Five OLLU faculty members have been named as recipients of the “At Home—In the World Course Internationalization Grants Program.” As part of the of the program, the faculty members will be redesigning their courses to more intentionally include international course content and global learning outcomes in their course lectures, assignments and assessments. The grant recipients are:
- Loranel Graham, PhD, professor of psychology – Dr. Graham will be internationalizing the Health Psychology course. The course will incorporate global health concepts such as: determinants of health, measurement of health status, the importance of culture to health, the global burden of disease, risk factors for health conditions and health disparities in both developed and developing countries.
- marcela polanco, PhD, assistant professor of psychology – Dr. polanco will be internationalizing the Psychosocial Support in the Borderlands course. This course will introduce students to alternative perspectives to the conceptualization and practice of Eurocentric models of behavioral health services. Such alternative perspectives will be presented by Latin American grassroots developments and non-Western perspectives.
- Casey Taliancich-Klinger, PhD, assistant professor of communication disorders and Patricia Kimes, MEd, assistant clinical professor of communication disorders – Dr. Taliancich-Klinger and Professor Kimes will be internationalizing the Clinical Methods Practicum and Policies course. Through this course, they will be offering graduate students the opportunity to travel to a Spanish-speaking country to provide evaluation and therapy services to pediatric populations with communication disorders. This would give more students hands-on experience in serving CLD populations and developing clinical skills within another culture.
- Deborah Vasquez, MFA, assistant professor of art – Professor Vasquez will be internationalizing the Barrio Art and Popular Culture course. This course will include a faculty-led study abroad component to Cuba. In spring 2018, Professor Vasquez will take her students to Cuba to focus on barrio art and popular culture in various areas with large enclaves of people creating barrio art. Her research into the Afro-Cuban experience will help broaden students’ comparative understandings of the African diaspora in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and Latin America.
The At Home—In the World Grants Program is funded by the Higher Education for a New America (HENA) initiative at OLLU, made possible by a generous grant from the Impetus Foundation. The courses administered through this grant will further the mission of the Impetus Foundation and HENA to enhance the academic success and intercultural competence of OLLU students.