By Julia Fedoruk ’26
Wesleyan’s annual International Education Week (IEW) 2026 will launch on Thursday, November 12th and run from Monday, November 16th to Saturday, November 21st. International Education week was founded through a collaboration between the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Education to celebrate international educational exchange, prepare American scholars for a global environment, and attract talented students from abroad to study in the United States. Wesleyan’s IEW focuses on the following four goals:
- Increase awareness of and promote global learning opportunities within and outside of Wesleyan
- Preserve and celebrate our interconnected cultural and linguistic heritages and shared environment
- Foster togetherness via intercultural dialogue
- Encourage interdisciplinary discourse about global pressures that threaten our shared heritage, including English dominance, forced migration, and climate change
This year’s IEW will launch with International Carnival on Thursday, November 12th from 5:30 to 7:30pm on the 2nd Floor of Fisk. At the event, Wesleyan community members are invited to explore tables representing a variety of countries in order to discover a popular game and snack from each! The Carnival is an expansion of previous years’ FLTA Carnival and will feature student clubs such as the Vietnamese Student Association, Korean Student Association and a Morocco table hosted by the Language Ambassadors as well the traditional tables hosted by the Foreign Language Teaching Assistants. We hope you will attend!
IEW 2026 will continue with a host of events the following week. There’s an event for everyone! Want to learn and share about global culture? Try attending “the Off-side of World Football” football trivia event on November 18th or the “Dress Desi” event on November 20th where you can learn about, try on, and take pictures in traditional dress, among many others. Want to dive into social justice or issues of intercultural exchange? You could attend SpeakeaSEA and the Wesleyan Refugee Project’s “Forced Displacement and Food Justice: A Teach-in, Collective Discussion and Fundraiser” and “Transitional Justice in Nepal”, both on November 17th, “Dear ___: A Multilingual Letter-Writing Event” on November 18th, or WesWell’s “Taboo Topics” on November 19th, in which you can anonymously submit and have health and wellness questions that may be taboo in your country answered. What about opportunities to get involved globally? We’ve got you covered there as well, with an Info Session on Iracambi, a summer research program in Brazil on November 16th and a Wesleyan Global Engagement Minor Info Session later that day!
The full list of events can be found here. We hope you will enjoy the breadth of programming offered this year!