Classroom Visits and Fairs
As the busy fall season for promoting study abroad programming gets underway in virtual spaces, you can find us at The Forum on Education Abroad's Study Abroad Fair on September 10th. We are also on Luna Fairs and we hope to see you on one of those platforms.
As a small team wearing all the hats in the organization, the number of individual fairs, variety of platforms being used for them, range of formats they are taking, and need for specialized content with quick turnaround have made planning more challenging than usual. We are unable to fulfill every institution's individualized requests for content. We work hard to keep all of our program information available and updated online, and have committed to The Forum, Luna, and virtual class visits to maximize resources, opportunities, and the spirit of camaraderie and mutual support in this difficult time.
Visit Our Virtual Classroom!
We are hosting 3 classroom visits to give you the opportunity to hear about our programs, meet our teachers, and have your questions answered!
No prior Arabic experience required, but hopefully, you'll walk away with some new Moroccan Darija skills!
Classes will be:
Wednesday, September 16 at 11:00 am Eastern
Friday, September 25 at 9:30 am Eastern
Monday, October 12 at 2:00 pm Eastern
Are you having a Study Abroad Fair or Virtual Campus Visits?
If you have not already been in touch with us about a live or asynchronous presence at your fair, or if you would like a virtual campus visit, we are thrilled to attend and to share everything we have made with you.
Just email us at edabroad@amideast.org!
Why Community-Based Learning over Internships?
We're often asked whether whether we have internships. And when we say no, people usually move on without asking why.
While we have and continue to run internships on a customized basis, it's something about which we have complicated feelings.
We are an organization that has been working in one part of the Global South for 70 years. When we welcome young program participants from the US into our host countries, we have a responsibility to work with deliberate awareness of the respective positionalities of our host community members and our participants.
On a spectrum weighing benefit to the individual participant in an internship versus the host community, the participant is the primary beneficiary. Given the legacies of colonialism generally and how they continue to play out in education abroad specifically, we take to heart the very stark difference and responsibility, articulated by far smarter colleagues than we, between supporting intercultural competence and intercultural humility.
Internships such as they are in the US and some other contexts are not so readily available in our host countries, can require a particularly intensive collaboration among organizations, and, we believe, should be available firstly to young people from our host communities. When we can support equity in this way, we are pleased to do so. As education abroad in the US is, however, ultimately a relationship driven by clients, internship programming rarely allows us to seek this ideal.
Community-based learning (CBL) continues to form the basis of our approach to supporting participants in work experiences abroad. It is available to participants in semester programs in both Morocco and Jordan, and is the entirety of our summer program, Action AMIDEAST: Social Innovation Abroad in Tunisia. Guided by gifted instructors, our CBL courses are designed to be context-specific and critical, supporting participants to interrogate the systems they encounter vis-a-vis their worksite placements.
Students who do not take CBL but are committed to volunteering are welcome to speak with staff for support finding viable opportunities. Additional opportunities to participate in short community service projects are available to all students as program activities.
Virtual, Onsite, and Hybrid: Customized and Faculty-Led Programs with AMIDEAST Education Abroad
AMIDEAST Education Abroad is thrilled to put AMIDEAST's eLearning platform, AMIDEAST Online, to work for customized and faculty-led programs and for all the new possibilities to engage its mission to help build mutual understanding among peoples.
Spring 2021 Onsite AMIDEAST Education Abroad Programs in Morocco and Jordan
Application deadline for onsite programs and scholarships is October 15th.
While the situation remains fluid, AMIDEAST continues to plan for onsite spring 2021 semesters in both Rabat and Amman according to the academic calendars published online.
And while we didn't give the critical tweak to our ac year '20-'21 financial policies a brand name (our bad), it still stands: participants in onsite programs (and their institutions) have up to a week prior to the start of program to withdraw without financial penalty (including program deposits). For the spring '21 term, that's by 5 p.m. EST on Saturday, 2 January 2021.
Unlike the US, Morocco and Jordan have waged aggressive and model national COVID-19 responses that have worked successfully to flatten the curve and contain hotspots. Accordingly, AMIDEAST EdAbroad's "COVID plan" is exactly what the governments of Morocco and Jordan dictate as reopening plans proceed - compliance is required to operate and what we have seen in the US is not normative in most of the rest of the world. As of now, both countries continue to impose a near total lockdown of their borders. As those restrictions are slowly and carefully relaxed in the coming months, both countries are likely to limit entry of foreign nationals per the situation of COVID from country to country around the world at any given time, require COVID test results obtained within a particular window prior to travel, and require testing, monitoring, and tracing once in country. Social distancing, masks, and essential hygiene will obviously be required.
We will continue to keep you updated as the situation develops and we learn more from our host country governments. US partners should be prepared that that host country anti-COVID measures are laws and not options, visa requirements may become a lot more difficult for US passport holders, that we all have to live with a certain level of uncertainty, and that participants may not be able to engage in independent travel before, during, or after their programs.
Please keep in mind that our semester programs are now hybrid, so students need not be onsite to participate, learn, and experience.
Spring 2021 AMIDEAST Education Abroad Virtual Learning and Cultural Exchange
Your institution can expand their academic offerings and their engagement with the MENA region
Classes may be taken individually, in combinations up to 11 credits, or as an entire semester
Are you a student taking 11 credits or less with AMIDEAST?
$200 flat fee per credit hour for students enrolled in community colleges and tribal colleges and universities
All other students pay the rate per credit hour of their home institutions (in-state/out-of-state rates apply)
Spring 2021 Virtual Learning and Cultural Exchange Program and scholarships for virtual open September 15th!
Want to know more about the classes we offer? Check this out!
