TODAY at Minnesota State Mankato is published in May, August and January and mailed to 90,000 alumni and friends. The mission of TODAY is to entertain, inform and connect readers to campus.
Fall 2008
Volume 9 Issue 1
It was not so much the 20-hour flight that Linda Good was dreading. The Minnesota State University, Mankato professor and former Early Childhood Education coordinator knew that as soon as she flew the 6,500 miles between Korea and Minnesota, she'd have a happy reunion with her daughter at the airport. She knew she'd get to hug her grandchildren and kiss their cheeks. She knew she'd be able to see the friends she had been missing for months.
It was what she was leaving behind that brought tears to her eyes.
After a semester-long sabbatical teaching at the Catholic University in Daegu, South Korea, Good had made genuine friendships. She had become more personally invested in the people and the culture of South Korea than anything she expected when she began her time as a guest professor. "Some of my Korean friends commented that I must have been Korean in a former life," she says. Many of those friends have invited her to return; some have also expressed an interest in visiting her in Mankato.
And while Good's work as both a professor and a representative of Minnesota State Mankato was top-notch, it's the friendships that cemented the Mankato-Daegu connection.
As Minnesota State Mankato strives to connect with the rest of the world, personal relationships are what make the connections stick. During the 2007-08 academic year, University representatives traveled to at least eight different institutions abroad and hosted officials from half a dozen foreign universities as well. Most of those meetings went far beyond the happy handshakes shared and the collaborative agreements signed. Many also strengthened ties between colleagues and forged friendships that extend beyond academia.
The University's global partnerships are in large part created and maintained by the ambassadors it sends abroad. Students have long been encouraged to study at sister institutions in Europe, Asia and Africa. Now faculty and staff are seeing the benefit of international travel as well. Their experiences often change the way they teach and relate to students; they also help the University solidify its standing around the world.
By the time Linda Good landed in Daegu, South Korea, last March, she had already visited 23 different countries, many through an international organization known as Friendship Force. Each time she visited a new place, she learned more about different people and different cultures - "not good, not bad, just different," she says. Teaching at the Catholic University of Daegu, which has an agreement to exchange faculty and students with Minnesota State Mankato, would be an opportunity to immerse herself in that culture as well.
But there was more to it. Even as she worried about how well she'd be able to communicate and how she would survive as the only woman in a dormitory housing 500 men, she knew that everything she did and said reflected back on Minnesota State Mankato. "I was keenly aware that I was the first person from MSU to go as a visiting professor to CU," she says. "I was an ambassador. Because my words and actions might impact the new relationship, I took my commitment seriously."
That included being the best teacher possible to the young Korean students in the three classes Good taught. She was able to introduce a more active style of learning to the classroom, and offered both students and faculty an opportunity to practice their English skills in conversation. She was also working hard to form friendships and to learn more about the culture. "I put effort into my relationships," she says. "I took advantage of every opportunity presented to me to experience the culture and explore Korea."
She went to the "DMZ" - the demilitarized zone from the Korean War - to look at the Bridge of No Returns. She visited the United Nations Cemetery and Memorial to the soldiers killed in the conflict. She went to sporting events - including a Jokju match, which is a cross between volleyball and soccer - dance presentations (even spontaneously participating in one).
While she was learning from the Koreans, they were learning from her too - and not just in the classes she was teaching. "One person said to me that she felt that she was at a turning point in her life," Good says. "She was influenced by being with me and learning that there is more than one way to solve problems or look at solutions."
As Good prepared to come home in June, she knew her own life had been changed as well. She had learned to see the world in a new way, a perspective she knew would color her vision in Mankato. "I am now a person with a third culture perspective," she explains. "I am thinking and acting differently, as I have a more global viewpoint. I am perceiving things with different eyes: my blue, Euro-American eyes, and my imaginary, dark, almond-shaped Asian eyes."
When Don Friend started trying to plan a sabbatical for the 2004-05 academic year, he sent an e-mail to a friend he had met at a geographers conference a few years earlier. That friend was in Erlangen, Germany - just 10 miles north of Nuremberg - at the large, research-oriented university there. Twelve hours after hitting "send," Friend, chair of the Department of Geography at Minnesota State Mankato, received an official invitation to come to Erlangen.
That e-mail led to Friend's year as a Fulbright Scholar, which led to several close, personal friendships for both Friend and his family (his wife and their two children traveled with him). It was also the catalyst for the institutional relationship now taking shape between Minnesota State Mankato and Erlangen.
"At the time I went there on the Fulbright, there was no relationship whatsoever between the two universities," Friend says. "But the day I walked into that institution and met all my new colleagues, it became more than a professional relationship in many cases. They opened their hearts and their homes to me. When it was time to leave, my friends said, 'Come back, come visit.'"
So Friend went back, along with an official delegation from Minnesota State Mankato, eager to ink an agreement to exchange students and faculty. Last fall, a group of 18 graduate students from Erlangen came to Mankato for a joint field trip with Minnesota State Mankato students; in the spring, Friend took 11 students and two other faculty members back to Germany for a field trip with students from Erlangen.
Of course, Friend was eager to explore Germany's mountainous terrain - as well as several islands in the Mediterranean Ocean - with colleagues and students. Of course he was looking forward to learning more about the land and its people. And of course he was delighted by the opportunity to see the dear friends he'd made in Erlangen again. But what meant the most to Friend last spring was watching friendships blossom among students.
During the 22-day trip, the cultural differences between the American and German students were eased by the common ground they shared. The importance of that became clear on the day one of the Erlangen faculty members took the group on a walk through a former American military base near the University. In the center of the base sat a large stone monument inscribed with a quote from George Marshall, the Army chief of staff during much of World War II who received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
"We had been walking for four hours at this point," Friend remembers. "But here my colleague brings these impressionable young American students to read this quote by Marshall - 'The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.' It was the last thing he did that day, and I think those students got it. I think they understood."
Those few minutes meant more to Friend than the rest of the trip combined, from visiting the ruins of Pompeii to hiking through the German Alps. The joint field trip and the agreement between Erlangen and Minnesota State Mankato were tangible ways to fulfill Marshall's prophecy. "That was the essence of the whole trip," Friend says. "That was what it was all about."
Before last fall, Roger Severns' passport had only taken him to Canada, Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. The finance professor at Minnesota State Mankato was most comfortable at home, enjoying the familiar view of campus from his office on the second floor of Morris Hall. But after spending a semester teaching at HAN University in Arnhem, a town just an hour outside of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Severns has a new appetite for international travel.
"It will be a while before I can afford to do something like that again," he says with a laugh. "But I can definitely see going back. I enjoyed it very, very much."
Before Severns and his family left for HAN, which has a student exchange program with Minnesota State Mankato, he wasn't sure what to expect. And although it took a couple of weeks to get used to the new environment (and to the reruns of "The A Team" that were popular there), Severns soon made new friends and learned new things that he could take home with him to Mankato.
Severns hopes to integrate some of the pedagogical techniques he picked up from his colleagues at HAN into his classrooms in Mankato. He also hopes to turn his experience into empathy for international students he encounters in his classes or elsewhere on campus.
"I have a much better understanding of what it means to go to another country now," he says. "I hope that will help me help our international students here. I hope it will help me establish and strengthen relationships between those students and our programs that will in turn benefit the University."
He has the same hope for the relationships he developed while at HAN. "I hope those relationships will make it easier to have their faculty come here and our faculty go there," Severns says.
While opportunities for the University were always on his mind, Severns made time for personal growth as well.
"That trip gave me pause to think about how we do things," he says. "One way is not necessarily better or worse, just different. But I do believe that the integration of international travel and exchanges are just going to increase in the future, and we need to be prepared."
It may have been the drums that impressed Scott Fee the most.
Even after helping to establish the new Eden Campus in Karatara, South Africa, and then helping to establish a relationship between that campus and Minnesota State Mankato. Even after seeing the first class of Eden students earn their certificates, and seeing seven of those students continue working toward bachelor's degrees at nearby Nelson Mandela University. Even after seeing how advanced the South African society is in terms of environmental sustainability and economic development, and seeing how much Americans can learn from them.
It was when Fee, a construction management professor at Minnesota State Mankato, saw the 23 students from Mankato work one-on-one with their South African counterparts that he realized the full potential of the partnership.
On the first night of a trip last May that took more than 30 people - students, faculty, staff and supporters of Minnesota State Mankato - to Karatara, the whole group gathered in a circle around several large African drums. The American students were paired with South African counterparts, then given instructions to create some kind of drum introduction for their two-person team. By the time those teams returned to the circle, the room was alive with more than drumbeats.
"Those partnerships started to take on a very personal level," Fee says. "The students became friends with their partners."
Nurturing those relationships is important to Fee, whose personal friendship with Eden founder Steve Carver spurred his own involvement in the project. Now he wants others to experience the opportunities that he's had - and he's pleased that so many members of the Minnesota State Mankato community are interested in doing so.
Like Shane Bowyer, who teaches management and runs the new Center for Global Entrepreneurship in Mankato. When he found out that students at Eden start and run businesses as part of their education - and that those businesses help contribute financially to the school - he brought his own students to the campus. "He sees potential for the Eden model to fit with the Center for Global Entrepreneurship," Fee says. "He sees the value to an alternative approach to teaching entrepreneurship."
Bowyer will likely be back. So will others from Minnesota State Mankato and from Greater Mankato as a whole. Fee is planning a trip in the near future that will bring construction professionals to South Africa to learn about sustainable design and green building techniques. He's also planning to welcome an Eden student to Mankato next spring. "He'll be the first student from Eden to study internationally," Fee reports.
That's how it happens, after all: One student leads to more students, one teacher leads to more teachers. The goal is to keep the momentum high until it reaches the entire community.
As Good says, "I feel like I am the drop in a puddle that creates a series of concentric circles that reach out and touch more and more people. I hope that others will jump into that puddle and create more rings."
Sara Gilbert Frederick lives in Mankato. Since graduating in 1993, she and her five close college friends have reunited at least once each year. Make your own reconnections at www.mnsu.edu/alumni/linkedin/.
