In an orientation exercise, international students who have just arrived at Beloit make hand-drawn maps of how they perceive their new surroundings. Called “mind maps,” these drawings relate known points of reference, such as the location of residence halls to classroom buildings, the bookstore to the grocery. The most significant feature of most maps is the void pervading Beloit’s campus and its larger context.

Photo by: Daniel Youd

A city in transition: Kaifeng, China.

The exercise, conducted during exchange student seminars at Beloit during New Student Days, also has broader significance, offering insight into the experience of all new students. Whether they’ve just come to Beloit from another country or arrived at their study abroad location for the semester, the blank sections of their mental maps represent opportunities for discovery.

Beloit has a number of programs on campus that help visiting students complete their collective “maps.” But what about Beloit students who go abroad? Is it possible for students to go to study abroad locations and never appropriately fill in their conceptual maps?

Elizabeth Brewer, director of Beloit’s International Education program, says that a successful study abroad experience today requires students to venture forth in situations that allow them to apply their knowledge of a second language and interact with a variety of people.

“The focus of study abroad programs was once almost exclusively on rigorous coursework taken toward a degree,” Brewer says. “Now, in an interconnected world, other competencies are highly valued.” Among them, she cites intercultural communication, sensitivity toward commonalities and differences among and within cultures, and understanding multiple perspectives and global forces. Students also need to learn how to apply this knowledge responsibly, she adds.

Photo by: Bogdan Stamoran’03

A new curricular program called Cities in Transition is designed to encourage exactly this kind of learning by challenging students in select study abroad programs and in the city of Beloit to engage productively and critically with the local environment.

The program’s centerpiece is an interdisciplinary project that focuses on a chosen aspect of a city’s evolving urban environment. Depending on the location, students might do field work, volunteer, observe, or pursue other projects that culminate in written papers, documentary films, or public presentations.

To date, Beloit has Cities in Transition classes in five locations abroad and will open a fifth in the fall of 2008. In the meantime, the pedagogy behind the program is inspiring Beloit College faculty members to create a range of new courses on campus.

The creation of the program has been made possible through grants and the financial support of donors, including Life Trustee William Keefer (Hon.’94) and his wife, Gayle Keefer, and Betty Rearick Chenoweth’55, who have supported faculty development seminars and student grants, among other things. A Freeman Foundation grant helped Beloit make early headway in the area of faculty and curriculum development. Recently, a major, three-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was obtained to further grow the program, and a gift from Marvin Weissberg (Hon.’05, P’84) has allowed the College to create a full-time post to help coordinate Cities in Transition and connect it to a new program in international human rights.

Cities in Transition courses currently focus on Kaifeng and Jinan, China; Quito, Ecuador; Managua, Nicaragua; and Dakar, Senegal. The city of Beloit serves as both a lab to prepare students for studies abroad and as the subject for some projects. A course in Moscow, Russia, will begin in the fall of 2008.

The City in a New Light

Beloit has a long and distinguished history in international education—the College has been exchanging students and faculty across the globe since the late 19th century. Today, more than 45 percent of any one class at Beloit will have spent either a semester or a year abroad, and the goal is to increase participation to 55 percent. Last year, 155 students studied in 42 countries through 68 different programs. The Cities in Transition project complements Beloit’s existing programs by increasing the quality and depth of experiences abroad.

Cities were chosen as the focus for this program, Brewer explains, because complex, urban locations seem to be ideal places for encouraging students to adopt perspectives that cross traditional academic boundaries. Cities offer ideal “texts” for considering historical and cultural forces, the effects of globalization, social problems, and the human impact on the environment. Perhaps most importantly, Cities in Transition projects offer students many opportunities to react in positive and productive ways to the changes they see going on around them.

Children in Quito, Ecuador, perform traditional dances at a school where Beloit students volunteer.

Conditions on the ground determine the locations and types of Cities in Transition projects. The culture in Quito, for example, is known to be open to students joining existing local organizations. While enrolled in a Cities in Transition course in Quito, Rebecca Hufford’07, a Spanish and education double-major from Rockford, Ill., volunteered as a Spanish teacher at a school for children from surrounding villages. The school emphasizes the children’s indigenous traditions, while preparing them for a formal education in Spanish. During a semester in Quito, Eric Nelson’09, an integrative and medical biology major from Evansville, Wis., considered the geographic distribution of the city’s population, based on income, social status, and ethnicity. He also found time to volunteer at a mobile medical clinic in the city’s southern section, where many of Quito’s marginalized populations live.

Ibou Diallo, a member of the faculty at the Dakar Media Center in Senegal, teaches for the Dakar in Transition course, pairing Beloit students with Senegalese students to investigate the city. Students are able to take advantage of the Media Center’s expertise and facilities to produce documentary films. During the spring of 2006, Natalie Chwalisz’07, a comparative literature and international relations double-major from Mundelein, Ill., made a documentary with her Senegalese partner, Mbérou Sarr, that focuses on the contemporary problem of unemployment among university graduates in Senegal.

Kaifeng, China, by day. After dark, the night markets—the subject of one student’s Cities in Transition project—alter the urban landscape.

In China, Aaron DeCosta’06, an East Asian languages and cultures major from Manchester, N.H., studied the night markets of Kaifeng as part of Chinese Cities in Transition. He interviewed and observed street-stall owners and then created a photo essay of these ephemeral meetings of buyers and sellers.

Although the location is not currently part of the Cities in Transition program, Anthony Skriba’07, an economics/management and East Asian languages double-major from La Crosse, Wis., studied the impact of rapid change in Shanghai. During the fall of 2005, he observed the daily lives of migrant laborers at a shopping mall construction site and wrote a research paper about his findings. The introduction to his paper appears on the opposite page.

The Mellon Foundation grant is allowing Cities in Transition to evolve to include additional projects in other cities. Students who are interested in studying cities beyond the established list may do so if they can make the case that the location lends itself to such a project. Tom McHale’07, a health and society major and African studies minor from Cherry Hill, N.J., completed the Health and Micro-Credit in Nicaragua Cities in Transition course in 2005, then went on to design a project the following year that examined perceptions about malaria within a Maasai community in Kenya.

Natalie Chwalisz’07 participates in an orientation exercise in Dakar, Senegal.

Students may also apply for International Education Venture Grants to take their projects to the next level during optional follow-up projects pursued during the summer.

Brewer says Cities in Transition is unique in the extent to which Beloit faculty members have helped shape it and continue to contribute to the program, as well as in the way it connects study abroad with the Beloit curriculum.

“Beloit has spent a lot of time and resources on faculty development and on examining how we teach,” Brewer says.  “We’ve always known how much learning takes place outside the classroom during study abroad, and now we’re trying to make a dialogue between that and what students have learned in class. We don’t want those spheres to be separate.”

A Case Study: Nicaragua in Transition

Lee Meiners'09

A page from the journal of Lee Meiners’09 includes a sketch of the Managua dump, “a place where people fall in love.”

Nancy Krusko

School children in the village of Yasica Sur. Their mothers operate small farms started with micro-credit, which allow them to make enough money to send the children to school.

Adrienne Perkins'08

Makeshift house in the Managua, Nicaragua, city dump.

Erin O'Connor'09

Beloit students tour the National Museum of Nicaragua.

Lee Meiners'09

Maryel Mercado speaks to Beloit students about her coffee and tilapia farm in the mountains north of Matagulpa, Nicaragua.

Matthew Miller'07

The Managua, Nicaragua, city dump.

Danielle Hildreth'09

Erin Ballou’09 with a local child in Managua.

Lee Meiners’09 enrolled in the Cities in Transition course on Nicaragua last spring, hoping for a chance to study a country thoroughly and then apply what he learned in a direct and personal way.

He was not disappointed.

“I’ve never taken a class with that kind of depth,” says Meiners, a studio art major from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of Nicaragua in Transition: Health and Micro-Credit. “It was lifechanging. It was incredible.”

Nancy Krusko, professor of anthropology, teaches the class, which served as a model for Beloit’s new Cities in Transition program, though its structure differs from the typical semester-long programs abroad.

Students spend the first part of the semester studying Nicaragua’s tumultuous history, as well as the practice of granting small loans for sustainable projects—known as microcredit. At the same time, they sharpen their observational skills in Beloit in preparation for an eight-day trip to Nicaragua.

During spring break, they travel to Managua, Nicaragua, and surrounding rural areas to see the country for themselves and to consider how micro-credit is improving people’s lives.

Using Beloit as a kind of lab for honing their powers of observation, students seek unfamiliar places in the city: the local VFW club, a tacqueria, a Baptist Church on a Sunday morning. It is one of several exercises designed to teach students to make accurate observations in environments and communities completely new to them.

Krusko selected the Managua area for the course because it is a community in transition, composed mainly of people relocated after ongoing political strife and natural disasters. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in Central America, and many families live on less than two dollars per day.

Even with six months between him and the trip to Nicaragua, Meiners describes the trip as “intense.” He and his classmates kept daily journals, in part, as a way to decompress. “In Managua, signs of past violence were everywhere,” he says. “In the space of a one-hour drive, there was so much to see, you could hardly process it. The place was still buzzing from its past.”

Krusko made connections in the area five years ago, after joining a tour run by the Madison-based Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua, one of many non-governmental organizations with micro-credit operations in Nicaragua.

Students get to see some of these projects first-hand when they visit a fair trade coffee cooperative, a sewing collective, and an organization that makes bricks for construction and terra cotta pots for filtering water.

They meet the entrepreneurs behind these enterprises and see the ways that sustainable earnings are reducing poverty and improving the health of families. Many of the loan recipients report better access to health and dental care, and mothers of young children say their micro-credit-financed businesses are allowing them to buy uniforms for their kids so the children can attend school. (Tuition is free, but only if students wear uniforms.) In one village, people pooled the money they made on micro-credit-financed projects and sent a young resident to college.

In stark juxtaposition to thriving cooperatives and entrepreneurial ventures in the country, students see abject poverty in parts of the city. Their photos depict groups of roving children, who are skipping school to sell braided palm fronds to infrequent tourists, or even worse, roaming a smoldering city dump as they and their families try to eke out a living from other people’s garbage. A makeshift village exists in the dump, made up of tiny houses built from cast-off materials. Meiners says a local guide described the city dump as “a place where people fall in love,” meaning that generations of people live and die there with almost no contact with the outside world.

After returning to Beloit, students sifted through their photographs and put together an exhibit in Pearsons Hall. They also gave presentations to groups on campus about the trip and the issues it raised.

Meiners says the experience in Nicaragua put his life in perspective and expanded his knowledge of the world. Even though he’s a studio art major, he’s continuing to think about ways he might eventually join humanitarian efforts there.

Krusko says the course has that effect on students. Some have switched their majors in its wake, while others have altered their future plans. One former student plans to become a nurse-midwife and return to work in one of the clinics she visited with the class. Others are considering the wider potential of applying small-scale, sustainable projects in other environments. Most will carry the experience with them for the rest of their lives.

“It was amazing,” Kelly Skibiski’07, an anthropology major from Barrington, Ill., says of the class, which she took two years ago. “I still think about it all the time.”

A Cities in Transition Observation Project: Wujiaochang Shopping Mall Construction Site By Anthony Skriba’07 In the fall of 2005, Anthony Skriba’07 studied and lived in Shanghai, China. Through one of Beloit’s earliest Cities in Transition projects, he studied the lives of migrant workers at a shopping mall in the district of Yangpu as part of the largest tide of migration in human history. This is the introduction to his paper. Anthony Skriba’07 At 11:08 on a Thursday morning in early November, a man dressed in green overalls and a yellow safety helmet approaches a newsstand perched on the corner of Zhengtong and Guobin Roads. He picks up a Shanghai Morning Post, and hands seven mao to the stall owner to cover the expense. He turns around to face the north part of the boundary wall that encircles the Wanda Shopping Mall at Wujiaochang, in Yangpu district of Shanghai, China. He flips through the newspaper for several minutes, reading part of a story about a proposed bridge project that will connect Shanghai’s Puxi with the more recently developed eastern part of the city, Pudong. He will return to the worker dormitories at 11:30 to queue for lunch along with 1,500 other such workers, none of whom are native to Shanghai. In two years, this area is expected to become Shanghai’s “second Xujiahui,” a prosperous district in the southwest corner of the city. He lives in crude dormitories set up along the wall of the construction site, which wraps around the entirety of the area, sporting signs with slogans such as “Yangpu district’s brilliant new commercial center.” Not much farther down at the corner of Zhengtong and Guoding Road, there are a dozen or so men assembled with cardboard and metal signs perched in front of them that advertise various trades—plumber, electrician, and laborer. Mr. Shi is one such man, a native of rural Jiangsu province who has lived in Shanghai for 10 years. He expects to earn 20 RMB (approximately $2.48) per hour for his employment as a tradesman, the majority of which will be given to his wife and child when he visits them next month via train. Sometime throughout the day, Mr. Shi hopes he will be approached by a prospective employer, who will inquire about costs for various services and discuss the place of and time required to complete the job. Some jobs may only be for several hours; other times he will be hired on projects that can last up to a month. The entire transaction takes little more than two minutes to complete, the worker being whisked away on the back of a motorcycle or in a cab at the conclusion of the transaction. This paper will discuss the findings of a research project conducted from October to December of 2005 in Shanghai’s Yangpu district, regarding migrant workers at a China Construction shopping mall construction site. Information was gathered primarily from interviews with office staff of the construction site in question, as well as with several laborers and migrant workers throughout the course of the project. Anthony Skriba double-majored in economics and East Asian languages and cultures at Beloit. Since graduating last May, he has been managing research projects in the U.S. Gulf Coast for the Mercatus Center. Eventually, he plans to study finance or statistics in graduate school. He has applied for a Fulbright grant to China, with the intent of continuing the type of research he did through Cities in Transition.

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