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ABSTRACTS FOR PANEL 4: ENGAGEMENTS WITH COMMUNITY COLLEGES AND MINORITY-SERVING INSTITUTIONS

“Approaches to Partnering with Community Colleges and Minority-Serving Institutions on Curriculum Development”
Amy Carey, Senior Assistant Director, East Asian Studies Center, and Eileen Kunkler, Assistant Director, Center for Slavic and East European Studies, Ohio State University

The Ohio State University’s East Asian Studies Center (EASC) and Center for Slavic and East European Studies (CSEES) will share the successes and challenges of various approaches to partnering with community colleges for curriculum development. EASC will feature their collaboration with Columbus State Community College which culminated in the development of eight video modules on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history for inclusion in CSCC’s world history courses. OSU faculty, staff, and graduate students worked in close partnership with CSCC faculty and high school teachers to develop and implement the material into the CSCC and College Credit Plus program curriculum and also make it available worldwide via YouTube. EASC’s other collaborations on language curriculum development, course support, and collaborative lecture series with community colleges and minority-serving institutions will also be discussed. CSEES will share information about two different programs that it is part of to support curriculum development at minority-serving institutions and community colleges. First, it has partnered with the Senior Lecturer at Howard University to support and enhance Russian language and area studies coursework through guest lectures, research and curriculum development funds, and conference networking opportunities for faculty and students. Second, CSEES has worked with four other Russian/East European and one Inner Asian and Uralic Title VI National Resource Centers to organize a national curriculum development stipend competition that has resulted in the development of seven new or redesigned area studies courses in two years.

“We Are Changing: How partnerships with MSIs and community colleges enhance opening access initiatives”
Barbara Anderson, Associate Director and Outreach Coordinator, Associate Director, African Studies Center; Thupten Norbu, Interim Director and Outreach Coordinator, Carolina Asia Center; and Ricky Hurtado, International Center, Student Latino Initiative, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This panel presentation will discuss ways in which UNC’s “Opening Access Initiative” to increase Area Studies participation by under-represented students has been enhanced by our partnerships with MSIs and Community Colleges. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is currently home to 6 NRCs (Africa, Asia, Europe, International, Latin America, and Middle East), which collaborate extensively in outreach and evaluation activities, leveraging both NRC and institutional funds in a multi-pronged commitment to being truly “The People’s University.” Examples of this commitment include outreach to Latino high school students and families, support and collaboration with Asia Studies (and other) faculty at NC MSIs, and deep qualitative evaluation of MSI and Community College collaborations. The work of NRCs for our proposed MSI/CC collaboration priority at UNC has changed staff and faculty understandings of the factors that promote under-represented students in participating in Area Studies education.

Cross-Disciplinary, Collaborative Approaches: What’s the world got to do with it?
Meredith Clason, Associate Director, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, University of Chicago; and Ann Peters, Director of Development and Outreach, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

The four NRCs at UChicago have been working with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to provide professional development and internationally-focused programming for faculty and students at the City Colleges of Chicago to meet the Competitive Preference Priority mandating work with community colleges and MSIs. We’re making progress on a Campus Consortium model that is taking

root and would like to share our story and also open dialogue about what other centers are doing to meet this CPP. I would like to present on this topic with a colleague from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Please let me know if this seems a good fit for your schedule.

“Internationalization and Inclusion: Refugees in Community colleges”
Brenna Fitzgerald, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University

Community colleges across the United States have increasingly diverse student bodies as more and more refugees and new arrivals to America enroll in institutions of higher education. This diversity has enormous potential for cross-cultural exchange, yet also poses challenges for faculty and administrators to create an inclusive educational environment. In order to explore the tapped and untapped potential for internationalizing and enriching the community college experience for all students, the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program outreach in collaboration with Syracuse University’s South Asia Center, Onondaga Community College, Mohawk Valley Community College, and Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and South Asia Program held a conference in November 2016 called “Internationalization and Inclusion: Refugees in Community Colleges.” The conference focused on refugee education at community colleges, hoping to raise awareness of refugees’ experiences and to explore ways in which this awareness can be used to internationalize, or include more global context, in course curricula. This conference created space for ongoing discussions around best practices for initiating administrative and curricular changes across campuses with the goal of fostering global learning and encouraging cross-cultural understanding. While presentations provided background and contextualized the arrival of recent refugees from South, Southeast Asia, and Somalia focusing on Bhutanese Nepali, Burmese/Karen, and Somali-Bantu communities, participants at the conference also learned from community colleges that have successfully engaged refugee students and integrated their culture, history, and communities into the educational landscape of their campus.

“Exploring India: Navigating the pitfalls of short term study abroad”
Richard D. McLain, Onondaga Community College, State University of New York

Onondaga Community College (OCC), located in Syracuse, NY, and the Cornell-Syracuse University Consortium for South Asia have partnered on several initiatives during the current Title VI grant period. One of the most fruitful was the creation of a study abroad opportunity for OCC students to travel to India in March 2016. This program was linked with coursework on campus prior to departure to fully prepare students for this exciting opportunity. Curricular support and guest lectures were provided by the South Asia Center at Syracuse University as well as financial resources to make sure that the program was affordable for the students. Dr. Richard McLain, Professor of History at OCC, will discuss the opportunities and challenges that came from this experience and make suggestions for those who might be interested in such future collaborations.