Strengthening Our Global Community
Year of Public Engagement grant expands program to benefit community
By Erika Binegar
A South African international student asks to see his adviser, and the secretary impatiently tells him he’ll have to come back later because he doesn’t have an appointment.
Communication grinds to a screeching halt as the secretary uses informal American slang and raises her voice, becoming more annoyed at having to repeat herself, and the student backs away, saying that he understands when he really doesn’t.
The student and secretary are role-playing in an exercise to educate professors, faculty and administrators on the profound impact they have on new international students’ lives. This scenario was played out thanks to a Strengthening Our Global Community program organized by the University of Iowa Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS).
Claire Cardwell, an OISS adviser and a workshop presenter, said such miscommunication is not uncommon at the university or in the wider community.
“I believe people are basically good — nobody wants to be rude, nobody wants to be condescending, but a lot of people don’t have the background or experiences,” Cardwell said. “It’s really important as administrators to think about how we’re going to offer training to make international students feel more welcome.”
And thanks to a Year of Public Engagement (YPE) grant of$6,134, OISS staff members are expanding their cross-cultural training program to nonprofits and businesses outside of the university, as well as to area community colleges.
Kelli Andresen
UI students Gulchin Aydin (left) from Turkey and Gyorgy Toth from Hungary share insights during a two-day, free training in October 2006 as part of the Strengthening Our Global Community grant.
The YPE grant made it possible for OISS staff to provide major programming support for the Community Colleges for International Development (CCID) annual summer institute held July 21 to 24, 2006. During the three-day session, more than 80 administrators, professors and faculty members from community colleges across Iowa, the United States and the world, gathered together in two rooms to learn methods for effectively communicating with international students and welcoming them with open arms.
Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids hosted this year’s institute, which featured training from OISS personnel and centered around the theme of “Building the Community College’s Global Capacity.”
“The training was designed to make college campuses more welcoming to international students, particularly for community colleges where numbers have increased substantially in the last few years,” said Helen Jameson, OISS assistant director, who administers the YPE grant.
In the fall of 2004, more than 565,000 international students were enrolled in U.S. higher education, with more than 84,000 of those in two-year institutions, Jameson said during her presentation.
CCID reaches out to those students in community colleges across the country and beyond, with a special pitch for community colleges in Iowa, Jameson said. And this year, they approached OISS for help with their summer institute – using the office’s training as a foundation for workshop sessions, with topics ranging from an international student’s application and acceptance saga, to culture shock and communication “hot buttons.”
“Their timing was perfect because we were beginning discussions on expanding our multicultural training options and CCID’s needs aligned with our goals,” said Scott King, OISS director.
OISS personnel led various workshop sessions during the three-day time span, including one entitled “Learning to be Successful in a New Academic System,” led by King and including a video dramatization of an intercultural classroom, where the students’ cultural backgrounds resulted in various conflicts, and the professor was challenged to move the class beyond these disagreements.
“Culture does play a big part in what international students expect in the classroom,” King said, calling attention to examples such as honoring history versus problem solving, and the philosophy of whether one keeps opinions to oneself or shares them with others.
The video – now permanently at home in OISS because of money from the YPE grant – brought up differences between higher education in the U.S. and other cultures’ more streamlined educational systems.
Catherine Schaff-Stump, Kirkwood Community College’s English Language Acquisition coordinator, said one of their five-year plans is in regard to international educational training.
“This is a great model for us…because we’d like to do the same thing,” Schaff-Stump said about the OISS program.
Kelli Andresen
Lisa Troyer (right) chairs a panel on "Global Perspectives on Philanthropy" while UI student Gyorgy Toth, from Hungary, shares insights. Both participated in a free training for community leaders in the non-profit sector held in October.
Carolyn Stephenson said about 500 international students are enrolled at Kirkwood, where she teaches general and developmental psychology. Plagiarism misunderstandings and language confusion are common, she said, but her biggest personal difficulty is persuading her international students to share their differences in class.
“Often times they’re hesitant to put out those differences because they’re here to fit in,” she said. “I think we all can learn a lot from international students. We can’t afford to be American-centric; we have to understand how Middle Easterners think and the differences in religion. We can’t sit here in Iowa and think the world comes to us.”
Jameson said the workshops offered in CCID’s institute are ones people can develop on their own campuses.
She described the university’s BOGC program, created in 2004, as a series of training sessions for faculty and staff to develop effective ways of communicating and working with international students. It has been available to the UI community for two years, but it was the Year of Public Engagement grant, awarded in late October 2005, that allowed the office to reach out to the wider community.
Partnered with UI Learning and Development, OISS received one of 15 grants and a portion of the $100,000 the UI awarded to faculty, staff and students who submitted applications during the Year of Public Engagement. A committee reviewed 80 applications, all of which detailed projects to strengthen the university’s connection to Iowa and its commitment to engagement.
“The CCID institute training was just one part of the Year of Public Engagement grants,” Jameson stressed.
The grant also funds basic cross-cultural instruction for trainers, as well for nonpartisans and nonprofit community business leaders. A two-day, free training was also held in October 2006, and was open to as many as 25 community leaders. The workshop focused on how to make nonprofit organizations more ”user-friendly” for internationals, Jameson said.
“International students don’t just live on campus, so this aspect of the training is important,” she noted. “The YPE is serving as seed money to develop ongoing programs.”
Workshop topics included an understanding of Iowa's changing demographics, the major obstacles internationals face when moving to Iowa, and increasing cultural self awareness on the part of the majority culture.
Though the YPE grant period ends in December 2006, Jameson said they hope to keep the concept alive, offering training for businesses, schools and nonprofits via a sliding scale fee – which would take organizational finances into account.