International Education Week sparks worldwide engagement, international student awareness

Last summer, while Jami Miller, a fourth-year international relations and Spanish double major, was taking a business writing class, she had the opportunity to do a cultural diversity project with two of her classmates, both of whom were from China. The experience allowed Miller to get to know people she most likely wouldn’t have met otherwise.

“I hadn’t realized how many international students we have [here at Davis] because I feel like I was one of a handful of native students in that classroom,” Miller said. “It’s cool though because you don’t realize that you don’t need to just study abroad to get a completely different experience, sometimes it comes to you. You have to be open to it because it could be really cool.”

UC Davis is home to more than 8,400 international students and scholars, a number that far outweighs the 1,300 or so students that study abroad each year. Not only that, but UC Davis maintains around 150 partnerships with institutions in 45 countries around the world.

The internationally-focused intentions of UC Davis fall under the responsibility of Global Affairs, which encompasses programs including Study Abroad and Services for International Students and Scholars. This year, Global Affairs hosted its 15th International Education Week.

“International Education Week provides an excellent opportunity for international students at UC Davis to share about their home countries, experiences and perspectives of being in the United States,” said Joanna Regulska, the Vice Provost and Associate Chancellor of Global Affairs and a professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies. “In return, they also get to meet with and hear from other international students and students from California and around the U.S. about their experiences and perspectives.”

International Education Week, which ran from Nov. 13 to 17, is set by the U.S. Departments of State and Education to celebrate the benefits of global education and international exchange.

“This year, we have events ranging from international grant writing and career workshops to international game and karaoke nights,” Regulska said. “There is a film screening, language fair, storytelling workshop, study abroad information session, calligraphy class, potluck dinner and even an international fair to wrap up the week at the International Center with food, student performances and cultural exhibits.”

Miller, who is currently a student assistant for Global Affairs, is no stranger to engaging with new cultures. She previously spent time studying abroad in Peru and plans to study abroad again in Chile to finish up her Spanish degree. She notes that International Education Week isn’t just for international students to come and learn, but domestic students as well.

“It’s hard to reach the entire student body here, [and] we still kind of see a divide between international students and students who are from the United States,” Miller said. “I think this week and these programs in general will really help push people together and show them that there are ways to learn about each other and learn about each other’s cultures and everything.”

Another student who appreciates International Education Week is Edward Xia, a second-year economics major who is also part of the Global Ambassador Mentorship Program. Edward, an international student from China, was a mentee his freshman year and is now a mentor for the program.

“We have five mentees for each mentor,” Xia said. “Basically we will introduce [them to] the UC Davis community, the diversity on campus, the American culture and the Davis local activities and lifestyle before they come to Davis. When they arrive at Davis we prepare many events for them such as the kickoff event, or a Halloween party, or the current International Education Week for them to get more involved into the UC Davis community.”

Xia mentors students from all over the world: one from Mexico, two from China, one from Indonesia and another from India. He has hosted activities with them like hang out sessions where they drink tea and chat, and has even taken them to the iconic Black Bear Diner downtown, which he says was quite the hit.

“Anyone, any race, any gender, any background can apply to be a mentor [or mentee] in this program,” Xia said. “We are a really diverse group.”

UC Davis International Education Week and the Global Ambassadors program are just two programs run by Global Affairs that help foster understanding and engagement between different people from different backgrounds in an increasingly interconnected community and world.

“[The] world is becoming more globalized, and society is more diverse,” Xia said. “We really need to introduce to the whole campus culture from all over the world, because we have students from all over the world.”

Written By: Marlys Jeane — features@theaggie.org

A look at how students can reevaluate their sleep habits

Students across the UC Davis campus can all too often be found melting into uncomfortable chairs for their scheduled or impromptu midday naps.

While it could take an especially taxing week to rattle the rigid sleep schedules of some students, other students may regularly have difficulty getting enough sleep, either due to behavior and stress or because of a diagnosable sleep disorder. To address these problems, UC Davis has several outlets for helping, treating and counseling students who are seeking to correct unhealthy sleep patterns.

The most readily accessible options are offered by Student Health and Counselling Services (SHCS) within the Student Health and Wellness Center.

“Our medical providers help screen for medical conditions that may interfere with restful sleep and take a careful history to help identify possible contributing factors,” said Dr. Cindy Schorzman, a medical director for SHCS.

Schorzman emphasized that students can be most successful in developing healthier sleep patterns when they direct their attention to small variables that they can control. However, this type of self-evaluation may prove difficult for students to conduct objectively, which is why seeking input from medical providers may be a useful step for students looking to influence their sleep with behavioral changes.

“They often start to address these [problems] by recommending sleep hygiene techniques, which include getting up the same time every day, avoiding substances that can interfere with sleep and avoiding the use of electronic devices while in bed,” Schorzman said.

Meeting with these medical providers or the counselors at North Hall can help students find the help they are searching for in assessing their sleep patterns. However, Schorzman clarified that the help offered through these channels is mainly catered toward students who are experiencing sleep troubles as a result of external factors, such as midterms and finals, rather than sleep disorders.

Since sleep issues can negatively impact many aspects of someone’s general health and productivity, considering how other physical and mental health complications either cause or worsen sleep deprivation is an important factor to study. In other words, it is a process of discovering what came first, the chicken or the egg.

“Sleep issues may be secondary to other conditions, including mental health concerns such as anxiety or depression, or physical health concerns such as pain disrupting sleep or sleep apnea,” Schorzman said. “Primary sleep disorders are less common and suspicion of these will often lead to a specialist referral.”

With these more serious cases involving actual sleep disorders, patients may require more specialized treatment through sleep medicine professionals. This is available through the UC Davis Health System at the Sleep Medicine Consultation Clinic in Sacramento, which deals with sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, narcolepsy, sleepwalking and REM sleep behavior disorder. The clinic’s Sleep Disorders Laboratory conducts sleep studies to help diagnose these disorders.

“In sleep studies, we measure several physiological parameters and take video recordings monitoring breathing, heart rate, or physical movements as someone sleeps,” said Dr. Matthew Chow, an assistant clinical professor of neurology and sleep medicine. “We look for disruptions in these parameters, which can be associated with various sleep disorders.”

Meanwhile, on the third floor of the Student Health and Wellness Center, Emilia Aguirre, UC Davis’s mental well-being and health promotion specialist, works to provide resources for students seeking input on the many health problems that can permeate into every aspect of daily life, including sleep.

“My focus is to foster a health-promoting campus environment that enables students to succeed academically and achieve life-long mental well-being,” Aguirre said. “For sleep health, this means advocating for a campus environment which supports student sleep. At Health Education and Promotion, we provide students with the education and resources so that they can aim to get seven to nine hours of sleep each night.”

Aguirre listed several of the information pages and resources that are available for students online. These include lists of tips for healthy sleep habits, blogs on sleep-related topics, an online program for conquering insomnia, the UC Davis Nap Map and even a power nap class that is offered at the ARC.

Camilia Zaher, a fourth-year psychology major and a Health Education and Promotion student coordinator, works closely with Aguirre and is involved with campaigns that help promote sleep health.

“This year, our Sleep Campaign [‘Be Wise, Shut your Eyes’] was held on the week of Oct. 30 to Nov. 3,” Zaher said. “Our main goals are to increase awareness among students about the importance of getting seven to nine hours of consistent, restful, sleep and to encourage students to make sleeping a priority in their schedules by reducing use of technology and exposure to blue light before bed.”

Zaher has worked on many projects, including collaborating with the Yoga Club to promote before-bed relaxation methods, increasing messaging at locations like the dining commons and residence halls and even having professors give talks on the matter.

“We held two crash course events about sleep that were lead by psychology professors,” Zaher said. “Professor Adele Seelke […] spoke to students about the neurobiology of sleep and how it changes across development [and] Professor Camelia Hostinar […] spoke to us about sleep and its role in health, emotional well-being, and academic performance.”

By this time of the quarter, stress and anxiety levels among students are hitting their peak, which can only accentuate poor sleep habits and negatively impact their academic performance. If students feel that they need to reengineer their routine from square one, it is important for them to know that there are resources available, but it is their job to decide that they want to make a change.

“It is important for people to take a self-inventory,” Chow said. “If your sleep situation is causing daytime dysfunction, or if in a boring situation, if you fall asleep, it’s because your body is going to the way it wants to be. You should be bored and awake, not bored and asleep […] Sleep is truth.”

Written by: Benjamin Porter — features@theaggie.org

A Multilingual Look at Radical Literary and Educational Innovation

“Une Si Longue Lettre,” a novel by Senegalese author Mariama Ba, is often referred to as a “liberatory feminist classic” in the words of Tobias Warner. Warner, a professor in the UC Davis Department of French and Italian, has researched this novel extensively, tracking its translation from the original French into Wolof, a comparison which yields more complex takeaways than the English text alone. It is precisely in the space between languages and geopolitical boundaries, applying this comparative, and often radical, literary methodology that Warner finds his academic niche.

“Une si Longue Lettre” is more easily interpreted as a feminist liberation from polygamy and patriarchy, but in a class with Warner, one may believe they have discovered a more nuanced and elusive feminism and prerogative in general. This novel and the experience of coming to one’s own conclusions on it is a rich lens from which one can learn about Warner. Although he earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Warner has found himself working in the French department.

“Almost all of my teaching is in the French department because that’s where I’m housed […] that’s very typical for people who train in comparative literature and in language departments,” Warner said. “I teach a lot of texts, I teach some of the texts that I write on but I teach some texts from North Africa, from West Africa, from the Caribbean.”

As a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, Warner chose to focus on texts in French, English and Wolof and is fluent in all three languages. Wolof is spoken by 80 percent of the Senegalese population, although French is the nation’s official language. As French is the language of government and some institutions, Warner identifies fertile grounds to research on the politics of language.

“My work looks at the politics of language in Senegalese literature,” Warner said. “So I look at the history of a debate between writers who are working in French and those who are working in Wolof and I look at that in a kind of longer time frame. So I look at how that debate traces back to the colonial period, particularly colonial education, the uses of French literature in colonial education and I trace the history of this tension all the way up to essentially the present. So what makes the research interesting is that it’s not a phenomenon that’s unique to Senegal.”

Warner identified two tendencies in the Senegalese literature that he researches. One is, in his words, more normative. In this tendency, authors endeavor to create a standardized literary history similar to those found elsewhere in the world.

“One of the ways in which it’s often framed is that it’s about cultural authenticity, about decolonization and I affirm all of those things, but I also suggest that what’s at stake is really the definition of literature itself,” Warner said.

The other tendency is more radical, according to Warner. In this one, writers experiment with alternate modes of iterating their work.

“They could take a novel and they could explore something new with it,” Warner said. “They could write a work that isn’t just in one language but is in a couple different languages. They could shoot films that were multilingual. They could makes works that were for radio as well as for print […] what the politics of language does on the one hand, it sort of makes a literary tradition that is very similar to others but on the other hand it’s great space for writers and translators to just really experiment with what literature is, who it’s for, what kinds of discursive practices can be literary.”

Warner is engaged in a deep critical study of the nature of literature along the lines of post colonization, cultural production and the linguistics that illustrate it. Because of his research, he often finds himself interacting with primary sources and archival documents. Among these documents of colonial education, Warner is fascinated with the debates engaged with by colonial educators around instructing on literature. Teachers in the colonial period assigned to students under the imperial regime went so far as to question these students’ capacity for literature. Their discourse was manifested in an incredibly authoritative educational regime, something upon which Warner has reflected considerably.

“I often think about my teaching as shaped by a reaction to [studying colonial education],” Warner said. “Saying, rather than thinking about how to impose a particular view on students, from above, how can I take the classroom and create more space in which students can come to their own readings, their own conclusions? So sometimes that means that I’m a little bit less directive than other professors and I recognize that but for me that’s where that comes from. So it comes from studying closely a very, very authoritarian system of education causing me to reflect too on what my role is as a teacher in systems of power as well.”

It may now be clear why reconsidering the goals of the text “Une si Longue Lettre” in Warner’s classroom is the best way to get to know him as an educator. He is rigorously anti-authoritarian and entrenched in a politics of language that is often unclear and blurry, as traditions and histories become when sullied by imperialist forces. Warner enters the classroom eager to learn from his students, resistant to lecturing and an almost painfully attentive listener. He extracts original thought and committed engagement from his students through rich discussion. Although it’s often difficult to deeply study African languages due to a lack of institutional presence, Warner finds his 10-year commitment to studying Wolof and his research abroad to be a more honest investigation into the field of comparative literature.

“It’s more of a dialogue between and across languages that interests me,” Warner said. “I think that studying it as a dialogue is probably more faithful to the way in which that debate has actually happened.”

This dialogue is essential to the nature of colonial projects from their beginning stages until indirect rule. As colonial regimes insisted on divisiveness within the colonial state, compartmentalization of religious and ethnic groups through standardization of language took place. In Senegal, similar forms of Wolof were spoken among Animist and Muslim groups.

“The ability to say this is Wolof and this is distinct from French, that distinction too is a historical one,” Warner said. “So even the distinction between Wolof and other closely related African languages is at least partially the result of missionary linguists who wanted to maximize the differences between communities, one of which was Islamic and another was Animist, and so they called them different languages and studied them as different languages[…]to be sure there were differences, but often the distinctions between our ability even to speak of where Wolof begins is part of the history we’re studying. So it’s tricky to then say, ‘this is entirely different or we can entirely tell.’ Language is messy, but that’s what’s interesting about it.”

When Warner was 20, he traveled to Senegal as an exchange student. Speaking French, he thought he would be equipped in the classroom and abroad. However, he vividly remembers his first experience in a university class.

“I remember being in my class […] and before the lecture began, the professor would be talking about a famous Senegalese novel written in French and discussion before that was mostly if not entirely in Wolof,” Warner said. “Both among the students and among the professor as well. So once class began it switched over from Wolof to French.”

For Warner, this was the spark that ignited his academic and professional goals up until this present moment.

“I became curious about the history of [language switching] and how literature came to be written in French and how institutions such as universities and educational systems contribute to that,” Warner said.

Warner manages to be at once committed to his research and his classes in the French department. He makes efforts to incorporate the comparative methods from his research to the texts read in his French classes, whether through looking at colonial documents or reading North African, West African, Caribbean or French literature with the breadth of historical and geopolitical awareness they require. These more technical approaches are maintained without loss of the emotional and social lessons Warner has learned from the social realities of colonial education.

“It’s about creating situations where students kind of engage with texts and come to their own conclusions, their own readings,” Warner said. “I think there are ways you can bring that expertise in but I think it’s important to do so in a way that supports student learning and supports student insight and analysis rather than dropping a preformed idea.”

Written by: Stella Sappington — features@theaggie.org