EAGLE study program soars around the world

When a UW–Madison student can see how the Costa Rican rainforest can be harvested in a sustainable way, and when another UW–Madison student can learn how Cuban nurses contribute to public health, well, the EAGLE has landed.

But instead of the moon, this EAGLE has landed on different parts of our own blue-green globe. It’s called Expanding Access to Global Learning Experiences, a new effort by International Studies and Programs at UW–Madison.

EAGLE offers seed money to schools and colleges to enlarge the possibilities of international study for their students. And many have used EAGLE funds to open up the world in new pedagogical ways.

One EAGLE partner has been the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. As part of its faculty initiative to develop new curricular opportunities, the college added a course in 1999 titled “Sustainable Development in Costa Rica,” taught by Martha Rosemeyer, visiting assistant professor of agronomy.

It breaks from the common study-abroad format of a semester or winter break trip by integrating three components into a full year’s experience. This past fall semester, 17 students from the College of Letters and Science analyzed the natural resources, export production, history, economy and ecotourism of Costa Rica. That was followed by a January trip to Costa Rica and this spring semester, which is asking students to reflect, synthesize and write about what they’ve learned.

The field trip was “fantastically illuminating about sustainable development,” says graduate student Janet Parker, who is enrolled for the full year. “And the fall and spring semesters bring a continuity to the whole experience. People don’t always integrate foreign travel into their lives, and the format of this course helps us do that.”

The students lived with rural families during the January trip, which bore another kind of fruit. “It’s hard getting a sense of the world without living outside the United States,” says Rosemeyer, who spent eight years in Costa Rica teaching and doing research with other universities and a consortium called the Organization for Tropical Studies. “Otherwise, you assume that everyone should do things the way we do in the U.S. You need to be a minority somewhere.”

That sense of something else, of something that isn’t American, is what another EAGLE-funded program seeks to offer students. The School of Nursing sponsors a winter-break program for its majors that supported a month long stay in Cuba.

“Its purpose was to increase understanding of the public health-care system in Cuba and the role of nurses in that system,” says Linda Baumann, professor and associate dean for academic nursing practice. “It also enhanced understanding of what it’s like to deal with another culture.”

Baumann says Cuba offers a public health-care model that is effective — their infant mortality rate is comparable to that of the United States — and strikingly different. All Cubans have access to primary health care without cost, and doctors and nurses are assigned to neighborhoods of 400-500 people and must live in those neighborhoods.

One participant this winter was Victoria Gutierrez, who worked with nurses in Camagüey, which happens to be a sister city of Madison. It also happens to be the original home of Gutierrez’s grandfather, who moved to New York City in 1926.

“This program melded my two passions: Cuba and public health,” says Gutierrez. “I want to help create an exchange between our two countries. We have a lot to learn and a lot to give.”

Learning and giving is what EAGLE supports, as well as integrating study-broad into academic life.

“These programs address one of the chief goals of EAGLE,” says Joan Raducha, director and assistant dean of international academic programs, “and that goal is to tie study-broad experiences to the campus curriculum.”