By Regina Higgins, Ph.D.
 |
| NC educator visits a class in Senegal. The international study visit was the result of a partnership between UNC NRCs and World View. |
“Welcome to Carolina. Welcome to the World,” is the greeting we offer to our incoming students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The FedEx Global Education Center, home to our area studies, study abroad, and international students and scholars centers, stands as a visible sign of UNC’s global mission, a commitment that doesn’t stop where the campus ends. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education, UNC-Chapel Hill reaches beyond our own students and faculty on campus, to support international education throughout North Carolina.
The seven National Resource Centers (NRCs) at UNC-Chapel Hill represent nearly every world region:
·
African Studies Center
·
Carolina Center for the
Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations
·
Center for Global
Initiatives
·
Center for European Studies
·
Center for Slavic, Eurasian,
and East European Studies
·
Center for International
Business and Research
·
Institute for the Study of
the Americas
Supported by matching funds from
the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI program and UNC-Chapel Hill, each of
our centers reaches out to educators, businesses, thought leaders, and the general
public to support and to deepen understanding of world regions and global
issues. Whenever collaboration will strengthen
our outreach, the NRCs at UNC-Chapel Hill join together, and we frequently team
with campus and community partners to increase diffusion of resources.
A long-standing and fruitful partnership we share is with
World View, a UNC-Chapel Hill program to support international education in
K-12 schools and community colleges. Since
1998, UNC-Chapel Hill’s NRCs have worked with World View to provide
professional development and outreach for K-14 educators across North
Carolina. Currently World View works in
formal partnership with over 100 systems, schools, and community and four-year
colleges to foster commitment to international education. All NRCs contribute our own
expertise, speakers, and resources, according to region or theme, for
professional development conferences and outreach.
“Never has global education been
more important,” says World View director Charlé LaMonica, summing up our
shared goals. As partners, we work
together “to develop professional learning opportunities for global education,
integrate a global perspective into every classroom, and respond to rapid
cultural and demographic changes.”
This unique collaboration has
touched more than 20,000 teachers from 1,500 schools and community colleges around
the state. Since 2010, UNC’s Title VI
centers have reached 6,770 teachers through World View’s programs, including professional
development conferences and workshops, curriculum development grants, and study
visits abroad. These programs bring
vital skills and resources into classrooms across the state. More than 1,880 educators have been supported
in just the past year, 116 from schools in the Tier 1 Economic Zone—counties
designated by the North Carolina Department of Commerce as the forty most
economically distressed counties in the state.
Over the years, participation in
the World View programs supported by the NRCs has encouraged ideas for new
international initiatives in Tier 1 counties.
At Bladen Lakes Primary, a school in Bladen County with Title 1 funding
to meet the needs of students from low income families, administration and
staff determined to make international education a priority, developing plans
to introduce world language instruction for the first time. Educators in Camden County sought out and
secured funding and training from LEARN NC at the UNC School of Education for
designing virtual field trips, and arranged for second graders to get to know their
peers at a school in New Zealand through Skype in preparation for a possible sister
school project.
Through our partnership
with World View, we remain engaged with schools and colleges year-round. In the past year, NRC faculty and outreach
directors presented sessions and resources at a back-to-school teacher workshop
in a rural North Carolina county, two fall conferences: Global Population
and Migration, and Global Issues and Solutions, a workshop on international
law for community college educators, and two spring conferences, one focused on
understanding contemporary issues in Latin America and improving instruction of
Latino students in the state, the other on the expansion of the European
Union. All programs carefully balance
content on international issues with strategies for teaching, so that
participants can incorporate the learning readily in their own classrooms.
This summer, the NRCs will support a week-long conference for
education leaders. NRCs will also contribute
to an annual study visit for educators. Recent
study trips have included Senegal, Russia, India, Brazil, China, and
Turkey. This year
a group of 25 will travel to the Balkans.
For many participants, this is their first experience of international
travel and immersion in another culture. Educators prepare with a two-day
training on the world region, and participate in lectures, school visits, and
exploration of and historical and cultural attractions while in the country. When possible, home-stays are arranged. Upon return, all participants are supported
in sharing their learning with students and colleagues.
Through these many programs
and opportunities, UNC-Chapel Hill’s NRCs provide thousands of educators with materials
and opportunities for connections from all world regions for truly global
learning. These programs direct affect classrooms,
and the impact is monitored and measured by World View staff. In the past two years, of 3,000 participants
surveyed, 634 responding teachers reported creating 469 new lesson plans
integrating global topics, enhancing 544 current teaching or initiatives, and
sharing information with colleagues about international education 618 times,
based on content of presentations.
We also join
in funding and supporting community college faculty who are enriching courses
with international content. World
View’s curriculum grants program connects community college educators with
specific NRCs, who support the most promising grant proposals. Successful
community college grantees are awarded $750, and complete research visits to work
with faculty, outreach staff, and area studies librarians to create modules to
infuse global content, context, and connections into courses they teach.
Internationalized courses appear on World View’s web site, available to faculty
at all North Carolina community colleges. Curriculum grants made possible the
creation of the first Middle East history course at a North Carolina community
college, and have enhanced sociology, music, economics, communications, and
health sciences courses with international content. Since its inception in 2007, this program has
exposed over 6,000 students to international issues, extending the reach of the
UNC NRCs across the state.
A
curriculum grant combined with professional development can create even greater
benefits for international education. This spring, Crystal Edmonds, English and
Humanities instructor at Robeson Community College, received a World View curriculum
grant funded by the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim
Civilizations to add a module on the Muslim veil to her communications course. Edmonds participated in the ReOrienting the
Veil conference, presented by the Center, with support from its Duke University partner and other UNC Title VI
centers. At the conference, Edmonds
deepened her understanding of the veil through presentations by faculty, personal
encounters with Muslim women who choose to veil, and an interview with
photographer Todd Drake, whose collaborative self-portraits of Muslim women were
featured in a special session. After the
conference, Edmonds conferred with UNC professor of Asian Studies Sahar Amer,
whose research on the veil was an inspiration for the conference. Edmond’s experience has enriched her plans for
the course, and will open a new perspective for her students this fall.
“World View is fortunate to
collaborate with the National Resource Centers to achieve the goals of global
education for the students of North Carolina,” LaMonica concludes. We, too, are fortunate in our partnership, and
all UNC NRCs look forward to many more years of working and growing together with
World View for success in international education.
Regina
Higgins is the Outreach Director for the Carolina Center for the Study of the
Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, a partner in the Duke-UNC Consortium for
Middle East Studies.
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