A festival of colors

After four long months of planning, details, logistics, phone calls, emails, drawings and 66 lbs. of colored powder from Colorado .. we finally had our day in the sun. And literally – the sun was shining. In Central Illinois. In April. Believe me, I’m as shocked as you are.

Our Holi Festival of Colors was originally intended for April 19. On the way in to the office that day, it hailed. It had rained almost all week and the quad was a disaster. At 10:30 a.m. we called it off, and postponed to April 26 – the last day of classes.

With all approvals signed, sealed and delivered – I woke up early last Friday like it was Christmas morning. Eyes wide open, I scrambled for my phone and squinted at the Weather app. Already it was 40 degrees at 6 a.m. It had been 40 degrees close to noon the week before, so I considered this a good sign.

My staff rolled in at 9 a.m. and we headed out to the quad to prepare. We chalked, we walked, we talked. We hooked up a sound system, a photo booth, filled four giant troughs of water, and hauled powder out to the field. I took phone calls, fielded media inquiries and gave interviews with the sun on my face and my heart in my throat.

By 11:30 a.m., 30 minutes to go time, we had music going and the staff were getting giddy. Our first round of volunteers arrived, we started putting color on each other and Paige dunked her entire head in a trough like a champ.

By 11:45 a.m., bystanders were asking if they could start. Well, why the hell not.

By 12 Noon, groups of friends had sprinted onto the quad and were squealing, laughing and dodging cupfuls of cold water. We cranked up Nate’s sweet playlist on the sound system and started harassing passers by and handing out free study abroad t-shirts.

By 12:30 p.m. it was packed. We saw faculty, staff, students, children. We had bystanders, we had paparazzi, we had participants. EAGER participants. Holy crap these kids are having the time of their lives! My white shirt remains untouched, and my face is clear until Marilyn and one of her students approach to dust my face with color on their fingertips, as though they are painting.

By 12:45 p.m. we readied for an announcement and a toss. Asking our participants to get a handful of dye and hold, the president of the Association of International Students spoke about the Holi tradition celebrated by Hindus in India and Nepal. When he handed off the mic, I gave a few more instructions, and we faced the MLK Jr. Union and the tripods with cameras on the roof.

Three ..

.. Two ..

ONE …

An explosion of powder and color.

Red, yelling. Blue, laughing. Green, dancing.
Yellow and Orange, waving. Purple, blowing in the breeze.

I can remember the long meetings with the staff in the cold months of February and March. How many participants would we have? Were we doing a good job with marketing? How many pounds of this damn powder could we possibly need? Would people get bored quickly? Would they be entertained? Would they understand what this festival meant to us .. what it meant to the world?

That huge surge of relief comes somewhere after 1 p.m. People are smiling, the sun is shining. My shirt is no longer white, and my palms are dark green. I’ve been chased by some of my students, had color slapped on my face, and had water dumped on my head at least twice. And it’s beautiful.

All that hard work has resulted in a hugely successful, colorful, magnificent festival. Did they all get the message that it was about celebrating spring, friendship and new beginnings? Maybe. But after a long academic year and some incidents on campus that made us questions ourselves and each other, there they are – running through the quad, sliding in the mud after each other, and tossing color into the air. I don’t know if they’ll be able to articulate exactly what Holi is about .. but they sure do have the right idea.

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for a look at the fantastic portraits taken by photographer and EIU CATS professional Jay Grabiec, visit the Flickr set at eiu.edu/holi.

for a peek at local news coverage by JG-TC Charleston-Mattoon: click here.

“The Magic Wand of Immersion”

Last week in Chicago, a group of 1,400 international educators listened to the words of Dr. Lilli Engle on “What do we know now, and where do we go from here?” I’ll admit my mind wandered to the meetings I had coming up, the emails I had to get to. But several phrases and buzzwords stuck in my mind. One of these?

Sounds ominous, right? It is. This is not your fairy godmother sent from beyond the veil to turn your pumpkin into a coach. Neither is it the genie in a bottle, which you first rubbed in your office of study abroad, promising you untold fame, fortune and a spouse overseas.

The word immersion is a throw-away term used in brochures, next to skydiving photos and a white student hugging non-white local children. Is that immersion? Many schools and their students struggle to identify the proper definition, and continuing research is showing that some students never do. As educators, we cannot promise that your 6 weeks or 6 months in a foreign country will immerse you in a new culture. Immersion is not osmosis. You cannot achieve immersion by just being there.

In December 2012, at the culmination of a study conducted by myself and my American Institute of Foreign Study colleagues, we shared with a group in Dublin the following findings: Based on a survey with 170 respondents, 100 in Europe and 70 in the U.S., we found that access and use of technology remains almost entirely the same whether a student is at home, or abroad. That made me want to use my magic wand to bop them over the head and turn them into cobblestones. And so we continue to study both tools and roadblocks that assist and deter our students from this mythical immersion experience.

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How many times I have wished for a casual swish & flick to turn the tides of a travel experience, or that of my students. I am often found saying to my students, “study abroad is not a singular event.” Well here’s another gem for you: “study abroad is not a one-way street.” We drop that one in pre-departure orientation meetings, most often at the beginning of the session when my staff and I are talking about being an ambassador for the U.S., for our university, and for themselves. Here, I’ll set the stage:

Imagine yourself in a rural area. It’s hot, you’re tired, you’re probably lost and if you have to speak one more word of Spanish you’re going to freak. Then comes a barista, talkative, gracious. It takes a second or two in this god awful heat but you realize – he’s not pandering for tips or blowing you off as the dumb American. He has questions. Where are you from? How is your home? Do you like it here? Your one word answers blossom into longer explanations. He excuses himself to get your Fanta and ice, and upon return, peppers you with more questions: is your city very crowded? do you live with your parents? have you been to university? You’re charmed, even through your exhaustion. Several minutes later when you make your excuses to leave, he offers to take a photo of you in this place. You say, let’s take a photo of YOU in this place, so I can remember it. He is delighted and happy to oblige. When you tuck your chair back into the table and readjust your bag on your shoulder, he puts his hand on your arm and says, “do you know, I’ve never met an American before. I will tell my friends that they are wrong about you. Que dios te bendiga.”

The magic wand of immersion never could have touched that scene. The distance between two people changes in every foreign country, where the bubble of personal space expands and contracts. So what’s immersion? Reaching outside of that bubble and impacting another person. Sharing your culture. Sharing yourself. An active approach that calls on you, the traveler, to initiate the experience.

Our advice to our students, and my advice to you: Don’t sit back and wait for this to happen. Create these opportunities for yourself. It will make your experience far richer, and your purpose even clearer. Keep your magic wand for physics class, and use your own magic to find this elusive “immersion,” where others may never think to look.

Before you go to Belfast

When preparing to go to Northern Ireland, I think about the practical things: using pounds instead of euros, how to get from place to place. It’s also necessary to bear in mind the politics and the history, both recent and ancient.

As Lonely Planet points out, Belfast was “once lumped with Beirut, Baghdad and Bosnia as one the four ‘B’s for travelers to avoid.” Why? Many people would point to the IRA, the bombings, the Troubles. As so many cities often do, Belfast is moving on and building up – starting with the celebration of the Titanic. Celebrate a sunken ship? A doomed voyage? Aye. “The Titanic Experience” is an exhibition focusing on the epic timeline from conception of the ship to recovering the wreckage. It’s something I will miss, given the timing of my quick visit North – but an interesting piece of Belfast history.

photo courtesy of myguideireland.com

When my students came home last summer from a month-long tour of Ireland and Northern Ireland, I was not sure what to anticipate. As with any first time returnee – I expected “awesome,” “sick,” “amazing” in response to my questions. What I actually received in return for my questions, was very different. The group of fourteen girls had met with locals who lived through the Troubles and as a result, learned more than they could have possibly imagined. Some turned to Ireland as heritage seekers, looking to the Aran Islands as the departure point for a grandparent or family member. Others turned to the country as a platform for their course: Intercultural Communication. To my knowledge, not one was expecting lessons in conflict resolution – but this is what they found on the Emerald Isle.

I hope to see the murals that my students photographed so much. Wikipedia reports that almost 2,000 murals have been documented since the 1970′s. I gravitate toward images and art as a people’s expression of time, and am looking forward to seeing these images up close. Both nationalist / republican and unionist / loyalist present colorful propaganda that I’ve read about in the weeks leading up to my trip.

Photo courtesy of Belfast resident Liam Moore via http://ow.ly/fxUJy

For a far more visual take on the Troubles, I watched the 1993 film In the Name of the Father with Daniel Day Lewis. Even now as he plays Abe Lincoln on screens across America, he played Gerry Conlon in this film, a wrongly convicted Irishman who served as a face for a revolution. Based on a true story, it is both fascinating and terrifying (and not so bad for a movie made in the 90′s!). Click here for a YouTube trailer.

On a far lighter note, Belfast also holds for me a dear friend and two years worth of catching up to do. So while I anticipate a far less historical visit than I first imagined, it will be my first touch with this controversial place – and surely not my last.

Anything for scholarship

So, the day after this godforsaken election, I will head to one of the reddest states in the Union: TEXAS.

What for? Benjamin A. Gilman. Specifically, his scholarship. The Benjamin A. Gilman International scholarship program “provides awards for U.S. undergraduate students who are receiving Federal Pell Grant funding at a two-year or four-year college or university to participate in study abroad programs worldwide.”

So what does that mean? Pell Grants “provides need-based grants to low-income undergraduate and certain postbaccalaureate students to promote access to postsecondary education.” These are students who simply cannot afford an education, as determined by their financial aid status with the federal government. The Gilman is the government’s way of saying, let us help you go abroad.

The Gilman is funded through the International Academic Opportunity Act of 2000 and is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. So this is real. So real, in fact, that since 2001: 31,462 applications have been received and 9,796 scholarships have been awarded to students participating in study abroad programs around the world.*

I volunteered to be a “reader” or more formally “selection panelist.” I just read 68 applicants from all over the U.S. with students headed to destinations all over the world. I scored them based on a rating system, and will fly to Houston to meet with a co-panelist to deliberate over the group. Literally thousands of students apply in each term, so although my 68 took 2 solid days to read, it’s only a small batch!

So off to Houston, the International Institute for Education offices and the heat.

All in the name of scholarship.

 

* http://www.iie.org/en/Programs/Gilman-Scholarship-Program/About-the-Program

Once Upon a Helicopter

Occasionally in my life as an educator, I have the opportunity to meet with parents. Some are supportive, some are worried, some are curious. This is not a new phenomenon in education, as research and actual academic positions have materialized at institutions of all levels, everyone asking the same question: how do we deal with parents?

There is a fine line

between hover and smother.

In high school, when you’re a minor, your parents legally and literally have control of your records. Thanks to FERPA (Family Education Rights & Privacy Act) – once students turn 18, their records are their own. Granted, some students fly the coop before 18, but in the eyes of the law, that’s the age of majority.

In college, you’ve supposedly crossed the threshold to adulthood. Not only because the law says so, but because you’re out of the nest (in most cases). Yet even in a student’s early 20′s, you can still find a parent waiting in the wings, not just to cheer them on, but to intervene.

I have always been extremely close to my parents. As an only child, I had all the glory and all the blame – “the dog did it” really doesn’t hold any salt. I made some mistakes, and some great strides, and there were my parents all along: coaching me, encouraging me, raising an eyebrow if I was being an idiot (you know that look). But I was brought up to be independent, and to solve my own problems. If a teacher gave me a bad grade, the question was – what could I, the student, do about it? I could gripe to my parents, and ask for advice, but would not have dreamed of getting them involved. Bear in mind, this is not one-sided. I knew it wasn’t their place to get involved, and THEY knew it wasn’t their place to get involved, as well.

In a recent issue of the Chronicle Review, Terry Castle quoted Craig Lambert’s piece in Harvard Alumni magazine entitled: “Nonstop: Today’s Superhero Undergraduates Do ’3000 Things at 150 Percent.’“

“Parental engagement even in the lives of college aged children has expanded in ways that would have seemed bizarre in the recent past. (Some colleges have actually created a “dean of parents” position – whether identified as such or not – to deal with them.) The “helicopter parents” who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to “snow plow parents” who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.”

Castle focuses on understanding why her Stanford kids are talking or texting with their parents several times a day, and Lambert acknowledges we might have a much bigger problem on our hands.

For me, it comes down to five points:

• Trust – At some point, you have to trust your student to do the work. If they miss the deadline? Their fault.
• Dependence – It’s a beautiful thing when a parent can provide for a child, but don’t forget to bring some work ethic in on the silver platter. How else will they learn?
• Failure – Confucius is credited with the quote, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Learning from mistakes is a necessity, not a luxury.
• Embarrassment – There is something to be said about the elephant in the room.
• Expectations – No one is perfect. Collaboration is key in managing expectations. Parents often pay the bill, and students do the work. Shouldn’t they discuss meeting in the middle?

Imagine my surprise when a colleague shared the story of a study abroad student losing her luggage. I anticipated some small faux pas that was probably addressed in pre-departure orientation. What I didn’t expect to hear is when my colleague asked her to identify the contents of her bag, the student couldn’t do it: “I don’t know what’s in it, my mom packed it.”

Kids? Pack your own bags. Parents? Let them pack their own bags.