Elon staff and faculty were active contributors at this year's annual conference of NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
Elon faculty and staff were among the more than 11,000 participants in this year’s Annual Conference of NAFSA:Association of International Educators held in Boston from May 25-29. The largest international education conference, NAFSA brings together colleagues from more than 100 countries. Elon faculty and staff actively contributed to the content of the conference.
Amy Allocco, associate professor of religious studies and faculty director of the Global Neighborhood, and Paul J. Geis, senior associate director of Study Abroad, presented in the Internationalizing the Curriculum and Campus poster fair. Their poster, “Integrating Global Engagement into the Residential Experience: Elon University’s Global Neighborhood,” introduced colleagues to Elon’s residential campus initiative and the innovative programming offered to the nearly 600 undergraduate residents of the Global Neighborhood. Their poster presented the Global Neighborhood Association as a model of interdepartmental collaboration on campus. Geis had also participated in the review of session proposals for the Education Abroad Knowledge Community ahead of the conference.
Donna Van Bodegraven, associate professor of Spanish and faculty fellow in the Isabella Cannon Global Education Center, also presented in the poster fair. Van Bodegraven’s poster summarized the results of three years’ of administrations of the Global Perspectives Inventory – pre-experience and post-experience versions – to participants in short-term study abroad and off-campus domestic study programs at Elon.
After mapping the GPI statements to Elon’s global engagement objectives, Van Bodegraven analyzed the differences in the pre- and post-experience scores to determine the overall achievement of objectives for January 2013, January 2014 and January 2015, as well as the results based on different cohorts from each winter term.