from VCCA Journal, Volume 8, Number 2, Fall/Winter 1993, 11-16
© Copyright 1993 VCCA Journal
A major commitment of effort and a relatively small investment of college funds have paid off for Tidewater Community College's international education programs. Using grant funding, the college increased its international programs budget by more than 450 percent in 1993. On its second try, the college secured a $47,000 Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad grant which took 12 faculty from four Colleges in the Virginia Community College System to the Czech and Slovak Republics for five weeks in May and June of this year. The college also received a $60,000 grant from the U. S. Department of Education's Undergraduate Foreign Languages and International Programs to continue the internationalization of its educational program, especially with regard to foreign languages and Latin America. That program will provide another $60,000 for the 1995 fiscal year.
In addition, the college received two smaller grants: $2,250 from the Options Program, funded by the Institute of Peace, to maintain an international speakers bureau; and $8,225 from the Small Business Administration to set up a center to provide export assistance to small businesses. It also became a part of the Improving Foreign Language Project sponsored by the American Association of Community Colleges, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Community College Humanities Association.
None of this would have happened if Tidewater Community College had not taken the first steps on its own initiative and with its own funding. The college's initial efforts to become involved in international education were spurred by several factors. Internally, Ramona Mapp, Helena Krohn, William Paquette and several other faculty had been encouraging the college to move in the direction of international education without much success. However, external factors were also at work.
In 1984, the Southern Governor's Association reported that the South exported 53 billion dollars in manufactured goods in that year alone and that the export sector in the south employed 1.4 million people. In March 1986, Virginia Governor Gerald L. Baliles was appointed chairman of that association's Advisory Council on International Education. That summer, the Council released findings which focused on the problems associated with international literacy, and Governor Baliles made a watershed speech to the Association of Virginia Colleges:
In my mind, given the conditions we face in the world, the pursuit of trade and the desire for educational excellence is indivisible. . . . The fact is we do not prepare our students and, consequently, our workers and managers to succeed in the global economy.
That same summer, after learning through the Eastern Community College Social Science Association about the work being done in international education at other community colleges, two faculty members, Mary Ruth Clowdsley and Barbara Nudelman, were given a small Virginia Community College Association grant which enabled them to develop the initial plan to internationalize the college. After receiving their report in fall 1987, George Pass, president of the college at that time, appointed an International Education Task Force for the college. It was a significant commitment. The college's long range plan, Toward the Year 2000, produced in 1988, stated that "Tidewater Community College has become a leader in the System through the work of its International Education Task Force."
The task force immediately decided that a biennial action plan would best serve to bring about internationalization of the college in an orderly and efficient manner. Since curriculum change could not take place without faculty change, the initial plan established the education of faculty as its first priority. Numerous studies indicated that American adults were woefully ignorant about other areas of the world. Most TCC faculty, the task force judged, were no different. They received their degrees during a time when education focused almost totally on western Europe and the Americas. While much education has already taken place, faculty development still remains the task force's first priority.
Faculty development at Tidewater Community College has taken two forms. First the college received a Funds for Excellence grant of just over $50,000 from the State Council for Higher Education in the summer of 1988 to conduct a faculty and curriculum development seminar on East Asia. Through this seminar, nineteen courses were substantially revised to include East Asian components.
In awarding the grant, SCHEV mandated that the college cooperate with a similar effort taking place at Old Dominion University. The project director, Dr. Thomas Burkman, who was then the Director of ODU's East Asian Institute, became the consultant for the TCC seminar and certified all the revised syllabi which resulted from it. A year later, three of the participants in TCC seminar took part in ODU's faculty and curriculum development project in China and Japan, which happened to fall in the month of the Tienanmen Square events in 1989.
Under a second Funds for Excellence grant in 1990, the college conducted a faculty and curriculum development seminar on East Europe, just after the amazing revolutions of 1989. In this seminar, a total of 25 faculty revised courses to include Eastern European elements. Participants this time included a few faculty from Thomas Nelson and Paul D. Camp Community Colleges and from Norfolk State University, setting a model for future collaborative efforts.
Beginning in 1988, the college also began to actively encourage faculty to teach or study abroad. Barbara Hund, who had been a participant in the East Asian Seminar, went to China to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute for the 1988-89 school year, and returned there the following summer to participate in a conference for women leaders.
As part of its effort to encourage study abroad, the college offered what it then called Summer International Grants (SIGs). In 1988, these grants funded one faculty member's full-time summer salary while he did research in England to support and revise his American history course. The next year, the SIGs supported two of the faculty members who were in China with the ODU group and sent a Spanish teacher to Spain to update her spoken Spanish. In 1990, in the budget's blackest period, the college funded one such grant which sent history professor Phil Thompke to Charles University in Prague.
The SIGs were dropped in the budget debacle of 1991, but returned in a slightly different form in 1992 when two faculty members taught faculty groups at Charles University in Prague; the lead faculty in the horticulture program studied English gardens in England, and an economics professor "taught capitalism" in Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. One of the faculty teaching in Prague that year went on to attend an international seminar sponsored by the Council for International Educational Exchange in St. Petersburg. These grants were budget-conscious. Where earlier grants had provided an entire summer's salary, these provided only the actual expense of a pared-to-the-bones two- or three-week experience abroad.
Last year, in an effort not to restrict the grants to the summer term, the funds for international professional development dropped the SIG label. With those funds this year, a history professor participated in a China study tour sponsored by the college over the winter break; an English teacher went to Moscow and St. Petersburg and made contacts with the Center for the Study of All Human Values in Moscow; the college's coordinator of computer services went to Charles University to develop computer connections to facilitate our sister college relationship with them; an art professor taught the history of American art at the same university; English faculty members taught the language at a technical institute in St. Petersburg and at the Bialystok Campus of the University of Warsaw; and the foreign language coordinator from the Virginia Beach Campus went to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to lay plans for a TCC summer study abroad program there.
A third priority for the task force from the beginning was the expansion of the foreign language program at the college. With the budget cuts, we lost ground; the number of languages offered was cut to two (French and Spanish), the number of sections available was cut, and a full-time faculty position was not filled. Rather than moving ahead, the college was in the position of needing to regain lost ground. In the past year, the college appointed an assistant division chair for foreign languages at the Virginia Beach Campus, the campus with the largest enrollment in foreign language. The college also hired a full-time French instructor last year, and this fall, it has hired an additional full-time Spanish faculty member. It has also increased the variety of languages offered and the number of sections. Today the college offers German and Japanese in addition to French and Spanish. Further upgrading of the foreign language programs remains a priority in the current action plan.
In the fall of 1992, foreign language faculty from the three campuses of the college met to discuss the needs of the discipline. With little money available to support changes and upgrades of equipment, faculty development, updating of faculty language skills, training of adjunct faculty in proficiency-oriented teaching methodology, and the financing to conduct a summer study abroad program--all priorities to the instructors of foreign languages--the faculty decided to look for grants which would support foreign language initiatives. Three grant sources were identified: the U. S. Department of Education's Undergraduate International Study and Foreign Language Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Association of Community Colleges.
An AACC project funded by the NEH and CCHA, entitled Improving Foreign Language Education at Community Colleges, was about to select fifteen community colleges from a nationwide call for applications. In its application, Tidewater identified three major problem areas in foreign language instruction at the college and mapped out a proposed plan to correct them. Its application was selected from a pool of 83 applicants.
This project provided funds for two faculty members to travel to and participate in the National Foreign Language Education Conference, held March 7-10, 1993, in Washington, D.C. (The college provided funding for one administrator to attend to complete the required three-member team.) This conference brought together a dozen experts and leaders in the field of foreign language instruction from across the country to share their knowledge and expertise with the participating colleges.
In addition, Tidewater was assigned one such expert, Dr. Fe Brittain, chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, as its mentor. During the conference, she assisted the team in narrowing its focus in order to set priorities for improvement. The project also funded her visit to the college this past August to lend further assistance and to support the team in the implementation of its plan for improvement. She met with the college president and his staff, spoke during faculty orientation at all three campuses, and met with all full-time foreign language faculty to discuss problems and goals. The college will send its three-member team to the Second National Foreign Language Education Conference to be held in San Antonio, Texas, this October.
To help with funding to implement the plan for improvement, the college sought financial support from the U. S. Department of Education's Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program. Tidewater was awarded $120,000 to support a two-year project to carry out the following activities:
Planning for the faculty and curriculum development seminar is under way with a brochure and application already published and early development of the telecourse on Latin America in progress. This past summer, Deborah Edson visited three potential sites in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and selected one for the summer study abroad to be conducted there in July, 1994. The promotional flyer will be out in late October.
During the August 1993 faculty orientation, the first two-day workshop on teaching foreign languages for proficiency outcomes in speaking and listening skills was held. Leading the workshop was Dr. Irene Thompson, chair of the Department of Slavic Languages at George Washington University, who is a teacher-trainer, certified and arranged for by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). TCC's full-time and adjunct instructors of Spanish, French, German, Japanese and ESL, as well as foreign language faculty from neighboring Paul D. Camp and Thomas Nelson community colleges, participated in the workshop and evaluated it as excellent. Two more such training workshops, each emphasizing different skills, will be held during the period of the grant.
Applications were accepted from the college's foreign language faculty who wish to spend at least four weeks abroad this summer to study and update their own proficiency in the language they teach and to increase their cultural knowledge. Two awards have been made for summer 1994, and two more will be made for the following summer.
Finally, the college now teaches the first level of Japanese and hopes to continue to offer Japanese and to offer another nonwestern language next fall. Since this region has the largest Filipino community outside the islands, Tagalog is being considered. Many here speak the language haltingly but do not write it, and many non-Filipino spouses want to learn the language. We have structured agreements with the largest university to which our students transfer which guarantees that Tagalog will meet their requirement for two years of a foreign language, and the college is at the brink of being ready to proceed.
Not only is this grant from the U. S. Department of Education helping to improve foreign language and international education at the college, it has also motivated faculty and administrators to seek new ways to incorporate those studies into a soon-to-be-established International Studies Certificate. Furthermore, a committee is now working on details for an approved International studies curriculum.
The OPTIONS grant was small but paid rather large dividends. Under that grant, an international speakers' bureau was developed which included the college's own faculty with significant international experience, visiting scholars from other countries, and people from the community. Our first report indicates that, after only six months, more than 600 people had been reached. That number skyrocketed in the next semester when our Chinese visiting scholar spoke to more than 350 people, not counting a public radio audience.
Other action plan priorities have been improving the climate for foreign students on the campuses and expanding their visibility, providing export education for small businesses, placing maps in classrooms, and bringing international faculty and lecturers to the college.
For the past two years, the college has put $25,000 into funding a half-time international programs director, a half-time grants director and a half-time secretary into this effort. The International Education Task Force produces a biennial action plan every two years and carefully monitors the achievement of its objectives. Limited release time has been an absolute necessity for the achievement of task force goals, and task force members and members of the international education committees and others on all the campuses have devoted large blocks of their own time to the effort. The time, money, and work has paid off.
Kathleen D. O'Connor is the former chairperson of the International Education Task Force at Tidewater Community College.
Mary Ruth Clowdsley is the director of grants and international programs at Tidewater.