UISFL grant awards MC’s Global+ program $200,000 for global competency expansion

Oct. 6, 2022

The first time around, an Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) Program grant provided the seed money to launch Maryville College’s Global+ program.

Two years later, a second grant through the same federal organization will allow Global+ to expand in ways that will meet the growing demands of an interconnected, diverse and rapidly changing world and workforce — and this time around, Maryville College was the only recipient of a UISFL grant in the Southeastern United States.

“Employers tell us that they need people who can think globally, communicate effectively and act responsibly,” said Kirsten Sheppard, director of the Center for Global Engagement at MC. “We think global competence is the ability to understand and appreciate local and global issues, diverse perspectives, diverse worldviews and to be able to interact appropriately and effectively with people from different cultures and identities.”

The grant is part of a collection of new fiscal year 2022 grants — more than $66.3 million awarded by the federal Department of Education’s International and Foreign Language Education office for five Title VI programs designed to “help strengthen the capacity of American education to provide instruction in modern foreign languages, international business, and world area and international studies at institutions of higher education across the United States.”

One of those Title VI programs provided more than $1.6 million to the UISFL Program, which awarded $200,000 over a two-year period for Maryville College’s Global+ Engage initiative, according to Sheppard. The first grant that funded Global+, she added, allowed MC to build the foundations of a program that stands to serve students even more capably with the additional funds from the new award.

“We realized after the first grant that we could expand on what we were doing,” Sheppard said. “Because it’s a whole new grant application and not a renewal, we can’t just do the same thing. We had to develop a whole new project.”

Building on success

Over the past two years, the Global+ program at Maryville College has served to embed global competency across the curriculum of the school’s nine academic divisions, and the interim 2022 report to UISFL, Sheppard pointed out, demonstrated that 92% of students in Global+ courses indicated improvement in their understanding of global competency. Global+ achievements were both direct — strengthening undergraduate instruction in international business and foreign languages through the revision of those particular majors, for example — and indirect, such as offering mini-grants to faculty members as an encouragement to build Global+ courses across the College’s various programs of study.

For the 2022-23 academic year, Sheppard said, three study abroad trips are planned under the Global+ umbrella, all designed with a significant focus on international themes and issues, and all a direct result of Global+ funding. Taking place in May, the trips to Costa Rica, Greece and the United Kingdom are faculty-led programs “that offer MC students alternate study environments, international experiences and exposure to diverse cultures while earning credit towards their degree,” according to the online triptych for each sojourn.

“We wanted to make sure all students had an opportunity to build global competency through their coursework and not just in international studies and foreign language majors,” Sheppard said. “We worked to build global academic pathways, global curricular opportunities and new study-abroad opportunities: For example, Dr. Crystal Colter (professor of psychology), taught a portfolio hour connected with her Cross-Cultural Psychology course fully in Spanish. Dr. (John) Gallagher (retired professor of management) built in three cultural workshops and three guest lectures from some of our global partners overseas into his international business course, even though it already had a significant global component.

“Irene (Guerinot, senior lecturer in physics) interviewed women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) from all different cultures; Dr. Ariane Schratter (professor of psychology) earned additional international credentials from the Arizona Trauma Institute in certified trauma support and folded coursework on global child trauma and resilience into her classes. Every faculty member did it a little bit differently, but they all worked toward much more interaction with people from other cultures or worked to deepen cultural learning.”

A three-part plan

Given the scope of accomplishments documented by the first grant — evaluation findings, according to the application for the new grant, “show that the Global+ program has begun to build vital capacity within the College for global competency” — Sheppard and her fellow Global+ team members, including Dr. Lori Schmied and Dr. Scott Henson, sought to write a proposal for 2022 funding that would build on Global+ achievements. That proposal includes a three-part plan to build on those initial experiences, Sheppard said. They include:

  • Strengthening and expanding international studies and foreign languages by engaging students in first-year programming through the new Global Scholars Program.

“We’re working on a first-year travel-study course and a support program to prepare students for those study abroad opportunities,” Sheppard said. “One of the things we noticed is that we need to get students into a pipeline to explore global issues earlier. Right now, they’re built into the curriculum, but we need students exposed earlier than in 300-level courses, and we need to get them abroad earlier so they can see how these components can apply to their lives.”

  • Improving instruction in foreign languages through applied learning experiences.

“We want to strengthen our Spanish program through more applied learning opportunities,” Sheppard said. “We’re anticipating doing a collaborative online international learning opportunity between students overseas and first-year Spanish students at MC, and then in year two, doing a Spanish immersion Spring Break. That way, first-year students get more exposure to global perspectives, and we’re creating an early pipeline into some of our academic programs that we think are really important for the world we live in.”

  • Engaging faculty in international studies and experiences through the new Faculty Global Fellows Program.

“While we’re creating global scholars out of our students, we also want to create faculty members who become specialists in global education,” Sheppard said. “When we launched Global+, we created mini-grants for faculty to design new courses, but now we’re thinking about the future and giving faculty the tools to successfully advise about global experiences and pathways. We also want to develop a second training program for faculty leaders of travel-study programs, because if we want our students to have international experiences, we need faculty who have had them first.”

These may seem like ambitious plans for a small, private liberal arts college in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains, but Maryville College has a history of turning out graduates who become leaders in businesses and organizations around the world. By the same token, MC has long been a destination for international students who have played important roles in the institution’s history.

Given those ties to the wider world, as well as the connections forged through technology that bridges physical distances at the speed of contemporary data transition, international experience isn’t as exotic a professional trait as it once was, Sheppard said — and in many modern career fields, it’s almost a requirement.

“Global competency is something that will make our students more attractive to a workforce that appreciates an ability to understand local and global issues and diverse worldviews, and has the ability to interact appropriately and effectively with people from different cultures and identities,” she added. “We’re a pretty large and diverse country, and even people who want to stay here for the rest of their lives are going to need to know how to interact effectively with people different from themselves. Global competency is a skillset, and we look forward to increasing it across Maryville College.”

Maryville College is a nationally-ranked institution of higher learning and one of America’s oldest colleges. For more than 200 years we’ve educated students to be giving citizens and gifted leaders, to study everything, so that they are prepared for anything — to address any problem, engage with any audience and launch successful careers right away. Located in Maryville, Tennessee, between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the city of Knoxville, Maryville College offers nearly 1,200  students from around the world both the beauty of a rural setting and the advantages of an urban center, as well as more than 60 majors, seven pre-professional programs and career preparation from their first day on campus to their last. Today, our 10,000 alumni are living life strong of mind and brave of heart and are prepared, in the words of our Presbyterian founder, to “do good on the largest possible scale.”