It's quite a mouthful, but it's been on the lips of students and faculty since last semester. Curriculum internationalization catapulted into student discussions on Grounds with Student Council's creation of the Committee on Curriculum Internationalization. The ensuing report, released in October 2007, along with the administration's Commission on the Future of the University report, has fueled a debate about the merits of globalizing the University's course listings.
But no debate is simply a matter of two sides. To broaden the conversation about curriculum internationalization, The Cavalier Daily invited a group of students with diverse viewpoints to discuss the topic.
The hour-and-a-half conversation began with a general question about the participants' views on internationalization, and the conversation took off from there. It covered topics ranging from study abroad to the administration's progress on globalization to reconciling science and internationalization. Below is a summary of the more salient points made, but the full transcript is available on The Cavalier Daily's Web site.
The initial views
Vadim Elenev: I think internationalization -- it's a funny word because it's so vague ... you could define it to mean anything you want. In the very heart, I am not against hiring better faculty, against expanding course offering[s] and against doing anything like that. I think we would all be supportive of something like that. The biggest controversy that can come out of there is [concerning] proposals I've heard of internationalization [like] the introduction of new programs, specifically those programs ending in the word "study." Those, I believe, are [of] questionable academic value to the University, to a liberal arts education, to detract from other pursuits that ... students engage in.
Ryan McElveen: I think we've made marginal progress over the past couple of years; I don't think it's going anywhere, personally. I've heard things to the contrary from the administration, but a lot of that has just been ... essentially just talk ... I just feel like the administration side of discourse and the student discourse is very perpendicular. I don't think students in general see the University heading in the same way that the administration hopes the University heads.
Reece Epstein: Do we mean that they're going to make new course requirements? Is it a matter of expanding faculty in certain areas? And if we are going to do that, then what are we giving up in order to do it? Because it doesn't come out of thin air -- I know that my tuition is high enough -- so I think we really have to define before we go further, OK, what ... programs ... we can sort of talk about, and then try and figure out what the costs [and] benefits are.
Patrick Lee: The way I view curriculum internationalization that Ryan [has] presented over the years has been more like fundamentally changing the curriculum at home at the University ... while the University is going on the track that curriculum internationalization is sending our students abroad and ignoring the fact that most of the students at this University will never study abroad, and if they do, they'll only study abroad for a semester in an area where they'll predominately speak English. They won't get that international experience that study abroad is supposed to be. I just find the whole curriculum internationalization to be more of a University versus student [situation].
Stephanie Dewolfe: For me, it's more important to look at what students at this University want right now, and I think that when I talk about curriculum internationalization it's about expanding the curriculum to represent student desires, student needs and what students have expressed what they want, so that's my main focus. We've measured a significant student desire for courses that have more of an international focus, whether it's more specific regional studies, whether it's looking at globalization and global development and that phenomenon going on in the world.
Reactions
Elenev: Once you have a language skill, to then learn, if there's a great contribution to world culture, world literature, coming from a certain region of the world, it should be taught within a literature setting, within a literature department ... Truth knows no cultural boundaries, so our pursuit of it ... should be done not through a cultural setting ... Culture, that's something that we should try to acquire, the truth that we should pursue ... That should be done through areas of thought rather than areas of the world.
Dewolfe: I think that if you look at the CIOs that we have and how wide-ranging they are and the international section and global development section, it's the complete representation of the fact that these students are looking away from the curriculum because their interests aren't being reflected there, so I don't think that it's the students' job to form our curriculum or to say "this is what course you need to teach." I should explain. I am calling upon the administration to take action and say, look, provide an outlet in academia, in education, that is a legitimate, sustainable way of educating students about their interests.
Study Abroad
Elenev: I appreciate that some of you want to study other regions ... and I would encourage you not just to spend a semester abroad, but to spend your education abroad, because I think if I was interested, let's say ... in something like French politics, I would try to spend my educational career, maybe not undergraduate but definitely graduate and maybe live there, [to study at] Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, and if I'm really interested in China, I would want to go study in Beijing, in Shanghai, [as opposed to] trying to learn whatever bits and pieces about China I can in a room in Cabell Hall.
McElveen: I think a big part of [Elenev's] argument relies on economic freedom and the ability to go abroad. The reason why I'm at the University is because it's cheaper, because I'm in-state. It's not because I like the mission of the University, it's because it's a public university, and its mission should be to educate everyone that wants to come here and who is forced to go here because of economic restraint.
Views on the West
Epstein: The second you're taking your first breath, you're inheriting a certain culture and history, a set of principles and values and traditions. We inherit the West, and so when you say to me I have a slight Western bias -- and I'm not remotely ashamed of that, I don't think it's a bad thing -- I take a certain amount of pride in it.
McElveen: [Assoc. History] Prof. Brad Reed said at the direct action [event] that when it comes to classes in Western history, some people just don't care, and I'm one of those people who just doesn't care. I think that if you look at the [On the Future of Curriculum Internationalization at the University of Virginia] report, there's also a lot of -- particularly in minority communities -- it's not that they don't care about the West, but they feel like their perspectives aren't being addressed ... Just from my own experience, which I can speak to best, I felt extremely marginalized at the University just in terms of my interest because every time the COD comes out, I found five courses that I would actually be interested in taking, and to get in to those requires some bribes or something along those lines.
Dewolfe: When it comes to economics and politics, these things aren't isolated to the West or nationwide; these things affect other countries, and so I can understand the appeal in wanting to learn about various studies within both of those areas.
Elenev: The University of Virginia is best at teaching about Virginia, then about the United States, then about the West, then about the rest of the world, just like by virtue of our vicinity to Washington, D.C., we're better at teaching about government than we are about teaching finance because New York is seven and a half hours away and London is even farther. So your geographic placement, your cultural, ethnographic placement defines your strength, and David Ricardo was not the original, but he did make a fairly good argument for why we should maximize our strengths rather than level the playing field between our strengths and our weaknesses.
Implementing internationalization
Elenev: Since that I've seen a lot of the goals ... as not just creating more opportunities but more compulsive requirements to internationalization and not just to allow students to pursue a different track ... but more toward taking students who don't believe in the merits of the track you're introducing and shifting them more in that direction and shifting the entire University more in that direction, so that is perhaps where this debate can get contentious.
Dewolfe: I don't think it's a matter of don't internationalize or do internationalize, I think it's a matter of representing more underrepresented voices, representing more underrepresented people, giving students at this University who aren't able to relate, like Ryan, who look at the COD and don't find what they want to study ... not taking from our excellent liberal arts education focus, not taking from our Western-based curriculum that [Epstein] said compares to some of the best schools in the nation, that's understandable. It's not about deteriorating what's here; it's about adding and building and allowing that to make our students stronger.
Discussion about a globalized curriculum
Lee: If you look at how this whole sustainability movement is, it's one of those things where the area we want to go into -- like Africa, Central America, South America -- and how the focus is how to bring green design into those areas. We can't do that, we can't bring our students there unless the University has faculty to teach these students what are the customs, what are the traditions in these areas. So it's one of those things where if we want to develop scientists that go abroad to do good research, they have to be culturally adapted to those areas as well.
Epstein: I don't think that if you're designing research that you really need to have a cultural immersion here because ... science is science, I don't really care where you are. I'm sure there are ways of getting around in foreign countries.
Lee: We want clean drinking water for everyone in the world. Some people think it's a fundamental human right, some people don't think so. But at the same time, if you incorporate a new water filter in a village in Africa, and it changes the taste of water, and all you do is build a filter and leave, they won't drink it. The people won't drink it because it tastes funny to them -- they don't understand the science behind it. Cultural studies, cultural immersion is all about giving those scientists the ability of conveying the point about how this water is cleaner and why you should drink it and how to adapt it to this village.
Elenev: You're presenting this purely theoretical, hypothetical scenario of a bunch of these completely ignorant Western-centric U.Va. students running into a village and installing a water filter in the middle of the night and then running out before anyone could notice. Presumably, within the process of any sort of collaboration ... you always partner a global organization with local organizations and groups and those kinds of concerns are discussed at a fairly high level ... When you get to combine the cultural expertise of people who know probably very little about sustainability but know a lot about what the customs of their community are and are capable of translating it to the Western ... scientists, who don't know about the culture but do know an awful lot about how water filtration works -- [when] you combine the strengths of one person with the strengths of another, you can combine both strengths rather than increasing this thing and this.
Lee: This is exactly what we're talking about. We have the science experts, but at the University, there's a dearth of cultural experts, and these nations where the science experts want to start exploring and start going into and doing their research in, it's one of those things when the cultural faculty aren't here. Anthropology and sociology, all these departments do not have that cultural expertise in these growing areas of need that the University is starting to expand to, and the [Commission on the Future of the University] report is all about strengthening those areas strategically.
Elenev: To really learn something about the intricacies of a certain culture -- and every culture has intricacies, no culture can be simplified by bullet points -- you go to that country and you study there. It is an illusion, it is a fraud to presume that you can teach those intricacies, again, in a room in Cabell Hall. We can teach Virginia, we can teach America, we can't teach Niger.
Lee: The University can teach Virginia, they can teach Virginia very well. We can teach it in Cabell -- why is that? Because we learn from books, we learn from books really well, and you can apply the same idea to cultural experts teaching books because that's what academia mostly is -- it's learning from a book and learning from the expertise from their experiences abroad and what their research is based out of. It's one of those things where curriculum internationalization is trying to ensure that those people that have that experience abroad, that have the expertise in their field, can come to this University and start teaching our students in the exact same way Western history is taught, U.S. history is taught.
The Cavalier Daily asked 10 students, representing a diversity of viewpoints, to participate in a debate on curriculum internationalization. Five students agreed to take part.
Read More
Virginia Policy Lab — a hub for student-led policy action
By Katherine Haden | December 9, 2024Students propose their own projects and collaborate with other members to research their issues of interest, brainstorm solutions and write policy proposals.
Perfecting the subtle art of the ‘sexile’
By Val Vixen | December 7, 2024Approach this sacred college ritual with a newfound confidence.
Top 10 ways to ring in the holiday season in Charlottesville
By Sam Saks | December 5, 2024With temperatures down, lights up and spirits high, not even pesky final projects and exams can dampen this holiday season.
