majors worked with texts in their second languages. By doing so, students could find new perspectives on a topic they were already familiar with.  I also had the opportunity to catch up with my colleagues and learned more about the shared language project they are working on. There were many other interesting presentations and conversations at the CLAC conference, and I came back to Granville with new ideas for my classes. The take-home message for me was: we need to give our students the tools to be global citizens.  

Lori Randall

The clear focus of the CLAC conference made it easy to find relevant, engaging sessions. Indeed, for the first time in my conference-attending experience, I found it difficult to choose between sessions. Each session promised to provide valuable pedagogical ideas and social, pedagogical, or ethical issues to consider. Each session that I attended lived up to that promise. High quality sessions were not the only positive aspect of this conference; the duration and size of the conference were likewise ideal. Attendance was small enough and the events of the conference were condensed enough to foster a genuine sense of community. Yet attendance was large enough to ensure diversity. Attendees represented a variety of institutions, from the Defense Language Institute and the US Air Force to the K-12 public school system, to post-secondary institutions of all types. All of these factors – high quality sessions; small, yet diverse participants; and a condensed, efficient schedule – combined to create a rich, invigorating atmosphere for sharing ideas, strengthening existing relationships, and creating new ones. I, personally, was pleased to have this opportunity not only to connect, share ideas, and plan for the future with colleagues from Denison but also to connect with staff members from the Defense Language Institute, learning from their expertise and sharing my own with them.

Three cheers to CLAC for reminding me of the true value of academic conferences, collaboration, and lifelong learning!