Vanier at CBIE Annual Conference on International Education

Vanier College is pleased to announce that Alena Perout, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Science, Melodie Hicks from the Nursing program and Brandee Diner, Coordinator of Environmental and Wildlife Management will be speaking at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Bureau of International Education (CBIE 2022) on Monday November 14th in Toronto. The conference brings together international education professionals from across Canada and around the world.

Under this year’s theme, “Finding Balance,” the conference will address how international education can recover from the past two years of the pandemic. In particular, it will explore international education as an interconnected system of economic, social, ethical and environmental considerations and share examples of projects that seek to integrate these elements.

The Vanier presentation entitled “Developing Competencies Through Partnerships in Africa: Pre-departure and Internships in Malawi and Namibia” will share Vanier’s experience with two projects in Africa, in particular.

The first is “Overcoming Barriers by Crossing Borders: A partnership with Kamuzu University of Health Sciences” which comes out of a long-term nursing project with Malawi that was going strong until 2020 when it was cancelled due to the pandemic. In getting the project going again, Vanier discovered that some of the communication that was developed virtually could have an essential place once students are able to travel again. In fact, increased levels of intercultural competency, improved pre-departure training and more first-hand knowledge has emerged as nursing students interact online with African partners.

The second project, “Developing Conservation Competencies in Namibia: The Cheetah Ecosystem” looks at how Vanier students can develop sustainability-related transversal competencies while completing their end-of-program internship in Namibia. This project will involve students in the Environmental and Wildlife Management program as well as students in Animal Health Technology. In this case a very different virtual mobility is used to ensure that students are well prepared for their time spent working with Cheetah but also working within the Cheetah environment in Namibia.

“The pandemic has taught us lessons in international education and international exchanges that we never knew we could learn,” says Alena Perout, Vanier Dean, Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Science.