Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 27, 1995 TAG: 9511270081
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
After three years at Roanoke College, Megan Collmeyer found herself shopping Barron's and Peterson's guides to schools again. But this time her search started on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Collmeyer got bitten by the international bug during her sophomore year when a professor introduced her to Roanoke College's May Travel program.
May Travel, which pairs a professor with a small group of students for a month of course work abroad, is one of several international offerings at the school.
International programs always have had a presence on the small liberal arts college's campus, but lately the Salem school has been stepping up its efforts to send students abroad, attract international students, increase its on-campus international programs and add an international dimension to its offerings.
Denise Doz, director of international programs, said those goals won't be achieved overnight, but the college is taking small steps forward on each goal, starting with her arrival a little more than a year ago.
Doz "was one of the first steps in this process," said Teresa Thomas, director of media relations. A part-time faculty member once handled the program, "but we realized we needed to have someone full time to focus on this," she said.
The result: In the year since Doz arrived, the number of students who have studied abroad has gone from 17 to 86.
Doz has done it by getting Roanoke College's name on a seemingly endless list of international programs, such as ISEP - a global exchange program with about 100 study sites scattered throughout 38 countries.
Through ISEP, students can study anything from political science to chemistry in almost any language overseas, all for the price of Roanoke College's tuition, room and board.
"Let's face it - technology doesn't help you to experience sitting in a French cafe. ... It's like the difference between watching baseball on TV and being there eating a hot dog and hearing the roar of the crowd," Doz said.
Collmeyer, who spent last year studying art in Florence, Italy, agrees.
"I think I've gained an appreciation and understanding of the art that my fellow art majors don't have because they haven't been there to see it," Collmeyer said.
What makes study abroad programs so invaluable is students learn beyond what's in textbooks, Doz said.
The same applies to professors. The difference is that when a professor learns, students can benefit. That potential for passing on cultural information is what prompted history Professor Susan Millinger to spend two weeks in Denmark and Norway last summer.
"In history books we get the broad picture. It tells in a very general, national level what happened. But history is lived out on the local level. And you cannot find that in books," Millinger said.
"I haven't done the history of Scandinavia in the past because I didn't understand it that much. In graduate school they concentrate on history of Germany and France and the larger countries. I wanted to get more background on the history so I could teach it."
Millinger, who received a grant from the college to finance part of her travel, admits she hasn't used the information she gleaned from her trip yet. But she is confident that she will. Her semiannual trips to England have proved useful in the classroom.
On one trip she picked up a yarn helmet, similar to helmets worn by medieval soldiers.
"I had the students try it on to give them an idea of what it was like to have chain mesh on your head," Millinger said. "When you can tell kids, `This is what it's like in this place,' the students perk up."
Still, psychology professor Galdino Pranzarone said there's nothing like students seeing a different culture with their own eyes.
"No videotape, no lecture and no slides can be as impactful as being there and tasting and hearing and using all of your senses to experience another culture," Pranzarone said.
He taught a May Travel program a couple of years ago and took about eight students to Japan. He filled the days with lectures, and the afternoons he spent introducing students to the culture they were learning about.
"It's one thing to read about the Shinto religion. It's another to go see the priests chanting and burning incense," said Pranzarone, who in May will take a group of students to India and Nepal to study sex roles and marriage. Other May Travel opportunities include a month in Austria, Spain, Italy and England.
However, overseas travel is too expensive for many students.
For those who cannot invest thousands of dollars in a jaunt abroad, the college is attempting to bring the world to them by attracting students from abroad and offering programs on different cultures.
This year the school's incoming freshman class includes seven students with homelands zigzagging the globe from Korea to Canada to Bangladesh. Thomas said the school will attempt to lure more international students by putting a tour of the campus and an enrollment application on the college's Internet home page.
Thomas said exchange programs like the one starting this year with Sang Ji University in Wonju, South Korea, also will help keep those numbers growing.
Chemistry Department Chairman Benjamin Huddle is the guinea pig for the college's exchange program with the sister-city school. "The way we get better in our educational system is by sharing," he said.
Other cultural outlets on the Salem campus include a lecture series on Korea and a German film series.
The sum of the college's offerings have one purpose: to expose students to a world beyond the U.S. borders.
"In today's world, the next generation has to have firsthand knowledge of working with other cultures face to face," Doz said.
by CNB