Ohio University’s regional campuses tend to have a smaller international student population than in Athens, but some branches are committed to holding events for International Education Week.
“The regional campuses are important contributors to OU and offer their students an array of cultural and international experiences,” said Deborah Meyer, IEW committee chair and assistant professor in the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, in an email.
Preliminary IEW discussions included regional campus activities. Now, four of OU’s seven regional campuses will hold IEW events, Meyer said.
IEW committee discussions included representatives from regional campuses who attended meetings in person or via Skype.
About 4.8 percent of OU’s students are international. Of these, 53 students are enrolled at OU’s regional campuses. Similar to OU’s main Athens campus, most international students at OU’s regional branches are from China, according to data from the 2012-13 academic year.
Zanesville campus, which has 12 international students and 14 international faculty members, is well suited for the event because of its diverse faculty, including those from Iran, Jordan and India, said Sheida Shirvani, Zanesville’s chair of IEW and professor of communication.
Shirvani recruited faculty members to talk about their international experiences and created an international cookbook to distribute during Zanesville’s Tastes from Around the World event Wednesday.
“It’s not just only we’re trying to teach what we have in Zanesville, we’d also like to take our studies outside the campus in order to inform our students of other cultures,” Shirvani said.
Some Zanesville students will travel to Panama to study tropical plants and culture over spring break. The group will be led by Mohannad Al-Saghir, associate professor of biological sciences at Zanesville and IEW speaker on Wednesday.
“I think that international education as a mission is growing at regional campuses and at Zanesville campus,” Al-Saghir said.
Lancaster campus, which has about 90 enrolled veterans, and more international students than any other regional campus with 26 students from five countries, is incorporating these populations in its IEW activities, said Matthew Wanat, IEW committee chair for the Lancaster campus.
The theme of the Lancaster events is Conflict and Contact in order to combine the discussions with Veterans Day, Wanat said.
“Because we have a large number of veterans in this area and a large number of veterans on regional campuses, I think it’s interesting to be thinking of that as a way into the discussion of cultural diversity rather than thinking of it as a discussion of recent foreign wars,” Wanat said.
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@DanielleRose84
