International Student Engagement: Strategies for Creating Inclusive, Connected, and Purposeful Campus Environments

This book responds to the growing calls among international educators, activists, and students themselves to pay closer attention to the qualitative dimensions of international students’ experiences at U.S. colleges and universities.

This book outlines deep approaches to the academic and social integration of international students at U.S. colleges and universities. It describes concrete examples of strategies to enhance the international student experience across a wide range of institutional types, and explores actions that have enabled colleges and universities to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for international students. It fleshes out the effects of these actions through the first person narratives of international students themselves. It focuses on reinforcing an institution’s existing strengths and capacities to help academic leaders at these institutions to develop comprehensive strategies that will enable the creation of inclusive campus climates for international students.

The book combines evidence derived from the national Global Perspective Inventory dataset, the experiences of institutions at the forefront in developing effective strategies, as well as first-person narrative experiences of international students to illustrate the real-life consequences of institutional policies, practice, and programs.

One of the aims of this book is to take readers on a journey, from community colleges to liberal arts institutions to large public flagship research universities, from rural parts of the U.S.to highly-populated urban areas in order to raise questions about the impact of the surge of international students in these environments and about the corresponding challenges that confront senior administrators seeking to strengthen and deepen connections for the students.

The book explores some of the actions that universities and colleges across the U.S. have taken to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for their international students, placing particular emphasis on the importance of tapping and reinforcing each institution’s existing strengths and capacities in the development of strategies that will enable it to create more inclusive campus climates for current and incoming international students, and engaging in active collaboration with all departments and offices across the campus, with the larger community, and most important, with the international student community itself.

Chris R. Glass is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Leadership at Old Dominion University. He has been actively involved in national efforts to identify educational experiences that contribute to international students' positive development. He is a lead researcher on the Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI) which examines the relationship between educational experiences and global learningoutcomes based on survey responses of 70,000 undergraduates, including over 5,000 international students at 135 American colleges and universities.

Rachawan Wongtrirat holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration with a concentration in International Higher Education Leadership from Old Dominion University, a M.Ed. in Educational Psychology from Chulalongkorn University, and a B.Ed. in Business Education from Kasetsart University, Thailand. Wongtrirat is a former EducationUSA adviser and the Program Officer for the Advising and Education Services Unit at the Institute of International Education (IIE) Southeast Asia office in Bangkok. Wongtrirat has given presentations at national and regional conferences such as NAFSA: Association of International Educators, Colonial Academic Alliance Global Education Conference, and the EducationUSA East Asia & Pacific Regional Conference.

Stephanie Buus current research interests center around the influence of internationalization processes on the higher education systems of the United States and the European Union. She has participated in study abroad programs at the high school, college, graduate school and post-doctoral levels in several countries and spent more than a decade working as an international researcher at institutes and universities in Denmark and Sweden. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Stephanie received her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages & Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley and holds an Ed.S. from Old Dominion University. In August 2014, Stephanie relocated to Paris, France to continue her research.