As a discipline, international education focuses on developing an international consciousness. There are moral and ethical, as well as pragmatic, consequences of the development of an international consciousness:

• In terms of ethics and morality, international education inculcates positive attitudes towards international understanding and global citizenship. Students come to understand that what might look like purely local or national decision-making can have international and global effects and implications.
• Pragmatically, international education prepares students to be competitive within a global workforce and prepares institutions of higher education to serve a global student body.

International education does important work. But few universities have the resources to develop international education, especially in the depth and breadth that it is visible in the professional associations and disciplinary literature. On a small campus, for instance, responsibilities for international education are split among staff who support international students, staff who plan study abroad, faculty who teach courses with explicit international content, and others who value international work but find no clear path toward integrating international education within their current responsibilities.

When wanting to internationalize experiences for students, it can be hard to know where to begin. That is why we created The Power of One: Theories, Strategies and Case Studies in Internationalizing the Student Experience. As coined by Gayle Woodruff, the “Power of One” is the idea of one international educator working on international curriculum integration, starting with small-scale changes. These are shared with colleagues, built upon, and lead to small changes across the curriculum. Eventually, Woodruff argues, they lead to transformed programs — which themselves lead to transformed minds that are not only open to different ideas, worldviews, and ways of thinking, but that actively seek these out, recognizing the strength that comes from multiple perspectives. By creating transformed minds, we create the world we want to see, one that embraces the values and perspectives of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the idea of “nothing about us, without us” at the core of international and global work.

As we have envisioned it, this book makes two contributions:

• Taken as a whole, it contributes to the discipline of international education by surveying the many and diverse ways that practitioners, administrators, and scholars innovate, every day, internationalization within the university. Read this book cover to cover, and you’ll see how study abroad can integrate with COIL, how faculty development in Indigenous thinking can integrate with faculty development structured around the Intercultural Development Inventory, and how faculty in psychology and rhetoric improve their courses to address changing student needs. Taken together, the chapters of this book map “what is possible” across disciplines and contexts in International Education.
• At the same time, because it focuses on the work of individuals in diverse institutions, the book offers exemplars and models for faculty administrators who seek to innovate within the limited resources available to them. Faculty and administrators on those journeys are fueled by “the power of one.”

If International Education is a complex territory, this book offers both a map and a turn-by-turn set of directions for some of the most interesting routes. It collects stories of the power of one as visible through several cases in several universities. ^[1]

The Power of One contains research and stories that demonstrate the power of one in three areas of international education. Each section collects half a dozen articles and essays by scholars from multiple disciplines. Below, we offer an overview of each.

Development of Networks in International Education

International education requires international participation — sharing insights across national lines and testing insights in international and inter-institutional collaboration.

Many of our contributions focus on partnerships across oceans and disciplines. In “Strategies for Developing Reciprocal Networks in the Development of a Writing-Focused Service-Learning Study Abroad Program,” Andréa Caloiaro, Kgopotso (KG) Molapisane, Lauren Wright, and Angela Brown write together, representing a team that includes faculty, students, and staff from a Florida university and their partners from South African organizations. This collaboration models the best of what is possible when International Education, Service Learning, and political action are brought together. Christopher Johnstone shares the story of “Engaging Faculty Experts: Professional Learning Communities,” a project to create learning communities across disciplines and oceans. These communities sustain faculty interest and engagement while the real work of institutional transformation begins.

The global COIL program (Collaborative Online International Learning) is another engine for teaching courses with colleagues and students around the world. Marzell Gray describes his COIL experiences in a public health class in “Fostering Global Learning: The Power of Collaboration, Networks, and Online International Learning in Higher Education.” Similarly, in “Marketing Across Cultures,” Al Fattal Anas shares his “Insights and Implications from a COIL Initiative on Consumer Behavior Education.”

Dana Lindaman and Ryan Goei share the power of two, really, in the story of building “The Undergraduate Research Study Abroad (URSA) program at the University of Minnesota Duluth.” They have developed an innovative partnership with colleagues in Morocco that can serve as a model for study abroad and undergraduate research abroad across institutions.

This section concludes by looking at the power of networks in conducting and publishing international research. Stephanie Gingerich shares a “New Path for Multilingual Publication,” in which she outlines the work of assembling a team to peer review and publish research bilingually in the Journal of Partnership Studies. If we are to engage international education deeply, we should heed her story — and the stories told in all of these chapters — about the importance of beginning with the power of one and creating the power of a network.

Redefining Cultural Competencies

A significant goal of international education is the development of cultural competence (and its twin, cultural humility). Both Chapman and Beard, the editors, work within the University of Minnesota’s (UMN) definition of globally competent staff, students, and faculty (a definition in part shepherded by our mentor, Gayle Woodruff). Within our context, international education prepares students to solve problems from three perspectives: intercultural, international, and global. A willingness to use this framework to approach problems serves as a basis for critically innovating solutions. Global warming, for example, is a global problem, in that it affects everyone, but it can also be conceived as an international problem, solved in part through the mechanisms of international diplomacy. A number of essays in this section focus on initiatives to help students, faculty, and community respond to the challenges of our age within this tripartite framework.

Thorunn Bjarnadottir walks us through the work she led in “Culture Corps,” a UMN initiative to integrate international students into campus life. Viann N. Nguyen-Feng and Dakota Leget introduce “The COFFEE Model as a Multicultural Communication Framework in Classrooms,” describing a model used to help prepare students to encounter diverse people in their classrooms and their professional livee.  

In “Developing a Global Perspective through Historical Memoirs,” James Thomas Ford uses memoir to teach students to encounter people from different backgrounds, helping them develop empathy and the ability to identify with people different from themselves. Ford’s students are all enrolled in a Health Science major, and so their ability to connect with people from diverse backgrounds does more than just meet liberal education requirements in their degree — it prepares them to work to repair the equity issues that challenge health systems today. In “The Story of Transdisciplinary Engagement,” anthropologist David Syring and biologists Jennifer Liang and Katy Chapman tell the story of integrating Indigenous thought into their work. One of the most important outcomes of their work, and a concrete manifestation of it, was the development of a land acknowledgment. While a land acknowledgment is not the final word on our relationship to the Indigenous peoples we have displaced, done correctly it is an opening gesture from a position of humility that invites further learning and dialogue.

Paula Pedersen ends this section with a complex interweaving of the work of internationalizing the curriculum and working for diversity, equity, and inclusion. In “Our Connective Thread is Strong Enough for Many Lifetimes,” she retraces a lifetime and career bringing her expertise in psychology together with her passions for change. As a term or non-tenure-track faculty member, the work of change she achieved is immense, and still, every step of the way, her story is one of humility in the face of challenge.

Every essay in this section demonstrates the power that we can experience as teachers if we reconceive of our work not as creating “culturally competent students,” but as instilling a perspective of cultural humility in which we ask questions, learning from perspectives different from our own, within the larger heuristic that parses questions in terms of their global, international, and intercultural dimensions.

Redefining Pedagogy

Pedagogy for international education grows along diverse paths. It can include study abroad, international collaboration mediated by technology (e.g., COIL), and curricular revisions for courses delivered on campus, without connection to students or institutions abroad.

At the course level, David Beard uses a passage from Simone Weil to explore the notion of “force” in a classroom. In “Force is That Which Makes a Thing of Whoever Submits to It,” he reflects on his attempts to rethink his approach to teaching the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in his humanities courses. He’s started a journey that, like the war in Gaza as of this writing, doesn’t have an end in sight.

Two essays here address curriculum change. Angelica Walton explores changes in the nursing curriculum in “Restoring the Embodied Art of Connection: A Value-Based Approach for Internationalization.” Katy Chapman, Brian Dingmann, and Joseph Shostell tell us about the “Lessons Learned Internationalizing the Environmental Science and Biology Programs at the University of Minnesota Crookston,” an exciting interdisciplinary collaboration to internationalize entire curricula in STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine).

Two of our essays focus on campus-level change. Lynn C. Anderson addresses the challenges of “Curriculum Integration,” or making study abroad a seamless part of the student experience. And Dennis Falk traces the story of “Roots and Transformations: Internationalizing the Curriculum and Campus through Global Engagement,” an initiative that caught fire across the nation when picked up by national organizations, including the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Whether at the course, the curriculum, or the campus level, we hope these stories can inform your own work towards change and transformation.

Further Implications: International Education as Essential to Antiracist and Sustainable Futures

We want to share a brief note about our own collaboration. We — Chapman and Beard — work at two branch campuses of the UMN system, in the disciplines of biology, environmental studies, and rhetoric. Our vision of our work as editors of this collection has been inclusive of disciplines, professional roles, and personal identities. We have adhered, as much as possible within the limitations of project resources, to the guidelines offered in the “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors” created by a collaborative of scholars.^[2] Among their guidelines, we have adhered to the following five central principles for antiracist editing of scholarly work.

Editors commit to inclusivity; Recognize a range of expertise and encourage citation practices that represent diverse canons, epistemological foundations, and ways of knowing.

While this collection speaks to international education, it includes the work of a broad range of faculty and staff in disciplines including history, biology, nursing, world languages, and literature. It attempts to represent authors from diverse professional backgrounds (tenured professors, term or sessional faculty, academic staff, and partners in non-governmental organizations), and has encouraged voices from around the world (from the Midwest to the global south and back). This collection attempts to include diverse ways of knowing, including first-person narratives of lives lived in international education, quantitative assessments of international education activities, and critical and theoretical reflections; where possible, we have included engagements with diverse epistemologies, including Indigenous ways of knowing.

Make the review process transparent; Recognize, intervene in and/or prevent harmful scholarly work—both in publication processes and in published scholarship

We have worked as developmental editors, attempting to encourage genres appropriate to the needs of the author. In some cases, we have encouraged works closer to memoir and essay for senior scholars for whom a genuinely anonymous peer review process would have been impossible; their legacies in international education are too visible to mask. Given this freedom of genre, they have had space to make arguments, we think with greater power. In other cases, we have worked with early career faculty to secure double-blind anonymous peer review (regardless of whether their disciplinary standards prefer single- or double- anonymous processes), then encouraged these colleagues to develop arguments fully and with the fullest standards of academic rigor. In all cases, the works in this collection serve as invitations — to teach in new ways, to develop new programs, and to reflect through new directions, never closing down agendas, initiatives, or identities. In all cases, we served not as gatekeepers but as partners; it is in our best interest for the works in this collection to be as strong as possible, just as it is in the best interests of the authors to see their works develop into their best possible form, of use to as many of our colleagues as possible.

Establish and state clear but flexible contingency plans for review processes that prioritize humanity over production

We are grateful to our partners in the UMN Libraries Publishing Team, whose immense flexibility in this process has made possible a humane form of collaboration. Their willingness to work with us with flexibility and, more importantly, with professional support has made the process humane for everyone involved.

We acknowledge that we can commit to these principles while remaining unaware of the blind spots we have carried into this process. Any and all failures to live up to these principles remain our responsibility. We believe that the development of an international consciousness among faculty, staff, and students, and the call toward antiracist work in our classrooms and our research, are intertwined, evolving, and ongoing projects.

Finally, as scholars committed to international education and environmental studies, we also believe that the principles of International Education, especially as it entails moral, ethical, and pragmatic transformations, are an essential part of a more sustainable tomorrow. In 2015, the United Nations member states adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a 15-year plan for global sustainable development. The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a plan for peace and prosperity for people and the planet through “an inherently integrative and interdisciplinary approach highlighting linkages between ending poverty, improving health and education, and addressing climate change and other environmental degradation.” International Education and Sustainability are partners in this quest towards a more sustainable tomorrow, as one of the cornerstones of the SDGs is that we must work together as a world to achieve these goals. International education creates scholars across disciples who are able to work effectively across cultural boundaries and physical borders so that we can all look forward to a more sustainable tomorrow.

In collecting these works, then, we are making a contribution to the discipline of International Education. For readers at universities and colleges across the US and the world, we are hopeful that you will be inspired by the innovations that are possible through the power of one. And maybe, we can point just a bit toward what a future in which global awareness, antiracist action, and sustainable development are intertwined.

Coda: A Dedication to Gayle Woodruff

This collection is dedicated to Gayle Woodruff. Gayle was the founding director of curriculum and campus internationalization for the UMN system, where she established the Mestenhauser Legacy Initiative and the Internationalizing the Curriculum and Campus conference, and co-founded the Internationalizing Teaching and Learning Faculty Cohort Program. She provided leadership for initiatives aimed at faculty development, campus internationalization, and the evaluation and assessment of internationalization. More than that, she was a tireless mentor, an encourager of faculty personal and professional growth, and a transformative figure in dozens, if not hundreds, of lives. She cared, and she expressed it with her institutional authority and with the warmth of her hugs. The editors of this collection express their gratitude for the structures and institutions she built, in which we live and work today. And we express gratitude to her for modeling the ways in which the transformation of one heart and one mind can catalyze the transformation of students, faculty, institutions, perhaps the world.