Global Campus Learning Environment:

CEA Strategy for Learner-Centered Pedagogy

CEA Global Campus has developed a layered academic strategy that emphasizes a multi-faceted and integrated approach to creating dynamic, effective and proven learning environments. These include the following:

• A Multicultural Urban Setting
• CEA Active Learning: The Global City as Extended Classroom
• An International and Mentoring Faculty
• Best Practices in Experiential Learning Pedagogy
• Learner-Centered Instruction for Focused Learning Outcomes
• Fully-Equipped and Wireless Facilities

A Multicultural Urban Setting

Purposefully situated in global city centers, the scope of CEA Global Campus instruction integrates the traditional study abroad emphasis on local identity and national cultural heritage into a larger reality in which today’s cities are globalized and digitally-connected crossroads of multicultural, multi-faith, and multi-ethnic interaction. CEA places great value in providing students with opportunities for close and meaningful encounters with the mix of peoples, beliefs and cultures sharing, sometimes contentiously, today’s urban spaces. The demography of immigration, the socio-economic consequences of relocation, and the inter-ethnic urban mosaic of multiculturalism that results constitute a valuable learning environment critical for fostering student understanding of global forces and issues.

CEA Active Learning: The Global City as Extended Classroom

A core feature to our Global Campus programs, CEA Active Learning engages students in their host culture through class activities designed to incorporate students' first-hand experience with course objectives. CEA faculty regard the host city as an essential part of the learning environment. By integrating local resources directly into course content and by taking students out of the traditional classroom and into the socio-economic fabric of the city, our faculty create extended and living classrooms. The result brings students face-to-face with the very issues treated in their related course readings. On-site sociological, ethnographic and anthropological study in, for example, immigrant neighborhoods, museum and gallery collections, historical and architectural monuments, and business or commercial districts allow students to see, experience and analyze information critical to core, discipline-based, learning objectives. It also allows them to the process of internalizing their understanding of foreign cultures. As a result, students return home more capable of adding diversity, intercultural insight and breadth of thought to the educational environment of their own home institution.

An International and Mentoring Faculty

Our faculty's educational background, cultural diversity, personal and professional experience, and unconventional insights are important contributions to effective learning environments. The makeup of our international faculty reflect the many diverse cultures of our host cities, and many even hold bi-national citizenship. All are intimately familiar with international education, either through past study abroad experience themselves or through related professional experience. Their backgrounds and ties within the host city make our faculty the ideal mentors for study abroad students, helping them navigate and excel in their foreign learning environment. Additionally, small class size, experiential learning modules, and extremely low student-faculty ratios create a setting where mentoring can flourish to the benefit of students and faculty alike.

Best Practices in Experiential Learning Pedagogy

CEA is committed to introducing into its classrooms progressive and proven instructional models that create dynamic and effective learning environments that are relevant to study abroad. To this end, we have become a Sustaining Member of the National Society for Experiential Education. CEA Global Education supports the NSEE mission of fostering the effective use of experience as an integral part of education in order to empower learners and promote the common good. Sharing in the commitment to create experiential learning environments, our faculty design and implement, in conformity with the NSEE Eight Principles of Good Practice for All Experiential Learning Activities, instructional modules that draw upon city resources and which build critical knowledge, skills and behavioral attitudes appropriate to discipline-based learning.

Learner-Centered Instruction in Global Competence and Global Awareness

Learning environments today, if they are to be effective, must convey to students the compelling reality of globalization and the interconnectedness and interdependence that shape their lives and future career opportunities. The mix of knowledge, experience, behavioral skills and attitudes that constitute global competence, as well as an appreciation of empowerment, interdependency, cultural identity, sustainability, governance and ethics that constitute global awareness are, together, crucial areas of student intellectual and moral development that CEA learner-centered instruction fosters. Empowering students personally to take on roles and responsibilities for targeted learning processes, while engaging their own individual knowledge, experiences and insights about globalization, creates motivating and effective learning environments.

Fully-Equipped and Wireless Facilities

CEA Global Campus classrooms and support facilities are equipped with advanced instructional technologies outfitted to foster interactive, modular and collaborative learning environments. Wireless internet access and advanced language-learning sound systems are standard equipment in all classrooms. These consistently designed and supported facilities throughout the Global Campuses provide reliable and speedy access to global information so important to student learning habits and today’s evolving instructional techniques.