Mary and Mark Grove
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Editor’s note: Mark Grove retired as registrar of IUPUI and his wife, Mary Grove, recently retired as director of Passport, a program jointly funded by IUPUI and Ivy Tech-Indianapolis.
You know what it is like. Sitting at Thanksgiving dinner, your aunt turns to you and asks, “Now what, exactly do you do on your job? I know you’ve told before, but this time I really want to understand.” You do your best to answer the question as succinctly as you can, knowing that the detail it requires will quickly render her overwhelmed and dazed. And this assumes that you understand your job well enough to be able to explain it to someone in the first place. Now, imagine you are asked what everyone at your department, school and university do on their jobs. And how they do it; preferably with examples, ideally in writing. Add to this having to worry about how this is translated into another language.
This is how a recent visit to Kazakhstan seemed to my wife and me: a three-week-long Thanksgiving dinner. Course upon course of questions about all aspects of American higher education combined with more food than you thought it was possible to eat.
For the past four years, IU and Taraz State University have provided the opportunity for faculty and administration at TarSU to focus on issues of curricular development, new methods of teaching and methods of administration. We were asked to travel to Taraz, a city of approximately 300,000 people in southeast Kazakhstan, to discuss issues surrounding a move to the credit-hour system. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and has allowed both brief and extended visits between our institutions.
Read about IUPUI’s Mary and Mark Grove in Kazakhstan:
E-mails from Taraz State University, Kazakhstan
For more information on Kazakhstan, go to:
http://www.greatestcities.com/Asia/Kazakhstan/Taraz_formerly_Zhambyl_city.html
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