Twenty-one-year-old Gabrielle Whisenton had dreams of studying abroad, but she couldn’t visualize how she’d be able to do it financially until she received a presidential scholarship.
That funding established at Savannah State University by President Cheryl Davenport Dozier allowed Whisenton, a junior, to travel with 13 other students and two professors to Nova Scotia, Canada. They went to investigate the link between that country’s population of Black residents who had retained portions of their African language and culture and Blacks in the United States from the Gullah/Geechee culture in South Carolina and Georgia who had done the same.
The experience left an indelible mark on Whisenton. She now considers herself a global citizen who has developed a cultural acumen academically that she may not have obtained if she hadn’t traveled abroad to interview the small community of Blacks in Canada. As a group, she said, they regularly pay homage to their ancestors in everything that they do.
“We met people who still speak their native tongue from Sierra Leone,” Whisenton said. “I came back with a different mindset that there are still people of African descent in other parts of the world that didn’t lose their culture.”
Whisenton’s experience offers a foot print for a new wave of students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) who are studying abroad. The institutions are expanding their global studies programs in part because the leadership at those institutions.
To help HBCUs establish more global citizens, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the American Council on Education a three-year grant to explore internationalization efforts. The goals of the project are to identify the factors that “enhance and impede the internationalization process at HBCUs and to disseminate findings from this action research project to the broader HBCU community,” said Gailda Davis and Brad Farnsworth of ACE.
Colleges and universities of all types are increasingly accelerating internationalization programs, according to a 2011 ACE survey of 3,357 accredited degree-granting institutions.
