Tuesday, September 29, 2020

I'm Excited for The PIEoneer Awards (October 2) & The PIE Live (October 5-8) #PIELive



I've been a huge fan of The PIE News since their beginning! I admire what our colleagues at The PIE News have built and their continued entrepreneurial growth! I've always wanted to attend The PIEoneer Awards but they are held in September and that is a particularly challenging month for me to travel as my wife's work schedule is insanely busy this month and it's really tough on her when I travel. I was in Dublin, Manchester and London for a week back in September 2019 and I missed The PIEoneer Awards by just a few days and my absence was really felt back at home. This year, The PIEoneer Awards will be held this Friday, October 2nd and their new endeavor The PIE Live will be held October 5-8th. Following is a copy and paste from The PIE Live site describing event:

The PIE Live is a new dynamic, online virtual summit from The PIE News team offering exceptional global networking opportunities and learning experiences. #PIELive

• Five panel debates on areas of critical interest and importance

• Four country-focused sessions offering latest insight into national policy and operating outlook

• Four hours per day of video one-to-one networking available to suit varying timezones

• Exclusive insight videos profiling PIEoneer Award category finalists

• Q&A huddles focused on research or company innovation

• Chat roulette function to meet peers attending the same PIEoneer insight sessions

• AI-backed networking suggestions facilitated by our events platform

• Keynote speech from globally renowned professor and commentator on global higher education, Simon Marginson


Both events are virtual and you can learn more about them and register here. Note that The PIE Live full access ticket also includes The PIEoneer Awards!

I will be attending both The PIEoneer Awards and The PIE Live so expect some tweeting and posting to IHEC Blog's Facebook page!



Note: Aside from free registration I receive no compensation for any promotion of and tweeting, posting and blogging about The PIEoneer Awards and The PIE Live. I'm just a fan!


Monday, September 14, 2020

CEA and Dickinson College Amplifying Perspectives from Abroad - A Live Moderated Discussion on Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 10:00am CST

This coming Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 10:00am CST I will be moderating a live online discussion related two IHEC Blog guest posts on the topic of “Amplifying Perspectives from Abroad”.  

I will moderate this live virtual discussion among all four of the guest bloggers:

You can register for this live moderated discussion here.

Related IHEC Blog posts:

Future-Forward Community Building in Education Abroad during COVID-19: Recognizing our Power and Positionality and Amplifying and Listening to Marginalized Voices – Part 1 (August 13, 2020)

Future-Forward Community Building in Education Abroad during COVID-19: Recognizing our Power and Positionality and Amplifying and Listening to Marginalized Voices – Part 2 Overseas Voices (September 1, 2020)

I have been looking forward to this live discussion for quite some time and I hope IHEC Blog readers will be able to join!

Friday, September 11, 2020

I spy in the corner of our kitchen window on a chilly overcast afternoon on Friday, September 11, 2020...

Three of these items are related to international education

- My son’s spider plant from second grade four years ago!
- Christ the Redeemer nick-nack I bought for my wife somewhere up at that summit in Rio
- Small elephant that my daughter gifted the family from her pre-eighth grade, eleven day service-tourist trip to Ecuador
- A ‘Handmade in the Holy Land’ gift I gave to my wife that I picked up in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, Jerusalem
- Artsy cross given to one of the kids...either at birth or baptism from a family member
- A little figurine of a Saint...I think it’s the one that you bury in your front yard to help sell your house but I really have no idea




Thursday, September 10, 2020

Abroadia "Global Thoughts" Speaker Series - September 15th at 2:00pm EST

I've been a fan of Tom Millington and his perspectives on the field of international higher education for a long time and I was honored when he invited me to be a part of the Abroadia "Global Thoughts" Speaker Series. I look forward to joining Tom next Tuesday, September 15th at 2:00pm EST for a discussion on our field.  You can register for mine (and future) "Global Thoughts" here and you can learn more about Abroadia here. Below is a screenshot of the description of the Abroadia "Global Thoughts" Speaker Series.



Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Future-Forward Community Building in Education Abroad during COVID-19: Recognizing our Power and Positionality and Amplifying and Listening to Marginalized Voices - Part 2 Overseas Voices

Part 2 Overseas Voices: Redefining and Reinforcing Community Partnerships in Education Abroad

We are very grateful to have been invited into this conversation between U.S. and onsite education abroad stakeholders. It is an excellent way to utilize the changes brought forward by the global pandemic to start redefining those key terminologies underlined by our American colleagues, Samantha Brandauer and Lou Berends, in Part 1 of this blog series as well as regulate the volume of our voices: we, onsite, should perhaps communicate better and “louder” to be heard and trusted, whether we are working on the provider side of education abroad, or representing a U.S. based college or university.

The two following “voices”, Julia CarnineResident Director for the Dickinson in France program and Monica Francioso, Academic Director at CEA Florence, are expressing our true life experiences as we lived them. We hope to illustrate how we are part of both our local  communities in Toulouse and Florence and our education abroad community in the U.S. Our goal is to highlight what we have learned to strengthen and connect both communities moving forward, ultimately leading to more equity and inclusion.

Also, Part 3 will be a live moderated online discussion and is scheduled for Thursday, September 17, 2020 11:00 am EDT (more information and register here)

On Feb 24th our U.S. students returned from weekend travel back to Toulouse, France, their immersion education abroad program site. Indeed, to be immersed locally means to live with local families, take local transportation to the university, shop the markets all reinforcing the central goal of French language and cultural socialization. Yet lately, we have worked at odds with the increasing weekend student travel trend. Due to accessible low-cost air flights, and despite the programs’ commitment to relationship building with host families, students often spend much time discovering European capitals, rapidly checking destinations off their bucket list. This February was no different. Several students returned to Toulouse to their hosts’ homes from Italy and regions experiencing what we now know is the COVID-19 outbreak. Then rather surreptitiously, Monday morning, the French government laid out self-quarantine recommendations for those returning from specific Italian regions. In our program, this meant that six students having made it back from Italy at the last possible minute Sunday night, should not attend courses at their local University campus the next day, nor for 14 days ahead… and had potentially brought ‘home’ more than Instragrammed souvenirs of their Italian travels, rather had they unknowingly returned with a dubious, infectious health condition?

Calling the students out of classes, informing hosts of the precarious safety situation, sourcing appropriate lodging became urgent preoccupations. The decision was made to remove students from the homes of their hosts. Once students were moved into hotel rooms, we feared that many levels of damage had been done to an already fragile ‘homestay’ social experiment. Hosts are integral members of our community, opening their doors, their bedrooms and bathrooms, refrigerators and wacky family dynamics to student adventurers. Now students were forced to be alone in a foreign environment, left without their cultural guides— students and hosts were scared and frustrated. Research and many personal anecdotes show that a highly functioning homestay can be the source of a lifetime of learning and deep cultural understanding, and whereas this is not always possible, we know after 30 odd years of experience, that by actively cultivating community, listening deeply, engaging hosts as partners/learners on the voyage of intercultural understanding, all parties benefit immeasurably. Our choice to quarantine students (fortunately, none of which succumbed to COVID symptoms) was as much as protecting students as it was for valuing and preserving the healthy family life of their hosts. Given our long history here in Toulouse, we know our hosts intimately, watch their children grow and leave the home, undergo job changes, lose grandparents while growing old themselves. These shared life markers not only represent cultural attitudes and symbolize French values that can be harnessed for student learning; more so, such lived experiences are integral parts of our extended team, enlivening empathy and celebrating our interdependence across borders.

Operating as an immersion study program means careful investment locally, developing trust, honest dialogue and good humor around sometimes tense cultural exchange. In addition, it means clear ethical considerations whereby ‘authentic’ local experiences, (some of which also benefit from being incredibly photogenic and highly memorable!), are understood first as actual moments in the daily lives of local people. Contrary to education abroad mythology, local hosts are not simply screensavers nor extras in the background of a whirlwind travel itinerary. When several hosts dropped off cooked meals and special treats to their frightened, isolated, quarantined host students; when they texted and called every day, this reinforced their investment in these students as members of a community. This scary experience brought them closer to their student(s) and opened many channels of communication and we saw the overall value of our labor-intensive, chosen approach and how it will guide us through COVID and beyond.  

Among lessons learned during COVID-19 is to embrace the deep contributions of local people, in this case, our hosts in our intentionally-formed Toulouse community. During this short but intense crisis, our hosts reinforced student’s coping mechanisms through concrete examples, remaining informed, taking care of their family (including their student) and thereby assuaging bigger fears running so rampantly about.

As U.S. centered education abroad moves forward, it needs to reinforce and develop student learning objectives around this kind of community building.  Putting local relationships at the center, directing students toward this rich component and guiding them to increased soft skills around interdependence, cultural humility and empathy.

February 25th, 2020. Florence, Italy had its first official COVID-19 case and everything started spinning. A large U.S. university  that operates in town decided out of the blue to suspend classes and, on our part, decisions needed to be made fast. We were at a loss with no examples to follow since we were at the forefront of what then became, in just a few weeks, the “new normal”: Spring 2020 moved online and all students were sent back to the States. At first, though, we made the decision to suspend classes (a Spring break was never so welcomed) and while we were trying to decide what to do when the suspension was over, students started to receive emails from their home campuses asking them to return to the U.S. immediately, with no explanation on how this was going to work for them. We, onsite, were as confused as students were; we had no idea that students were going to receive these communications, we had no conversations with their home campuses during this compelling time. As a result, we had no answers for our students and we, onsite and at headquarters, had to find the best solution while navigating many different U.S. college and university responses to the rapidly changing situation.

One question has become, since then, the classic elephant in the room: are we, onsite staff, part of a community? What type of community? Our focus has always been our headquarters and the local communities - university partners onsite, vendors, guides, faculty members, local students, host families - and these partnerships have, over the years, become solid and are based on trust. This helps us, onsite, push the boundaries of what can be offered and how it can be offered to our students; it helps us to be more inclusive and learn new ways to accommodate various requests. What still requires work and commitment, is creating a broader sense of community that includes us, providers onsite, and the various American colleges and universities that send students abroad. The example given at the beginning should be seen as our first lesson learned from COVID-19: Headquarters does an excellent job in creating, building, and fostering partnerships with U.S. universities; however, there must be a way to make us, onsite, more visible and to have a stronger voice in the conversation with our partners. Doing so will strengthen those partnerships even more and it will allow us all to push boundaries, create and innovate courses, programs, and cultural activities that will work better for our students, their degrees and their experiences abroad as well as for us and the wellbeing of our communities.