Caitlin Osorio Ferrarini recently joined Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Global School as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Caitlin is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston's College of Education. She has worked in the field of global experiential learning in Colombia and the United States as a field director, student advisor, professor, and researcher.

See our blog for the full conversation; here we edited for space

While I was in Colombia, Eric invited me to join the Collaborative’s steering committee. I became more involved – first in the community impact and fair trade learning side, and then with the student learning outcomes part and assessment. I then translated a portion of the GES (Global Engagement Survey) into Spanish with a Colombian professor, and I gave it to professors who were co-teaching English with our students. We led a co-teacher training, and I had them complete the GES pre-survey, with the idea that I was going to do the post survey at the end of the program. The government changed over and our program ended, and I never gave it to them. I sometimes forget that that happened!

Then I came to the US for a PhD in the College of Education at UMASS, Boston. There I began to work as Nora Reynolds’ research assistant with the GES, which was really a great introduction for me. I spent a lot of time with the qualitative data analysis and learned a lot from Nora about that, as well as data management, working with big data sets. That's how I came to start to work with the Collaborative. After serving as Nora’s research assistant I became the Collaborative’s director of assessment for global learning. That was exciting, because I got to dedicate my time and energy to the global engagement survey, which needed that time and attention.

One of the great things there was that we initiated the community of practice (CoP) group and sparked more engagement there. Nora began that group during the COVID pandemic, and then I structured it more based on Nora’s main recommendations. The CoP was my favorite part of working with the survey.

The survey is such an interesting tool to use, because, in a way, it's somewhat driven by participatory action ethos. The members who are using the survey give input – for example on updates to the demographic factors that we're interested in looking at. We discuss what are additional questions and modifications that we could make to the GES? It's really interesting to me that this group comes together to think about shared research questions in this global civic learning space. It was great to meet people from all of the different universities and programs and nonprofits, learning about the unique programming that they're doing. There is a lot of really unique and innovative programming going on among GES users.

Brandon Blache-Cohen is the Executive Director of AllPeopleBeHappy (formerly Amizade). He has over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit, service-learning, and international development sectors. See our blog for the full conversation; here we edited for space

One of my favorite professional experiences was in Skaneateles, NY, where we held an Institute. We convened folks at an old nunnery – there were nuns all around. It was right on the lake, it was fall 2010 or 2011. It was just a great group of people. The weather changed a lot. It was this very unseasonably warm fall day, and then it snowed a bunch in the night. It was just a really, really cool experience. A lot of people who attended that are still in our network, still working with us in in different ways.

We had held Institutes, usually on a college campus. Kansas State was probably the biggest gathering I remember. There was Notre Dame also, we bounced around the country. That felt like our super bowl. That grew into globalsl.

I have great relationships, great friendships. It's not just talking about these issues and having activities around them. It's also about building a community of practice with people all over the country.

At the same time, all this was percolating Amizade and our community partners were ustrated with the sector, especially the study abroad side of what we do. For-profit companies could come in and talk about service learning or volunteerism but really it was just an exploitative practice to extract resources from communities and charge students money and make a profit from it.

We got really interested in the marketplace of what was going on specifically in study abroad and service learning. The image n the Collaborative webpage is an organization called Wamida that works on all sorts of women's economic development issues in a very rural, very impoverished community in northwestern Tanzania. It's not fine to do it there under the the guise of of community or international development. So we worked with our partners to create the concept of fair trade learning.

AllPeopleBeHappy works in communities in 22 countries. We don't typically work on university campuses. We have partnerships in each one of those countries, and they're not academic in nature. In the academic space the Collaborative would be our favorite people I go to The Forum, I went to NAFSA this year, and I wander around like roaming, looking for people. They're not there. They're with the Collaborative.

It feels as if there's a major seismic change happening in higher ed. This could be the moment, the opportunity for a new birth. I don't think higher ed is helping the world have a tomorrow that is not just worthwhile, but that makes the next day even better. So the Collaborative can put pressure. I think there's something there.