The Center in Africa -- led by the Great Lakes Colleges Association, Inc.

The first summer seminar in Nairobi will be held June of 2000. There were 44 applicants for 21 places in the seminar, from faculty members at 19 institutions. The group selected represents all three consortia, a wide range of disciplinary and teaching interests, and all faculty ranks.

One of the distinctive features of this seminar is its truly joint planning. A faculty committee at the University of Nairobi, parallel to the Global Partners task force on Nairobi, has been working with the task force to design the seminar and select the participants. There will be equal numbers of East African and U.S. participants in the seminar, which will encourage the development of research and program links between and among participating institutions. A list of participating faculty is attached.

The task force has also discussed possible Center activities, which would extend beyond the seminar. In particular, the directors of the Earlham and Wooster programs in Kenya have been involved in early discussions of ways the Center could support their activities and allow for sharing of resources.

Latin America

The proposal to the Foundation did not outline a center in Latin America, but it did call for the exploration of the growing interest in Latin America among the colleges that could ultimately lead to collaborative efforts in that region. With this in mind, the three consortia note that there were several discussions during the first year of the Global Partners Project about Latin America. These discussions have begun to lead to the creation of faculty networks, an effort to identify programs currently available through our institutions in that region, and an initial consideration of possible programs that might be created jointly by the three consortia. Faculty see considerable value in joint discussions and planning for the future, and are learning lessons from the three other centers being developed. Consequently, they should be well positioned in a year or two to prepare a comprehensive plan and strategy for future collaborative efforts.

Best Practices -- led by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest

The Best Practices task force met in December and includes four representatives from each of the three consortia. The representatives include faculty members with extensive experience in international education and college staff, particularly off-campus study directors. The representative from the Coordinating Committee is Roger Casey from Birmingham-Southern College. This task force is also assisted by Cheryl Jacobsen and others from the ACM staff.

The Best Practices task force began by reviewing its charge, looking over the parts of the grant proposal that fall under the Best Practices guideline. They agreed that drawing from the proposal, both the Initiatives for Excellence: Strengthening Intercultural Competency and Best Practices: Strengthening Programming Leadership were part of their responsibility. They concluded that intercultural competency was an important component of international study and inherent in the broad educational goals of international education in liberal arts colleges. Recognizing that students choose study abroad programs both for specific content and for experiential potential, they agreed that the task force should identify and disseminate annotated bibliographies of the most useful professional literature addressing these themes to college faculties and students. Among Best Practices they agreed that models or criteria for assessing off-campus study should be gathered, along with successful models of director training, analysis of language pedagogy, integration of on- and off-campus study, effective advising practices, and the liberal arts context for all these concepts.

As a set of activities to identify and disseminate Best Practices, the task force agreed to sponsor a major conference with plenary speakers and concurrent workshops. The title of this conference might be Integrating Liberal Learning and Study Abroad: Theoretical Frameworks and Best Practices. The conceptual framework emphasizes integration: integration of liberal arts curriculum and off-campus study, of academic content and cultural context, of theory and practice in intercultural competency. Additional foci will include training for faculty directors of off-campus study, design of interdisciplinary re-entry courses, development of field study and service learning methodologies, and analysis of language teaching and technology. The conference is scheduled for the summer of 2001 and will bring together 100-120 participants with two or three participants from each consortial college. Colleges will send small teams including faculty members and international education administrators.

The conference will be followed by the award of challenge or incentive grants to teams interested in further work on specific conference topics. The goal of the challenge grants is to encourage innovative development of products, such as guidelines or templates that can be widely disseminated within the consortial colleges. The task force will encourage, solicit, and select the teams working on individual products on the basis of proposals submitted and discussion at the conference. The teams will meet and prepare a draft of their reports by December 2001, working with the task force on drafts and revisions so that the guidelines for Best Practices will be available for distribution by the summer of 2002.

The task force has continued to meet electronically through the winter to refine the conceptual framework of the conference topics, identify the date and site for the conference, and develop the agenda.

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