Stateside Study Abroad

Posted on Nov. 13, 2020

When you’re stuck at home, sometimes the best strategy is to take off for the other side of the world.

by Elizabeth Leland ’76

From the bedroom of her family home in Graham, Anna Doan recorded a video introducing herself to students in Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. “Meeting people from different parts of the world — even if it’s virtual — it’s an experience I can’t wait to experience!” she said. “I’m a freshman here at UNC-Chapel Hill, and I’m majoring in pharmacy.”

Doan told the Thai students that she had never before considered studying abroad because “it sounds terrifying to me.” But over the fall semester, living at home because of the coronavirus pandemic, she eagerly traveled via Zoom on a “virtual study abroad” to East Asia with the 16 other students in Marc Cohen’s ’11 (PhD) composition and rhetoric class.

While learning how to compose papers and deliver presentations, Doan and her classmates swapped stories and shared videos with university students and Carolina alumni in Thailand, Singapore, Japan and South Korea.

Cohen, who is a teaching associate professor in the department of English and comparative literature, was determined to teach an online course that would help his students connect socially, envisioning the project as a way to “uplift and inspire my socially isolated students.” By midway through the semester, he would have them all singing and swaying to Hark the Sound.

“We’re social creatures, we human beings,” Cohen said. “They’re at an age where they want to leave home, and now they’re living at home again in their high school bedrooms. This is my typical way of thinking: I’ve got to create something that’s going to mentally liberate them. I have to get them out of this state of mind. These kids need a break.”

At the start of each class, Cohen appeared on the computer screen, wearing big over-the-ear headphones and sitting in his living room in front of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books and with mementos given to him by former students: Coasters from Lebanon. A bottle opener from Singapore. A hand-painted box designed to look like a book and featuring a quote from Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Cohen is applying that weapon to that goal, one student at a time.

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“We’re social creatures, we human beings. They’re at an age where they want to leave home, and now they’re living at home again in their high school bedrooms. This is my typical way of thinking: I’ve got to create something that’s going to mentally liberate them. I have to get them out of this state of mind. These kids need a break.”

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Their faces popped up on the screen of his laptop, one at a time, most joining from their childhood bedrooms across North Carolina; a couple were from as far away as Mexico and South Korea. Tony Grimes, a cornerback on Carolina’s football team, logged on from his dorm. Seven thousand miles away in Pyeongchon, South Korea, Andy Pyo logged on at 2:18 a.m. Korean time.

In one Zoom class early in the semester, the students presented oral reports about students from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok with whom they had exchanged recorded videos. Afterward, Cohen asked them to separate into breakout rooms, ostensibly to discuss in more detail what they had learned about their Thai counterparts — but just as importantly, he believed, for a chance to simply talk with each other.

Cohen’s daughter, Olivia, is a junior at Carolina, and Cohen has witnessed firsthand the disappointment that college students have felt over the upheaval of their lives. “One of the things students are missing so much right now is student life,” he said. “This is a way for students to connect with students.”

Cohen devised four units for the class, each with a different topic: Japan (public transportation), South Korea (how young people spend their leisure time), Singapore (food) and Thailand (student life at college). He solicited people he knew in each country to partner on the project.

Interspersed with the “study abroad” classes were more traditional classes devoted to the fundamentals of writing. Cohen’s goal was that by the end of the semester his students would have mastered the techniques to write papers about what they learned from the online exchanges — and have had fun doing it.

Cohen’s teaching philosophy is known as experiential education — a learn-by-doing approach that encourages students to immerse themselves in an experience and reflect on it using skills taught in the classroom. One pre-COVID class shadowed medical professionals in the UNC Health emergency department. One studied the Carolina field hockey program. Another attended a concert by rapper Tierra Whack as part of a study of Afro-surrealism.

“The idea is to create an interdisciplinary experience that will bring to life the literature or the culture associated with the literature,” Cohen said. “It can have a powerful impact on your classroom. It can connect you with the themes of the literature we’re studying, provide source material for writing, and it creates community.

“I like this approach because it allows me the freedom to be creative, which is essential to who I am. And I think my units are better because I have freedom to create.”

Danielle Aiello was so taken by the class visit to the emergency room in fall 2019 when she was a first-year student that she is pursuing a major in nursing with hopes of becoming a physician’s assistant — a profession she had never before considered.

“We worked hard. We wrote multiple papers, with multiple drafts. But it was fun, and it was more than just English,” Aiello said. She described her thrill at shadowing doctors in the ER and drinking tea with the consul general of Turkey for a unit about social norms in Turkey. “When you have someone like Professor Cohen who is so excited about what they’re teaching, it makes you more excited.”

High school experiments

Cohen didn’t know about the theories and scholarship behind experiential education when he tried it for the first time in 1998 while teaching high school in Los Angeles. It was just a hunch he landed on — not yet the passion that drives him forward each semester with each new student. “I was looking for ways to bring the literature to life for my students,” he said. “It was a low-income neighborhood … a mostly immigrant population … and for a lot of them, school was the least of their challenges. A number of them were not connecting with the work we were doing in class.”

He came up with an ambitious plan to change that. He had grown up in Portland, where the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was an annual rite of passage for middle school students from middle-class families. If he could take his high school students there, he thought, perhaps the experience would bring Shakespeare’s plays to life for them.

He raised more than $20,000, which paid for 50 students and five chaperones to go to the festival, a 10-hour bus drive from Los Angeles. The students saw two plays, slept in dorms at Southern Oregon University, sat in on a couple of classes, dressed up for a nice dinner and jet-skied on the Rogue River.

“It was about theater, but about so much more,” Cohen said. “It truly was about the total experience. When I first hatched the idea for Project Shakespeare, I told them, ‘You’re going to have to trust me on this. Be my partner on this thing.’ ”

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“The idea is to create an interdisciplinary experience that will bring to life the literature or the culture associated with the literature,” says Marc Cohen ’11 (PhD). “It can have a powerful impact on your classroom. It can connect you with the themes of the literature we’re studying.”

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Because of that experience, Regina Castellon chose to attend Southern Oregon University. She was so inspired by Cohen that she got a master’s in education from the University of Southern California. A first-generation college student, she now teaches part time at a community college in addition to her full-time job as an employee relations manager.

“I’ve never met anybody in my life who cared so much about my education,” Castellon said. “The modeling of it really stayed with me. Mr. Cohen let us explore what we enjoyed and explore our reading. That was my first time really thinking about a deeper understanding of literature and about how I interpret the text and how that matters.”

Cohen took students to the festival for two more years. “One of the greatest moments was equally horrifying and joyful,” he recalled. “One of the groups studied Othello. The students knew that play by heart. So the play starts, and the next thing you know, my students are reciting the play with the actors out loud. I was dying. Obviously, it wasn’t typical audience behavior. But at the same time, I felt incredible joy because we had achieved our goal and they really were connected with the literature. It was a beautiful thing.”

A student-centered environment

Cohen learned something about himself, too, from the experience. Before taking the teaching job, he had worked 10 years in the movie business, primarily as a script reader and story editor but also as location assistant on Terminator 2: Judgment Day. When it became evident that he was unlikely to achieve his dream job of screenwriter, he decided to try teaching. It was at James Monroe High School in the North Hills area of Los Angeles that he discovered his passion.

He left the school to get a master’s in English from California Polytechnic and was so convinced of his path that he uprooted his family — his wife, Pam, who now works at Duke Health, and their two children, Olivia and Asher — and moved across the country in 2004 to pursue a doctorate at Carolina. He has been a member of the faculty since 2012.

Kelly Hogan ’01 (PhD), associate dean of instructional innovation at Carolina, looks forward every semester to hearing what Cohen has conjured up. “He’s all smiles when he talks about his courses,” Hogan said. “He’s really good at putting timely stuff in front of students in ways that transform them, in topics they might not know they’re interested in. He’s making connections at a time when it’s not easy to make connections.”

Cohen has a special knack, colleagues said, for teaching international students and others who might not have a strong background in English. The judges described his efforts with those students as “magical” when they named Cohen a 2018 recipient of the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

“I heard from so many students how he’s creating a student-centered environment,” said Gidi Shemer, a teaching associate professor of biology, who helped judge the nominations. “All the students praised him for being somebody who cared for the students and cared for their success. He wasn’t just throwing material at them. He was trying in the best way possible to engage those students with the materials.”

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“He’s all smiles when he talks about his courses. He’s really good at putting timely stuff in front of students in ways that transform them, in topics they might not know they’re interested in. He’s making connections at a time when it’s not easy to make connections.”

— Kelly Hogan ’01 (PhD)

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Desmond Yeo ’18 took Cohen’s “English Literature and Cultural Diversity” class when he studied at Carolina as part of the UNC-NUS (National University of Singapore) Joint Degree Program.

He is now a middle and high school teacher in Singapore with a new appreciation for Cohen’s devotion not only to teaching but also to the students themselves. Yeo said he will be forever grateful to Cohen for inviting him and another international student to dinner with his family one Thanksgiving. He gladly agreed to help out on the Singapore leg of the virtual study abroad.

Jittima Pruttipurk ’16 (PhD), a professor at Chulalongkorn University, became involved with the project for similar reasons. She said Cohen had a significant impact on her life when he volunteered to be her mentor while she was studying for her doctorate. Her students in Bangkok partnered with his students in Chapel Hill. “We have been corresponding in the morning as early as 4 a.m. and as late as midnight,” she said. “His energy inspires me.”

Cohen estimates he gets about five hours of sleep a night during the school year, mostly because of demands he puts on himself. “The things I like to do require extra time,” he said. ”I’m very fortunate because I have a job that I don’t have to separate from my life. I choose to live it while I’m doing it, and there are so many rewards …  watching people transform both in terms of learning and maturity, watching people fall in love with the subject, helping people discover a passion. … I get a charge out of it.”

Ringing clear and true

A few minutes before the start of one class in mid-September, Cohen logged on as usual from in front of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in his living room. One by one, the faces of his students appeared. They were working on expository papers about their exchange partners in Thailand, writing and rewriting from home with feedback from Cohen and from peer critiques.

For part of the class, and in keeping with the theme of study abroad, Cohen separated the students into small online breakout rooms to research different UNC study abroad scholarships. When they gathered back together, they made short presentations to the class about each opportunity. What may have seemed like a random research and rhetoric assignment actually carried an unspoken message from Cohen to his students: “You could do this. For those who might not think study abroad is for them, that’s not true. It’s for everybody, and it could be for you, too.”

They also devoted a few minutes that afternoon to rehearsing a group welcome in anticipation of their first “face to face” virtual meeting as a class with the students from Thailand. Again, what might have seemed like a light-hearted exercise held an underlying purpose. “They’re not just in an individual relationship with me,” Cohen explained. “They’re in a relationship with each other, and I’m trying to the best of my abilities to establish those relationships in a COVID environment.”

Cohen uploaded an audio version over Zoom of Carolina’s alma mater and fight song and instructed the students to pantomime certain parts of the recording. With their computer screens set to “gallery view,” their faces appeared in a grid format, sitting virtually next to each other.

“This is an ice-breaker,” he said later. “Think of it as a semesterlong icebreaker. They will always, as a result of this experience, have this connection to one another that no one else in the University will have had. It’s my hope they connect with their classmates in addition to connecting with people overseas.”

Cohen hit play, and the lyrics rang out around the world from his students’ computers:

Hark the sound of Tar Heel voices, ringing clear and true.

The students swayed to the beat as if they were at Kenan Stadium or the Dean Dome. As Cohen instructed, they held their arms outstretched at shoulder height as if they had their arms draped around the shoulders of students on the screens next to them. From La Paz in Mexico, Aranza Vazquez swayed side to side, her right arm stretched toward the screen to her right, where Allie Spies swayed side to side from Matthews, with her left arm outstretched toward Vazquez.

Singing Carolina’s praises, shouting N.C.U.

The students fist-pumped in unison. During the next verse, they held up handwritten messages for their study abroad exchange partners, using their Thai nicknames: “Hello Jam.” “Hi Mei-Yu.” “Hello Bua.” And then the fight song launched:

I’m a Tar Heel born, I’m a Tar Heel bred.

Together the students all clapped along to the familiar rousing beat. They were smiling. Tears welled in Cohen’s eyes when he saw their joy, a shared experience despite so many miles apart.

Elizabeth Leland ’76 is a freelance writer based in Charlotte.

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