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LIKE A CHAMPIONSHIP BASKETBALL TEAM FROM THE PAST, the first dozen Beloit College students who flew off to Europe in 1960 are still remembered and celebrated at the Wisconsin campus as "the Brussels Sprouts" who set the pace for study abroad. Beloit s international roots extend to the nineteenth century when the first international students enrolled and goal-setting alumni founded universities in Japan and Turkey. Campus museums display the artifacts that archeology and anthropology professors brought back from Africa and Asia. Between the two world wars, Dean George Collie made headlines with a proposal to turn Beloit into a "world college" for students from around the globe dedicated to pursuing peace and racial harmony.
Today this liberal arts campus by the scenic Rock River is renowned for its success in integrating education abroad into the curriculum. Working with colleagues from Kalamazoo College, International Education Director Elizabeth Brewer coedited and other Beloit faculty contributed to an entire book on the topic, Integrating Study Abroad Into the Curriculum: Theory and Practice Across the Disciplines, which lays out a blueprint for maximizing the benefits of education abroad. "We established a mission statement for international education and then invented learning goals for study abroad," said Brewer. "We've focused on multiple things - communication skills, understanding oneself, learning from the host country, and not just about the host country but making discoveries about the subjects the students study here." Beloit also is a sponsor of the journal, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary journal of Study Abroad. A signature Beloit approach is its "Cities in Transition" courses that use foreign cities as classrooms and send students off on explorations after teaching them how to map new places, conduct ethnographic studies, and interview strangers about their everyday lives. Brewer, an adjunct professor in German, has helped Beloit secure steady support from foundations for these efforts. Brewer, director of the international education office since 2002, is a former study abroad director who took three years off in mid-career to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Slovakia.
Integrating Student Insights From Abroad
The 45 percent of Beloit students who take part in education abroad may spend a semester at one of the college's 1 1 bilateral exchange partners or sign up for classes...