from VCCA Journal, Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 1988, 23-24
© Copyright 1988 VCCA Journal
At the first meeting of the Commission on the University of the 21st Century, Governor Gerald Baliles stated:
I am quite concerned that too few of this nation's colleges and universities are adequately preparing students to be international citizens. This nation cannot maintain its world leadership role if our young people do not understand the cultures and languages of the nations with whom we trade, work, and negotiate.
I believe that community colleges have an important role to play in addressing these perceptive curricular concerns of the Governor by promoting suitable international education activities on our campuses. During the past two years, Virginia Western Community College has experimented with ways to introduce an international dimension to our programs. I would like to describe a few of the experiments that have worked for us.
Our goal was and is to stimulate our rather homogeneous student body to think about foreign people and foreign ways and to provide our faculty with opportunities to develop their courses and curricula with international content when appropriate. Essentially, our method has been to bring foreign visitors to our campus to study or lecture and to send our people abroad for the same purposes.
The first successful effort came from the our community's Sister City Committee. Roanoke, our city, has a sister city in Kenya and, inasmuch as Kenya is considered an economically developing country, funds were made available from the parent Sister City organization to our local committee to develop an exchange program between the two communities. Coincidentally, the Kenyan city is building a community college, and Virginia Western was invited to submit a proposal as to how we might, through the Sister City Committee, help that emerging institution develop. The outcome has been that two people from Virginia Western have been to Kenya to do just that, and two people from Kenya have visited Virginia Western. The faculty from the Kenyan college studied our curricula and methods and were welcomed on the campus as lecturers and classroom visitors. We hope to continue this popular and effective relationship in the future.
Another collaborative effort between Virginia Western and other agencies to promote international education on the campus and to provide our students an opportunity to study abroad has developed with the Community College Ministries, an organization supported by several church groups in Virginia. One of their aims is a desire to promote knowledge about poverty and so-called third-world concerns among community college students in western Virginia. The organization offered to help sponsor student visits to poor countries if a structured program of study could be devised. Through the Social Science Division at the college, a multidisciplinary course was developed emphasizing the study of social, economic and political problems associated with poor but developing countries. The Dominican Republic was selected as the target country. The course was offered in the spring quarter of 1987 and was followed by the class trip to the Dominican Republic during the subsequent summer session. The course was repeated in 1988 and is planned again for the spring semester of 1989.
It is remarkable to hear the reports of the students after they return to the college. Almost all are profoundly affected by their experience, and many have reevaluated their plans for the future. The trip brings a reality to their studies that few community college students have experienced.
Nearly seventy-five educators from a variety of foreign countries have visited the college during the past eighteen months. The first, sponsored through the United States Information Agency, involved a two-day visit to campus of Virginia Western by approximately fifty college teachers and administrators from nearly as many countries. Since few of these visitors had any first hand knowledge of community colleges, their purpose was to learn something about them in a relatively short period of time. The second group to visit was made up of twenty-two educators, businessmen and political leaders from new nations in the Pacific region. The United States Department of Education helped to sponsor this tour of six American community colleges. The three days at Virginia Western were devoted to visiting classes, talking with students and faculty, and meeting with board members. The results of these two visits were very helpful in furthering our goals of providing our students and faculty with opportunities to meet and learn about foreign people.
The most important result of all these activities has been to stimulate faculty interest in the idea of international education. The faculty International Education Committee has attracted new and vigorous interest from the faculty at large and has taken an important lead in helping to establish the college's growing agenda of international education.
We also hope that these small and inexpensive experiences in international education have helped to move our campus closer to the Governor's goal to prepare our students to be international citizens and to help them understand a bit better how to meet the people of nations with whom they will have to trade, work, and negotiate.
Charles Downs is President of Virginia Western Community College. He also serves as chair of the Rotary International Exchange Scholars Program, and is a member of Sister Cities International Commission and of the Roanoke Valley Educational Consortium.