Why Dickinson College Supports The Abroad View Foundation

  • Dickinson College sponsors the Abroad View Foundation because we believe that the Abroad View magazine offers an important, intellectually stimulating, and globally-focused outlet and resource for our students.  To this end, Abroad View not only serves as a uniting publication among international education professionals, but as a useful means of engagement and reflection for our students.

Dickinson College

 

Mission Statement:

The mission of Dickinson College is to prepare young people, by means of a useful education in liberal arts and sciences, for engaged lives of citizenship and leadership in the service of society.

Our Strategic Goal for Global Education:

To create a global campus infused with internationalism so that each student, faculty member, employee, office, program and department is charged to act globally and weave internationalism into all academic and non-academic areas of pursuit.

A Global Curriculum:

Internationalization at Dickinson begins in the classroom. Dickinson’s global education curriculum is best envisioned as a series of concentric circles. At the core is foreign language. The college offers instruction in thirteen foreign languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Ancient and Modern Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. All students must reach at least the intermediate level of accomplishment; all are encouraged to continue well beyond. Enrollments demonstrate Dickinson’s success in building a campus in which language mastery is commonplace rather than an exception.

Cultures are complex entities; their study requires application of insights from a variety of fields and theoretical approaches. Consequently, strong interdisciplinary programs constitute the second circle of the college’s global curriculum. Dickinson offers interdisciplinary majors in East Asian, Italian, Latin American (certificate), and Russian Area Studies, Environmental Studies, and International Studies, Business & Management. Each of these programs is staffed by ten to thirteen contributing faculty; each has its own dedicated budget. By their nature, the interdisciplinary programs model the importance of breadth of vision and synthesis of insights in global education. International Studies, and International Business & Management particularly focus on placing individual cultures within a context of theory by requiring students to combine a shared methodological core with specialization on a single nation or region

A global curriculum on campus, no matter how strong, would be ineffective if not joined with direct encounter with foreign cultures. More than any other activity, Dickinson’s particular approach to study abroad has created an ethos of global awareness and a sense of participation in international endeavor across the entire campus.   This is the third concentric circle in our model: global encounters and engagement.

Dickinson now sponsors 35 programs on 6 continents in 22 countries. At the heart of this network are semester/year programs in Australia (Brisbane), Cameroon (Yaoundé), China (Beijing), England (Norwich, separate programs in science and humanities), France (Toulouse), Germany (Bremen), Italy (Bologna), Japan (Nagoya), Korea (Seoul), Mexico (Querétaro), Russia (Moscow), and Spain (Málaga). All are operated by the college in partnership with a foreign university.  Dickinson also has affiliation agreements in Argentina (Buenos Aires), Australia (field studies), Costa Rica (field studies), Egypt (Cairo), England (Bath and Durham), India (Hyderabad), Israel (Jerusalem), Italy (Rome), Kenya (field studies), Mexico (field studies), and Turks and Caicos (field studies).  Where enrollments allow, a Dickinson faculty director is in residence; elsewhere the college relies on colleagues from partner universities who have taught courses in residence on the Dickinson home campus. Most programs offer a combined, specially-designed curriculum of courses and extensive course work at Dickinson’s partner institutions. Almost all have home stays, and many offer internship and research opportunities.

Dickinson also operates a series of summer sessions, often using its abroad centers as home base. Most tightly integrated with the centers are five-week summer “immersions” offered in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. The immersions target students who have just completed their foreign language requirement, giving them an opportunity to employ what they have learned and progress further in their acquisition of the target language.

Summer study abroad programs are also sponsored by other departments.  The Classics Department sponsors an archaeology program at Mycenae, Greece, where a Dickinson professor serves as assistant director of the excavation.  Other examples of summer programs are International Business and Management/Policy Studies in Hong Kong; Theater and Music in London; China Cultural Practicum in China; and an Ethnographic Field School in Tanzania.

In addition to study abroad, Dickinson’s Carlisle campus hosts a continuous flow of international students and scholars from around the world who help to make it a truly global campus.  Since 1984 Dickinson has hosted over 200 such scholars through a special International Education Endowment, and through outside grants such as Fulbrights. Residencies last from a week to a full academic year.  Some visits are single events, others regular occurrences such as year-long stays of faculty from Chinese and Russian universities in support of Chinese and Russian instruction.  For the past several years, Dickinson has been the recipient of several Department of State-funded grant programs, including the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and Southeast Asian Student Leaders Programs, which have brought students and scholars from various regions to Carlisle to learn about the United States.

Please consult the Dickinson College Office of Global Education webpage for more information at www.dickinson.edu/global. 

Key Contact:
Brian Brubaker
Associate Director for Study Abroad
Office of Global Education
Dickinson College
P.O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA  17013
U.S.
Tel: +1.717.254.8068
Fax: +1.717.245.1688