By Adriana Alfaro Liendo ’25 and Anita Deeg-Carlin
On December 6th of 2024, in Fisk 201 (The Global Commons), students from CGST 205: Introduction to Global Engagement celebrated the end of the course’s first year as a designated Community Engaged Learning course. CGST 205 is the gateway course to the Global Engagement Minor (GEM), and limited to first semester sophomores. Students joined their international community partners – faculty, staff, Middletown community members, and their families from many national backgrounds – to celebrate their accomplishments and enjoy a meal together.
This pilot semester, funded by Allbritton’s CELIG program, was an initiative by GEM coordinator Anita Deeg-Carlin, Director for Intercultural Learning, that sought to teach global engagement through first hand experience. Students could practice and develop their intercultural skills by engaging directly and meaningfully with local community partners in sensitive and mutually beneficial ways. Throughout the semester, students and their partners shared each other’s perspectives on their backgrounds and experiences in the USA during four unique meetings. They chose to share meals, play games, organize campus visits, as well as share skills and hobbies – any method they could agree on to build relationships and foster connection. The celebration demonstrated the effects of the program. Some quotes from our participants include:
During my first meeting, it stuck out to me that people from different cultures and ways of life all take different things for granted.
From the get-go, I was ready to find an immediate connection with [my partner]. Not only is [her country geographically] parallel to [mine], but her story of having to uproot her life and plant it on a completely foreign land is something that resonates with my life as an international student.
One thing that stood out to me was [my partner’s] perspective on maintaining one’s identity as an immigrant. Despite living in the U.S. for over a decade, she proudly retains her accent and emphasizes the importance of standing up for oneself in the face of microaggressions and racism.
Our conversation gave me a fresh perspective of study abroad experiences, the power of alumni networks, and the importance of increasing representation on campus.
I feel as if [my partner] was the perfect candidate for this partnership. She described … feeling like a transplant into a community where she had no family. She also speaks about the feeling of being a nomad. She explained that when she returns [to her home country], she is perceived as a foreigner now, and in the U.S., she is also perceived that way.
Celebrating the end of the semester came with a special dinner from Iguanas Ranas, a Mexican restaurant in town, whose owner, Julio, was one of our partners. With a delicious dinner spread out, everyone started to gather together. Something particularly noticeable to Adriana was the different languages that were in the space. Children of some faculty members were running and speaking Portuguese in the room, others Tigrinya, and she was fascinated because it reminded her of when she used to get together with her family members in her own country.
After eating and listening to international music, every single person who was in the room had a chance to introduce themselves and describe their experience this past semester. There were many different countries, many different languages, and many different colors represented in that one room. That is the essence of the Global Engagement Minor: people from different backgrounds getting along together.
Special thanks to Amy Grillo, the Director of Community Engaged Learning, and the Office of Community Engagement, https://www.wesleyan.edu/slc/index.html, for supporting this transition within the Global Engagement Minor. Finding and partnering with local international community partners was made possible by the CELIG grant. Because of the connections made this first year, future partnerships will be much easier to make. The Office for Intercultural Learning wishes to thank both our amazing peer social entrepreneurs and our generous community partners for helping to realize this program with their time and friendship. For more information about the Global Engagement Minor, or to learn how to participate in the future, please email Anita Deeg-Carlin, Director for Intercultural Learning at adeegcarlin@wesleyan.edu.”