Jo Beth Mullens Fostering Global Citizenship Through Faculty-Led International Programs

With awareness of both the opportunities and challenges presented by globalization, there is a growingtrend among colleges and universities across the country to commit goals and resources to the concept ofinternationalizing their campuses. This can occur in a number of different ways but a common threadinvolves exploring the concept of global citizenship and finding ways to embed this concept in undergraduatecurricula. For faculty, this may call for moving out of a presumed comfort zone in the traditional classroomand determining new approaches to teaching a generation of students who will live and work in amore global context. A method for accomplishing this work that is growing in popularity involves offeringshort-term, faculty-led field courses to international settings. In fact, today more college students are participatingin such short-term study abroad opportunities than the more traditional semester and/or year-longprograms.Faculty and administrators who want to capitalize on short-term, study abroad programs as a means forinternationalizing their campuses need practical resources to help them realize this challenging but importantgoal. They not only need support in developing the course curricula and logistics, but also in constructingauthentic means for assessing the multi-faceted learning that occurs. Short-term international programs, when carefully planned and executed,engage the participants (both students and faculty) in unique learning experiences that can inv...