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As Matthew Troutman and Carlos Burgos stood at the airport in Mexico City and waited for the students to arrive, the parents texted: They’ve landed. Do you see them yet?
Troutman, head of school at Thomas Jefferson School, had traveled there last fall with his colleague to meet six students from China who were traveling with visas to the boarding school in Sunset Hills. Because there weren’t travel restrictions in place between the U.S. and Mexico at the time, they’d decided to meet in Mexico City, quarantine and hold classes there for 15 days, then return to St. Louis.
For some St. Louis educators, such as Troutman and Burgos, accommodating international students during the pandemic has required creativity, patience, and going the extra mile—sometimes literally.
To teach students who were living in such places as Albania, China, and Korea, the school hosted classes via Zoom. This hybrid approach allowed classmates—both remote and in-person—to attend class together.
At Washington University, more than 900 international students were unable to return to campus last year, which meant a lot of coordination around remote learning, class and office hours, new technologies, virtual sessions and events, mentoring programs, and more. Each school within the university worked to find ways to stay connected with students abroad. Law students were linked to mentors and employers stateside, the business school held learning sessions by video, and the engineering school hosted workshops.
“The most important thing that we had to think about was the social side of learning and being part of the university,” says Kurt Dirks, vice chancellor for international affairs at Wash. U. To help foster a sense of community, the university rented space in locations throughout China—Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, and Shenzhen—to create dedicated areas for Chinese students to meet, access resources, and have a place connected to campus. The centers were operated in part with the help of undergraduate student leaders based in China.
Webster University administrators also worked to address feelings of isolation and loneliness while helping students continue to work toward their degrees. The school already had significant experience with online learning, having offered remote classes since the early 1990s. Administration and faculty tried to remain flexible while working with students remotely on a one-by-one basis, sometimes rearranging or substituting required courses and labs. International students and those on campus remained in touch in other ways as well. One student leader, for instance, made every meeting for the student government association this past year while studying remotely from Indonesia.
School officials anticipate this fall’s classes will more closely resemble previous years, with vaccine requirements and loosened travel restrictions allowing for a more robust return to campus life. John Buck, dean of students at Webster University, is excited to see a number of activities come back, including study abroad programs and the tradition of new students taking an aerial photo on the quad with the large W.
Even though Wash. U. is preparing for a larger return of international students, Dirks says the school will remain flexible. “The same philosophy will apply,” he says, adding that administrators “want to do whatever [they] can to make sure those students who cannot make it here have that full experience as much as possible.”
And while it appears that staff at Thomas Jefferson School won’t have to travel to Mexico City again this semester, Troutman says that if it were necessary, he “would love to do that trip” again.
