March 3 L4L Forum
Internationalization

Attendees:Teresa Boucher
Lisa Brady
Mark Buchanan
Craig Hemmens
Sabine Klahr
Sharon McGuire
Nick Miller
Beret Norman
Tony Roark
Gail Shuck
David Wilkins
Shelton Woods
Scott Yenor


Nick: Is there a place for international issues in a liberal arts curriculum? I assume we all think that the answer is ‘yes’, but we might be concerned about practical difficulties that stand in our way. But let’s try to think about the very best possible outcome that we can imagine and then we can make adjustments. We don’t want our efforts here to duplicate the efforts of the internationalization task force. One of the things we might talk about is the universal foreign language requirement.

Sabine: It’s under consideration by the advisory board.

Nick: I know that one concern is that Modern Languages would have to be as large as English or Math to staff all of the sections required if every student were required to study a foreign language.

Sabine/Beret: That’s a concern.

Shelton: Craig, do all Honors students have to do a language?

Craig: No.

Gail: There’s also skepticism among folks (e.g., on the diversity committee) that one year of a foreign language will confer the kind of appreciation of different cultures that we’re looking for.

Sabine: But the language is just one facet of what we’re hoping they’ll get when international issues are worked into courses across the curriculum.

Gail: I just want to make sure we don’t view the language requirement as a sufficient condition to the achievement of those goals, but rather as a necessary condition.

Beret: We’d need an MA program in Spanish to make it work, because we’d need GA’s to carry the teaching load; we can’t rely on adjuncts to teach the numbers we’d get.

Sabine: That’s one of the problems in integrating internationalization across the curriculum: we don’t have TA’s that can work between departments in the kind of way we’d like. There’s too much isolation.

Nick: We’ve got the diversity requirement, the international advisory board has done its work. Is there some way we can achieve some of the desired outcomes without growing departments?

Gail: We’ve got a faculty learning community here (CTL) working on putting together cross-cultural sections of different courses. A couple of years ago, 7.5% of BSU students identified themselves as non-native English speakers, and I suspect the number is higher now. We’ve got these cross-cultural sections of ENGL 101 and 102 that are purposefully designed to have an even higher percentage in order to expose folks to cultural diversity right there in the class room. Lisa will teach HIST 101 as a cross-cultural section, someone else is doing it in Biology, so I think we’re already doing the sort of thing we’re talking about to some extent.

David: Would you be interested in a Geography course?

Gail: Absolutely. We’re still working out the details of this faculty learning community, but that’d be great.

Scott: Can I ask what kind of connection you see between cross-cultural and LA?

Gail: When I think of a LA curriculum, I think of opportunities to bridge disciplines and get different perspectives on the world. It also includes being self-reflection and thinking about how you came to view things the way you do. When you’re forced to confront different cultures, you can’t help but notice and begin to reflect on your assumptions and values in a way that’s otherwise difficult.

Lisa: Internationalization is an easy way to bridge some of the gaps between disciplines, because although we all work within our own disciplines, confronting different cultural aspects of our disciplines is something we all do, something common that can help us work together without having to learn the details of our collaborator’s discipline.

Nick: This is a low-cost thing, isn’t it?

Gail: Yes, it is. I get a one course release each semester to do the training and organizing. That’s a modest investment for a program involving colleagues from a variety of departments and a good number of students.

Mark: We already offer everything that small liberal arts schools offer. What if some of our students could choose a liberal arts “track” within their chosen field? So a student working in business management could take a specified compliment of courses and get a BA in management without adding extra credits.

David: We’ve thought about that in Geology. We could offer a BA in Geology for someone, say, who would go to work for Exxon Mobile in their marketing department and wouldn’t have to know all of the science. This might increase demand in some of the humanities courses already offered, but maybe not.

Scott: Some of us are working on proposals of this kind.

Gail: I like that idea. My father is a surgeon, and he says with pride that when he’s interviewing interns, he always prefers the English majors, the music majors, the art majors. He says they think better thinkers in many ways than some of their science peers.

Gail: How can a group this small craft a program “template” that would work for every department?

Scott: This group can’t presume to tell departments how to structure their degree programs, but we can consolidate some of the courses that we already teach and designate them worthy of a liberal arts certificate.

David: Certificates are problematic, as lots of students and employers don’t know how to use them. Maybe there would be some way of putting it on the diploma, “I’m internationalized,” or “I’ve got liberal arts.”

Lisa: Maybe the CTL could help put together some kind of template.

David: A minor in internationalization or liberal arts would be viewed much more favorably by students, because they want it on their diploma. It wouldn’t cost very much, but I

Sabine: The internationalization task force didn’t propose a minor as a sort of add-on because we thought that it ought to be woven into the curriculum, not more work tacked on. I see liberal arts as the sort of way; I don’t think it ought to be just something extra that they’re required to do.

Lisa: Nussbaum recommends creating a culture of respectful compassion. This isn’t a suggestion for any particular course of study of an particular field, but rather an ability to appreciate other cultures in order to prevent becoming jingoistic.

David: Does she have any specific recommendations?

Nick: Here’s one: have a course or limited number of courses that’s required of all students that delves deeply into the particular culture and history of a place. In our case, it might already be part of the curriculum.

Sabine: Another way is to require a study-abroad experience, perhaps done in the first year so as to take advantage of the flexibility of first year requirements and to inform the subsequent studies. Princeton has done this. Perhaps we could implement a more modest version of the program.

Nick: That’s quite different form the model in which internationalization is dispersed throughout the curriculum.

Scott: Seems to me that all the reasons to study internationalization can be recast as reasons to study history. If the goal is to get an appreciation of one’s current culture, studying Ancient Greece would be more useful than going to Europe, because Europe is much more like contemporary America than is ancient Sparta.

Sabine: But that’s not the only thing that we’re trying to do.

Mark: What’s the problem we’re trying to address? Is it a matter of market forces, what the students or their parents want? My own goal is to help students get a deeper appreciation of the different pieces of wisdom at a younger age than I was when I got them. I think that’s what the liberal arts are: the philosophy, the language. Until you confront another culture, you can’t really appreciate these things.

Sabine: Who do we want to be as an institution? Who do we want our graduates to be? Worker bees or critical thinkers? I think that all of these initiatives are trying to emphasize the latter, but there’s a lot of institutional inertia favoring the former.

Tony: But there’s lots of evidence that the kind of skills imparted by the disciplines that we traditionally think of as falling in the liberal arts are exactly what employers want. So one desirable outcome of this initiative, in my view, is to get a clearer conception of this truth, to be able to articulate it clearly so that we convince students and their parents of its truth. We are offering many excellent liberal arts courses and programs right now; we can increase the effectiveness of these simply by making students more aware of their actual value.

Lisa: Students always ask “how can a history degree help me?” When we tell them that critical thinking skills are highly desirable in the business world, their eyes glaze over and they can’t make the connection. Besides, our institution has the mandate to serve the community needs in public affairs. So I agree that we have to reconceptualize our mission and put our resources into the service of that end.

Gail: Part of the conversation has to be giving students some level of understanding of “the other.” I’ve heard comments about students walking past another student who looks vaguely Arabic and making a terrorist comment. How can a person who does that be called educated?

David: Next year’s first year read should be helpful in that regard.

Beret: Another idea is the UNIV 101 courses. In MLL we’re doing these in foreign languages. The student gets the training in language, but they also get instruction in what to expect in college, practical help, and also exposure to the importance of being aware of differences among students’ backgrounds, values, experiences.

Gail: Portland State incorporates the first year writing requirement into a course like UNIV 101, which seems like it would be effective. But if it only lasts one year, who knows how long it will stick.

Sharon: If it’s connected to their senior capstone experience, that helps.

David: But starting early on with that kind of intensity makes it much easier to integrate it into higher-level coursework than trying to take someone who’s been here for two or three years, who’s already cynical and inflexible.

Sabine: So where do you go from here?

Nick: We’re charged with producing a set of proposals. We’ll consider everything from the most practical to the most idealistic when we’re putting together the package.

Sabine: I think you should look at integrating your ideas into the existing initiatives, since our action plan is a work in progress and needs updating.

Lisa: One of the best things that has come out of these fora is seeing different faces at the meetings. We’ve got good ideas and proposals, but it’s encouraging seeing people from across the disciplines and realizing that there’s broad based support for improving the liberal arts education students get at Boise State.

Nick: Thanks for coming, everyone.