The American Council on Education (ACE) recently announced Arkansas Baptist College among the 11 collegiate institutions invited to participate in the 2017 Internationalization Laboratory Cohort.
The Internationalization Laboratory is an invitational learning community of the American Council on Education (ACE) that assists participating colleges and universities to achieve comprehensive internationalization. To help institutions reach their goal, ACE guides the process of reviewing the array of international activities; articulating student-learning goals for international learning; assessing progress towards those goals; and developing a strategic plan to broaden and deepen internationalization.
Over the last eleven years, 116 institutions from all sectors have successfully participated in this intensive program. ACE limits the number of institutions in each year’s cohort so that everyone receives an appropriate level of assistance for finding new ways to internationalize teaching, learning, research, and service. Arkansas Baptist College and Clark-Atlanta University will be among the first private Historically Black Colleges and Universities to participate in the lab.
“We are delighted to welcome Arkansas Baptist to the 2017 cohort of the Internationalization Laboratory,” said Robin Matross Helms, Ph.D. ACE Director for the Center for Internationalization and Global Engagement.
A group of faculty and staff will join other colleagues from the other ten institutions around the country and world at the ACE opening meeting in Washington, D.C. late August.
“Participating in this internationalization lab will reposition Arkansas Baptist College towards becoming a global campus by taking an internal and external look at our capacity to adapt to needs of globalization,” said Dr. Arkansas Baptist President Joseph Jones. “We are excited to enter into this intellectual space with other institutions and look forward to providing our students, faculty and staff a broader view of education through internationalization.”
Participation in the cohort provides institutions the opportunity to take part in an international learning community with regular access to expert consultation and the opportunity to learn from the experiences of institutions with which ACE has worked on internationalization.
ACE is the major coordinating body for the nation’s colleges and universities. Representing nearly 1,800 college and university presidents and the executives at related associations, ACE is the only major higher education association to represent all types of U.S. accredited, degree-granting institutions: two-year and four-year, public and private. The Council’s strength lies in their loyal and diverse base of member institutions, 75 percent of which have been with ACE for over 10 years. ACE convenes representatives from all sectors to tackle the toughest higher education challenges, with a focus on improving access and preparing every student to succeed.
