by Kathy Frost, Professor, Psychology

I had the great pleasure of taking part in a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) during the year 2022-2023. This FLC brought together colleagues from a multitude of disciplines at ACC as well as several from UT-Austin to collaborate on strategies and content for globalizing our courses. I benefitted from the expertise of the many speakers who had both an international focus as well as a concentration in peace and conflict studies. And I also gained immensely from listening to my colleagues’ ideas and teaching strategies for globalizing their own courses.

My primary reason for applying for this FLC was to enrich the overall structure and course content that I offer associated with a study abroad course I teach. I have been offering a study abroad program to Romania that begins with focused study in two major content areas: Social Psychology and Psychology of Adjustment. Prior to Summer 2023, I had run this study abroad program four different times, but I struggled with how to integrate all of the topics included in the program. That said, I knew that the concept of “trust” provided a meaningful bridge between the two courses as well as between the two countries that were part of our focus (Romania and the U.S.). Hearing from a few of our FLC speakers helped me re-envision how the concept of trust could become the lynchpin of the course content that I offer.

One of our FLC speakers was Lisa Schirch who offered us a presentation on her new book, From Toxic Polarization to Social Cohesion. In this book, Schirch discusses both individual and group sensibilities of isolation, exclusion, and frustration that lead to distrust of leaders and institutions. She discussed many of the reasons that Americans are feeling more isolated and frustrated as technology exacerbates the loss of our shared reality and magnifies a “perceived” polarization gap (the gap is more “perceived” than it is “real”). But she also proposed that technology could be part of the de-polarization process and is already being used to help us make decisions together.

Schirch’s presentation helped me to re-envision the topics for my study abroad course. Just as Schirch laid out her work as moving from polarization and distrust to social cohesion, I realized that the topics I had been presenting also moved from the topic of group and individual mistrust to trust and cohesion. I saw how the topics in my course began at the macro or group level of study then proceeded to an individual focus on trust (in the form of attachment theory and research). I also saw more clearly the way in which I could divide each lesson into two sections, one focusing on American perspectives and the other on Romanian. Schirch’s work also helped me to better understand the role that technology was playing on growing public mistrust, and my conversations with her were instrumental in my selection of course reading material by some social psychologists focusing on the influence of technology on teens and young adults.

With the help of the FLC, I was able to reconstruct my course content and offer a much-improved course to my most recent Romania program students. Though they described the course as intense and very demanding, they also reported that they learned quite a lot. My sense is that the content was more comprehensible than it has been in the past primarily due to a course structure that made more sense.

I am indebted to the Global Studies FLC for giving me a forum for creating a more meaningful and informed course than I had offered before.