international education

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NOTE: Use the playlist button located in the top left of the video window above to switch between episodes.

Tips for International TAs (2:20)
This video is intended for non-native English speakers TAing in English-speaking environments. Key tips: talk with your peers and professors, practice your English, solicit advice from your students.

Establishing Expectations for Your Class (4:46)
Stresses the importance of setting policies and communicating them to students clearly at the beginning of a course to help them succeed. Offers key questions to consider when establishing policies around attendance and participation, classroom behavior, late work. Recommends including these in syllabus and presenting them in class.

Motivating Students to Succeed (3:14)
Presenter offers ways to motivate students to succeed: be passionate about your subject, be clear about “how to succeed” (e.g., through syllabus, rubrics), be connected with student  interests, and be aware of what they want out of the class.

Academic Integrity (2:42)
A sympathetic approach to teaching students what “Academic Integrity” is and the consequences of violating it. A few comments on how to recognize plagiarism and how to respond.

Mid-semester Teaching Evaluations (4:12)
Discusses why you should administer your own mid-semester evaluations, what you might include, and how to use the feedback students provide.

Being Enthusiastic  about Your Class (2:32)
Explores why being enthusiastic while teaching is important and offers simple strategies for expressing engagement and interest in your students.

Maintaining Student Engagement  Using Eye Contact & ‘Scanning’  (1:44)
Details why and how to use eye contact to enhance learning. Seriously? We have to tell people this? Repetitive of “Being Enthusiastic” video.

Cover image

Internationalizing Higher Education: Critical Collaborations across the Curriculum

Williams, Rhiannon D.; and Lee, Amy, eds.
Sense Publishers, 2015

Book Review

Tags: global higher education   |   intercultural education   |   international education
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Reviewed by: Joanne Robinson, University of North Carolina - Charlotte
Date Reviewed: November 30, -0001
This collection showcases a wide range of approaches to the problems and promises of internationalizing higher education in meaningful and sustainable ways. The essays recognize that these efforts take place in a rapidly changing world, with new technologies and changes in funding and student enrollment patterns affecting efforts to internationalize curricula and campuses. In recognizing these systemic issues, the editors and authors note that many internationalization efforts are undertaken on ...

This collection showcases a wide range of approaches to the problems and promises of internationalizing higher education in meaningful and sustainable ways. The essays recognize that these efforts take place in a rapidly changing world, with new technologies and changes in funding and student enrollment patterns affecting efforts to internationalize curricula and campuses. In recognizing these systemic issues, the editors and authors note that many internationalization efforts are undertaken on an ad hoc or case-by-case basis with little effort to systematize and broaden support for internationalization initiatives. These essays together aim to “investigate, to better understand, and to inform intercultural pedagogy that supports the development of mindful global citizenship” (xii). One of the salient findings of the collection is that successful efforts tend to embrace uncertainty rather than tight strictures and rules. Another is that institutional support is necessary for any internationalization efforts to permeate campuses and become integral parts of undergraduate experience.

Authors from across the globe and from very different institutional contexts contributed to this volume, with the University of Minnesota very well represented. The book is helpfully divided into three sections. The first, “Mindful Global Citizenship: Critical Concepts and Current Contexts” takes a bird’s-eye view of undergraduate education through the lens of internationalization. The second section, “Developing Intercultural Programs and Practitioners,” focuses more on faculty development and institutional infrastructure that can support internationalization. The third section, “Critical Reflections from Across the Curriculum,” focuses more narrowly on particular disciplines or courses with faculty development and graduate education in the mix. This section provides insight into the ways courses and curricula integrate internationalization in varying ways, and these essays provide the most detail about course and classroom experience.

The most relevant essays for readers of this journal are in this third section. These include Solheim et al.’s “Illuminating a Course Transformation Journey”; Gibson et al.’s “Social Media and Intercultural Competence: Using Each to Explore the Other”; Hammell et al.’s “On Becoming a Global Citizen: Critical Pedagogy and Crossing Borders in and out of the University Classroom”; and Jackson’s “ ‘Unpacking’ International Experience through Blended Intercultural Praxis.” Each of these essays relies on meaningful data (mostly qualitative) and contains sufficient detail about process and product to make some of their work replicable. Each also embraces a call to reflection, which helps each essay feel more complete. Perhaps most valuable here is the recognition that internationalization does not just mean study abroad or international student exchange. Rather, internationalization can happen through, for instance, social media, films, and learning communities on campus. In short, internationalization can be anywhere and everywhere.

Overall, the essays in this collection are of varying quality, and several contain grammatical or typographical errors. That aside, the subject matter is likely appealing to many who teach religious studies or theology in higher education, as international perspectives are often the bread and butter of classroom experience. This book will appeal most particularly to those who are interested in building programs or courses that intersect with institutional internationalization efforts.

 

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