“There have been a lot of changes on campus, in the country and in the world since 1982 when this model was created and approved by the faculty, and so it’s clearly time for a reevaluation to ensure that the programs meet the needs of our current student body. That’s what we’re intending to do.” Director of Intercultural Programs, Christina Harrison said.
Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) is currently in the early stages of reevaluating and reimagining the future of the intercultural program, which is a process conducted by the Reimagining Intercultural Project Team consisting of various faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
“The reimagining process has just begun,” Harrison said. “Nothing has been decided yet. All we’re doing now is gathering data. We’re in the clarification stage.“
In August, Harrison was charged with putting a team together to reevaluate the intercultural program’s model. The Project Team has been conducting focus groups for the past two months, speaking to around 150 students. In addition, Harrison met with the first-year class, Big Questions, which was an additional 100 students. The team also sent out a survey to all faculty, receiving about 80 responses. A second survey is being prepared to send out to alumni with the hopes to then conduct a focus group with them as well.
Senior Jason Dwyer and member of the Project Team said they have been “looking at ways to make the intercultural programs more sustainable, both economically and environmentally, as well as ways to make it more appealing and accessible to all types of students.”
Throughout the evaluation process, there’s been a focus of obtaining data driven results in what is a “very emotional and important” program to the university. “We want these decisions to be data driven. It’d be easy to make decisions based on emotions, but we want to make them based on the data,” Harrison said.
In the new year the team will start “ideating about what possible program models might look like” while addressing the concerns but also keeping the strengths and benefits of the current program, Harrison said. Once ideas are gathered, the team plans to offer them to some stakeholders, inviting feedback before submitting recommendations to the Provost about the model going forward.
Director of the Washington Community Scholars Center (WCSC), Ryan Good who is a part of the Project Team said that the team is “doing critical and creative work exploring a model and structure for intercultural learning that is able to achieve robust intercultural learning outcomes and is also inclusive and accessible to all EMU students.”
As the team considers a solution for the future he hopes it can offer a “broad variety of opportunities that are accessible to the diversity of life situations represented in our student body.” He also added that it is important for the intercultural program to continue to “equip students with the confidence to move in new contexts, the curiosity to learn from new people and places, the ability to communicate and work together with people from very different backgrounds, the humility to understand that the way [we] see the world is not the only way to see the world, and the insight that there are systemic processes at work in mediating the types of life opportunities different communities are able to achieve,” as it has been achieving for decades.
In a “Student FAQ” document that was shared with EMU students, it stated that EMU is taking a pause from international EMU-led international intercultural programs in Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 “because there were no faculty leaders able to lead a program during those semesters.” It noted that students interested in completing their intercultural requirements during these semesters can do so through WCSC, intercultural courses on campus with immersion opportunities in Harrisonburg, and intercultural programs offered by other universities or organizations. It also said “it’s busy considering ways to amend the Intercultural Programs model to ensure that it is accessible and workable for all EMU students, and will plan to roll out the new model for Intercultural Experiential Learning during the 2025-2026 academic year.”
The pause in EMU-led international intercultural programs due to a lack of leaders seemed like the appropriate time to consider changes for the future. “It makes perfect sense to use this time to evaluate the model carefully and to revisit the learning outcomes,” Harrison said. The Project Team wants to be very clear that the intercultural programs model is fully accessible to all students, that it is sustainable for the faculty leaders, considers our resources as an institution, and is environmentally conscious.
In January the Reimagining Project team will host an information session to engage students in conversation and questions about the evaluation of Intercultural Programs. Input and feedback is encouraged and helpful in furthering this process.
