July 6, 2006
Around the world … and back again
Editor’s note: The photos that accompany this story were all taken by Christine White, a student who participated in last year’s Exploration Seminar to the Galapagos Islands.
Students heading abroad this fall for the annual Exploration Seminars will be accompanied by an excited group of academic advisers — the first group of advisers to be funded to take the trips with faculty and students.
Exploration Seminars — which happen in August and September — are four-week, five-credit classes that take place in locations around the world. This year’s choices include “Swahili, a Resilient Culture through the Ages” in Kenya; “Exploring Energy Generation, Usage and Renewable Energy Projects” in New Zealand; and “Environmental Processes and Problems” in the Galapagos Islands. There are 18 seminars in all, and advisers will be going along on some of them for 10 days of the journey. (For a complete list of seminars, go to http://www.artsci.washington.edu/exploration/.)
This isn’t the first time that advisers have headed abroad with the help of the University. For three years now, the International Programs and Exchanges office (IPE) has presented the Pangaea Award to an adviser who has made an “outstanding contribution to global citizenship, departmentally-based international engagement, and student/faculty mobility,” sending him or her traveling, though not with a class.
But this year 19 advisers are being supported, with help from the College of Arts & Sciences, the Office of Global Affairs and the Comparative History of Ideas Program (CHID), in addition to IPE.
Exploration seminars, according to A&S Assistant Dean Paul LePore, were conceived about five years ago in a conversation that the late Jim Clowes, then the assistant director of the CHID Program, had with Susan Jeffords, who was then the divisional dean for social sciences in A&S.
“Jim, who was a really idealistic and visionary person, simply asked, ‘Isn’t there some way we can make it possible for more students to study abroad?'” LePore recalled. “From the spark of that conversation, we said we should probably look at the calendar a little bit more flexibly.”
Thus was born the idea of four weeks away rather than a whole quarter, and in the August-September time frame when no other classes are meeting.
Kyra Worrell, an adviser in the Office of Student Fiscal Services who will be going to Kenya as part of the program, recalled how when she was in school, she didn’t study abroad because she was worried about the money and she was worried about not finishing her degree in four years. Exploration Seminars address both concerns, she said, because they are cheaper and don’t take a student away from regular classes.
“I’ll be having my experience 20 years later,” Worrell said, “but maybe it can be different for some of the students I see.”
And that’s one of the reasons advisers are being sent along — so they can tell the students they work with from firsthand experience what international study can mean to their lives. According to Jeffords, who is now vice provost for global affairs, the University administration is on a cultural change mission to make the UW the institution with the greatest recognition of the importance of international experience for students.
“There can’t be a more important group than advisers to help us get students involved,” she told the group who is going on the seminars. “If anybody can convince a student to go for it, it would be an adviser.”
Surveys of returning students show that participation in the seminars can have far-reaching effects. One of last year’s groups who went to Guatemala with Law, Society and Justice Professor Angelina Godoy, for example, were so touched by the living conditions on coffee plantations that they helped raise more than $6,000 through an independent student group to help send children on the plantations go to school. They also promoted Fair Trade Certified coffee — meaning it was produced under conditions less oppressive than usual — and met with local organizations and individuals to share the impact of their excursion.
Starting with only a few seminars, the program has grown each year, but LePore says A&S’s ambition is far greater — to have seminars offered by every department that teaches undergraduates.
Mary Harty, an adviser in chemistry who is going to Costa Rica this year, is onboard with that goal. A former Peace Corps volunteer who caught the travel bug early and has traveled widely in Africa, India, Nepal and other countries, she wants to start a study abroad program in chemistry — a department which has never had one.
“Many of our students are on the pre-med track and can’t be away for a whole quarter, so the Exploration Seminars are perfect,” she said. “By participating in this one, I hope I can learn enough about the logistics to work with our faculty to create one of our own.”
Sylvia Kurinsky, in contrast, works for the CHID Program, which offers many international programs, but she herself has never gone. “I help to run orientation programs, and parents often ask me, ‘Have you gone on one of these program?’ They want to hear that I’ve been there and I know it’s safe. Now I can say yes,” Kurinsky said. She’ll be heading to Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.
At least two of the advisers — Cynthia Caci in Digital Arts and Experimental Media and Judi Clark in art — will be doing some teaching, based on their backgrounds in art history. Caci will be going to Paris and Clark to Rome. Other advisers will assist the faculty member leading the seminar in ways yet to be determined.
IPE Director David Fenner explained to the gathered advisers that his original award was called Pangaea because Pangaea is the name given to Earth’s land mass before it separated into the continents we know today.
“You,” he told them, “are helping to reverse 200 million years of continental drift.”
