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They will travel to Rishikesh, India, at the end of May for an immersive weeklong seminar on critical experiential pedagogy led by the center’s director, Lina Rodríguez, and William Crow, director of the Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG).

The GTLF seminar aims to help faculty members design pedagogically sound and innovative international education experiences. Rodríguez is organizing the experience around this question: How do we show up as educators in places not necessarily home to us, with students both like and unlike us, as well as local residents, all of us with our own fears and desires, to create meaningful engagements that positively shape our shared future?

The seminar’s three defining elements are the global citizenship framework, coaching, and using art to stimulate reflection and critical thinking. Rodríguez describes global citizenship as “an orientation of care and concern for the world that includes other humans (with whom we may or may not have anything in common) as well as other beings and the planet and implies a commitment to action.” She says that as faculty work to teach students to be self-aware and able to encounter difference, coaching approaches afford another path to critical self-reflection and provide the support that students need to sustain themselves and their socially engaged work. It is open to tenured, tenure-track, and teaching faculty from all disciplines and colleges

For this first year, the seminar is in Rishikesh, on the Ganges River in the foothills of the northern Himalayas. Rishikesh is an important spiritual site that inspires cultural, touristic, economic and environmental questions. The city also connects with LUAG’s spring 2023 exhibition, Gateway to Himalayan Art, presented in partnership with the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City and sponsored by the Office of International Affairs. Over the spring semester, the fellows will engage with the exhibit, as well as with works from LUAG’s permanent collection. Onsite in India, they will use visual and material art – from sacred art to still life and portraits, to local objects and tourist souvenirs – to further stimulate reflection and critical thinking.

The seminar, May 22-29, is designed as part retreat, part mini study away experience. Fellows will explore methods and practices of teaching, try out different learning activities, and design their own variations to fit their disciplines, all while exploring the location. The ultimate intention is that they will gain new insights and tools, as well as a larger global perspective that will inform their teaching in support of students’ ability to connect themselves to others and the world.

“The GTLF initiative will run for the next five years with the intent to have between 40 and 50 faculty members take part and truly impact what global learning looks like at Lehigh,” says Rodríguez.

“Our desire is to give faculty an opportunity to be the students – to play and practice with new ways of engaging with difference and place – and to also have space to thoughtfully consider what it means to teach about and in the world in this particularly complex moment.”

2023 Global Teaching and Learning Fellows

Nandini Deo, Associate Professor of Political Science (pictured above)

Deo’s research examines how civil society actors create solutions to problems, drive policy, and change culture. Her teaching emphasizes the connection between theory and personal efficacy.

Rochelle Frounfelker, Assistant Professor of Community and Population Health

Frounfelker obtained her doctorate in public health from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and postdoctoral training in cultural psychiatry at McGill University. She is a social epidemiologist who: uses mixed methods to investigate the life course impact of social and environmental adversities on psychiatric disorders among marginalized populations; implements new or adapted evidence-based interventions to reduce negative mental health outcomes; and assesses the effectiveness of interventions in clinical and community settings. Frounfelker’s primary area of research is addressing mental health disparities among refugees and other war-affected populations. She conducts community-based participatory research with refugees that address mental health throughout the lifespan, ranging from preventing mental health problems among children and youth to promoting the psychosocial wellbeing of aging adults. A focus of her work is on adapting and implementing interventions that incorporate and privilege local understandings of mental health and wellness and leverage culturally relevant strategies for coping and healing. For the past decade, she has worked on community-based participatory research with Bhutanese and Somali Bantu refugee communities in the United States and Canada.

Almut Hupbach, Professor of Psychology

Hupbach received her PhD from the University of Trier in Germany and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona before she joined Lehigh’s faculty in 2009. Her research area is human memory. She is fascinated by the dynamic nature of memory and studies the conditions that promote vs. prevent change of long-term memories in children and adults. Her research has been funded by the German Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation. She regularly teaches courses in cognitive neuroscience, research methods, and memory. Outside of work, Almut is passionate about art and has taken sculpture classes at the Baum School of Art in Allentown for over a decade. As a Global Teaching and Learning fellow, she is eager to find novel ways to incorporate art, mindfulness and a global perspective into her scholarship and teaching.

Terry-Ann Jones, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Africana Studies Program

Jones studies international and domestic migration in Africa and the Americas. Her research has compared Jamaican immigrants in the metropolitan areas of Miami and Toronto, examining the racial and ethnic settings and labor markets of the two areas, and the immigration policies of the two countries. Her book on this theme, Jamaican Immigrants in the United States and Canada: Race, Transnationalism, and Social Capital, was published in 2008. Her co-edited second book, Mass Migration in the World-System: Past, Present, and Future, was published in 2010. Her other projects include a study on undocumented students’ access to tertiary education. Her co-edited book on the latter, Undocumented and in College: Students and Institutions in a Climate of National Hostility, was published by Fordham University Press in 2017. She is also the author of Sugarcane Labor Migration in Brazil (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), based on her research on migrant labor in Brazil. With support from a Fulbright research grant, she is currently studying South Africans’ perceptions of immigrants from other Sub-Saharan African countries. Her commitment to education has led her to her current role as Deputy Provost for Undergraduate Education at Lehigh University.

Mary Anne Madeira, Assistant Professor of International Relations

Madeira is the author, with James Caporaso, of Globalization, Institutions and Governance (SAGE, 2012). She studies the global political economy, and is particularly interested in the domestic politics of international trade, the role of women in economic globalization, and regional integration in Europe and Latin America. Her work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, and in other journals. She is completing a book manuscript on the domestic political effects of intra-industry trade in developed economies.

Ziad Munson, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Munson’s research and teaching focus on conservative social movement mobilization and political violence. He has conducted research and published on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, terrorism, religion in politics, and civil society. He is also the author of The Making of Pro-Life Activists, a study of recruitment and mobilization in the American pro-life movement (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Abortion Politics, examining the history of the abortion debate in the U.S. from colonial times to the present (Polity, 2018). Munson received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2002.

Xiaochuan Tong, Teaching Assistant Professor

Tong teaches courses in corporate finance at the MBA level and the undergraduate level. His teaching practice integrates student-centered active learning approaches, such as peer group discussions, student-faculty interactions, case studies, and analyses of real-life market phenomena. He acknowledges the diverse needs of students and pays particular attention to adaptiveness in his classes. His research interests relate to topics of behavioral finance, particularly the psychological and sociological perspectives of finance (e.g., cognitive limits, distorted beliefs, social interactions, peer effects). One series of his research investigates how social communication alters retail trader behavior leveraging proprietary datasets and modern analytical techniques, such as big data analytics and textual analysis. The other series of his research examines the impact of government ownership on various aspects of corporate governance outcomes, such as firm performance, CEO compensation, and market reaction. Tong is an Associate of King’s College London (AKC) and an Associate Fellow of Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). He held a Royster Global Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a visiting position at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

The Global Citizenship Center for Pedagogies of Self, Other and World Well-being works to educate toward a stance of care and concern for others and the planet and in support of sustained action toward creating a more peaceful, just and sustainable world. The Global Teaching and Learning Fellows (GTLF) seminar builds on Lehigh’s distinctive ability to put theory into practice through the design of pedagogically sound and innovative international educational experiences. The application for the 2024 seminar will open in fall 2023.