Visitors from Sweden Take Lessons from CIT

By Anne-Marie Kent

Last month, a group of eight educators and administrators from the University of Southern Stockholm, Sweden, came to UMass Boston for a three-day visit with members of the Center for the Improvement of Teaching (CIT) to learn new ways of teaching in a diverse environment. Their visit was funded by the Swedish government.

CIT is an active network of faculty, staff, and students concerned with inclusive teaching and learning, academic excellence, and curriculum transformation. CIT's ongoing work includes faculty development seminars, public forums, student-faculty dialogues and conferences, faculty peer mentoring, and the promotion of scholarship on diversity, learning, and teaching.

"That they were willing to travel such a distance says a lot about the quality of CIT," said CIT director Vivian Zamel, who planned the three-day visit.

The trip was spurred by a recent visit by CIT's Esther Kingston-Mann to a symposium at Fittja, Sweden, where she discussed the book she edited with Tim Sieber, Achieving Against the Odds: How Academics Become Teachers of Diverse Students. The University of Southern Stockholm's Annick Sjögren, who was there for the symposium, remarked, "I was most struck by her statement that nowadays one cannot have quality teaching without diversity teaching."

That talk led to the visit of Sjögren and seven of her colleagues. They met with the CIT board, made visits to classes in English as a Second Language, immigration, and multi-ethnic literature, and attended a special CIT forum on race and immigration.

"From my point of view, the aim of the trip was to learn from the comparison of our two universities, which have diversity as a characteristic. Our university college was founded in 1996, and we have a lot to learn from yours, especially from CIT, which has done so much for diversity teaching," said Sjögren. "We also hope to establish a ground for eventual exchanges of teachers, researchers, or students."

Image: Raymond Liu, associate professor of management and marketing, shares in a discussion on education with Annick Sjögren of the University of Southern Stockholm at a March 4 luncheon. (Photo by Harry Brett)

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