Headbump or Headway? American Students' Engagement with their International Peers on Campus

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Understanding international student experiences and complexities

Proposal

International students bring with them a variety of experiences and skills, as well as a level of
knowledge about life and society in their home countries. While this wealth of knowledge could
be leveraged for the global awareness of local students, the challenge lies in the fact that U.S.
colleges and universities are essentially are missing on the opportunity by largely limiting
themselves to the rhetoric of institutional mission statements and insufficient gestures toward
engagement (Bentao, 2011). It is imperative that US academe start to actively identify
motivating versus inhibiting factors for student engagement, facilitate the process of interaction
and knowledge-sharing, and develop strategies and policies from the ground up.
By aiming to determine motivations or inhibitions towards cross-national interactions,
this session explores the deeper (de)motivations of local students that can be tapped into to
inform intervention programs on how to foster intercultural communication. Academic
institutions need to start by understanding how domestic students view the opportunity to learn
and share knowledge and experience with their international counterparts. What kinds of
deliberate, resourceful, and organized approaches are institutions adopting/developing in order
to help students go beyond connections and learning by serendipity? Are curriculum, policy,
and programs invoking domestic students’ agency and choice toward interacting with their
international counterparts as part of their education? How are institutions aligning their mission
statements and goals with students’ needs and motivations toward such engagement? Are
faculty, administrators, and staff across campuses intellectually and practically involved in
putting ideas to action? What can institutions do to build on the pathways and overcome the
obstacles toward preparing a globally competent and engaged next generation of professionals
and intellectuals?

Authors

• Uttam Gaulee, Morgan State University.

• Benjamin Welsh, Morgan State University