Brown students have access to an impressive array of international expertise right here on campus. But how can they tap into this expertise fully? How can the campus community best engage the intellectual wealth of its faculty as it seeks to encourage students to intellectually engage themselves with the global community? Brown’s Global Independent Study Program aims to significantly increase the level of student/faculty collaboration in meaningful international study and research.

Students who go abroad beginning with the fall term 2009 will be encouraged to seek out Brown faculty members with teaching or research experience in their proposed study destinations. In collaboration with these faculty members, students will develop global independent study projects that will become an integral part of their course loads abroad. To give a semblance of the kinds of projects that could be developed, imagine the following scenarios:

Global Independent Study Scenarios

• A student works with a Brown faculty member whose research focuses on health issues affecting the Caribbean region, to develop an independent study project focusing on the health care system in the Dominican Republic. The project is carried out while the student is enrolled on Brown’s approved program at Catholic University Madre y Maestra in Santiago, Dominican Republic.
• A student works with a Brown faculty member whose research interests include cross-linguistic language acquisition in Sub-Saharan Africa, to develop an independent study project focusing on language acquisition in Tanzania, a country with over 120 ethnic groups. The project is carried out while the student is enrolled on Brown’s program at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and will be assisted by the UDSM’s Kiswahili Department.
• A student works with a Brown faculty member whose research focuses on migration and demographic change in Latin America, to develop an independent study project focusing on the challenges to urban planning in Peru posed by the massive migration of citizens from rural areas to the country’s capital, Lima. The independent study project takes place while studying at the Pontificia Universidad Católica, a premier Peruvian social science research university.
• A student works with a Brown faculty member whose research focuses on urban trends in China, to develop an independent study project focusing on the transformation of Shanghai in the last 25 years to become mainland China’s leading financial and business center. The independent study project is carried out while the student is enrolled at Fudan University in Shanghai.