GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP – 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 Stockton can offer students, whether they spend a semester in another country, participate in a shorter faculty-led program or collaborate from Galloway Township with students thousands of miles away.
During the 2025-2026 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 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.”
“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.
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