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Global Learning for All
Kennesaw State University
http://www.kennesaw.edu
Contents
General Institutional Overview
http://www.kennesaw.edu
Kennesaw State University (KSU) is one of the fastest growing members
of the University System of Georgia. Located in densely populated and
rapidly developing greater metropolitan Atlanta, the university offers
40 baccalaureate degree programs. These include majors in the arts,
humanities, social sciences, mathematics, natural sciences, accounting,
business fields, teacher education specialties, computing and
information systems, and nursing. The foundation for all undergraduate
majors is a comprehensive, coherent general education program that
strongly promotes international education.
Serving nontraditional students is central to KSU’s mission. In
fall 2002, KSU enrolled more than 15,000 students (approximately 10
percent of them graduate students), making it one of the largest of
Georgia’s state universities in headcount and equivalent full-time
(EFT) enrollment. Among undergraduates, 36 percent are over the age of
25, 39 percent are part-time students, and 62 percent are female.
Minority enrollment is at 20 percent and increasing rapidly. A large
percentage of students transfer to KSU from other colleges, including
439 in fall 2002 from Georgia Perimeter College, KSU’s partner
institution for the Global Learning for All project. The number of
international students at KSU continues to increase substantially, with
more than 1,259 (8 percent of the KSU student body) from 118 countries
in fall 2002. The number of students studying abroad is also increasing
dramatically and has more than tripled in the past five years to more
than 350 students annually.
The KSU
International Center coordinates international programs and
activities for all six colleges of the university, including more than
15 study-abroad programs, numerous student and faculty exchanges, and
the annual Country Study Program. The center enhances international
education for the university as a whole by working collaboratively with
a wide range of academic departments, student groups, and community
organizations. Five full-time staff work in the center.
Overview of Internationalization Efforts
KSU seeks to provide all of its students with an international
education that emphasizes learning about cultural diversity and global
interdependence. The approach is collaborative, multidisciplinary, and
experiential. International education at KSU begins with a strongly
internationalized core curriculum. All students study world (not
western) civilizations, world (not western) literature, global
economics, and American government from a comparative perspective. Arts
appreciation courses in music, theater, and the visual arts all contain
significant nonwestern components.
KSU’s three most significant achievements in providing all of
its students with a more in-depth understanding of the world beyond our
borders are: (1) the internationalized core curriculum; (2) the annual
Country Study Program; and (3) a rapid, successful expansion of
accessible study-abroad programs.
Internationalized Core Curriculum
The core curriculum at KSU was heavily internationalized in 1991. Core
courses are taken by every KSU undergraduate student, regardless of
major, so the impact is universal. As noted previously, the revised
curriculum stresses material on nonwestern cultures in a wide range of
courses. Literature and history surveys add significant Asian and
African materials, and the American government course was recast so that
students are constantly comparing American political institutions with
those of other nations. In addition, new courses were added in global
economics, regional geography, and anthropology.
With the revision, many faculty members needed additional training to
teach newly required materials, especially those relating to nonwestern
cultures. As a result, KSU stressed faculty participation in
professional development seminars at international locations organized
by the University System of Georgia. KSU leads the University System of
Georgia in attendance of these seminars, with 52 faculty participants
since the inception of these seminars in 1993. The KSU International
Center organized the first of these seminars, patterned after the
Fulbright Group Projects Abroad program, and has played a major role in
convincing the university system to fund several seminars per year since
1993.
In the area of curricular development, KSU’s primary strategy
has been to build and use faculty expertise in area studies and develop
strong institutional linkages with partner institutions abroad to
complement this expertise. In this way, faculty expertise in area
studies at KSU has improved rapidly. The development of an African and
African Diasporan Studies (AADS) major and a Chinese Studies Center
demonstrate KSU’s focus on learning about the world beyond the
traditional focus of Western Europe. Likewise, the KSU International
Center served as the administrative headquarters for the University
System of Georgia’s Asia and Africa Councils from 1997 to 2002.
The KSU faculty resource groups that the International Center has
organized, funded, and facilitated have effectively encouraged
curricular enhancement, particularly relating to less commonly studied
regions such as Africa and Asia.
Both the AADS major and the Chinese Studies Center aim to capitalize
on faculty expertise and international partnerships to provide students
with a wide variety of curricular and experiential international
education opportunities. KSU has 12 faculty members from China, and more
than 15 other KSU faculty members have participated in KSU’s
exchange programs in China. KSU also coordinates numerous collaborative
projects and partnerships focused on the study of China, including
several exchange relationships with universities in China.
Annual Country Study Program
The Country Study Program demonstrates one of the most successful ways
in which KSU has infused classes with international perspectives. Each
academic year, KSU sponsors a series of lectures, performances,
exhibits, and films that focus on a different country or world region.
These public programs are linked to at least four credit-earning special
topics courses and to new instructional units throughout the general
education curriculum. Working with the General Education Council, the
university has introduced a grant program to encourage general education
faculty to produce discipline-based modules on the country under study,
use them in their own classes, and disseminate them among
colleagues.
The Country Study Program’s impact ripples across undergraduate
instruction in two ways. First, many students either take the country
study special topics courses or sit in core classes that contain
country-specific modules. Other students attend the public films,
lectures, performances, and art exhibits that constitute the heart of
the program. Second, and perhaps more important in the long run, the
faculty members who create and use the general education
modules—or who create and teach the special topics courses
focusing on the country under study—are themselves significantly
internationalized in the process. Such internationalization efforts
affect faculty members’ teaching for years to come.
Expansion of Accessible Study-abroad Programs
Building significant participation in study-abroad programs presents a
challenge when working with nontraditional students, many of whom have
limited resources and family or job responsibilities that make it
impossible for them to be out of the country for significant periods of
time. In response to such situations, KSU has developed a wide range of
inexpensive, short-term study-abroad programs. The university offers a
significant number of these highly accessible programs for two weeks
between spring and summer terms, when airfares are generally lower than
in summer. The results have been impressive: In the past five years, KSU
student participation in study-abroad programs has tripled to more than
350 students per year. KSU was recently ranked 11th in the country by
the Institute for International Education
(IIE) for sending students on short-term study-abroad programs.
KSU’s approach to study abroad is highly collaborative; the
university recruits students from across Georgia for all of its
study-abroad programs and has established consortium agreements with
other institutions to ensure transfer of credit and mobility of
financial aid. The study-abroad program to Italy attracts more than 90
students each year, including more than 20 students per year from
two-year institutions such as Georgia Perimeter College. As an
affiliated program of the University System of Georgia’s European
Council, the Italy program allows students to register at their home
campuses. Study-abroad programs to Ghana and China depend on recruiting
students from across the state in order to maintain the viability of the
programs. Experience has shown that programs to such nontraditional
sites attract higher percentages of new majority students than do the
more traditional sites in Europe.
In addition to the programs already mentioned, KSU also offers
regular Chinese-language courses through its critical languages program.
During the past five years, 55 students have participated in the
KSU-administered Summer Study Abroad Program in China; six have returned
to China to teach English. KSU also placed its first student teacher in
China in spring 2002, and seven KSU education students conducted their
student teaching in China in spring 2003. The Chinese student teaching
initiative includes a cross-cultural examination of teacher competencies
and an emphasis on identifying effective, appropriate methodologies for
teaching about culture.
Internationalization and the New Majority Student
KSU’s three main achievements—the international core
curriculum, the annual Country Study Program, and the expansion of
accessible study-abroad programs—all address the needs of new
majority students. All three focus on reaching as broad a range of
students as possible. Another successful approach to promoting
international education on the KSU campus is through classroom
presentations done by visiting international students. KSU encourages
such presentations through its International Diplomatic Corps, a
volunteer service program through which international students can
qualify for a nonresident tuition waiver program. This program results
in more than 5,000 hours of campus and community service per year. New
majority students who cannot find the time, funds, or childcare needed
to study abroad gain firsthand exposure to different cultures and world
views through such classroom presentations. Similarly, KSU’s
Conversation Partner Program, which pairs American students with
international students for language learning and friendship, emphasizes
shared cross-cultural experiences.
The KSU Campus Internationalization Mentors program is aimed at
developing international student leadership. It provides students with
tools for effective classroom presentations on international education
and issues of globalization. The program also provides ongoing
intercultural training and a structured format in which visiting
international students and returned study-abroad students can build
greater awareness of the challenges and rewards of international
education. The program has strengthened international student leadership
at KSU in a manner that bridges classroom activities with life
experiences. It has focused on the importance of international education
and intercultural communication skills in the development of student and
community leadership. This program particularly affects students whose
financial and family responsibilities make it difficult for them to
study abroad.
In response to Hispanic enrollment having increased by more than 50
percent in the past five years, KSU recently established a Hispanic
Studies Center. One primary goal of this center is to better serve the
rapidly growing Hispanic population of Northern Georgia. KSU is not only
trying to respond to this demographic trend, but is actively recruiting
Hispanic students. The university has established a bilingual admissions
web page and hired a bilingual recruiter. Spanish is the most popular
choice for foreign language majors at KSU, and the university’s
longest running, most successful study-abroad program is based in
Oaxaca, Mexico. Professional language courses such as Spanish for Nurse
Practitioners represent an important curriculum advance in teaching
foreign languages and in meeting the needs of the new majority student.
International Learning Goals
KSU’s goals for internationalizing the campus and creating an
atmosphere conducive to international learning stem from its mission,
which emphasizes the importance of global and international education in
three specific ways:
1. “Faculty, staff, and administrators are committed to
providing a challenging and facilitative collegiate environment that
fosters...global and multicultural perspectives.”
The International Center contributes greatly to the global
environment at KSU through its administration of the annual Country
Studies Program, coordination of special programs such as teach-ins, and
teaming with departments and faculty groups to bring international
speakers to campus. Advocacy and administration of study-abroad programs
and faculty exchanges also contribute substantially to global and
multicultural perspectives on campus.
2.“The foundation for all undergraduate majors is a
comprehensive and coherent general education program that promotes
internationalized and connected learning in the liberal arts
tradition.”
From 1989 to 1991, the director of the International Center chaired
the Ad Hoc Core Curriculum Committee that achieved several major
accomplishments:
- Introduced world history and world literature courses into the core
curriculum, replacing western civilization courses.
- Mandated that faculty teach the American Government course from a
global perspective.
- Added courses in global economics and world regional geography.
All of these courses remain in the current core curriculum.
3. “Cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender diversity in the
faculty, staff, and student body, supported by practices and programs
that embody the ideals of an open, democratic, and global
society.”
KSU supports the recruitment of foreign-born faculty and staff by
assisting with visa issuance, petitions, and change of status
applications. Similarly, the KSU International Center coordinates all
efforts toward recruitment and retention of international students. This
coordination includes a comprehensive orientation program and ongoing
international advising services. KSU encourages more globally oriented
programs by organizing, promoting, and supporting faculty
internationalization seminars and by encouraging interdisciplinary
international programs and courses.
Assessing International Learning Goals
KSU strives to provide an international education to all of its
students through the strategic, integrated development of area studies,
cultural centers, exchange partnerships, the year of country-study,
study abroad, international student recruitment and retention,
intercultural classroom presentations, Campus Internationalization
Mentors program, conversation partners program, English as a Second
Language program, and foreign languages. KSU has placed particular
emphasis on developing programs and structures that increase
opportunities to learn about and interact with different cultures and
world views. Efforts at assessment have largely occurred within the
classroom and have tended not to look at the overall impact of the
various programs and opportunities. KSU will benefit greatly from a
thorough process of articulating and assessing international learning
outcomes and welcomes the opportunities provided by the Global Learning
for All initiative.
Last updated: April 27, 2005
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