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California State University–Stanislaus

www.csustan.edu

Contents

General Institutional Overview

1. Vision and Goals for Internationalization
2. Progress
3. Successful Strategies
4. Future Plans

General Institutional Overview

California State University–Stanislaus, one of the California State University system’s 23 campuses, is an 8,000-student public university awarding degrees through the master’s level. A federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, it is located in Turlock, in a rapidly urbanizing region of California’s agricultural Northern San Joaquin Valley, 100 miles southeast of San Francisco. Founded in 1960, the university lies in an ethnically and linguistically diverse region that is home to numerous ethnic communities, such as Mexican, Azorean Portuguese, Hmong, Punjabi, Khmer, and Assyrian.

CSU Stanislaus’s commitment to access for all eligible students has led to aggressive recruitment efforts and expanding financial aid programs to facilitate university education to "new majority" students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college. Minority students make up 50 percent of the student body, adult learners 46 percent, and part-time students 38 percent. Thirty-seven percent of students have learned a language other than English at home. And Hispanic Outlook magazine lists CSU Stanislaus among the top 100 U.S. colleges hospitable to Hispanic students.

To maximize student access and address the needs of a diverse population, the campus has made academic programs available at nontraditional times. Since 1999, CSU Stanislaus has given students the opportunity to take a full general education program and complete many majors in classes offered after 4:00 p.m. For two decades, the university has offered courses to students in remote locations by instructional television, including many on evenings and weekends.

CSU Stanislaus is committed to creating a learning environment that encourages all campus community members to expand their intellectual, creative, and social horizons. This commitment includes a growing effort to ensure global learning for all students through the curriculum and co-curriculum. To facilitate its mission, the institution promotes academic excellence in the teaching and scholarly activities of its faculty, encourages personalized student learning, fosters partnerships with its surrounding communities, and provides opportunities for the intellectual, cultural, and artistic enrichment of the region.

Overview of Internationalization Efforts

CSU Stanislaus was one of eight institutions selected for the ACE Global Learning for All project.

I. Vision and Goals for Internationalization

Internationalization Vision:

To prepare CSU Stanislaus graduates for service in an increasingly global and diverse society, the university seeks to ensure that each student will have the opportunity to demonstrate the following through the university curriculum and co-curriculum:

• Adequate knowledge and experience through the general education curriculum to understand and apply the global themes of social justice, interdependence, and sustainability.

• Understanding of the major discipline’s global issues, especially as related to the themes of interdependence, sustainability, and social justice.

• Perspective consciousness, defined as recognizing that one’s view of the world is not universally shared and that others may have profoundly different perceptions.

• Significant cross-cultural experience.

Internationalization goals:

• To provide faculty development facilitating continued curricular internationalization.

• To strengthen foreign language training.

• To improve access to study abroad.

• To enhance the presence of international students on campus.

• To make increased use of local ethnic enclaves as resources for cultural and linguistic immersion.

II. Progress

In 1984, three CSU Stanislaus faculty members worked to bring international perspectives to what was then a relatively isolated rural campus. Gradually they were joined by other colleagues and, calling themselves the Institute for International Studies, gained funding to carry out a diverse array of extramurally funded projects in support of international education. After 14 years of focused activity, the effort was institutionalized as the Office of Global Affairs. This office now facilitates of all of the campus’s diverse international and global learning initiatives.

According to the Global Affairs database, currently, 30 percent of CSU Stanislaus tenured and tenure-track faculty have significant international experience or interests. Approximately 50 courses have been internationalized through grant-funded programs. A tutorial-based Critical Languages Program allows the campus to continue to teach less-commonly taught languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, and Hmong. A high-intensity language-training format in Spanish allows students who have resisted other approaches to language learning to succeed through an interactive, low-anxiety, activities-based approach. The campus Education Abroad program offers opportunities to study in 23 different countries in yearlong, semester, summer, or winter-term programs. Bilateral exchange agreements permit low-cost student exchange in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Overseas development projects in Ethiopia and the Middle East are conceived as campus-wide opportunities for faculty and students to gain real-life international experience. These and many other efforts contribute to a growing commitment to global learning among faculty and staff.

In 2003, CSU Stanislaus was selected to participate in the ACE Global Learning for All project, in which a campus-wide Global Learning Team proposed campus global learning goals, reviewed global learning across the entire campus, and proposed a strategic action plan to take the campus to the next stage of global learning for all students. In the process, a rubric for evaluating global learning was devised, building on other institutions’ previous efforts.

III. Successful Strategies

Among the many innovative strategies developed over the previous two decades, three stand out:

• Cultural immersion opportunities for students and faculty through a local ethnic community. Since 1989, CSU Stanislaus and Modesto Junior College faculty have sustained a community center in a Modesto neighborhood with a large population of Cambodian refugees. Called The BRIDGE, this center provides cultural immersion service learning opportunities for undergraduate students and research opportunities for graduate students and faculty. Noted for its best practices in early intervention gang prevention, The BRIDGE has allowed scores of students apply their classroom learning in a manner appropriate to Southeast Asian culture.

• Cross-disciplinary language immersion abroad. Each winter term, approximately 30 students, along with professors, travel to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to participate in intensive language study, home stays, and an optional course taught in English by a Stanislaus professor. Students have studied courses such as History of Mexico with visits to important historical sites, Transcultural Nursing with visits to health clinics and traditional healers, and The Multicultural Classroom with visits to local schools. Hispanic and non-Hispanic students alike return to the campus with a deepened understanding of Mexico and greater Spanish-language skills.

• Departmental Award for Leadership in Global Learning. Now in its second year, this award program focuses on the department as a critical element in global learning improvement. Departments compete for one or two $10,000 awards that recognize, not the greatest global learning progress to date, but the best plan to move the department, with its major and general education courses, to the next step.

Departments must demonstrate that their proposals have input and support from their entire faculty. They also are encouraged to include proposed language about international education in their departmental Retention, Promotion, Tenure elaborations, plans to establish an "international path to the major" incorporating study abroad without loss of time to degree, and other initiatives to strengthen global learning at the departmental level.

Faculty are obviously fundamental to the global learning initiative, but in terms of institutionalizing curricular change, the department also is critically important. Faculty tend to change assignments over time, and ultimately, they retire. But the department continues. It establishes the major. It makes assignments in the general education program. It rewards faculty through the Retention, Promotion, Tenure process. This reward program, established by President Marvalene Hughes in 2003 and currently funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (Title VI-A), is proving to be one of the most successful strategies for global learning advancement the university has developed to date.

IV. Future Plans

A Global Learning Strategic Action Plan, developed under the ACE project mentioned above, gives detailed guidance for the campus’ next steps in internationalizing. In general, efforts will include the following:

• Continued work (through departmental structures) to internationalize the general education curriculum and the majors, especially seeking to incorporate the four Global Learning Goals developed under the ACE project.

• Particular focus on strengthening foreign language instruction to make it useful and accessible to all students.

• Development of additional short-term study abroad programs based on the Cuernavaca program model.

• Strengthening the campus’s international ethos by faculty/staff training, increasing the participation of international students, and additional international events.

• Continued assessment of the status of global learning for all students.