A conversation with Melinda Lewis, International Teaching Awardee

After Melinda Lewis led her students on a long, muddy hike to the spring that supplies water to a rural Costa Rican community, an undergraduate turned to her, overwhelmed by the realization that without the infrastructure they were studying, people would have to make that arduous journey every time they needed water. The experience moved the student to tears, tears that marked an understanding the student would carry for a lifetime.   

Memorable moments like this, tearful or otherwise, are exactly what Lewis hopes her students will encounter abroad. Lewis, a professor of practice in the School of Social Welfare, leads groups of University of Kansas social work students to Costa Rica each summer, guiding them through programs lasting roughly two weeks that blend academic rigor with transformative real-world experiences. Her work won recognition in the fall of 2024 as she received the International Affairs Advisory Board International Teaching Award.

The class she leads, International Social Work: A Costa Rican Perspective, typically enrolls about ten students. Both undergraduate and graduate students join the program, learning side by side in a unique cross-level experience. We spoke with Lewis about those trips and her hopes for teaching and inspiring future social workers at KU.  

Your trips to Costa Rica benefit from a longstanding partnership between KU and the University of Costa Rica, with colleagues from UCR coordinating logistics, building community connections, and helping to create experiences that would not be possible otherwise. How do you see this partnership play out?

ML: I get to be the faculty lead for a program that is at its heart a partnership between these two premier educational institutions in two different parts of our hemisphere. It's honestly hard for me to think about what doing study abroad without the depth of connection between KU and UCR would be like. 
I don't even know how I would pull off doing study abroad without the institutionalization that exists in this relationship. I may be the only person from Kansas who's getting on that plane with these students, but when I get there, we also have Jayhawks who are going to meet me there, full-time KU employees who are Costa Ricans.

When your group goes to Costa Rica, you don’t stick to well-traveled paths. You went to Guácimo, for example, a rural town that is hours away and far from big-city conveniences.

ML: Yes, it is not on most people's itinerary when they're going to Costa Rica. Also, the time it takes to travel there, if it’s possible at all, depends mostly on how clear the roads are of mudslides. But it was so worthwhile. Part of what we do through this study abroad experience is help social work students from KU understand what social work practice looks like in Costa Rica and then understand how the UCR Social Work program prepares students for that practice. Guácimo was one of the sites where they were training their social work students.

For our students, it was not only the highlight of the trip in recent years, but several students said it was the highlight of their entire social work education, because they got to then see in real life what working as a part of an interdisciplinary team in community-engaged practice looks like. There is no good substitute for being able to be in the work, to really see it, to really get to hear from not just the faculty member that is leading it, but the people who are experiencing it and the students who are driving it.

How is social work different in Costa Rica and why is that important for KU social work students to take in?

ML: Social work in Costa Rica is much less clinically and therapeutically focused than in the United States. Social work is very community engaged, community embedded, and multi-level, where you're working with individuals, yes, but also trying to change systems and develop organizations.

What is the magic behind international education? What makes it so powerful?

ML: It's almost like a fire in which you can forge this clearer sense of yourself as a learner. It strips away the things that can just get in the way of really being fully immersed in a learning experience, and it de-centers the U.S. lens that I think can make it really hard for students to see where we really sit in the world. When we lift the “screen” that can make it hard for us to see from others’ perspectives and through other lenses, we spark the kind of insights that students need to be able to thrive in a global future. When students are in another country, they learn about themselves, and they learn to be effective across difference.

Do you have any creative ways to bring these experiences into the classroom back at KU?

ML: Yes, but it’s an ongoing challenge. I do that because of my commitment to economic justice, and just studying abroad, even with the supports from the university and from the School of Social Welfare, specifically, it's still a financial lift for students. So, it's important to me that we find ways to bring global learning experiences to students, even if they can't get on a plane.  

What has winning the International Teaching Award meant to you?
 
ML: It has really helped me think of myself as an international teacher. I mean, to be totally honest, I don't think I felt that way or saw myself that way before—I was more an educator who happens to lead a study abroad course. And I think that getting that recognition has catalyzed my thinking about ways to pull in the tremendous value of international learning into other spaces in which I sit at the university. 

Watch: View Melinda Lewis’ talk as she received the International Teaching Award.