Jacek Lubecki remembers the exact moment he discovered a new world.

It was the summer of 1988. The young Polish student was hitchhiking around France tasting his first sips of freedom thanks to his country’s glasnost with the West.

“I stopped in a French supermarket, and I was shocked by all of this abundance of goods — the shelves fully stocked with groceries and all the goods,” said Dr. Lubecki, now a UALR political science assistant professor who directs the International Studies and Middle Eastern programs. “I cried. I was overcome.

“It was such a shock to see such a super-surfeit and abundance of material goods as compared to what I had experienced in Poland. I did not experience any kind of extreme poverty in Poland, but it was an extremely austere place. At that time and place, the gap was extreme and very visible.”

Among the produce and canned goods, Lubecki knew his life had changed.

It is this kind of learning jolt the professor sees in his students who are transported from their world to another when they study abroad. Their senses open in a way that no book or lecture could.

“You look at your own country with different eyes after an experience like that,” he said. “But after the shock, you see beyond the first impression. I hope my students (who travel abroad) learn and love and appreciate the differences in the world.”

A growing number of American students and their professors understands that learning to operate in different cultures is an essential skill where even the most provincial of businesses can find that their customers live halfway around the world. Study abroad programs — even those lasting only a few weeks – can provide that experience.

“Students should get a passport along with their student ID, and they should use it to study abroad at least once during their academic careers,” said Allan E. Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education (IIE).

The Open Doors survey that IIE publishes annually to track global education reports that the number of American students studying abroad increased a record 8.7 percent in 2007 over the previous year. The number of U.S. students receiving academic credit for their study abroad has increased 150 percent in the past decade, according to the report. In 2007, more than 223,500 American students were studying abroad compared to 90,000 in 1995-1996.

The University of Wisconsin’s (UW) new bachelor’s degree program in global studies, the first in the nation, illustrates the nuances between traditional study abroad and 21st century global education.

UW-Milwaukee says the program, intended to create globally literate students, “is an innovative interdisciplinary program based on a philosophy of experiential learning.” Its approach combines studying abroad, mastering a foreign language, and pre-professional coursework from across the traditional disciplines and allows students to focus on five tracks: global classrooms, global cities, global communications, global management, and global security.

UALR Donaghey Scholar Ivy Renfro understands the value of globalizing her education with overseas experiences, study, and research.

“We are in an economy that is increasingly globalizing,” said Renfro, a native of Malvern, Ark., and graduate of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts. “The U.S. is further and further imbedded and more and more interconnected with every other country. If you are going to do any kind of work where you deal with people who are different, who aren’t born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, you are going to need the experience of dealing with people whose cultures are different.”

Renfro, a first-generation college student majoring in history and German studies, spent more than a month in a German language immersion program in Graz, Austria, in 2006 through UALR’s study abroad programs. This year she spent two months taking Mandarin Chinese at Pingtung University of Education through the Taiwan-United States Sister Relations Alliance Summer Scholarship Program. In September, she will return to Graz for a full semester of study.

Without fail, UALR students who study abroad are ready to go again if the opportunity presents itself.

English major Greg Clark came home from a month of study in Orleans, France, with plans to visit friends in London, Mexico City, and Kyoto, Japan.

“I found friends all around the world. That’s probably one of the best things about the program,” he said.

The latest study abroad statistics in Open Doors 2007 also indicate that American students are increasingly choosing nontraditional destinations for overseas study abroad experiences. Latin America excursions are up 14 percent; Africa, up 19 percent; Asia, up 26 percent; and the Middle East, up 31 percent.

UALR students are among those numbers experiencing study abroad in exotic locales.

Dr. Yupo Chan, UALR Systems Engineering professor, was instrumental in forging an agreement with the University of Hong Kong for a student exchange: each institution may send two undergraduates who are studying systems engineering to the other school for one semester.

Construction management Professor Jim Carr accompanied a UALR group to Russia for three weeks in 2005, interacting with a Moscow developer and — after two days of train travel — worked with a Siberian scientist from Sustainable Development of Human Settlements.

“We worked on a green building project,” Carr said. “We also went to the Altai Mountains and Lake Telskoyoe and visited with a local environmentalist.” In between, the group toured Moscow and St. Petersburg, attended a ballet, and visited museums.

The experience is more than just cultural enrichment. Phillip McMath of Little Rock, who obtained three grants to study for a total of nine months in the Middle East, landed a job at the end of his travels.

McMath, who attained three grants to study for a total of nine months in the Middle East, said he has been able to bring back special knowledge to the academic and nonacademic community.

“I have been offered a position as an archaeologist, as well as assisting in public education on ancient Egypt for an exhibit at the Arkansas Art Center in 2009,” he said.

“These opportunities were due in no small part to my professors, who believing in my commitment, gave me a chance to make the most of my time at UALR.”

Lubecki said the best study abroad programs are those where the faculty, who are experts in that country, can travel with the students.

“Then the faculty member, who has legs in both societies, can be a transitional bridge for the student between the country being explored and the home country,” he said.

Lubecki, who took another group of students to Poland this year, was a study abroad student himself last year. He joined McMath, UALR student Anna Evatt, and post-graduate Nathan Owen in Cairo, Egypt, for a two-month intensive Arabic language program.

“All of a sudden, all of your conventional wisdom just ceases and one is put in this strange world,” Lubecki said of the shock all three experienced upon landing in Cairo. “It was fantastic. You have gleaming high rises right next to what you would call slums, but they are really villages with dirt streets.

“It’s hot, dirty. Goats, wild dogs and cats and little creatures that look like small ferrets, sheep, horses, and camels are all together with 20 million cars and 27 million people — sheer chaos and energy. But then one discovers the goodness behind it. It was tremendous.”

She has these suggestions for students and faculty planning to study abroad:

1. Meet as many of the locals as possible. Not all learning goes on in a classroom.
2. Be flexible. Every day is different and usually never goes as planned. Go with the flow.
3. Read up on the customs. Know what is polite, and impolite, in each place you visit. You never know when you could be offending someone.
4. Know a few basic words in native language. Most everyone speaks English, but all appreciate the attempt.
5. Ask the locals where the best places are to go, especially for food.
6. Take some time to relax and enjoy, be more concerned with experiencing the place than seeing the sights.
7. Don’t expect the service you get in America.
8. This isn’t America or Disney World. Don’t expect it to be.
9. Don’t be afraid to wander. Some of the best things happen when you’re lost.
10. Don’t be afraid. This is an adventure.
11. Don’t forget you’re there for school. The education you get abroad is priceless, so pay attention.

Think studying abroad is for traditional students from top schools on the East and West coasts, with parents who can afford to send pampered prodigy off for a junior year in Florence, Paris, or London?

Meet Elizabeth Thornhill. The 1992 graduate of Pine Bluff High School is the single mother of a 5-year-old son. Until this spring, she commuted from home to a job in Little Rock and classes at UALR.

But in July 2006, the first-generation college student who had never traveled outside the United States found herself in Poland. For three weeks that summer, she examined the ghostly remnant of Nazi concentration camps and conversed face-to-face with Chechnya rebels still fighting to separate their country from Russia in the Northern Caucasus Mountains.

Thornhill and a half-dozen UALR students accompanied Dr. Jacek Lubecki to his native land for three weeks of study. He took another group this summer. They participate in seminars at UALR and read several books, then reconvene in Warsaw.

Thornhill said she has always had an academic interest in the Holocaust as a piece of history. But she never felt it the way she did by being there, standing in the middle of the Nazi’s notorious extermination camp at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

“None of us walked out of there without tears in our eyes. It was pretty intense,” Thornhill said. “When we went to Gross Rosen, they had this fireplace outside where they had dumped all the ashes of the people who had been burned in the crematorium, and you literally, still today, see ashes seeping out between the bricks of the smokestack.

“It hits home. This is real. You can read it in a book all day long, but until you see it, it doesn’t seem quite so real.”

She stood in cathedrals where Karol Józef Wojtyla tended his flock before he became Pope John Paul II. She experienced first-hand how a country reinvents itself from a Soviet puppet to a gung-ho member of the free market West. And she met curious students eager to learn, so different from her, yet so similar.

“I felt that I had put myself into someone else’s world,” she said. “I was learning what life was like for them and how they live on a daily basis, what their culture is and how they interact with other people. It was a life-changing experience.”

Could she have learned what she did any other way?

“No,” Thornhill said without hesitation. “You look at pictures and books, and it just doesn’t compare to standing there and looking with your own two eyes. I never gave it much thought about going out of the country. But now that I did it, I’m addicted.”

The universal raison d’être for studying abroad is to expand one’s horizons. But UALR junior Ivy Renfro found herself and her roots during her experiences overseas in 2006.

The Malvern, Ark., native spent a month in Graz, Austria, as a UALR Donaghey Scholar. At the conclusion of the program, Renfro took a side trip to the Harz Mountains region of Germany where her grandmother survived the Nazi regime and wartime deprivation.

“She was from Braunlage and came to the United States after World War II,” Renfro recounted. “She had married an American soldier. As a consequence of her assimilating into America, she raised my mother and uncle in English.”
She added, “It was a lost language (German)for me so I was going to go abroad … to ground myself in the Germanic culture, which is extremely important to me.”

After her studies ended in Graz, Renfro took a side trip to Braunlage.

“I found my grandma’s hometown where she was born and raised. I saw the one-room wooden church where she was baptized,” she said. “I saw the house she grew up in, which was really cool. She had told me stories about hiding out up there and how her mother sold things on the black market to get ration cards.”

Renfro was able to bring back pictures of her pilgrimage to Braunlage to her grandmother, who lives in Malvern.

“It was awesome to be able to bring together a family tie with an academic experience,” Renfro said.

Dr. John Ahlen is president of the Arkansas Science & Technology Authority, a state agency promoting scientific research, technology development, business innovation, and math, science, and engineering education.

On Arkansas’ Globalization Outlook

By Robin Henson

Why do Arkansas students need a global education?

It’s globalization of the economy. Often people say, ‘I don’t see globalization where I live.’ Yet, you can’t even get dressed in the morning without seeing where your clothing comes from; it’s Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, China, and Italy.Look at the large companies some of our board members represent. When they have a new product idea, their global companies have a dozen places around the globe to get it made. They would like to make it in Arkansas, but if we don’t have the workforce, they have to go somewhere else. Another example is our graduate students in science and engineering. They are international students coming from all over for their education in this country. Many want to stay, but an increasing number go back to their native land. Many of the skills they could use here now can also be used in other countries.

How does study abroad prepare students for their careers?

A little more than a generation ago taking foreign languages may have been required for certain degrees. The assumption was if you spoke English that was all you needed to worry about. I think now familiarity with other cultures is much more important. It’s not just because we’re in a globalized economy, but because we’re exposed to so many different cultures in the workplace and through our work that require an understanding of differences among people.

How does having more globally educated graduates affect a state or a region?

Look at what happens if you don’t have them. If we don’t have internationally trained, globally aware students, Arkansas might appear to do just fine and get by. But is that good enough in a global economy where others are working harder, working smarter, and aspiring to an economic position that many in the U.S. take for granted?We need to emphasize global competition, which more and more is in the area of technology. That means states and regions need to emphasize more math, more science, and more engineering in order to be globally competitive with other regions.

What are current collaborations between the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority (ASTA) and universities that affect global issues?

We are working with Arkansas State University, UALR, and UA Fayetteville on a National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant ($9 million) to research nanotechnology and bioproducation and reach out to middle school and high school students to interest them in pursuing science and engineering degrees in college.

In your time as ASTA president, what is the biggest change you’ve seen in education that reflects globalization?

Faculty research previously seemed to be driven mostly by professional curiosity and a desire to discover things that nobody else had observed. Professors wrote papers and converted that knowledge into lessons for students. Research drove higher education, publications, and professional activities.Recently we had a physicist who spent 30 years in higher education come visit and said he had missed opportunities to commercialize new products. His professional interest has shifted, and he is not going to miss that opportunity this time. He now has a team of multi-disciplinary, multi-national scientists and has an expanded vision of taking new ideas to the marketplace.I think his major change in attitude is a result of the publicity of globalization of the economy and the new approach to regional economic development centered on scientific and engineering innovations. The multi-disciplinary and multi-national makeup of his team is a reflection of global nature of the 21st century economy.

How has the higher education curriculum evolved in those 25 years to encompass globalization?

The contemporary curriculum has had to keep pace with rapid change and accelerating technological developments, in terms of both content and delivery during the last 25 years.There have been many changes. Students are more tech savvy. Both students and faculty are more ethnically diverse. Entrepreneurship is an emerging and important skill. Foreign languages have increased value. Often the most interesting academic work is at the intersection of disciplines, requiring multidisciplinary teaching credentials.If students are technologically trained and believe in lifelong learning, all kinds of things are possible in the global economy.

What is your vision for Arkansas’ development of globalization initiatives?

Arkansas has students in middle school and high school who are inspiring in their approach to academic rigor. Arkansas has talent in its colleges and universities to prepare students for technical jobs at every level and professors can infect them with an entrepreneurial spirit and encourage them to take risks. Arkansas communities that want to be globally competitive will attract these well educated entrepreneurs back home.The vision is to provide visible pathways to Arkansas’ young citizens that allow them to receive support for going to college, studying hard disciplines, and becoming entrepreneurs. I see a culture of technology-based entrepreneurship springing up around the state.I think it’s possible because 25 years ago there were very few people who thought about such economic development. Today, Arkansas has the talent and resources to do all of this here. The challenge is to invest in Arkansans and increase that capacity.