The West Virginia Consortium of Faculty and Course Development in International Studies will celebrate its 35th anniversary Nov. 12, as it holds its annual workshops at Lakeview Resort and Conference Center. The conference runs Nov. 12 and 13, and will focus on “The Arts and Politics: Defending—or Challenging—the Status Quo.”

The result of collaboration by five political science professors from various West Virginia institutions, FACDIS owes its origins and early development to WVU Political Science Emerita Sophia Peterson who served as director from 1980-1997. Its guiding philosophy, expanded in application but never altered in purpose, was to enhance the teaching of all subjects with international content.

FACDIS founders believed that each discipline had its own professional organization, but none helped bond faculty teaching international subjects at far-flung institutions in the Mountain State. To date, in fact, no other state seems to have developed a comparable organization, and FACDIS has won a number of state, regional, and national awards because of its contributions to professional development.

“Our board of institutional representatives from all 20 colleges and universities in the state seeks to select topics of current relevance,” said Jack Hammersmith, professor of History. “Last year it was global climate change; in 2013: immigrant and migration. This year it just happened to coincide with what’s happening on our campus.”

West Virginia University is currently celebrating the creation of the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities.

The uniqueness of FACDIS, its administrators say, doubtlessly aided Peterson in obtaining a three-year federal grant that provided the critical start-up. By 1983, when that grant expired, then-WVU President E. Gordon Gee and other WVU officials helped give it a permanent home on campus with office space and staff.

Membership contributions from participating colleges and universities in the state helped support the consortium, which has received major funding through the Higher Education Policy Commission and the state legislature.

At first, faculty from both public and private institutions simply met in November at two-day workshops. In 1987 the program was expanded to include a summer institute for K-12 teachers, and in 1993 a three-day John A. Maxwell Scholar-Diplomat Seminar was added in Washington, D.C. for a dozen higher education faculty. Each program operates separately with topics chosen for their relevance and significance.

Together, the workshops and scholar-diplomat programs have included more than 4,000 faculty members and reached in excess of 10,000 students in higher education through the development of new courses, the reorganization of existing ones, the adoption of new readings, revised lectures, or outreach opportunities.

The summer program for public school teachers began with two-week sessions on the Marshall and WVU campuses. In time, however, the limited time public school teachers have during the summer vacation period has compressed the in-state institutes, now held at a state park, to a week. Longer periods of time are required for overseas travel, which occurs roughly every three years. The most recent trip was to Cuba in 2013 with earlier ones to China, Venezuela, Italy, Russia, and Mexico.

For more information about the program, visit http://facdis.wvu.edu.

-WVU-

dr/11/04/2015

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