2019 Comprehensive Kirkwood Community College
While Harrison Bontrager had certain goals in mind as he traveled to Sydney, Australia, as part of a study abroad program at Kirkwood Community College, he had no idea it would lead to an international career in architecture and design. The study abroad program, led by Kirkwood professor Jillissa Moorman, took students on a two-week tour of architecture and design firms across Australia.
During the program development stage, Bontrager contacted Moorman and asked if she could include a visit to Alexander & CO., Bontrager’s favorite architecture firm, on the itinerary. This outing had significant outcomes for Bontrager. “After touring their space and getting to chat with their principal, I was offered an internship, which has turned into a position as a designer,” he explains.
Bontrager returned to Iowa to finish one more semester at Kirkwood and then completed his associate’s degree by working with Moorman remotely. “I’m not going to say he can’t continue because he’s around the world,” says Moorman, who coordinates Kirkwood’s interior design program.
It is the passion and support of faculty members like Moorman that have helped Kirkwood earn its reputation for study abroad programming for community college students. Each year, Kirkwood offers approximately 20 faculty-led programs across multiple disciplines. The Institute of International Education ranks the college fifth nationally in the number of community college students it sends abroad.
Offering a Central Hub for Global Experiences
Kirkwood’s study abroad programs are run through its International Programs (IP) Department, located on the college’s main campus in Cedar Rapids. The department also manages international enrollment management, international student services, English language acquisition, international partnerships, international grants and projects, and faculty and staff development. IP offers a centralized office for global engagement and is intentionally situated within academic affairs to facilitate interaction with all areas of the college. The department’s mission is to have “every faculty, staff, and student at Kirkwood engage in an intercultural experience."
Dawn Wood, dean of international programs, says that this mission is particularly important for Kirkwood as a community college because the vast majority of students stay in eastern Iowa after graduation. Thus, the college takes a broad, long-term outlook on its internationalization efforts. “These are people who are going to live in our community and give us the advantage we need to be globally competitive,” she says.
When President Lori Sundberg joined Kirkwood in 2018, one of the first things she noticed was how internationalized the college was compared with her previous institutions. “It really is pervasive across the campus, from individual courses to opportunities for students and faculty outside of the classroom,” she says.
John Henik, associate vice president for academic affairs, says that the college has been engaged internationally since he started at Kirkwood more than 30 years ago. Kirkwood was the fiscal agent and host for Community Colleges for International Development— an association made up of community, technical, and vocational institutions dedicated to creating globally engaged learning environments—from the late 1980s until 2013 and remains a member of the organization’s board.
To support Kirkwood’s global efforts, the International Programs Department has always had its own budget allocated out of the college’s general fund. Dedicated funding for international activities is essential because new programs at community colleges are often seen as taking away scarce resources, according to Henik. While some specific projects are grant funded, the majority of the department’s budget comes from general funds.
“There is a commitment to international programs, just like another department like allied health or business,” he says. “That is a really important move for the sustainability of the department.”
Enhancing Professional Development with the Global Service Award
Another aspect of Kirkwood’s internationalization strategy has been to engage stakeholders throughout the institution. Kirkwood has created professional development opportunities for staff, faculty, and administrators through the Global Service Award (GSA), which provides funding for staff to join students on international service-learning trips. The GSA was created in 2012 after former college president Mick Starcevich participated in a service-learning program to Guatemala with dental hygiene professor Lisa Hebl. Starcevich was so moved by the experience that the two sat down at dinner one night and sketched out on a napkin what the GSA might entail. “He didn’t expect [that the experience] was going to impact him as much as it did, and he wanted to make it possible for more people on campus to do it,” Hebl says.
Full-time faculty and staff who are employed at Kirkwood for at least 3 years are eligible to apply for the award, which is competitive and provides full funding for the trip. While abroad, they participate alongside the students and support the lead faculty. Upon return to campus, the awardees complete an assessment, take part in events where they share their experience with colleagues, and develop projects to integrate what they learned into the classroom or their daily work.
Wood says it is important to give staff a chance to travel because they then become champions for education abroad. “Our students talk more to the people who are sitting at the front—that’s our office assistant, our admissions team, our counselors,” she says.
Five to six faculty and staff receive the GSA each year. Since the program was launched, more than 40 Kirkwood faculty and staff have engaged in service-learning programs in 10 different countries.
International programs office coordinator Maria Moore traveled to Lima, Peru, as a GSA recipient where she and the students volunteered at an elder care facility and at a school. Moore says the experience gave her a new perspective on her work for the International Programs Department. “I really learned the value of students going abroad, because I think too many people get too entrenched in their own culture and they don’t want to venture out to see what else is out there in the world,” she says.
Making Study Abroad Accessible
Kirkwood’s enrollment is made up of many nontraditional students: older students returning to college, first-generation students, part-time students, low-income students, technical students, rural students, and students from underrepresented backgrounds. Approximately 34 percent of its students were Pell-eligible in the 2017–18 academic year. For many of these populations, education abroad poses particular challenges, but the International Programs Department does everything it can to make education abroad a possibility for anyone who wants to take advantage of it. In 2017–18, Kirkwood sent 151 students overseas out of a total full-time undergraduate population of approximately 15,000.
By developing its own study abroad programs, the college is able to keep the costs down. All program fees, including the flight, are built into the cost of the program. “When all of us are designing these study abroad programs, it’s about quality, but also looking at cost-effective measures to make sure that students can afford it,” says study abroad adviser Ken Nesbett. “Even when faculty are proposing programs, we have the mindset of, ‘How will this be accessible for students without sacrificing quality?’”
Kirkwood works to break down some of the financial barriers by offering more than 90 percent of its study abroad participants $1,000 to $2,000 each as part of its Global Advantage Scholarships for faculty-led programs, totaling more than $150,000 in funding. Kirkwood is also a top producer of Gilman Awards, which are available to Pell-eligible students, among associate’s colleges. Six Kirkwood students received Gilman Awards in 2017–18.
Kayla Acosta, an early childhood education major, was one of Kirkwood’s recent Gilman awardees and a recipient of the Global Advantage Scholarship. She was able to study abroad in Australia and participate in a service-learning program to Cambodia. “There’s no way financially I’d be able to ever study abroad without a scholarship. It’s just not doable with working and being able to just up and leave everything,” she says.
In Australia, Acosta toured early childhood education centers and learned how they incorporate indoor and outdoor play into the curriculum. “I was able to bring a lot of that back here. I already work at a preschool currently, so I did a lot of training with my staff on how to better incorporate play,” she says.
Collaborating Through the Global Education Network
For both of her education abroad programs, Acosta joined other students from Australia, Canada, and Singapore who attend institutions that are part of the Global Education Network (GEN), a consortium of four schools that Kirkwood has been a part of since 2001. Acosta and her peers had the chance to interact through established channels prior to departure, allowing for some relationship building among the participants. “We had met prior through Zoom, and when we got off the plane we saw giant groups of us that all looked lost,” she explains. Students from across the GEN consortium have the opportunity to not only learn from their host community, but each other as well.
GEN is a partnership between Kirkwood and the Box Hill Institute in Australia, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Canada, and Institute of Technical Education (ITE) in Singapore. GEN partners share similarities in their vocational and technical curricula, such as auto technology, welding, graphic design, veterinary technician, and early childhood education. The collaboration of these four institutions has resulted in hundreds of student, faculty, and staff exchanges; virtual exchanges; global learning programs focused on diverse curriculum areas; and joint faculty and staff professional development.
Henik acts as the representative for the GEN consortium at the World Federation of Colleges and Polytechnics, an international network of colleges delivering workforce education. He says that while each institution brings its own strengths to GEN, they collaborate on the curriculum and plan joint servicelearning programs. “One of the parts of our strategic plan is that we’re sharing best practices and learning from each other,” Wood says. Kirkwood has, for example, developed medical simulation labs modeled after those at ITE.
Together, the four institutions contribute to the network’s operating budget, develop a strategic plan, and determine and assess key performance indicators. Every other year, one partner institution hosts a planning conference that includes the campus presidents. Kirkwood hosted the planning conference in June 2019.
Each institution hosts students and faculty from the other partners every year. Kirkwood alumnus Travis Riggan and other students from GEN took a project management course focused on the Jones County Fair, an annual event in Iowa that showcases local agricultural products and livestock. Students worked in multicultural teams and presented their projects to the fair board at the end of the class.
Riggan says it was a unique experience to be able to take the visiting students to a county fair: “We got to show international students from Canada, Australia, and Singapore our culture. They’ve never been to a fair where people bash demo cars, showcase cows, and [have] fried food galore.”
Internationalizing Career and Technical Education
Participation in the Global Education Network has helped Kirkwood internationalize its career and technical disciplines through its various student exchanges and other collaborations. At Kirkwood, around 50 percent of students are studying with the intent to transfer to a four-year institution. The remaining half complete a one- or two-year degree before entering the local workforce.
To meet students’ needs, Kirkwood has developed faculty-led programs in fields such as agriculture, construction management, and culinary arts. The architectural technology program takes students to Germany to learn about green building practices, and nursing and allied health students have participated in service programs in Belize, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. Kirkwood’s culinary arts program runs a three-week course at Florence University of the Arts in Italy that allows students to take lab courses or intern at a restaurant.
Students enrolled in Kirkwood’s agricultural sciences program get the chance to visit Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) in Lavras, Brazil, over spring break. Professor Scott Ermer says that the program balances between academic and cultural activities. “The majority of the students that we have taken have never been outside the country before,” he says. “To immerse them in another, non-English-speaking culture is a game changer for them. You can just see the growth in 12 days.”
The program explores issues related to small-scale agriculture and encourages students to compare and contrast farming practices between Iowa and Brazil. “We spend a day on coffee production, so we drive through miles and miles of coffee. Just like you drive through miles and miles of corn here in Iowa. So, coffee is our corn. Our students learn to look at that as a cash commodity and gain a different perspective when they’re drinking that cup of coffee,” Ermer says.
Justin Shields, who graduated from Kirkwood in May 2019, says Brazil was the first place he traveled to outside of the United States. The experience was so eyeopening that he plans to study abroad again after he transfers to Iowa State University in fall 2019.
“Brazil has developed into an agriculture stronghold, and they’re one of our biggest competitors from the global trading standpoint,” Shields says. “It was just incredible to see the mountainous regions and the cattle. You could see them planting crops on such steep slopes that I never imagined was even possible.”
While the group was in Lavras, students from UFLA served as the tour guides. “When we were getting ready to leave Lavras to head to Rio, there were people who were almost in tears because we were leaving such good friends. And it was just incredible to me that you could build a relationship that strong that quickly,” Shields says.
Diversifying the Campus Through International Student Recruitment
In addition to its efforts to send students abroad, Kirkwood has focused on welcoming international students to its campuses. From 2005 to 2015, Kirkwood’s international student enrollment increased from 174 to 399. Since then, Kirkwood has experienced a decline in international enrollment, forcing a reexamination of its enrollment strategies. Kirkwood’s recruitment efforts now target partnerships in Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries.
To diversify its international student population, the college has also concentrated on recruiting more sponsored students from programs such as the Community College Initiative Program, the Thomas Jefferson Scholarship Program, the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission, and Science Without Borders.
Still, one of the benefits of having a relatively small international student population is that Kirkwood has been able to personalize the support it provides each student. “I came from an institution where we had 4,000 international students,” says international student adviser Shannon Ingleby. “I couldn’t tell you a single name of any student, compared to Kirkwood where I know all the students. I get to interact with them all the time and spend a ton of time with them.”
Many international students at Kirkwood are active members of the campus community. Mathlida Mola came to the United States from Kenya in 2016 to pursue her associate’s degree in accounting. She was selected as the commencement speaker for the 2019 graduating class because of her work on the international student leadership team, which helps with orientation and organizes activities for international students.
“I was extremely happy to represent my international student family as the commencement speaker,” Mola says. “It was an honor to share about my experience at Kirkwood as an international student.”
The English Language Acquisition (ELA) Department has provided an important service to the Cedar Rapids area over the years. More than 600 students are involved in the intensive English course sequence targeted at English language learners. While some students are on F-1 visas, the majority are immigrants and refugees who live in Cedar Rapids and the surrounding communities. “We have a five-level English course sequence. They are all courses that prepare students for college-level coursework or whatever certificate coursework they want to take at Kirkwood,” says instructor Betsy Baertlein. “All of our students have some sort of academic goal when they come to us.”
Kirkwood has also been able to leverage its distance learning technology to teach ELA courses to high school students in Brazil by using the same online platform it uses to offer dual enrollment classes to Iowa high school students. “There’s no difference between us communicating between here and Chicago or here and Brazil,” says Todd Prusha, executive dean of distance learning. “It’s been a great partnership.”
Kirkwood ELA instructors have been offering online English courses to Brazilian high school students for the last 7 years. In the course of the partnership, an ELA instructor did a site visit in Brazil and trained local community members on how to administer an oral proficiency exam. Kirkwood instructors have also been able to travel with agriculture students to Brazil over spring break and meet their online students in person.
Renewing the Commitment to Comprehensive Internationalization
Kirkwood is currently in the process of constructing a new $60 million student center. “The college really wanted us front and center in our new student center because of its focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion,” Wood says. “We want all groups to feel welcomed and have a space to interact and engage.”
Once the building is completed in 2020, the International Programs Department will occupy a prominent location in the new space, along with other student resource centers. The goal is to better integrate international students and other groups into the larger campus community.