Meredith Blumthal
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States
Meredith Blumthal is an instructor and Director of the Food and Agribusiness Management Program in the department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. Prior to this she had an extensive career in higher education in study abroad, serving as Assistant Dean and Director of International Programs in the Grainger College of Engineering and the Director of Education Abroad for the College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. With over 15 years of experience in international education, she has a passion for bringing international perspectives into the classroom through traditional study abroad faculty-led study abroad programs, and more recently through implementing collaborative online international learning, or COIL classrooms. Meredith is very excited to lead ACE 436, the International Business Immersion Program, a course in which she was a student of, and supported for four years as the experiential learning coordinator. Now Meredith had turned it into a COIL course with a study abroad option. Meredith is a natural collaborator and enjoys working with faculty, staff and students within the department and across the college of ACES.
“COIL has been such a great learning experience for both my students and me as a faculty member because it constantly teaches all of us that diverse perspectives are so important and there can always be another way of thinking that is different from our own.“
Project Information
Partner Institutions: University of Puira (Peru), University of Veracruzana (Mexico), University of São Paulo (Brazil), University of Pisa (Italy), and Amizade Global Service Learning (Bolivia)
Length of Collaboration: 5 semesters, 5-8 weeks each