Panel Discussion:
Internationalizing Community College Curricula
Frances Vavrus – Vice Provost & Dean, International Division, UW-Madison
Geoff Bradshaw – Chair and Faculty of Anthropology, Madison College
Jonathan Pollack – Chair and Faculty of History, Madison College
A public brainstorming session on the challenges and new opportunities in expanding international education in community colleges, including Madison College. Please join us!
Coffee, tea and donuts (Greenbush Bakery!) will be served. (Note special time 1-2:30pm.)
This event is free and open to the public. A recording will be available on the CSEAS YouTube channel following the event.
Dr. Frances Vavrus is the vice provost and dean of the International Division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which leads campus efforts to promote international scholarship and engagement, cultivate global awareness, and prepare students for a diverse and interconnected world. As a UW–Madison alum, Dean Vavrus studied Swahili as a graduate student with the support of a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship; she is the recipient of both a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship; she taught in the International Studies Major; and she studied abroad as an undergraduate and led a study abroad program as a professor. In addition, Dean Vavrus has helped to establish institutional partnerships with universities abroad and served as the co-principal investigator for a U.S. Agency for International Development project partnering with higher education institutions in Zambia. Dean Vavrus served for two decades as a professor of comparative and international education at Columbia University’s Teachers College and at the University of Minnesota, where she received numerous awards for her teaching and mentoring. She has also held leadership positions at both universities and, since 2015, she has served as the North American representative on the Joint ILO/UNESCO Committee of Experts on the Application of the Recommendations concerning Teaching Personnel, a multinational committee of 12 experts that monitors international trends in education and allegations of violations of the rights of K–12 teachers and higher education faculty.
Dr. Geoff Bradshaw is the Chair of the Madison College Department of Anthropology and a Fulbright Specialist. He currently leads multiple initiatives related to curriculum internationalization, including projects in Hmong and African Studies. He has over 25 years of experience in international programs leadership, including serving as the Associate Vice President of Global Strategy. He has led the implementation of multiple grants for internationalization, several in partnership with UW-Madison. In 2023, he published a chapter in the edited volume Wisconsin in the World, which provides an overview of more than 20 years of UW-Madison and Madison College partnership in curriculum internationalization efforts.
Dr. Jonathan Pollack has taught History at Madison Area Technical College since 1998, where he has also coordinated the Arts & Humanities pre-major since 2019. From 2010 to 2012, he served as the International Education Fellow in MATC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and since last year, he has been working for CETL observing new faculty members and creating professional-development programming for faculty. He is also the Project Director for Life During Wartime, a professional-development program for history teachers in grades 5-12, funded by the Teaching American History initiative of the U. S. Department of Education.
Jon graduated from UW-Madison with a PhD in History in 1999, and, barring unforeseen Bad Things, he will be retiring this coming May. In retirement, Jon plans to publish a second edition of his book Wisconsin, The New Home of the Jew: 150 Years of Jewish Life at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and pursue other projects in his research field of American Jewish history. His other publications include: “‘Is This We Have among Us Here a Jew’: The Hillel Review and Jewish Identity at the University of Wisconsin, 1925-31,” in Charles Lloyd Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, eds. Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); The Voice of the People: Primary Sources on the History of American Labor, Industrial Relations, and Working-Class Culture (co-editor) (Harlan Davidson, 2004); and “Jewish Problems: Eastern and Western Jewish Identities in Conflict at the University of Wisconsin, 1919-1941,” American Jewish History 89:2 (June, 2001).