Susan Atkins to receive the President’s Award for Leadership in International Education
One of three U-M leaders recognized for their work to strengthen global education opportunities for students, Atkins is honored in the Rising Professional category.
Susan Atkins has served as lead faculty for English Language Development at the Marsal Family School of Education since 2021. In her role, she has quadrupled enrollment in the ELD endorsement program, and revived international study-abroad programming for teacher education students after a 15-year hiatus.
Atkins developed immersive programs in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and Quito/Otavalo, Ecuador. The Ecuador program also brought the Marsal School onto the M-Compass platform, U-M’s one-stop shop for education abroad opportunities, for the first time. She helped secure nearly $80,000 in donor funding to make the experiences more financially accessible for students.
“It was a dream of mine to create an experience where our teacher candidates could have a parallel experience to that of their future multilingual students,” Atkins said. “Many of my students tell me they never thought an opportunity like this would be possible for them.”
By taking interns abroad, Atkins says, the program allows future teachers to experience what it feels like to live and learn in another language.
“There is certain learning that happens abroad that cannot be created in a classroom,” she said. “Things like the body memory of not understanding something, or feeling confused or homesick, or wondering if you are going to be able to express yourself clearly—these are things that the majority of our students who travel abroad experience.”
These opportunities, Atkins suggests, stay with students and later shape the way they approach their own classrooms as teachers. She believes the most important outcome of these programs is not simply the travel, but how the experience changes the teachers her students become.
These programs have reshaped perceptions across campus about what it means to be an educator, drawing students from public policy, the sciences, and other fields to explore how global perspectives influence their own disciplines and future work.
“I see these experiences transform students. I see their learning change. I see their perspective shift,” Atkins said. “And that, honestly, is the most fulfilling part of this work.”
This article was originally published by Michigan News.
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