Galloway, N.J. — A Stockton University education is designed to help students see beyond the boundaries of a classroom, a campus and, increasingly, a country.

Through new partnerships with universities around the world and programs that bring international perspectives directly into Stockton classrooms, students are gaining opportunities to work across cultures, encounter different ways of thinking and better understand their place in an interconnected world. And they don’t necessarily have to study abroad to do it.

“I want to integrate policies, programs, initiatives and individuals to make Stockton more globally oriented and internationally connected,” said Patty Sagasti Suppes, the university’s director of Global Engagement, directly citing the definition of “internationalization” from the American Council on Education. “I want to see us embed much more internationalization in our curriculum and in the campus life.”

That effort is expanding what a Stockton education can offer students, whether they spend a semester in another country, participate in a shorter faculty-led program or collaborate from Galloway with students thousands of miles away.

During the 2025-26 school year, Stockton signed new memoranda of understanding with Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University in South Africa; Universidad Panamericana in Mexico; and the National Academy of Art in Bulgaria. Those join long-standing partnerships with Nürtingen-Geislingen University and the Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences in Germany.

Sagasti Suppes also understands some will never want to leave Stockton’s Galloway campus, but the university’s push for global learning does not leave them behind. Last year, she instituted a collaborative online international learning (COIL) pilot program with select professors.

COIL is a virtual exchange program where professors from two different countries at two different universities bring their students together virtually. The students, with help from the professors, must learn how to figure out a problem together, despite communication and cultural differences, over a five-week period.

“Research shows that COIL can help students learn these intercultural competencies in a very similar way that study abroad does,” Sagasti Suppes said. “So, my hope is that students will decide well this wasn’t bad. I’ve been working with somebody in a different country. Maybe actually going abroad isn’t so horrible or scary. Maybe it’s attainable.”

Sagasti Suppes believes faculty study-abroad experiences are among the most effective ways to bring international perspectives into the curriculum.

“Nobody has more influence over the students than their professors,” she said. “They trust them. They look up to them. If a professor says studying abroad is going to be beneficial to your career and it’s a wonderful life-changing experience, that’s a much stronger message.”

Agreements with universities abroad are one traditional way of exposing faculty to international perspectives. As part of the agreement with Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Stockton was accepted into the Erasmus+ program funded by the European Union to send students and faculty members to Greece. Stockton can also host the Greek university’s faculty and researchers.  

“My time in Greece was deeply meaningful, both personally and professionally. As an Erasmus+ scholar, I had the opportunity to share my work on teaching the Holocaust through children’s literature with my Greek colleague and her students, further developing an existing collaboration,” said Judy Vogel, a professor of Mathematics and Holocaust Studies, who traveled to Greece in January. “Visiting cultural sites connected to the history of the Holocaust provided an important lens that continues to impact my research and pedagogy."

Also, Sagasti Suppes is strategizing to get more university faculty involved with the U.S. Fulbright program, a cultural exchange organization administered through the Institute for International Education that selects students and scholars to study, teach and conduct research abroad.

She recently was one of only 17 people nationwide to receive a Fulbright International Education Administrator Award. She will spend two intensive weeks in November in Berlin taking a seminar on the higher education system in Germany and developing new partnerships to bring back to Stockton.

Other recent Fulbright awardees at Stockton include Associate Professor of Business Studies Behnam Tavakkol and Professor of Mathematics Chia-Lin Wu who were selected as Fulbright Specialists. Their selections will allow them to be matched with an international university for projects that last two to six weeks at a time over three years.

Earlier this year, Eline Xia ’25 was selected as a Student Fulbright recipient. The Political Science and Sustainability graduate will participate in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Global Environment and Development through the University of Copenhagen in Denmark this fall.

Finally, Sagasti Suppes said the OGE has been providing more training to faculty interested in leading travel programs abroad.

“In the past, Stockton faculty did not have a lot of preparation for teaching travel courses abroad. This training will better prepare them to develop and run successful programs,” she said. “The ultimate result should be faculty-led programs that will be stronger, and we might even have more of them.”

Together, the programs are intended to make encountering different cultures and perspectives a more integral part of a Stockton education, Sagasti Suppes said.

“Internationalization doesn’t mean everybody has to go abroad. It means being willing to see the world in a different way,” she said. “It’s about learning to see yourself and your place in the world. It’s about self-reflection because our own cultures are invisible to us.”

-- Story by Mark Melhorn