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Internationalization Collaborative
Community Colleges
University of Hawai’i Kapi’olani Community College
Kapi’olani
Community College (KCC), one of 10 campuses in the University
of Hawai’i (UH) system, offers comprehensive programs leading to
the Associate of Arts degree in liberal arts and Associate of Science
degrees in various 21st century career fields, as well as university
transfer and certificates. Kapi’olani is located in Honolulu on
the island of O’ahu, more than 2,300 miles from the west coast of
the United States. A bridge community between Asia and the Americas,
Honolulu boasts an incredibly diverse citizenry, including a mixture of
Native Hawaiians, Euro-Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos,
Samoans, Micronesians, and Southeast Asians.
The demography of the Kapi’olani student body mirrors this
diversity. In fall 2001, the college enrolled 7,203 students (4,405
FTE)—more lower-division students than any other campus in the
University of Hawai’i system.
In line with its location and demographic profile,
Kapi’olani’s educational focus is decidedly international.
Key components of this focus include:
- A curricular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region that is thoroughly
integrated into classroom pedagogies and designed to develop socially
responsible and economically productive local, national, and global
citizens.
- A series of innovative co-curricular programs.
- Community- and Internet-based learning opportunities, as well as
study abroad.
KCC’s commitment to multicultural and international education
is popular among students, many of whom indicate it was a deciding
factor in their choice of college.
Notable Kapi’olani offerings include the largest number of
liberal arts and transfer programs in the University of Hawai’i
system; the state’s only nursing and health sciences training
center; and high-quality training programs in hotel operations, tour and
travel, business education, and legal assisting. Further, the
college’s culinary arts program, modeled on the Culinary Institute
of America, attracts and trains chefs from throughout the Asia-Pacific
region, and will soon be expanded with $2.5 million from a University of
Hawai’i Foundation fund-raising drive.
Overview of Internationalization Efforts
Kapi'olani Community College was one of eight institutions selected
for the ACE
Promising Practices Project: Spotlighting Excellence in Comprehensive
Internationalization.
I. Vision and Goals for
Internationalization
Hawai’i is at once both a place of assimilation and enduring
commitment to traditional beliefs and values. These opposing but
compatible sentiments have resulted in the creation of an island
community that John F. Kennedy once described as "what the rest of the
world is trying to become."
To learn from and integrate the forces of culture past and present,
Kapi’olani, in 1986, launched a comprehensive cross-curricular
initiative focusing on Hawai’i’s connections to Asia, the
Pacific, and the Americas—the ancestral homelands of
Hawai’i’s contemporary multiethnic population. Three years
later, informed by a landmark American Association of Community Colleges
publication, Building Community, that directed community colleges to
play a vastly expanded role in international education, KCC unveiled a
new initiative, the Kapi’olani Asia-Pacific Emphasis (KAPE),
through which it began to develop curricula and programs rooted in the
experiences of local students and that address issues of the wider
Asia-Pacific region.
Throughout the 1990s, Kapi’olani continued to internationalize,
working to expand its curricular and professional development bridge
between Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. In doing so, its goal has
been to provide national leadership in promoting educational outcomes
that prepare students for lives as socially responsible and economically
productive local, national, and global citizens. At the heart of this
charge is KCC’s vision that internationalization must:
- Build on and support the languages, cultures, and histories of
Hawai’i’s people.
- Develop students’ capacity to understand and respect diverse
cultures.
- Build strong educational and economic partnerships in Asia, the
Pacific, and the Americas.
These beliefs complement specific objectives in the Kapi’olani
Strategic Plan, 1997–2007, designed to champion diversity:
- Strengthen KCC as a premier resource in Hawaiian, Pacific Island,
and Asian programs.
- Enrich the curriculum with an intercultural emphasis on
Hawai’i, the Pacific Islands, and Asia.
- Become a major site for the development of instructional resources
and languages of Hawai’i, the Pacific Islands, and Asia.
- Shape a campus environment that reflects the Hawaiian, Pacific
Island, and Asian diversity of the local community.
- Recruit and retain students, faculty, staff, and administrators,
especially Hawaiians, from under-represented groups.
- Promote a respect for differences.
II. Progress
Since 1987, KCC has offered a thorough, competency-based curriculum
in its liberal arts and career programs that emphasizes learning
outcomes—that is, the actual abilities that students should
acquire in classes and programs of study. (Competence is defined as the
ability to make conscious and informed use of knowledge, skills, and
attitudes relevant to a particular situation.) The practice of
identifying explicit competencies for each course, degree, program, and
department ensures a solid curricular foundation, and provides a basis
for developing new courses. The college has used this framework to
internationalize its curriculum through the Asia-Pacific emphasis. The
success in implementing KAPE in a short period of time is remarkable. To
date, nearly 50 percent of faculty have participated in planning and
developments related to KAPE, and approximately 50 percent of all
courses include Hawaiian, Pacific, and/or Asian content.
Faculty curriculum development efforts are enhanced through overseas
travel opportunities supported primarily by external funds. For example,
the college has received two Fulbright-Hays Summer Seminar abroad grants
for study in Asia, as well as support from The Ford Foundation for
travel in the Pacific Islands. The college’s numerous
institutional partnerships have supported both administrative and
faculty travel to Asia, and the college’s role in providing
service learning and technical training has drawn funding for faculty
travel to the Pacific Islands.
Ongoing curriculum development efforts focus on integrating
indigenous, multicultural, and international content across the liberal
arts and career programs. To provide a more visible curricular
structure, the college has created two Academic Subject Certificates in
Hawaiian-Pacific studies and Asian studies. The certificates require
students to complete approximately 24 credits in general education
courses with substantial indigenous, multicultural, or international
content, and 14 credits of Hawaiian or a foreign language (Japanese,
Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, Samoan, Spanish, or French), all of which
meet Associate of Arts and baccalaureate requirements.
KCC’s campus environment reflects the college’s
commitment to international diversity, with architecture, sculpture, and
landscape all managed in ways that symbolically value multicultural and
international understanding and respect. For example, the campus’s
main library is named after the Lama plant, which Hawaiians used to
provide light in the darkness, and other campus buildings bear the names
of plants indigenous to the tropical Polynesia and Southeast Asia
region, providing a metaphorical link to the KAPE program.
Service-learning students in ethnobotany courses cultivate and maintain
such plantings, thus underscoring the link between people and
places.
Outside the classroom, KCC offers a wealth of programs and activities
in support of its international orientation. An especially popular event
is the college’s Asia-Pacific Festival. Held each March, the
festival runs for an entire week and explores and celebrates
Hawai’i’s Pacific and Asian past, present, and future. The
festival brings together performing artists, craftspersons, scholars,
community-based supporters, and hundreds of students and local
residents, forming an experience rich with the sounds, sights, smells,
tastes, and feelings of various Asian and Pacific cultures. Always
favored by attendees are the numerous traditional demonstrations
sponsored by KCC’s international student clubs. Another popular
annual event, India Night, is sponsored by a local Indian family and
brings together the costumes and customs of India, along with culinary
delights prepared by Asia-Pacific master chefs affiliated with
KCC’s culinary program.
Located in the Honda International Center, KCC’s International
Café is an informal gathering place where local and international
students meet for cultural and language exchanges. Language tutoring is
one of the most popular features of the International Café.
Students enrolled in Japanese 101, for example, can find ample native
Japanese speakers with whom to converse in exchange for help on homework
or the like. Many students from KCC’s overflowing ESL classes
spend time in the International Café practicing their English,
learning the local dialect (called "pidgin"), and learning about
American pop culture from local students. International Café
participants also are encouraged to prepare cultural presentations for
their fellow students. For example, two women from Micronesia conducted
a presentation on life in Kosrae and the Marshall Islands; another
student gave a multimedia presentation on the family’s
four-generation practice of Japanese arrow making; and an Egyptian
student presented information to the entire campus on Egyptian history
and culture, including Egyptian food and belly dancing.
Student clubs focus on the languages and cultures, as well as current
events, of specific national and ethnic groups. Clubs welcome members of
these groups as well as other students interested in their cultures and
contemporary issues. Throughout the year, these clubs and their faculty
advisers invite internationally renowned guest speakers to campus. These
noted experts are sponsored by the Pacific and Asian Affairs Council,
the East-West Center, and the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific
Studies at University of Hawai’i, Manoa.
Study-abroad opportunities have been provided through institutional
student exchange agreements, the University of Hawai’i
study-abroad office, and specific partnerships, such as with Kamehameha
Schools, which supported Native Hawaiian students who traveled to New
Zealand to study with the Maori people. During 2000–01, 125 UHCC
students went to Asia and the Pacific for study in language and culture,
art, engineering, hotel management, and culinary arts.
III. Successful Strategies
Three aspects of KCC’s many international initiatives are
especially noteworthy: faculty and administrative leadership;
high-quality language programs; and faculty expertise.
- Faculty and Administrative Leadership
The development of a faculty leadership model for the Asia-Pacific
Emphasis has reaped major dividends, in terms of sustaining innovation
in international education. This leadership model, which involves
participation in summer curriculum development institutes as well as
broad-based faculty involvement, increases both resident expertise and
the sense of community and teamwork among faculty. Many faculty have had
the opportunity to help manage KAPE and some have subsequently moved
into supportive administrative positions. Administrative leadership,
guided by sustained campus and system policies and planning documents,
has effectively mobilized faculty effort and contributed to external
resource and partnership development.
- High-quality Language Programs
KCC is the only campus in the UHCC system with a one-year Hawaiian or
foreign language requirement for the Associate in Arts degree. Because
the University of Hawai’i has a two-year Hawaiian/foreign language
requirement for its bachelor’s degree, hundreds of students who
plan to transfer complete this requirement each year choose from among
KCC’s impressive range of offerings, including Hawaiian, Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Samoan, Russian, French, and Spanish.
KCC also educates 1,500 English as a Second Language students each year,
who then enter either liberal arts or career programs. For 86 percent of
these students, an East or Southeast Asian language is their first
language; 9 percent speak a Micronesian or Polynesian language as their
first language. The college also is home to the Gallaudet Regional
Center, which supports the educational success of hearing-impaired
students from the Asia-Pacific region and provides a two-year program in
American Sign Language. With such robust foreign language learning
opportunities, KCC has created a comprehensive language and cultural
bridge for students of all ethnic backgrounds and abilities.
- Faculty Expertise
Over the last two decades, the college has been able to recruit and
retain a large cadre of faculty with substantial Hawaiian, Pacific, and
Asian expertise and commitment. Many of these faculty have completed
advanced degrees at the University of Hawai’i or have conducted
research at the East-West Center, and significant numbers have taken
advantage of rich, ongoing opportunities for faculty development. The
college has successfully cultivated both intellectual breadth and depth
in its faculty.
IV. Future Plans
Emboldened by positive feedback on the college’s shift to a
more international focus, efforts are now underway for an even more
ambitious international emphasis. Dubbed the integrated international
education and globalization (IIEG) emphasis, this new plan for campus
change will pursue curricular and co-curricular developments focusing
on:
- The cultures, histories, and languages of indigenous and
multicultural Hawai’i.
- The cultures, histories, and languages of Oceania and Asia.
- Contemporary interactions among nations, territories, states, and
indigenous peoples.
- Evolving globalization.
- Social and civic responsibility at the local, national, and global
levels.
In implementing these five components, a first step is to identify
faculty and courses in which IIEG can be emphasized. This should lead to
a deeper conversation among faculty about learning outcomes for students
related to these foci. Eventually, faculty should be able to explicitly
answer the question, "If a student successfully completes a course in
each of these five areas, what should he or she know and be able to
do?"
The college is also currently addressing communications issues. As a
first step, a full report of KCC’s international activities,
programs, and vision will be shared with faculty, counselors, students,
and administrators. Further work on the campus strategic plan by faculty
appointed as IIEG leaders also will enhance communication and have a
positive influence on funding for the IIEG emphasis. And a faculty
retreat and summer workshop are planned to collect advice about how best
to incorporate the new IIEG focus into the institution’s strategic
mission.
Also pending are plans to improve and/or expand the college’s
language programs, in-class and online curriculum development, service
learning, study abroad, and global citizenship programming. In short,
much progress has been made, but much remains to be done before
realizing KCC’s goal of becoming an island college with a global
reach.
*Please contact the institution directly if you have
questions about their institutional programs.
Please direct questions about this page to:
beth_burris@ace.nche.edu |
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This page last updated on:
6/16/2006
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