Spelman College Joins Four Atlanta Area Colleges and Universities in New Global Research and Education Collaborative
ATLANTA – Spelman College is part of a new research and education collaboration designed to support global learning initiatives in the region.
The Atlanta Global Research and Education Collaborative will help connect the region’s international assets through an emphasis on supporting “global at home” projects that serve students, faculty and community partners, and define the metropolitan area as a hub for global education and research.
A key goal of the collaboration is to build and strengthen collaborative networks of multi-institutional scholars and practitioners to support global research and education initiatives in the region.
“Spelman College is pleased to be a part of AGREC,” said Dr. ‘Dimeji R. Togunde, vice provost for global education and professor of international studies. “This collaborative provides additional resources for Spelman faculty to study global issues at the local level through programmatic, curricular and research activities, while tapping into the richness of multiple organizations, a myriad of cultural activities, and the growing ethnic diversity of the Atlanta metropolitan area.”
The collaboration will initially include Atlanta Global Studies Center of Georgia Tech and Georgia State University; Office of Global Strategy and Initiatives, Emory University; Agnes Scott College’s SUMMIT Center for Global Learning and Leadership Development; and Spelman’s Gordon Zeto Center for Global Education.
Georgia Tech and Georgia State initiated the collaborative with Emory University, which developed to include Spelman and Agnes Scott.
Established through an anonymous endowment gift of $17 million, the Gordon-Zeto Center reaffirms Spelman’s commitment to engage students with “many cultures of the world” and to widen their socio-economic and political horizons in an increasingly complex and interdependent global society. As an institutional space to expand Spelman’s long history of commitment to international education, the Center provides leadership for the College’s efforts to internationalize the campus through curricular and co-curricular program enhancement; increased recruitment of international students and visiting scholars; promotion of study abroad and faculty/staff-led study travel programs for students; international service learning; and support for faculty global engagement.
As part of its initial programs, AGREC offers grants to support collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cross-university research and education projects with a focus on global engagement. The 2020-2021 grant program, “Connecting Globally While Grounded at Home,” will place significant focus on the programs’ potential to develop new and sustainable relationships among partners such as universities, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and community groups, as well as their impact on Atlanta communities.
“The theme, ‘Connecting Globally While Grounded at Home,’ is consistent with Spelman’s curriculum internationalization agenda and faculty global research engagement,” added Dr. Togunde, who also sits on the advisory board of the AGSC. “The opportunity to collaborate with other institutions on this initiative, bodes well for cross-fertilization of ideas as it also lends credence to Spelman’s reputation as an enriching global learning laboratory nested within a vibrant cosmopolitan area.”
The collaborative will be housed in the AGSC, a national resource center and foreign language and area studies Fellowship program, funded by a Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
More information about the grant program, including the call for proposals and online application form is available on the AGREC website.
“It is becoming increasingly more urgent to show that fostering global engagement brings tremendous value locally here at home in Atlanta and in Georgia,” said Yves Berthelot, vice provost for international initiatives at Georgia Tech. “By leveraging the incredible strengths and complementarity of our local partners, we can fire up the innovative engine of the Atlanta community.”
