Revealing our roots: Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler’s Collaborative Origin Story

Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Research on Global Engagement at Elon University. She has taught in and led study away/abroad programs in Hawai'i, London, Florence, and Copenhagen. Her research on global engagement encompasses intercultural learning and mentoring undergraduate research in global contexts. Recently she shared her Collaborative origin story.

I am a developmental psychologist in my 30-somethingth year at Elon University. The origin of my academic work is in Hawaii, as an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. In Hawai’i, I was able to teach about and study development in sociocultural contexts, a longstanding interest of mine. Although I wasn't able to stay very long in Hawaii, a couple years, a part of my heart was left behind there.

Part of my mission around global engagement and global education has been to lift up the stories of the Indigenous peoples, the Kānaka Maoli in Hawaii. As soon as I got to Elon, I proposed this short-term winter term course that I've been doing on and off for the past 25 years or so.

Currently, I am a professor of psychology at Elon, and I also direct the Center for Research on Global Engagement (CRGE). The center is somewhat unique in higher education. It was developed about 10 years ago, and I am the founding director. I worked in close partnership with Tim Peeples, then the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, and other colleagues active in scholarship related to global education, to conceptualize what a center for research on global engagement would look like.

Elon is often at the top of the charts in terms of student mobility, with about 90% of students studying away in a given year. The CRGE mission is to explore what high-quality global learning entails through scholarship related to students’ developing global engagement. This type of research can take many forms, as we describe on the website for folks just getting started. 

Another aim of CRGE is to foster partnerships and collaborations, on campus, but also nationally and internationally. We try to build a collaborative sense of conducting scholarship of global engagement, which is sometimes challenging with the small resources available.

The Collaborative is one great example of such a partnership. I'm always so grateful for this community as a place to turn. 

As a developmental psychologist, most of my research has concerned early childhood development, but my work in higher education encompasses global engagement and mentoring. As a mentor myself and a program director, I've been very interested in mentoring relationships and how they support student success, because there's so much evidence that good mentoring is just critical for students.

We've been working on a constellation model, where we think about fostering agency for students to create multiple meaningful and mentoring relationships. We know already in practice that it's not just one mentor and one student. That hierarchical, arcane model just isn't the way it works in practice. We know from our research that students have lots of people supporting them, and so helping them think about that idea of a constellation, including in their global engagement experiences, has been something that has really been driving my work for the last 10 years.

I found out about the Collaborative because CRGE was developed. The origin is fluid, but I was doing some preparatory work in the fall of 2015, and I attended a talk that Eric Hartman gave on the Global Engagement Survey at the AAC&U Global Learning conference . I was absolutely compelled, because I had started to look around at the tools, and was feeling – gosh, I don't know how to name the feeling, but frustrated, perhaps? They are so expensive, and they have a per-use, per-person price, so how can you afford to pay? So many of them are like that, it's just untenable for a university, and for me, as a person with a relatively small budget, trying to foster this kind of work on campus.

We do have some people who are trained in different measures, of course, but I was very, very interested in the Global Engagement Survey and the way Eric and others presented it. Some of the unique features of that tool have been interesting to me ever since.

For example, when students say they're very good at something, the GES asks them for the flip side, “Talk about a time when this didn't go so well,” or something like that. So there are some unique things built into the GES. Plus I believed it was ethical, as is the mission of the Collaborative. That ethical responsibility has sat heavy with me this whole time. I have continued to come back to the GES to offer as a recommendation for others engaged with research on global engagement on the Elon campus, but also in my own work in Hawai’i.

CRGE was starting just as I met Eric and others at that conference. I talked to them after their presentation. They were also engaged in other work of the Collaborative that they referenced, for example around preventing orphanage tourism, and some of the earliest themes concerning ethical community engagement.

I think I was asked to be on the steering committee the following year. I don't remember exactly when, but I know Eric and I had some really good, long conversations. We didn't meet in person again for a while, but then I did go to the summit at Clemson.

The moment I remember is the one I still talk about, which is in 2020. The pandemic hit and we all stayed home, wondering about how to stay engaged in our work related to global learning. These groups within the Collaborative, I think in particular Knowledge Mobilization (KM), became very active. We were all really seeking a community of people to talk about the fact that, obviously, we were no longer traveling for global engagement. But what could we keep doing?

That group was just amazing. There's still some of us around. There was just this unique sense of community that was formed. We became very close and looked forward to catching up during our biweekly meetings. This group knew if I had no coffee in my house, especially if it was a 7am meeting and Russ was running out to the store to get beans – we just had that kind of camaraderie.

That was led by [co-director] Sarah [Stanlick], who does such a nice job of making sure that there's this human connection that's happening. Sarah really set the stage for our meetings. She facilitated the relationships, but also kept the work going. The relational piece would take half the meeting, and then we would say, “What can we do?”

Out of that KM action team came this partnership around relational engagement. That became a series of really interesting conversations with Janice McMillan and Richard Kiely and me. The two of them had connected previously, and the work they were engaged in was very overlapping around adult education. My background was a little different, as I was thinking about mentoring and the work I was doing with CRGE.

I have long-standing experience as a mentor of students' undergraduate research. I work with 3 to 5 students in any given year, and those relationships typically last 3 years, for the most part. Some of them continue well beyond graduation. The students begin working with me by their second year, most often. Child development work is very slow in terms of recruitment and data collection, and we don't work in lab settings, we work in field settings. Those relationships are absolutely the backbone of my work as a psychologist, as a higher ed professor, and without those, I don't think I would have been very happy in my career. So I love and value this work of building and sustaining mentoring relationships.

So, Janice and Richard and I would come together to discuss these different literature streams that we knew and understood, different theoretical frames. We were starting to put them together, and the visual ways that you have on the blog that we developed are thanks to Janice, and then she started working with Danielle using different types of software to depict the possible connections between concepts. It’s very cool!

The Knowledge Mobilization team is still going today, and I think that's a big part of what CRGE is hoping to do, too, sharing evidence-based practices and building a community of scholars. It’s also something that I have found a little challenging. What's the best way to do that and also to share what you are learning? Working together on a blog post provides one type of opportunity, and of course, presenting at conferences. 

So, I still think a lot about relational engagement. I haven't written anything else besides the blog that Janice and Richard and I wrote together, but I'm interested in it in practice as well. One of the things that was so striking about that COVID-era was the depth of connection we formed in an online community – we've all been part of them, and while it's lovely to be with people on Zoom, you don’t usually feel so strongly connected.

Fortunately, I was able to translate the online connection to an in-person meeting with Janice. I had the opportunity to go to South Africa because Elon is a partner with the UNESCO Chair of Intercultural Competences, at Stellenbosch, so I attended the launch. And after that I traveled to Cape Town and I was able to meet Janice in person for the first time! She spent a whole day taking me around Cape Town and neighboring areas. The in-person connection was so nice, because we'd already felt very connected online. Our friendship continues to this day.

I think of how the pandemic was sort of a crucible. It was this perfect storm of the angst about what was happening around the world, and of course we had really big concerns about the United States. Talking with people like Faith [Valencia-Forrester] from Australia, and Janice in South Africa gave us a different worldview about the US and offered a chance to know about their contexts, too..

That's why I love Faith's recent blog. It's so important not to be so U.S.-centric. This community helps us do that – for me, it really has helped me do it. I've been able to suggest the GES to Mat [Gendle], who has become very active with the Collaborative, now he’s on the steering committee, and I'm on advocacy council. And we’re still keeping knowledge mobilization going as well, with you and others. The work is threaded forward, and the relationships are why.

I read in Erin's blog that she names Nora as a good kind of matchmaker, and I think Nora was very good at that, as are you, Mike. It is nice to have somebody else nudging the work and potential connections. I'm always willing to work with others, but you can get very insulated in your own community, your own job. The Collaborative offers partnerships that would not otherwise be possible.

The challenge for the Collaborative is the same as the challenge for CRGE: how do we fit everything in that we're interested in? I've always worn these three different hats, and I don't know that I do a very good job of balancing my work as an early childhood specialist, with the mentoring relationships, with global engagement. When I try hard, I can do a nice threading through, but in reality they can be off balance. And that's okay.

In relational work, and in relational engagement, one of the key things is trust. Because of its mission and how good the people involved in the Collaborative are, and how much they care about ethical, responsible engagement, there's such a good core and a foundation. I've never come into any space here and thought or been concerned, “Is someone going to steal this idea?” I don't go through the world that way, mind you, but none of that is here.

There's just a trust. Because if you care about the Collaborative, then I know who you are. I know something about you anyway. And that thing that we share, this commitment to this ethical community-based global learning, or however the words get put together, builds trust.

And it's generative, that's the other piece I love. It isn't a stagnant community where we look back all the time. It's always driving ahead.

The co-directors are doing a wonderful job. Okay, it's great, we like each other – now, let's drive this work forward, because that really matters. The care and the trust and the sense of generative community are what keeps me coming back.