Community colleges serve as the point of entry for the majority of Latinos in higher education, offering low‐cost, smaller‐scale educational opportunities in the communities where students live and providing the preparation for four‐year colleges and universities that may have been lacking in their K–12 education. The challenges to community colleges in providing services to Latinos are great, but their potential to facilitate the achievement of Latinos is vast.
When we began to design the Global Intercultural Experience for Undergraduates (GIEU) at the University of Michigan, we were looking to create a comprehensive program that would have a profound impact on the way students learned at the university and on the way faculty approached their students and taught. This was in addition to the mandate to both broaden and increase the level of "global" education at the university and to make sure that such a program drew in a far more diverse range of students and faculty than past efforts at experiential, community, or international learning. We wanted to be sure that our program had a positive impact on the community sites that were involved and a lasting impact on campus as well, building real and recognized skills among the student and faculty participants. All of these goals demanded a rigorous assessment regime and a complex and integrated set of activities that would build and develop from each other around a set of central field experiences.
Program DescriptionEach year GIEU funds eight to twelve faculty-proposed projects at sites both domestic and international. Each group is diverse and includes ten to fourteen undergraduates (GIEU student scholars) from across the university, 55 7
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