Faculty-Led International Honors Programs

We know that one of the major reasons for encouraging our students to study outside of the United States is to broaden their knowledge and understanding of the world. The insights and personal experiences that students gain from living, speaking, and taking part in the culture they are studying are immeasurable. Students also improve their professional potential. An international study program can provide students with cognitive and affective competencies necessary for them to thrive in a global economy, and it can provide the nation with citizens who are economically and politically savvy. Substantive research demonstrates some of the core values and skills of a liberal arts education that are enhanced, including critical thinking skills, the ability to communicate in more than one language, the ability to communicate across cultural and national boundaries, and the ability to make informed judgments on major personal and social issues. Although much can be gained from any experience of studying in another country, a program that is created and run by honors faculty is better. Honors international programs that have been designed and led by honors faculty tend to be customized both to the students and to the honors program, assuring that field pedagogy will replicate the standards and quality that students can expect in their home classes, seminars, and colloquia. Such programs are well-organized since they have to be arranged and approved well in advance. Furthermore, since the faculty members are aware of resources on campus or can propose and receive grants for international programs, the opportunities for students who cannot afford the expense of studying abroad are greater. For example, an honors faculty member at the University of New Mexico received a National Science Foundation grant for our Honors Biodiversity Program in Australia that allowed her to include qualified students regardless of their economic status. Equally important are the design and execution that can often only be organized by faculty members from the home campus. Faculty-led international programs are designed with awareness of the important components for encountering or engaging with a site: The component parts exist in time-space. Organizing them presupposes pace, rhythm, and movement through them. Unlike the presuppositions of campus organization, which (however inaccurately) assumes static structures and immovable objects, every [honors international program] begins with the concept of motion and the dynamic of movement through space over time. [Faculty] construct unique calendars, juxtapose field explorations and classroom discussion, and create arenas in which differing voices lead discussion throughout a term with variable blocks of time allocated to these activities. Further, participants are invited to see themselves as explorers—that is, to move and simultaneously watch themselves moving through uncharted territory. The mapping they undertake is, therefore, of a space, of themselves moving through that space, of themselves transforming that space into a place that has taken on the tangible familiarity of what they, the [students], have measured by their alert movement through it. (Braid 19)

Global Law Schools on U.S. Models: Emerging Models of Consensus-Based Internationalization or Markets-Based Americanization Models of Global Legal Education

This article examines two substantially irreconcilable approaches to internationalization that are emerging in the United States. The first focuses on globalizing the law school curriculum through internationalization. This approach is congruent with emerging trends in legal education internationalization in Europe. The second approaches internationalization as a market driven competition for influence among dominant domestic legal orders, that is, as nationalist globalization. Internationalization is understood as the extension of the influence of national law outside the national territory and is nicely illustrated by recent efforts to globalize the law school curriculum by internationalizing the conventional U.S. law school curriculum. The principle thesis is this: The global legal education community, led by the Europeans, has been constructing a vision of globalization of legal education that has as its basis the idea of harmonization and convergence of different systems and the development of a new institutional model grounded in harmonized global trends in law. The United States appears to be taking two approaches to this development. After an Introduction, Part II examines the internationalization efforts of U.S. law schools following one of five models: (1) integration; (2) segregation; (3) aggregation; (4) immersion; and (5) multi-disciplinary department models. This project seeks a newer framework for the construction of shared legal structures grounded in joint effort that is not dominated by the approaches off any one state. Part III then examines the ways in which American institutions are also working against this general trend by positing a form of nationalist globalization that has as its foundation the idea that national legal education can go global without globalizing the law taught. Nationalist globalization takes three forms: a focus on the training of lawyers for domestic service whose pedagogical methodologies can be exported, the extraterritorial extension of the U.S. law school system, and the management of post graduate degrees in law for foreign law graduates. In place of harmonization and globalization of law, the American nationalist globalization model grounded in extraterritorial competition for socialization in the laws of the domestic legal order of dominant states. The article ends with an analysis of the consequences of these competing forms of global engagement in legal education. While much of the attention on changes to the American law school environment has focused on internationalization within consensus-based and supplementary programs founded on the internationalization ideal, American law schools have also been developing market-based strategies that are, at their core, fundamentally inconsistent with the internationalization framework.En este artículo se examina dos enfoques sustancialmente incompatibles de la interna-cionalización que están surgiendo en los Estados Unidos. La primera se centra en la globalización del currículo escolar a través de la ley de internacionalización. Este enfo-que es congruente con las nuevas tendencias en la internacionalización de la educa-ción legal en Europa. La internacionalización de los enfoques en segundo lugar como la competencia por el mercado por la influencia entre dominante ordenamientos jurídi-cos nacionales, es decir, la globalización nacionalista. La internacionalización es enten-dida como la extensión de la influencia de la legislación nacional fuera del territorio nacional y está muy bien ilustrado por los recientes esfuerzos para globalizar el currícu-lum escolar la ley por la internacionalización del derecho convencional EE.UU. currículo escolar. La tesis de principio es el siguiente: La comunidad global de educación legal, liderado por los europeos, ha sido la construcción de una visión de la globalización de la educación jurídica, que tiene como base la idea de la armonización y convergencia de los diferentes sistemas y el desarrollo de un nuevo modelo institucional basado en la armonización de las tendencias mundiales de la ley. Los Estados Unidos parecen estar tomando dos enfoques para este desarrollo. Por un lado, algunas instituciones están participando en la internacionalización de la educación. Sin embargo, las institu-ciones estadounidenses también están trabajando en contra de esta tendencia general al plantear una forma de globalización que tiene como fundamento la idea de que la enseñanza del derecho nacional puede ser globalizada y el rechazo de la necesidad de crear y enseñar derecho más allá del derecho nacional. En lugar de la armonización y la globalización del derecho, los estadounidenses de un modelo basado en la competen-cia extraterritorial para la socialización de las leyes del ordenamiento jurídico interno de los estados dominantes