Education Partnership for Internationalizing Curriculum: Lessons From a Community College Fellowship Program at Stanford

• In Event: Qualitative Evaluation Impact on Title VI Internationalizing Curriculum Efforts in K–14: Melding Research With Practice

Abstract

This paper focuses on a one-year fellowship program that Stanford University developed to meet the Title VI mandate – the Education Partnership for Internationalizing Curriculum (EPIC). This program engages fellows in a partnership with Stanford academic staff and faculty in order to empower community college faculty to make changes on individual and institutional levels. To achieve this goal, the university supported a wide range of fellow activities (i.e., the development of curricular units, courses, campus-wide speaker series, and study abroad programs); provided access to Stanford’s library resources; and leveraged academic staff from two Stanford programs engaged in teacher professional development (Lacuna annotation platform and the Stanford Program on International & Cross-Cultural Education). In this symposium, staff from Stanford and its external evaluator, WestEd, will discuss the development of the evaluation, as well as key research results that informed the implementation of the of the EPIC Fellows Program.

A robust longitudinal evaluation program that provided iterative feedback during the life of the program was critical to the fellowship program’s success and evolution. Given the limited evaluation budget, Stanford and WestEd staff worked in a close partnership to collect a variety of formative and summative data that could be used to improve the program, including an appropriate blend of surveys, focus groups, individual interviews, and observations at the annual EPIC Symposium and in classrooms. Data collection was streamlined to collect rich data without much direct oversight by the evaluation team.

Early successes of the EPIC Fellows Program include: 1) effectively harnessing the knowledge, experiences, and energy of foreign-born students in the classroom ; 2) hands-on and applicable instructional professional development that created excitement and pride in community college faculty (crucial for morale, retention, and motivation); 3) partner Stanford entities grew from the experience (e.g., Lacuna is re-coding its platform to make it easier to download for non-EPIC participating institutions); 4) the fellowship program, based on evaluation feedback, evolved from a Bay Area-specific, on-campus program, to one that leverages video conferencing to welcome faculty from community colleges throughout (and beyond) California; and 5), based on the identified need to create a robust support network for community college faculty interested in internationalizing curriculum, the EPIC program is spinning off a new Global Educators Network for community college faculty.

This paper contributes to the emergent scholarship on internationalizing undergraduate education and the role of program evaluation in such efforts. The implementation and evaluation of the EPIC Program follow best practices for successful educator professional development and can serve as a model for other partnerships. The program provides opportunities for instructors to engage in hands-on curriculum or programmatic development within a scaffolded and mentored space. With the use of video conferencing technologies, the program model is scalable as is evident by the expansion of the program to admit community college instructors from beyond the Bay Area and California. Further, now that the Lacuna platform will be more readily available, other colleges would be able to more easily leverage this technology to enhance its internationalization efforts.

Authors

• Katherine Kuhns, Stanford University

• Cathy Ringstaff, WestEd

• Denise Geraci, Stanford University