CEA Global Campuses

A Truly Global Approach to International Education

CEA Global Education has built over the last four years a unique and innovative academic structure that now comprises nine Global Campuses, each purposefully designed for delivering the globally focused, immersive and experiential education today’s university students need to understand the many ethical, social-political, demographic, and environmental challenges they will face as tomorrow’s leaders.

This is the CEA Global Campus – a worldwide network of academic programs and supporting instructional facilities, each one centrally located in the heart of major European, Asian, or Latin American cities, and each one managed by highly qualified and locally knowledgeable academic and administrative staff trained in industry standards of study abroad good practice and outcomes assessment. CEA Global Campuses signal a new era in quality study abroad by providing American and international students with U.S.-regionally accredited courses in both traditional and non-traditional majors and using best pedagogical practices in experiential education through active learning, international internships, service learning, and hybrid-immersion programs.

The benefit: CEA Global Campuses offer you instructional excellence and quality assurance, flexible programming and ease of student mobility, discipline-focused instruction and practical experience in intercultural competence, and the student services and administrative support on which CEA Global Education built its reputation.

The New Landscape of Global Education

Additional principles guide the vision of Global Campus program design while emerging trends in study abroad shape its contours. These include the need to:

• Recognize that intercultural and multicultural competence trumps mono-cultural immersion;
• Identify language course learning outcomes that integrate cross-cultural understanding with grammar and style;
• Ensure that instruction is technologically geared to the realities and expectations of post-millennial students;
• Create Global Studies courses that address the critical topics of tomorrow, not simply the narrow histories of selected locations;
• Respond to the shorter-term realities of programs needed by professional schools and non-traditional students;
• Promote the employment and career prospects of students through the intercultural skills and understanding they acquire abroad;
• Design innovative curricula, focused on engaging students in dynamic activities and lessons that bring relevance to their future educational, personal and professional pursuits, and that equip students with the tools they will need to address global issues of poverty, climate change and human rights;
• Add flexibility to educational design and delivery through collaborative and mutually beneficial programs with overseas partners who share CEA Global Education’s core values and who facilitate CEA in achieving its mission;
• Offer learning opportunities across the world in ways that democratize access to global learning, and;
• Provide strategic opportunities for U.S. universities in need of study abroad, executive programs, corporate training needs, cross-border educational partnerships, distance education and other initiatives critical to achieving their mission.

Organized into three departments centered on CEA Global Education’s cores activities of Academic Affairs, Student Services, and Student Housing, each campus provides the overseas infrastructure, academic integrity, administrative professionalism, and flexible planning U.S. Universities require as they internationalize their campus and curriculum through study abroad.

This is a model of affordable, borderless education and because of the access it gives to a wider demographic of student, this model is the future both of U.S. study abroad and the ever-increasing global education solutions sought by non-American students.

A Student-Centered Academic Model

Discipline-based learning, intercultural competence, and personal and ethical development are the central goals of study abroad in higher education today. The fundamental goal of all CEA Global Campus academic programs is therefore to ensure that four essential learning outcomes take place in its study abroad students overseas that would not have developed to the same degree had they studied at their home institutions:

• That they grow intellectually, personally and ethically
• That they develop higher levels of global & intercultural competence
• That they develop greater fluency in foreign languages
• That they are better prepared for international careers

All CEA Global Campus academic programs provide academic learning opportunities that are appropriate to our mission, specifically designed to match the purpose of the Global Campus, and structured to meet the four goals above of study abroad.

Experiential Education

Empirical pedagogical research gives ample evidence that integrating authentic experience into directed learning activities increases both the depth and breadth of student comprehension while adding significantly to knowledge retention. Studies show that experiential education strengthens practical abilities, critical thinking skills, and core intercultural competencies that result in students empowered for better delineating and pursuing focused career strategies. CEA Global Education embraces these findings and builds purposeful academic structures and processes that situate experiential education at the center of student learning and faculty instruction. Applying the recognized principles of good practice for all experiential learning activities adopted by the NSEE (National Society for Experiential Education), CEA faculty members have developed a range of class activities, site-specific courses, and study abroad programs that engage students in academically rigorous, meaningful and memorable learning exercises set in diverse cultural contexts. These include:

• Active Learning in the Classroom: The Global Campus classroom emphasizes an experiential approach to teaching and learning that includes debates, focus groups, team projects, student teaching opportunities and interactive guest lectures. Across the curriculum, faculty members use the classroom as a forum for presenting multiple viewpoints by activists, experts and working professionals in the fields related to courses topics.
• Language Exchange: Authentic activities mixing Anglophone students with native speakers into shared experiences that enhance both language and intercultural skills for both.
• International Internships: Supervised pre-professional learning experiences in which students apply their skills and knowledge in a professional setting under the mentorship of an internship supervisor and in conjunction with a credit-bearing course on the international workplace.
• Community-Based Research: A research project initiated within a credit-bearing course and which is focused on social issues affecting the local community – usually involving the interviewing of local residents or surveying of local infrastructure.
• Service Learning: An experiential course-based learning pedagogy that integrates organized and needed community service within a structure of theoretical reflection in ways that enhance discipline-based knowledge as well as civic awareness and action-directed social responsibility.
• Working Abroad: A professional international experience that enhances one’s practical work-related skills, enriches one’s understanding of intercultural interactions and expands one’s career opportunities.
• Civic Volunteering: A volunteer opportunity promoting the discovery and exploration of the values of a host culture through important interaction and collaboration with local residents on targeted projects, initiatives and service.

Intercultural Competence

CEA Global Education is dedicated to fostering in today’s students the discrete mix of abilities that contribute to intercultural competence. While virtually all institutions of higher education have identified intercultural competence as one of the key skills today’s students must have, only through the cultural immersion that study abroad programs provide do students acquire the full mix of cognitive, affective and behavior skills that comprise this much sought-after competence. With opportunities for developing such skills in dozens of divers cultural settings, CEA Global Education has designed specialized courses in intercultural competence that are purposefully adapted to the context of study abroad while integrating the most recent theoretical scholarship into credit-bearing courses.

The core course in this endeavor, a 45-hour 3-credit course entitled Communication and Global Competence, was reviewed and approved by the faculty of the University of New Haven. This 300-level communication and cultural studies course, taught at all Global Campus sites, is designed to give students a fully structured and rigorous analysis of the theory, practice and personal challenges of developing intercultural competence. Within the structured format of this course, CEA Global Education students engage in a personal process of continuous reflection and critical analysis of the meaning of culture and the impact it has on interpersonal and professional relationships. This course provides the invaluable insights students need to better situate their value system, to explore their motivations for foreign study, to articulate clear intercultural goals for study abroad, and to continuously assess their personal development in cultural awareness, ethical growth, and civic spirit.

In addition, all courses offered through CEA Global Campus programs are intended to make important contributions to students’ appreciation of and respect for different cultures and peoples. This is a basic value of the Global Campus academic signature. To facilitate this, we encourage faculty to incorporate targeted forms of intercultural competence as a goal explicitly expressed in the stated learning objectives of their courses and to emphasize such objectives in class readings, discussions, and outcome assessment exercises.

Academic Excursions

Dedicated to using the extremely rich and varied educational resources of host cities, CEA Global Education instructors have designed an innovative curriculum that engages students in dynamic activities and experiential learning that stay with them as they set out on the educational, personal, and professional pursuits they will need to address tomorrow’s global challenges. To achieve this, both local learning resources are brought into the Global Campus classroom and, more importantly, students are taken out of the classroom and introduced into the social, cultural and political fabric of host cities.

Instructors are required to design, organize and implement on-site learning exercises as an integral part of the course content. In turn they require students to partake in additional on-site study through field “homework” assignments, museum-based projects and directed research throughout the city. While this approach to learning requires considerable organizational planning and logistical resources, it is one that students repeatedly emphasize as being the most beneficial aspect of their overseas learning experience. To this end and to strengthen the integrity and efficacy of on-site learning, CEA faculty members have designed on-site active learning procedures and guidelines in accordance with NSEE principles of good practice in experiential learning.

For on-site research, study excursions and active learning modules in the host cities where CEA operates, the local resources for discipline-specific learning, particularly for Art History, Studio Arts, International Relations and Business courses, are particularly rich.

Local Social Activities

CEA Global Education recognizes the importance of reinforcing academics with cross-cultural activities and excursions that provide opportunities for close and meaningful encounters with other peoples and cultures. Therefore, international staff members in each city are experts on local culture and share their knowledge through a host of unique and interactive activities. CEA Global Education organizes and facilitates many extracurricular integrative activities designed to assist students in acquiring general adaptive skills that prepare them to live in a cultural milieu different from their own. These activities provide opportunities for students to interact not only with local nationals, but also with those of other nationalities. Many of these out-of-classroom activities are also ideal opportunities to practice language and communication skills, and to develop oral, listening and writing skills.

Options in Housing

CEA Global Education offers a selection of apartments, home stays, dorms, or residence halls, all of which are designed to enhance the international experience and assist students in adapting to their new communities. These varied housing options offer students different choices for language practice, peer interaction, independence, public transportation, and study environments.