from VCCA Journal, Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 1988, 4-9
© Copyright 1988 VCCA Journal
According to a study released July 27, 1988, by the National Geographic Society, "Americans aged 18 to 24 ranked last in an international comparison of geographic knowledge, and American adults of all ages scored among the bottom third." The nine-nation study found that 75 percent of Americans surveyed were unable to locate the Persian Gulf on a map and fewer than half could identify the United Kingdom, France, South Africa or Japan. The United States, in addition, was the only country in which young adults, aged 18 to 24, scored below older adults, aged 55 and older.
This study is only the most recent in a series of demonstrations of the need to internationalize education in this country: A 1982 UNESCO survey of 10 to 14 year olds in 9 countries showed that American students ranked next to last in their comprehension of foreign cultures. Twenty-five percent of 8th and 12th graders believed that India or China extended into Europe. In 1984 a major southern university reported that only 5 percent of its students passed an elementary geography test. An early 1980's study by the Council on Learning revealed that 75 percent of young people from 14 to 25 believe that they (the students) were "more interested in and knowledgeable about (international affairs) than their teachers." In 1979 the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies reported that there were 10,000 Japanese business representatives in the USA--all of whom spoke English. There were less than 1,000 American business representatives in Japan--only a handful of whom spoke Japanese.
The United States can ill afford such a level of ignorance, given our political and economic connections worldwide. According to a 1983 report of the American Council on Education, the total value of US foreign trade has grown to 25 percent of our GNP. Twenty percent of U.S. industrial output is for export. The jobs of one in six U. S. production workers are directly dependent on international trade. Forty percent of our farmland produces goods for export. About one third of U. S. corporate profits are generated by international activities. Our 13 largest banks get almost half their total earnings from overseas.
Our links with the world become stronger each year. Japan receives nearly 30 percent of its huge GNP from trade and one quarter of that trade is with the United States. On the other hand, it imports over 80 percent of its energy. The Peoples Republic of China, home to more than one-fifth of the world's population and growing at a rate twice that of the U.S., has a GNP expanding today at a rate of 11 percent per year and is increasingly involved in international business (Population Reference Bureau).
Such links are particularly important to our region. In 1984 the Southern Governor's Association reported that the South exported $53 billion in manufactured products in that one year alone. This was 30 percent of the total U. S. manufactured exports. The export sector in the South that year employed 1.4 million people.
At its 1985 annual meeting, the Association authorized an Advisory Council on International Education to
In March 1986, Governor Gerald L. Baliles was appointed Chairman of the Association's Advisory Council on International Education. The Council reviewed the status of international education in the region, identified current shortcomings, discussed solutions, and formed subcommittees to study further geographic and cultural awareness, languages, teacher education, and business, and political issues. In August, the Council members released findings which focused on the problems associated with international illiteracy (Findings of the Southern Governors' Association Advisory Council on International Education).
On January 27, 1987, Governor Baliles spoke to the Association of Virginia Colleges. The following is an excerpt from his text:
In my mind, given the conditions we face in the world, the pursuit of trade and the desire for educational excellence are indivisible.... The fact is we do not prepare our students--and, consequently, our workers and managers--to succeed in the global economy. Conditioned to expect easy, even automatic success, American firms repeatedly blunder in foreign markets because they neither understand nor can communicate with foreign buyers....
We have become a living paradox: a nation of nations, where every citizen has an immigrant for an ancestor, and yet we have become insular and blissfully unaware of the world around us... Has our educational system become a sanctuary from the world, from other cultures? It would seem so. There are uncomfortably large numbers of supposedly educated Americans blissfully unaware of the world's complexities and unable to do much about them. Each day we pay a political and economic price for our inability to understand and communicate with our global neighbors.
Americans must understand a basic fact: the best jobs, the largest markets, the greatest profits, and the brightest futures will belong to those who understand the world and its many cultures.
Soon after this address, Dr. Johnas F. Hockaday, Chancellor of the Virginia Community College System, challenged community colleges in Virginia to develop international education programs.
Tidewater Community College was one of several colleges in the system to respond to this challenge. In February 1987, Dr. George Pass, President of Tidewater Community College, established a college-wide International Task Force and mandated that it develop specific goals for the college in the area of international education. These goals were to fall within the framework of the mission of the college, stated as follows:
Tidewater Community College programs are designed to serve the educational needs of qualified youths and adults beyond high school age and to prepare them for employment, for advanced collegiate education, and for improved citizenship.
In June 1987, the task force submitted a series of recommendations which were developed into a twelve point international action plan for 1987-88. Since that time a number of the points in the plan have been carried out:
The 1988-89 action plan has as its primary goal the institutionalization and thus the continuation of these programs.
In spite of the depth and seriousness of this commitment, the International Task Force has from the beginning acknowledged that educating students for the global village would first mean educating faculty, not just a small number of faculty but a critical core who would then infuse an international/ intercultural perspective into courses in every curriculum and create an atmosphere in which other faculty would be encouraged to do the same. Such a process is by necessity expensive.
Educating faculty to do this has been discussed often at meetings of various international consortia, but rarely attempted.
When SCHEV issued its call for proposals for Funds for Excellence for the 1988-89 biennium with emphases on faculty and curricular development and global education, TCC saw an opportunity to move in this direction. The Portsmouth Campus of Tidewater Community College requested funding for a summer international education seminar to train a critical core of faculty from every academic division--technologies, business, math/science, social sciences and humanities--at all three campuses of the college and to serve as a model for other such educational ventures throughout the state. East Asia was chosen as the focus for the seminar because of the size and population of China and the particular trade relationship which exists between Tidewater, Virginia, and the nations of Japan and Korea. The program was funded at $49,194, and the seminar was conducted in the summer of 1988.
The goals of the program were as follows:
The seminar began on July 11 and ended on August 4. Seminar sessions were scheduled three afternoons a week from 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. An additional all-day session was devoted entirely to audio-visual materials about China and Japan. Nine experts from outside the college were invited as presenters.
Stipends and travel expenses for each of the presenters, the consultant, and the evaluator were paid by the Funds for Excellence grant as were stipends for each of the faculty participants and the salary of the seminar coordinator.
The presenters assigned four books and several monographs for the participants to read. Some of the book funds were provided by the grant, which also covered the costs of renting audio-visual materials for the workshop. The other book expenses were assumed by the participants; the college paid the cost of duplicating hand-outs.
Eighteen faculty members were selected. The announcement of the grant came so late (May 1) that many faculty had made plans for the summer. However, we were able to have representatives of a wide variety of disciplines: art, business, early childhood education, geography, government, history, humanities, math, psychology, restaurant management, and sociology.
In addition to the selected faculty members, individual seminar sessions were open to other faculty and staff, members of ODU's seminar, and residents from the community. Several people from each of these groups attended one or more sessions of the seminar.
All of the faculty participants produced an East Asian curriculum unit integrated into one of the courses they regularly teach. These modules were then reviewed by Dr. Burkman and have been placed in the college libraries. A presentation of their use was made at faculty orientation on all three campuses. The modules were shared with faculty from other colleges in the system at the November 1988 meeting of the Virginia Community Colleges Association.
To assess the impact of the seminar, all students taught by the faculty participants have been pretested as to their level of East Asian awareness. A post-test will be administered to all of these students at the end of the fall semester. Faculty members will devise their own means of assessing the outcomes of the modules they have developed.
Additional books on East Asia have been acquired by the college for the libraries, and some audio-visual materials have been purchased for classroom use.
As an outcome of the cooperative mandated by SCHEV between Old Dominion University and Tidewater Community College, the seminar participants may take part in the seminar at ODU. Three participants (and one alternate) have been selected to take part in Old Dominion's six week study program in China and Japan in the spring and summer of 1989. They have already begun language and culture study with that group. Under an additional $2000 grant from the Funds for Excellence, TCC and ODU will jointly sponsor two lectures on East Asia this academic year. The first of these will bring Dr. Rhoads Murphey, a renowned geographer from the University of Michigan, to Old Dominion on September 26. The second will be held at TCC in the spring.
While a real assessment of the impact of the seminar cannot be made until the academic year has ended, the modules have been used and the student outcomes assessed. Several things are already apparent. Enthusiasm among the faculty participants ran high as evidenced by evaluations. Also evaluations of the presenters and those made by staff, administrators, and the community have been uniformly positive. The editing of the curriculum modules has just been completed, but already inquiries have been made by faculty who did not attend the seminar concerning their use. The seminar was well covered by the Virginian Pilot and Ledger Star, Tidewater's major newspapers, and is being reported in a number of journals.
If real internationalization of education is to take place, colleges and universities must retrain the faculty currently in place. Through the Funds for Excellence grant, Tidewater Community College has made a step in doing that. It is hoped that this will be the beginning of an on-going process as cooperation toward seeking funds to attain this goal continues through the colleges in the VCCS. It is also hoped that the fruitful colaboration between community colleges and universities in Tidewater will lead to other such cooperative efforts elsewhere.
Mary Ruth Clowdsley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tidewater Community College. She is chair of the International Education Committee and author, as well as recipient, of National Endowment of Humanities and Virginia Endowment of Humanities grants in areas of International Education.