The conceptual framework for the University of Minnesota’s (UMN’s) Culture Corps was developed by Dr. Mohammed Barri, who came to the US as a Palestinian Israeli international student. He believed that we should not simply look at international students as being here to earn a degree, but should focus as well on the assets they bring. He envisioned international students being integrated into campus life, making the campus global. In some ways, his vision was realized in the student life part of campus, which has always been open to having international students present their cultures to other students as part of Student Affairs’ extracurricular activities

Still, the knowledge brought by international students was only integrated into the curriculum once Culture Corps began working closely with Gayle Woodruff’s internationalization efforts. Gayle pulled Culture Corps into UMN classrooms and partnerships with other programs. With her background in international education, she recognized that many international graduate students have worked in their fields for some time before beginning a Master’s or PhD program, and that they bring a wealth of knowledge created in a different intellectual culture.

During UMN’s early internationalization efforts, Culture Corps was offered as a resource to faculty members, who slowly but surely began to realize the value of integrating international graduate students into the curriculum. These students were often chosen to go into a classroom because the class needed specific knowledge, and bringing in someone with direct knowledge and experience about an issue became desirable.

History of Culture Corps

Culture Corps exists within the broader umbrella of UMN’s International Student and Scholar Services Office (ISSS). The vision of ISSS is to create an inclusive and engaged international learning community, so from its inception, CultureCorps has always been housed in the ISSS.

Culture Corps was created in 1998 by Mohammed Bari, PhD, an ISSS counselor, who wanted a new approach to the extracurricular options available to international students. His vision was to have international students share their talents, experiences, and insights with the campus and receive a stipend for the work. According to Barbara Kappler, Assistant Dean of International Student & Scholar Services, Bari “built on the motivation of students to give to the community and the receptivity in the environment for community members to learn from one another. This was a new approach where students would propose a project, or faculty and staff would pose a project that relied on the talents, experiences, and insights of international students. Students would receive a stipend or scholarship for the project.”  The project grew beyond Bari’s expectations.

Nelda Njos took charge of Culture Corps in 1998, and when she graduated in 2000, Thorunn Bjarnadottir took the helm.  Marina Uehara became an assistant in 2012, taking over when Thorunn retired in 2021.  The program celebrated its 25th anniversary in November 2023. At that event, Barbara Kappler reflected:

The very first project, “Summer Institute and Cultural Corps Partnership,” was hosted by the Office of Multicultural Affairs. Twenty-five years later, Culture Corps remains vibrant, and has distributed more than $1.76 million in awards. Our alumni are now professors in various universities around the world, engineers solving grand challenges, human rights officers, researchers in academia and industry, and much more. The impact of Culture Corps is vast. For 25 years, hundreds of students have facilitated classroom discussions; added resources to the curriculum; presented at panels, workshops, events; and redesigned experiences to infuse global perspectives. The reach has been thousands and thousands of students, faculty, and staff.

In essence, Culture Corps is a fund to award students for their time and effort. The fund is created by a fee charged to international students. Initially set at $2, this fee has been gradually increased over its 25-year history and is now at $16. International students receive monetary awards based on the time invested, the resources committed, and impact of the project.

Culture Corps opens the door to as many international students as possible. All international students on an F-1 or J-1 visa and enrolled full-time at UMN are eligible to participate.

• Culture Corps serves students on an F1 Visa, supported by personal/family funds, outside funds, or a combination of both, whose spouses and immediate family are in F-2 status (and so may study part-time and are not eligible for employment).
• Culture Corps also serves students on a J1 Visa, in which more than 50% of the student’s funding is from an outside source such as a scholarship, fellowship, or government sponsorship. These students are granted more flexibility in terms of opportunities for their immediate family: dependents in J-2 status may study full-time and may apply for employment authorization.

As of 2024, students interested in Culture Corps must complete the following:

• the Culture Corps Canvas Orientation (after first registering on the training hub)
• the intake form on the Culture Corps website
• an intake interview
• an application.

The processes are complex to ensure that students are prepared and that campus partners are ready for them.

Student projects include serving as speakers on panels, making presentations at student life events, and being content experts in classes (for a limited time or for an entire semester). Culture Corps projects/internships are not considered employment, wages, or work, but are volunteer positions in which students qualify for a cross-cultural award. The amount awarded ranges from $100 to more than $1,000.

Culture Corp Opportunities Across and Outside the Curriculum

Culture Corps provides a wide set of opportunities, with some having international students come into the classroom, and others allowing them to reach into the community.

1. Student-initiated projects: Students meet with the Culture Corps Coordinator to define their projects and receive guidance in how to execute them. Such projects might, for instance, be centered in an international student’s dormitory, with a presentation about their culture or the sharing of horror movies from their culture around Halloween.
2. UMN department-initiated projects: Staff-initiated projects depend on the international student’s expertise. These can include a request for students to serve on panels or to provide feedback on websites or material sused by international students.
3. Students apply to be part of ISSS international teams: For these projects, international students work with partner organizations like the International Buddy Program-University of Minnesota or the Small World Coffee Hour.
4. Internships (20–30 students each year): Students are referred to an internship with a department or with a unit. These can last a semester or a year.
5. Faculty-initiated projects: Many programs deploy international graduate students as part of faculty research or community outreach. Students have, for example,

• • worked with the departments teaching various languages (Swedish, Norwegian, Arabic, etc.)
  • worked with the Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence
  • offered classes to Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) members
  • worked with faculty engaged in Internationalizing Teaching and Learning to enhance course content—serving, for example, as guests addressing environmental issues or issues in veterinary medicine from an international perspective
  • worked with the Learning Abroad Center on pre-departure orientations
  • worked as cultural presenters for the academic programs in Global Youth Studies
  • worked with the Minnesota English Language Program (MELP) Outreach, a unit dedicated to teaching English as a Second Language

The range of projects is vast, allowing students from diverse majors, backgrounds, predispositions, and skill sets to find ways to integrate their unique strengths into the program. The reach is equally vast, touching the first-year student as well as the lifelong learner in the OLLI classroom.

Impacts of having an international student being part of the classroom

Here we trace the impacts of Culture Corps across campuses of the UMN system.

A Partnership with the Crookston Program in Sustainability

Katy Chapman, Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Science and Director of Sustainability at UMN Crookston, taught a class in which her students created an environmental remediation plan for Australia. Once the plan was in hand, it was reviewed by Australian graduate students, who noted, for instance, that the plan required far too much water for Australia. Chapman offers insight into the impact of this review:

Another impact besides the quantifiable impact of adding culture and understanding to projects is that domestic students would begin to see international students as people with knowledge to share.  Oftentimes, domestic students see international students as coming to gain knowledge from the US educational system and then taking it back to their country to improve things back home, rather than the idea that other countries have knowledge to share also. Seeing people from other countries as equally knowledgeable, and even knowledgeable beyond what is present in the classroom/university/state/country, has a huge positive impact.

Chapman’s work internationalizing the curriculum is available in other parts of this collection, and her partnership with Culture Corps was an important part of this work.

A Partnership with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

The UMN’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) was the first entity on campus to seek out a partnership with Culture Corps. OLLI, which is supported by the Bernard Osher Foundation and is part of the College of Continuing and Professional Studies, is a vibrant learning community for people aged 50+, and offers hundreds of high-quality, noncredit courses each year to its members.

Steve Benson, OLLI’s founder and its first director, talked with Thorunn about having international graduate students offer classes to members. The first class was on Romania, focusing on Dracula, and was well received. The partnership soon flourished as  these courses became popular, and international graduate students were happy for the opportunity to design the curriculum for an entire class and teach it to eager participants. Examples of OLLI courses include “Global Climate Change Education” and “Zika Virus and Mosquitoes in Latin America.”

The OLLI website markets these important experiences as a strength of the program. From the OLLI website:

July 3, 2023, Bolanle Dahunsi first started sewing at age 12 or 13, helped by her mother who owned a sewing business in Nigeria. After discovering a career in banking wasn’t the right fit for her, Bolanle attended a fashion institute and started her own fashion design business, creating custom clothing for clients.

Today, Bolanle is completing her PhD in apparel design at the University of Minnesota, where she recently taught “Cultural Influences and the Nigerian Fashion Industry.” Bolanle developed the course for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) through its partnership with Culture Corps. “Designing a course from scratch for OLLI was an invaluable experience,” Bolanle said. “It gave me what I was missing—developing coursework, slides, and a syllabus.”

International graduate students rarely have chance to do any kind of course development. Through Culture Corps’ partnership with OLLI, however, they can write and create an entire course in fields and subjects in which they are the experts, and get paid accordingly.

Partnership with Internationalizing Teaching and Learning (ITL)

Culture Corps has been part of the internationalization of the UMN curriculum from its inception. Professors in the program were developing their courses from scratch, and having an international student involved was a plus.

Culture Corps students have worked with faculty to develop course content in Veterinary Medicine on the Twin Cities campus, Political Science at the Morris campus, and Francophone movies on the Morris campus, among many others.

Partnership with World Languages

The most logical partnership with a department on campus was World Languages. Once language instructors learned about the Culture Corps program, they began to ask for international students to be part of their classes, and actually requested undergraduate students. Culture Corps students would, for example, make presentations about a topic in their mother tongue. A Chinese student might make a presentation in Chinese on youth culture in Beijing. Other students become language partners with domestic students. One Japanese student taught a class on calligraphy, and another taught ikebana (flower arranging). A class on world literature had international students from the country of the novel they were studying come in and have a conversation about the novel.

Partnership with the University of Minnesota Police Department

One of Culture Corps’ most interesting collaborations has been with the University of Minnesota Police Department (UMPD). One takeaway from this collaboration involved how UMPD communicated with students.  For example, the police were communicating in a language that a lot of international students did not understand, using phrases like “shelter in place.”

More profoundly, this collaboration made it visible that international students come from countries where they do not trust the police. Through Culture Corps, UMPD was able to rethink some of its communication and outreach strategies with international students.

Conclusion

I’d like to close with two stories of how our international students can enrich our curriculum and campus life in ways we might not have imagined. A faculty member doing a course in conservation biology called me to ask “Would you be able to find me someone who can talk about the impact of large cats in Asia?” I found a student working a graduate degree at the UMN School of Veterinary Medicine. The student is a warden of the Valmiki National Park, a tiger reserve and wildlife sanctuary located at the India-Nepal border, and home to over 700 known species of wildlife, including the elusive Bengal tiger and the one-horned rhinoceros. When I called the faculty member back and told her about the student, there was  dead silence for a time; I don’t think she believed that I had actually found an international graduate student on campus who was an expert in wild cats.

The second story is of a young undergraduate student from Japan who wanted to know if he could do a Culture Corps session on the Japanese Tea Ceremony. I said yes, and we talked about how the best place for him to do this would be through student life in his residential hall. My sense, however, was that he had even more to offer. So I asked if there was anything else he could offer our campus, and he replied that he’d think about it. I told him to brainstorm what he would want to offer if there were no limits. A week later he returned, and told me he’d like to explore what he could tell us about gay culture in Japan. I directed him to the folks in the Gender Studies department and, to make a long story short, he discovered that the library had been gifted with material on gay culture in Asia. From that collection, he created an exhibition of gay culture in Japan, featuring a drag queen who was a big star in Tokyo’s gay scene. In part because of this work, this young man evolved from a shy person on a foreign campus into a confident young man who graduated with a strong sense of himself. He returned to Japan and later became a nurse dedicated to working with AIDS patients.