Blog: 'St Mary's Abroad' Series: Portland, Oregon

By Mariann Baker, Head of the International Office at St Mary's University, Twickenham. I have recently visited Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Most of my travels for St Mary's are focused on Study Abroad, an area of our work in the International Office that encapsulates the essence of learning, or learning about things, while immersing yourself in other cultures. Just as I was leaving London, I read in the Times Higher Education that 150 US universities have joined a campaign to double the number of American students studying abroad. At St Mary's, we are already a proud host of short-term visiting students from several partner institutions in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. My team have worked tirelessly to create a welcoming, institutionally embedded and culturally enriched programme for our incoming students, in ways that also enhance the international learning opportunities of those of our home students who may never study abroad. The first visit I made as part of my the trip was to Pacific University just outside Portland, in Forest Grove; an institution we have run a joint undergraduate Study Abroad programme with for several years. The name of the small town adjacent to the campus aptly describe the leafy, park-like environment, full of gigantic redwood trees, whose scent fills the crisp, fresh air. As our students who studied there for a semester will testify, Pacific, through the eyes of a Londoner, is a wonderfully gentle place, with its own version of multiculturalism. The University has many students from Hawaii, who of course are 'home' students but, coming from a variety of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino or other immigrant backgrounds and so crossing several cultures on their way to higher education, count as a defined group with specific needs and characteristics. Then there are the local Vietnamese, descendants of 1970s war refugees and their relatives and family friends joining them from the mother country. There is a Saudi government sponsored contingent and a high number of Canadian postgraduates studying Optometry, Pacific University's internationally renowned subject specialism. Over the weekend, I attended the Conference of the American Association of Applied Linguists. From Marianne Gulberg (Lund University, Stockholm, Sweden) I learnt how language use is linked to gestures and of research that investigates gestures as objects of acquisition, as medium of learning and language use, and as a window onto language acquisition. John McWhorter (Columbia University, New York) confirmed my understanding of the legitimacy and the grammar-rich, sophisticated completeness of non-standard language varieties and enhanced it with insightful examples from Ebonics, Black American English. Claire Kramsch (University of California, Berkeley) talked about the value of learning foreign languages and what important roles those who do can play in our world as cross-cultural mediators (Isn’t it great that we are offering foreign language classes at St Mary's now, another way for our students to give themselves an edge on the job market). An interesting point that Kramsch made about our new ways of communicating via various forms of social media was just how one-sided a lot of these platforms are, rather than being about true exchange. My last visit in Portland was to International Partnership and Service Learning IPSL LLC, an organisation that promotes academically-driven service learning opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate students. St Mary's will be, subject to approval, contributing to a new MSc programme in International Development and Service, run jointly by the College of Mount St Vincent in New York and IPSL. The semester that St Mary's will provide to students who enrol on the programme will draw from our Masters courses in Charity Management, Managing for Sustainability and International Tourism Development, and will include a service learning element through our Centre for Workplace Learning. Just as I was preparing to fly back home, Michelle Obama joined the campaign that I found out about on my way out to the States, encouraging American students to spend some time abroad. In the same spirit, and to avoid the criticism Kramsch levelled on social media platforms for being display rather than exchange-oriented, I invite readers to treat this as an opportunity for true exchange and write to me and my team at international@stmarys.ac.uk about what studying abroad has meant to them or enabled them to do. We will enter you into a competition and you will have the opportunity to win a generous hamper of St Mary's goodies. Let this also be an invitation to those of our current students who wish to blog themselves about studying at St Mary’s in London. We will publish the best entries on our Media Centre and social media platforms.