Want More Students to Study Abroad? Get the Faculty Involved

When Baldwin Wallace University decided to double the percentage of its students who study abroad, it had to find faculty members who had the know-how — or at least the desire — to create new international programs.

The search led to a new tenure-track position awarded to a Zambian graduate, some life-changing trips for professors, and a deep collaboration between Baldwin Wallace and the southern African nation. It has also led to some rare faculty-development opportunities for professors, whose work in Zambia has allowed them to enrich their teaching and expand their research.

“The Zambia program has created a buzz on campus, with faculty wanting to know more about the opportunities and asking how they can get involved,” says Colleen F. Visconti, dean of the School of Health Sciences.

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The roots of the collaboration date to 2014, when Baldwin Wallace, located in a suburb of Cleveland, signed on to a national initiative started by the Institute for International Education to double the number of students nationwide who study abroad. Administrators in the health-sciences school brainstormed about finding former international students who might be able to help meet the goal. The name of Chisomo Selemani jumped to the top of the list.

A Zambian native, Selemani moved to Ohio with her parents as a child and graduated from Baldwin Wallace. In 2014, when the university approached her, she was living in Zambia and finishing a master’s degree in speech-language pathology through Case Western Reserve University.

She considers it fortunate that Baldwin Wallace came calling. She was already trying to figure out how to combine two passions: introducing more Americans to the beauty and richness of Zambia, while building a career in her chosen field. “Everything came together in a beautiful, organic way,” she says.

Within the year, Selemani was hired as an assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders at Baldwin Wallace, and went to work designing the Zambia program. She and eight colleagues made multiple exploratory trips there over more than two years — paid for by Baldwin Wallace — before she took the first group of about 20 master’s-degree students there in 2017.

To help students prepare, Selemani teaches a class on Zambian culture during the spring semester. In Zambia, the students have given presentations to health workers on treating autism-spectrum disorder, conducted screenings for speech and language delays among elementary-school students, and worked in low-income communities using culturally relevant assessment tools.

By the 2016-17 academic year, Baldwin Wallace had met its goal of doubling the proportion of students who study abroad (32 percent that year, up from 15 percent in 2014). While that proportion has since fallen slightly, the university is developing additional short-term study programs in Guatemala and Portugal. As another incentive, the university gives an annual $2,000 prize to the Baldwin Wallace school that makes the most progress in raising study-abroad participation. Winners have used the award for study-abroad scholarships to students and for a faculty member to explore a new international program.

Next May two faculty members will take about 20 undergraduates to Zambia for a theater-and-film collaboration with Barefeet Theatre, a nonprofit group in the capital, Lusaka, that connects with street children through art and theater. The Zambia connection even extends to faculty members who haven’t traveled there: Professors in the sociology department are collaborating with Barefeet Theatre on a study that seeks to document the group’s effect on the lives of its clients.

Many of the professors who have traveled to Zambia say the experience has had a big impact, both personally and professionally. Duane Battle, an assistant professor of broadcasting and mass communication, grew up in a large family in Cleveland and had never been out of the country (except to nearby Canada) until 2016, when he traveled to Zambia to explore creating the theater-and-film program.

When he joined Baldwin Wallace’s faculty, in 2014, he attended a meeting at which faculty members were asked if they’d be interested in leading student trips overseas. Battle was among the few who didn’t raise a hand. “I’d never been abroad,” he says. “Why would I even think about taking students abroad when I hadn’t done it myself?”

But the incentive of a free trip gave him reason to travel to Zambia and explore creating a humanities program to complement the screening program in speech-language pathology. His first trip, in 2016, was eye-opening. “I am African-American, so there’s a connection there,” he says, “and yet you realize that culturally you’re so different.”

Battle will teach in Zambia with Scott Plate, chair of the university’s department of theater and dance. Plate says he was motivated to help expand the Zambia collaboration by the “creeping xenophobia” surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“I couldn’t change the nativism that was developing,” he says, “but I could teach students not to be afraid of the fact that they live in the world.”

Plate has traveled to Zambia twice, and on his more recent visit he and Battle worked with Barefeet Theatre staff members to draw up a plan for a two-week student collaboration. The Baldwin Wallace students and their Zambian counterparts will produce three or more 10-minute musicals, using improvisational techniques. One musical may illustrate the concept of citizenship — including everything from violent struggle to simply being visible in one’s community. Battle and the film students will make a documentary about the project and allow the Zambian theater group to use it for marketing and fund raising to support its programs.

“It’s been two years in the planning,” Plate says. “It all works on paper — now we have to go do it.”