Best Practices Conference in June, 2001

Centenary College of Louisiana

Participants:

• Grace Bareikis
• David Havird
• Maureen McKenna

Project Title: Global Semester

Project Description:

The mission statement of Centenary College includes the goal to challenge students to "appreciate the diversity of human cultures." To partially fulfill that goal the faculty instituted an Intercultural Experience requirement in 1992, which requires that all students graduating from Centenary College spend at least three weeks in a "culture other than their own" during their undergraduate years. This requirement can be met by participation in one of the semester or yearlong academic exchange programs administered by the college, and many students take advantage of those opportunities. However, it has become clear in our experience of the past decade that students majoring in the sciences or one of the professional degree programs have a great deal of difficulty fitting a semester abroad into their curriculum, and many humanities students simply do not have the financial resources for a semester abroad. Consequently, students increasingly are meeting their intercultural experience requirement with participation in one of the short travel-study courses offered during the May semester.

These courses have been carefully designed by the organizing faculty members to provide an academic rather than a tourist experience, and they have been well received by the participating students. We have become aware, however, that the task of introducing students to a culture different from their own in the space of a three-week sojourn is problematic. And while these study-trips are meaningful in themselves, many faculty express concern that for many students the content presented in the course of these trips remains unrelated to the liberal arts curriculum as a whole.

In an effort to address these concerns, Centenary College proposes to design a program where regularly offered semester courses will culminate in a short-term overseas study experience. We envision two courses offered each spring with an enrollment of fifteen to twenty students with successful completion of the semester-long course serving as a requirement for participation in the trip.

Faculty from all departments will be invited to propose courses, which could be either courses from the liberal arts core curriculum open to all students or upper-level courses designed to meet the requirements of a particular major. Part of the work of the delegation selected for participation in the Global Partners Workshop will be to survey faculty interest during the spring, 2001 semester. However, in our initial discussions we have identified a number of courses that appear to lend themselves easily to this design.

Participants:

Name: Grace Bareikis

Title: Director of Intercultural Affairs

E-mail: gbareiki@centenary.edu

Biographical Information:

Name: David Havird

Title: Associate Dean of the College & Associate Professor of English

E-mail: dhavird@centenary.edu

Biographical Information: I have been a member of the English faculty at Centenary College since 1988; I am now entering my second year as associate dean of the college. My Ph.D. is from the University of Virginia (1986), where I wrote a dissertation on Thomas Hardy. While my chief area of specialization is 19th-century British literature, my recent publications have been about Southern writers such as Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey, and I taught courses in Southern literature at the University of Aarhus in Denmark when I was a visiting professor there in 1991. Other recent publications include poems, in Seneca Review and The Texas Review, set on Crete, where I spent time in the early '90s.

Name: Maureen McKenna

Title: Assistant Professor of Spanish

E-mail: mmckenna@centenary.edu

Biographical Information: I have been Assistant Professor of Spanish at Centenary College of Louisiana for two years since graduating with a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Yale U. I teach elementary Spanish language, advanced grammar and composition, and Latin American literature and civilization. I have been interested in study abroad since I began studying foreign languages in elementary school. As an undergraduate at Smith College, where I majored in Latin American studies, I was fortunate to be able to spend an entire year studying and traveling in Argentina. At Centenary I have the opportunity to help students find suitable study abroad programs as well as to accompany students on short 3 week module trips. This week I am leaving with one of my colleagues in the history department and 15 of our students for Spain. We plan to complete roughly 200 miles of the Camino de Santiago on foot! I'm adventurous to say the least.