The Importance of Internationalizing STEM

When Tashi Gurung arrived in Crookston, Minnesota, from the Himalayas in Nepal to begin his undergraduate studies, he intended his reach to be further than the frozen plains and cold. As a student in the Environmental Sciences program at the University of Minnesota Crookston (UMC), he worked to find and, later, create opportunities to bring about positive change in the world. He worked with students in the International Club, for instance, to organize “One Day without Shoes,” an event to help children in Africa and to raise consciousness here in Minnesota about their struggles.

But for Tashi, the real surprise was in seeing how his coursework in biology and in environmental sciences could also reach around the world. In 2011, he became friends with two students in his biology class—one from Kenya, the other from Fosston, Minnesota. They shared more than assignments and coursework; they shared their ambitions and career goals. They decided to work together to develop a campus project called “Clean Water for Everyone,” which established the first permanent water filtration site at a boarding school in Nepal.

Projects and connections such as these inspired Tashi to expand his impact to make, as he puts it, a “better, cleaner, and more resilient planet through sustainability practices.” Tashi went on to earn his PhD, and continues to work on multidisciplinary projects that improve equity, inclusivity, and quality of education for learners everywhere.

Tashi experienced the internationalized curriculum at UMC, which allowed him to connect with his peers from around the world and encouraged him to apply his interests in environmental science to domestic and global issues. At UMC, being and creating leaders who are culturally and globally competent is part of how we achieve our mission. We focus on cultural competency—the ability of an individual to understand and respect values, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas that differ across cultures, and to consider and respond to those differences as they evaluate problems and develop and implement solutions. Our global component expands students’ cultural competency to all parts of the world as we work to help develop globally competent citizens. The Global Programs and Strategy Alliance of the University of Minnesota (UMN) says that students with this competence are able to “demonstrate the skills, knowledge, and perspectives necessary to understand the world and work effectively to improve it.”

Since Tashi’s time at UMC, the UMC environmental science and biology faculty have continued to create opportunities for students from around the world, as well as from rural Minnesota, to explore the international dimensions of STEM education.

How higher education in the US internationalizes college curricula has changed considerably over the last century. In its early years, internationalization was synonymous with the presence of international students in college classrooms and with study abroad trips. International students, though they currently represent less than 6% of college students in the US, contribute valuable perspectives in US classrooms. And the establishment and success of the United States’ first study abroad program at the University of Delaware in the 1920s has been repeated at colleges and universities across the country. These programs continue to help students become global citizens who understand global perspectives and embrace diversity, and today, hundreds of thousands of US college students study abroad each year—although this number represents only about 10% of the college student population (NAFSA, 2024). During the 1980s, a broader concept of internationalization that calls for the inclusion of international activities across college curricula gained popularity (Knight, 2004).

Regardless of how internationalization is accomplished, students who participate in internationalized curricula demonstrate improved problem-solving skills, the development of intercultural skills and sensitivity (Reid & Spencer-Oatey, 2013), and preparedness for socially responsible citizenship (Clifford & Montgomery, 2014), leading to a competitive advantage in a cosmopolitan workforce. These improved skills, and practice working across disciplines and cultures, emphasize the role of imagination and creativity in problem solving. Often, people with different perspectives working together on a problem generate ideas that would never be considered otherwise.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) are a set of 17 interconnected and interdisciplinary global goals focused on addressing social, economic, and environmental challenges to ensure a sustainable and equitable future for all. Achieving these goals will require interdisciplinary partnerships like those we are modeling in the environmental science and biology programs at UMC. Many great discoveries in science and technology have stemmed from partnerships rich in imagination and creativity. As Brown et al. say in “Towards a Just and Sustainable Future,”

Leaps of creativity in the formalized sciences are exemplified in the classification of life forms by Linneaus, which differed significantly from those of Aristotle before him and Darwin after him…. For each inquiry across the ages, a flight of imagination led to fresh scientific concepts and images which changed the interpretation of reality. (Brown et al., 2010, p. 9)

Recent examples of such “leaps of creativity” include advances in disease detection and treatment, innovations to address food insecurity, and technological advancements that provide cleaner and more sustainable energy sources.

The globalization of labor markets means that STEM graduates will be competing for jobs at the international level (Dewhurst et al., 2012; McGraw, 2003). To successfully compete in this diverse and cosmopolitan workforce, address the world’s grand challenges, and contribute to achieving the UN SDGs as we work toward a fully sustainable future, these graduates will need to be able to communicate, collaborate, and define and solve problems in ways that cross disciplinary, cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries (Hudzik, 2011; Nussbaum, 2010). Because higher education holds the responsibility to prepare STEM graduates to work in a globally and culturally diverse context, global experiences are essential for the success of these STEM students (Leggett, 2011).

The pursuit of knowledge within and across disciplines and national boundaries is central to internationalizing the curriculum (Leask & Bridge, 2013) Additionally, faculty in higher education hold not only the responsibility of preparing STEM students to be competitive in this global workforce, but the moral responsibility to teach them about responsible citizenship at local, national, and global levels (Leask, 2013) to create globally competent citizens.

In this chapter we address the inclusion of international activities and ideas across environmental science and biology curricula, and offer examples of the internationalization of college programs at UMC. This chapter exemplifies the argument put forth by Robson (2017): for higher education to become truly international, internationalization must occur “at home.”

Context of Our Internationalization Efforts

UMC is a public, baccalaureate, coeducational institution, and a statewide campus of the UMN system. It carries on a tradition of over a century of educational service to northwestern Minnesota. First established in 1906 as a residential high school, the Northwest School of Agriculture, the campus opened its doors as an institution of higher learning in 1966, and began offering baccalaureate degree programs in 1993.

The student body is complex; UMC is an accredited four-year public university with an enrollment of more than 1,500 students (approximately 600 on-campus and 900 online). Enrollment is largely Minnesotan (67%) and first-generation students (51%).

Authors’ Perspectives on Internationalization

Katy Chapman

As an undergrad, Chapman didn’t study abroad and wasn’t aware of why she might want to. Her primary interaction with people from other countries was with international students who had come to the US to study and take their acquired knowledge back home. From this limited experience and very partial worldview, she saw the US as a place to which people from other countries came to learn, not realizing that those countries had made their own significant intellectual contributions.

As an undergraduate, Chapman did engage in other high-impact educational practices that led her to the field of phytoremediation (using plants to clean contaminated environments), which quickly became a passion and led her to apply to related graduate programs. During her first year of graduate school at Purdue University, she found an advertisement in Science requesting applications to attend a NATO Advanced Science Institute (ASI) on phytoremediation. She applied, was accepted, and attended the conference.

The ASI was her first experience interacting deeply with people from other cultures. The conference was located in Třešt̕, Czech Republic, a relatively small town. Each day included eating with other attendees in the castle where they were staying, spending morning and afternoon sessions learning more about phytoremediation, then going to the local eatery/pool hall with the attendees to unwind; there was also a weekend excursion to Prague. Through this rich experience, Chapman began to understand the wealth of expertise and rich culture outside the US.

As an assistant professor, Chapman later drew upon this experience to improve her teaching and learning. When the opportunity was presented to her to learn how to Internationalize Teaching and Learning, she jumped at it. Reflecting on that first experience with the NATO ASI conference, and recognizing that many students don’t study abroad (less than 1% nationally; NAFSA, 2024) or interact deeply with international scientists, she wanted to create a way for her homebound students to have global experiences.

Brian Dingmann

Joseph Shostell

Shostell’s interest in internationalizing a college curriculum stems from a semester-long experience as an undergraduate student enrolled at the University of Seville in southern Spain. This study-abroad trip was crucial to the development of his worldview.

A Shared Framework in Internationalizing Teaching and Learning

Chapman (2012), Dingmann (2014), and Shostell (2018) each completed the Internationalizing Teaching and Learning (ITL) experience offered through the UMN system’s Global Programs and Strategies Alliance. The ITL program focuses on understanding your own culture (in some cases, this effort involves convincing faculty raised within the US to recognize that they have a culture) and valuing other cultures. Because one of the first steps in internationalizing your teaching and learning is to internationalize yourself, the initial focus of the ITL cohort experience is on understanding where you come from and your own implicit biases, and engaging in professional development opportunities at an international level that help you to become globally intelligent within your own field. These experiences were invaluable to each of us in our development as teachers and as global citizens.

Through our participation in ITL, we have internationalized ourselves, our courses, and our programs. The impact that internationalization has had on each of us has spread to our students, highlighting the power of changing even one mind.

Internationalizing Exercises in a Single Course

The first step each of us took in internationalizing the curricula of our programs was to internationalize one or two activities in a single course. An accumulation of small changes led to an entire course being internationalized, followed by another course, and ultimately to the internationalization of the entire program.

Chapman started with two small projects in EnSc 3124: Environmental Science and Remediation Techniques, a course developed for the Environmental Sciences degree at UMC and focused on understanding environmental issues around ecosystem management, risk assessment, sustainable energy, water quality, and air quality. The course discusses remediation techniques and environmental laws, and serves students in the Environmental Sciences and Natural Resources (ecological restoration emphasis area) as they prepare to work on remediating degraded sites. It typically enrolls juniors and seniors as they are beginning to synthesize information and apply the skills learned in their undergraduate careers.

The class begins with an internationalized activity titled “Would You Swim in That?” In this exercise, Chapman takes her students around the world (virtually, through photography), looking at different water bodies—some beautiful and some clearly contaminated—and asking “Would you swim in that?” At the beginning of the exercise, students say “yes” to water bodies that look pretty, but by the end of the exercise, students won’t go into even the most pristine bodies of water without first asking some critical questions (as a scientist would, using the scientific method).

The second project asks students to use their knowledge and skills to solve a problem. Students are given data about a contaminated site, and research the related laws and regulations of both the US and the country where the site is located. They decide on a remediation plan to clean up the site, interview someone from that country to determine if the plan would be accepted in that culture or needs to be modified, and rework the plan accordingly. They then present their findings in writing, to a scientific audience, and orally, as a public presentation to concerned citizens from that country.

Through these class projects, students learn to ask questions and seek to understand a problem before making judgments. Additionally, they learn to look across borders for solutions to problems and to seek to understand cultural values that may influence if and how a remediation plan will be accepted by a community. Community-based projects require community support, and this only occurs through seeking to understand cultures and asking for input from community members before implementation.

Shostell began the process of internationalizing his program by introducing an interviewing activity in his fisheries management class. The activity was linked to the course learning goals defined in the course syllabus, and incorporated as a natural extension of a topic (communication techniques for fisheries scientists) traditionally covered in the course.

It is good practice to clearly describe and justify all assignments, so students understand what is expected of them and how activities support learner outcomes. Of course, before listing an assignment in the syllabus, it is also good practice to follow a selection process that ensures that each assignment is a good fit for your class. Shostell first analyzed student assessments from the previous two times the course was taught, searching for trends and matching them to the course’s learning outcomes. During this review, he noted that students were having difficulty meeting the Human Dimension learning outcome:

Appreciate the relationship of and interdependence of life (fish, zooplankton…) and human impact on social, economic, and cultural norms and values both locally and globally. Understand the development, use, and revision of policy/regulation to attain fisheries management objectives.

When Shostell “inherited” this course, it lacked an international focus, and only covered fisheries management techniques and philosophies used in the US. “Globally” was the key term in the learning outcome that was not addressed.

The assignment Shostell chose to address this deficiency also supported the course’s communication learning outcome, in that it involved an interview activity and supported the development of students’ ability to express their ideas with clarity in written form. At UMC, effective communication is one of several skills we call core competencies, as we deem them essential to a student’s future success in any occupation or life setting. These core competencies are required across UMC curriculum.

Once he had selected an internationalization assignment (described below) and anchored it to course learning outcomes, Shostell decided where to incorporate it in the semester. Upon review of the course’s tentative schedule, he realized that an assignment about interviews nicely fit into the topic “Communication Techniques for Fisheries Scientists,” covered in week six.

In the final step of the assignment, students were tasked with reading and analyzing the class’s survey results. The aims of this activity were for students to determine if fisheries managers from different countries were dealing with similar issues (i.e., invasive species) and whether they had similar fisheries management plans, as well as to comprehend the wide range and commonalities of current research projects.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Interview Assignment

Along with supporting the two learning outcomes mentioned earlier, the interview assignment had many strengths. Beginning in week six, at the start of the assignment, students became more engaged in classroom discussions. By week ten, when each student had access to all survey data, class discussions were enriched with information collected from many different fisheries managers.

Students learned that the job responsibilities of fisheries managers were similar no matter their country or state. This helped students appreciate the value of having a basic set of fisheries management skills, useful across aquatic ecosystems and geographical locations.

While every fisheries manager surveyed was actively dealing with an invasive species, the specific species varied by country and state. A fisheries manager in Russia, for instance, discussed the snow crab in the Barents Sea, while a fisheries biologist in Michigan mentioned the sea lamprey and zebra mussel in the Great Lakes. Students also learned about the invasive grass carp in New Zealand and the spiny water flea in Lake Winnipeg, Canada.

This assignment gave class members access to current and detailed examples of fisheries management issues (in addition to invasive species), collaborations, and management techniques, and our class discussions tapped into this knowledge. For example, the fisheries manager from Russia explained how the world’s largest stock of cod is managed bilaterally between Norway and Russia. The fisheries manager from Bangladesh stressed the significance of conservation and restoration of natural biodiversity in a region stressed by water pollution, overfishing, water scarcity, and climate change. And the fisheries manager in Canada explained how they use quotas, net size restrictions, and fishing seasons to protect fish populations. Much of the information we garnered through the surveys related to topics covered in the course.

The assignment also had its weaknesses. As expected, not all fisheries managers replied to the survey questions. To address this possibility, students were tasked with contacting three fisheries managers in each country as well as in each state. They were also instructed to follow up with slightly different messages, with at least one day between messages.

Another problem was the variation in response time. To compensate for this, there was a four-week window (weeks 6 to 10) between sending out the survey and discussing the survey results. Language was an issue in some cases, but most fisheries managers, regardless of their geographical location, were able to effectively communicate (in writing) in English.

Of course, these types of barriers are welcome in an internationalization assignment. The idea is for students to experience other cultures to help them develop a more mature cultural lens through which to see the world. Providing suggestions and encouragement helps alleviate student frustrations and ensure a positive experience.

Tools for Internationalizing Exercises Across Multiple Courses

Global Village

After Chapman’s experience as an ITL participant, she went on to internationalize many of her classes. One tool she uses often is called the “Global Village” (Falk et al., 2010), created by Dr. Dennis Falk at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

The basic premise of the Global Village activity is that each student is assigned an identity based on the distribution of the world’s population. Once students are assigned this identity, they approach some or all of the course content from this perspective.

Chapman has used this tool in various ways, including asking students to find plants from their assigned country and answer questions about, for example, each plant’s basic structure, physiology, and allergenicity. She has also asked students to identify human diseases prevalent in their assigned country and, digging deeper, to find historic or current environmental problems in those countries and calculate their own ecological footprints—from the perspective both of who they are as a UMN student and who they are as a global villager.

Chapman has also refined her use of the Global Village exercise to raise awareness of sustainability issues. For example, she has asked students to calculate how many earths would be required to sustain the global population if everyone consumed as they do, and how many would be required to sustain their global villager, and to reflect on the reasons behind those differences. This requires researching the lifestyles, living situations, and so on of people in another country. US students typically have a higher ecological footprint than their global villager counterparts, and reflecting on why has often led students to make different choices about how they live their daily lives. Asking “why” is a first step in challenging the status quo, and a significant step towards reducing students’ global footprints.

Assessing Attitudes, Habits, Values, and Behaviors in Internationalized Education through Low-Stakes Assessment

From Internationalizing Exercises in a Single Course to Internationalizing Academic Programs: Environmental Sciences and Biology

As more UMC faculty participated in the ITL program, more and more classes began to incorporate internationalization and cultural competency.

The Environmental Sciences faculty wanted their program-level outcomes to reflect the growth and development of intercultural competency and internationalization during students’ four-year undergraduate degrees. They rewrote these outcomes using Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning (2013), which provides a framework for designing transformative educational experiences by integrating six key dimensions—foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn—with at least one program-level outcome addressing each of these key dimensions. Selected outcomes are shared in Table 1.

At this time, Chapman and Dingmann were also reviewing and revising learning outcomes in the biology program, and took a similar approach to updating those outcomes to reflect the value, seen by program faculty, of graduating students who are culturally component and globally intelligent.

Both the Environmental Sciences Program and the Biology Program require graduating seniors to produce a presentation portfolio in which they choose one artifact (piece of evidence) to document how they have achieved their program’s learning outcomes. This process of having students reflect on their experiences further solidifies program outcomes in the minds of both students and faculty. Seeing which artifacts students choose to demonstrate how they have achieved program learning outcomes allows faculty to evaluate how students understand their own mastery of the learning outcomes, and identify where we might need to make improvements.

Internationalization Has Impact—on Students and Faculty

The impact of UMC’s efforts to internationalize the biology and environmental science curriculum has been significant. Four undergraduate students at UMC have received the Josef Mestenhauser Student Award for Excellence in Campus Internationalization for their contributions to international education on campus. Several of them voiced their appreciation for the way faculty value international perspectives and have connected them to international students both in the classroom and abroad (through COILed classes, using Collaborative Online International Learning). Internationalization efforts in the classroom have made students more comfortable with the idea of studying abroad, and UMC students now study abroad and do summer internships around the globe. Within the environmental sciences and biology programs, those internships have been in France, Ireland, Thailand, and Morocco, to name a few.

Faculty involved in this work have also received recognition; Dingmann and Chapman received the UMN Award for Innovative International Initiatives in 2016 for their initiatives and work in internationalization of curricula.

Lessons Learned and Future Steps

As evidenced by Tashi Gurung’s work, which began reaching across borders even while he was a student, the benefits of internationalizing the curriculum can reach around the globe.

As we reflect on our experiences in internationalizing teaching and learning thus far, a few things stand out. First, as you begin internationalizing your curriculum, start with the end in mind. What do you want your students to gain from the experience? In our case, our end goal is to create globally competent citizens.

We acknowledge that this goal is aspirational. As more of our faculty (100% in Environmental Science; 75% in Biology) have gone through the Internationalizing Teaching and Learning training, we have built a supportive community of internationalized faculty both on our campus and within the UMN system. This community has already helped us improve our teaching through peer mentorship and professional development around best educational practices in teaching and learning, and has supported us as we internationalized two STEM programs.

This community will also help us achieve our next goal, of making the internationalization of teaching and learning something experienced by every student who comes to our campus, regardless of their program of study. As we work towards ensuring that our graduates become globally competent, we also aspire to have them be able to work within their fields on the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The faculty most recently completing the Internationalizing Teaching and Learning program were required to incorporate at least two SDGs into their revised curricula. As others across campus are internationalizing their curricula, they too are including the SDGs.

Internationalizing our faculty community has also resulted in improved communication and collaboration throughout our campus. This chapter represents one of those collaborations; we are writing a chapter together and spending hours discussing our curricula. This has led to increased communication and problem-solving among our faculty, and to the benefits of publishing together. This book represents one way in which the internationalization of curricula is publishable, but there are many others. Publishing on the internationalization of a particular curriculum is an excellent professional development opportunity for faculty at all stages of their careers, as it provides a means of disseminating your work while also reinvigorating you to think creatively about your teaching and the ways in which you measure student learning.

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