Harper College offices will be closed Monday, September 2 in observance of Labor Day.
The Office of International Education has received the following grants and is grateful to its many benefactors for their generosity.
In fall of 2022, Professors Richard Johnson (English) and Mukila Maitha (Geography) were awarded a Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) grant to fund a six- week professional development field seminar to Kenya and Uganda entitled Teaching Environmental Sustainability in East Africa through a Social Justice Lens for educators from post-secondary and secondary educational institutions in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
The 18-month project began with 10 months of pre-departure coursework to prepare 12 participants for the six weeks of cultural, academic, and language immersion. Pre-departure course work included monthly meetings with presentations by content area experts on the history, geography, and cultures of the region, and five months of Kiswahili language study.
As part of the grant program, participants were required to create curriculum infusion projects for their disciplines. The itinerary was built around locations and interactions that meant to provide participants with opportunities to identify and collect materials to bring back to their classrooms and impact student learning. Links to some of the participant projects are listed below.
Participants visited a wide variety of geographies and environments in both countries, and met with academics, government officials, businesspeople and Kenyans and Ugandans from all walks of life during the summer of 2023.
Dr. Maria del Carmen Paniagua (Ivy Tech Community College, Bloomington IN Campus) has created the most comprehensive set of curriculum materials for each segment of our experience:
This ArcGIS Storymap overview of the program was created by Okeyo Fred and Sylvia Angelova with contributions from Prof. Simon Onywere of Kenyatta University and Prof. Mukila Maitha of Harper College.
In 2021, Harper College was one of 40 colleges and universities to be awarded the grant, which provides funding to help first-year, Pell-eligible students obtain a U.S. passport. Working with the Grants Office, the OIE asssisted 25 Harper College students in receiving a U.S. passport for the first time.
In 2020, OIE was awarded a 4-year $10,000 grant to fund faculty curriculum infusion projects focusing on South Asia which coincides with the OIE’s Global Region of Focus for 2020-2024. Since its inception, over 191 students have participated in co-curricular programs focused on South Asia. Our co-curricular programming has included opportunities for professional development of our faculty, staff, and administrators; in 2023-2024 alone, approximately 126 attendees among Harper employees participated in our South Asia focused programming.
In 2021, OIE among 12 grant-winning teams in the 100K Strong in the Americas Innovation Fund competition. For the grant, we partnered with the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica (UNA) to forge an experiential, virtual-learning approach to innovation in teaching, training and intercultural exchange between our campuses. Grounded in improving technological literacy, global awareness and intercultural competence among students from populations typically underrepresented in traditional international exchanges, the Global Learning through Online Virtual Exchange (GLOVE): Transforming Teaching and Training through Immersive International Education Experiences project created virtual exchange opportunities for students and faculty in 8 classes spanning 4 disciplines. Through the grant, we hosted 9 UNA students and faculty for 10 days of educational and cultural experiences on Harper’s campus in the fall of 2022. And in spring 2023, 6 Harper students and 2 faculty traveled to Costa Rica for an intercultural and educational field seminar on UNA’s campus. While impossible to quantify exactly, OIE estimates that on Harper’s campus alone the GLOVE project impacted over 300 students through virtual and in-person interactions including presentations, workshops, classroom visits, and social programs.
