Applied Learning
This pages includes an overview of a variety of applied learning activities that I provide for my students after a short reflection on the role applied learning plays in my teaching. Additional resources and evidence are link throughout this page. Many of the boxes contain additional information on the topic in the form of mini slide shows. The first such slide show in the next section on my Croatia class shows pictures from the 7 travel courses.
a
Applied Learning Reflection
Applying my knowledge and learning with as well as from people has always been a passion of mine due to my upbringing. I realized early on that I was able to learn from the two different cultures that created my surroundings in interesting ways that allowed me to understand more of the world than my peers who did not have this chance. My passion for applied learning and particularly international and cross-cultural experiences go back to my high school exchange year in Eureka, California. It was such an influential experience for me in so many ways that I try to create applied learning opportunities for my students whenever possible. In a sense, my students would not be learning as much and as well as they do if I was not providing this very labor-intensive form of pedagogy. In my courses my students get to engage in simulations (Politica) and virtual cross-cultural communication (Soliya), and international collaboration projects (COIL). In addition, I have taught a faculty-led travel course to Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina 7 times and have created a new travel course along the U.S. northern and southern borders that I hope to teach in 2024. In addition, I try to ensure that my students gain hands-on knowledge through internships (GEP), research projects (Kilmer and Presidential Scholar), and dialogue facilitation training intendent studies. Besides ensuring that I help my students with their internship preparation and integration into their studies, I also spend a lot of time advising students before and during their time abroad and help ensure that their credits transfer and get counted after they return.
I am not covering all applied learning activities that my students engage in as it would be too much information. I am focusing on the most important and impactful activities. Creating and implementing applied learning is one of my favorite things about my job and I cannot imagine a future where I will not continue this work. I already have a number of ideas that are just waiting to be implemented. Most immediately, I am work on integrating Collaborative Online International Learning (SUNY COIL Center) projects into most of my upper-division courses after my great first experience with testing it in my WAYS 103 class. This will require me to find instructors in other countries that teach similar or complementary classes. I am excited to start this search and will focus on regions in the world to which our program does not provide connections like it does to Europe and the MENA region. There is some connection in the IS program to issues related to Latin America in the Politics offerings for the major, but that could certainly be expanded. Meaningful learning opportunities connecting our students with people and cultures from Asia and Africa are currently lacking and will be my point of start.
The applied learning I provide allows my students to build resumes that make them competitive in graduate school applications and successful on the job market.
"[Michael] helped me gain valuable experiences outside the classroom, giving me a distinguishing graduate school application." - Scott Boyce, PhD student at Indiana U Bloomington
Taught Fall 2017
Syllabus POLS 200 Fall 2017
POLS 347V Violent Dissolution of Yugoslavia
I taught this travel course every summer 2012 - 2017. Due to our demographic changes on campus, fewer students are now able to afford a 3-week travel course. I tried to organize the course for 2018 and 2019 but fell just shy of the necessary minimum number of students. I was in the process of trying it again for 2020 when Covid hit. I have high hopes that I will get to teach this course again due to the increased funding and grant money available for travel courses. I hope to teach this course again after my sabbatical during summer 2024. Since my teaching of this course falls technically just outside of the time period under review, I am not including it in my regular courses; however, I cannot discuss my teaching and its impact at Potsdam without including this course. Since it is my most involved applied learning opportunity, I am including the course here. The slide show provides you with some pictures from each of
our trips and many of the locations we visit.
This course is by far the most labor intensive course I teach. During
the three weeks in Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina,
I am on duty almost all day every day, which is certainly exhausting,
but almost every time when the course is completed, I come to the
conclusion that all the time and effort is well spent. I have heard
repeatedly from students that this course has changed their lives.
While this is certainly in part an overly enthusiastically expressed
sentiment, more than one student has changed or added a major,
has conducted independent research or written a senior seminar
paper (senior honors paper at SLU) based on this course. Two
students have applied to graduate school based on this experience
and one of them wrote about the experience of women in the war in
Croatia for her Master’s thesis at Queen’s University in Northern Ireland.
In this course students survey the history of Croatia, Yugoslavia and the
Balkan region with a concentration on the 20th and 21st centuries in
addition to a survey of the history of Dubrovnik with a special focus on
Dubrovnik’s economic and diplomatic role in the Adriatic Sea. Students
get to understand terms such as fascism, socialism, and communism
better and engage in an analysis of variations of socialism in the
Eastern Bloc with a focus on Yugoslavia’s “workers’ self-management”.
In addition, student engage in a critical analysis of explanatory
frameworks for the Yugoslav Wars with a focus on both structural and
agent-centric explanations as well as ethnic and civic nationalism on the
individual and societal levels. Besides these more standard aspects of the study of war, this course pays special attention to the role of women during the war and thereafter and encourages students to contemplate the varying frameworks for positive and negative human rights in Yugoslavia and Croatia, with a concentration on women, Serbs, and the LGBT+ community. Other terms central to students’ learning in this course are war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, political legitimacy and effectiveness, separatism and irredentism, collective memory and reconciliation, social marginalization, ethnic hatred and others. The course allows for experiential learning opportunities such as understanding of Croatia/Balkan culture and societal norms, understanding of living during a time of war (in part through eye witness reports of victims of war on location), understanding of difficulties facing post-war societies, esp. Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina.
When discussing war in a classroom, it is impossible to allow students to truly experience the personal and communal effects of war. While we can provide our students with all the available qualitative and quantitative evidence, standing in the location where the conflict occurred and listening to a soldier, former politician, or “everyday citizen” describing the events in great personal detail is something fundamentally different. With our extensive reading list providing the foundation for understanding, a large variety of experiential learning activities will lead to a more meaningful understanding of this war in particular. It will also allow for a broadened
horizon and changed perspective when analyzing current and historical wars elsewhere in the world. Students who have participated in this course in the past have said this course has also changed their perspective on life through a newfound understanding of war and human suffering in more general terms (vs. “first world problems”) and the importance of dialogue and tolerance in society as well as an increased ability to evaluate extremist ideology more critically.
In 2016, I added an amazing and very important component to the course. We now also
travel to Sarajevo and Srebrenica during our stay in Bosnia and Hercegovina. Our fist
attempt at this worked overall extremely well and being able to visit a city in which the
different groups lived and again live peacefully with each and to contrast this with the
genocide that occurred in Srebrenica is a powerful experiences. In 2016, we tried to
accomplish this task in 2 days but realized that we need more time and made this
excursion 3 days in 2017. While this is emotionally the most taxing aspect of the course, the
experience of witnessing the results of genocide first hand by visiting the memorial site, some of the locations where the killings occurred, the warehouse where thousands of people waited for their death, and the excellent museum that opened in 2017 is invaluable. Especially the opportunity to talk to a survivor of the genocide seems to leave a deep impact on the students. This experience requires significant content and emotional preparation, but I think our new approach here is a big success.
Since travel courses do not participate in the student evaluations regular classes do, I am providing you with a detailed description of all aspects of the course, which includes discussion of pedagogy and learning outcomes among other things.
Syllabus
This application includes detailed information about every aspect of the trip.
"Anytime I talk about my study abroad experience, I always start off by saying the same four words, "it changed my life." There has been no other experience in my life that has had such an influential impact on who I am as a person and who I strive to be in my own life and as a citizen of this world. I was able to study abroad in Dubrovnik, Croatia twice where I learned about the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. The uniqueness of my experience has set me on the path that I am currently on today, is the reason why I am in graduate school studying Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, and has catapulted me into truly finding what makes me a passionate individual. Sometimes there are no words that exist to describe how thankful I am to have been given those opportunities. I can say with full honesty, that I do not know who I would be or where life might have taken me if it was not for those experiences. With that being said, I owe so much to the dedicated professor who made all of this possible. Without his hard work and love for his students, myself and so many of my peers would have missed out on this chance of a lifetime. It is not very often that you meet a professor who is able to change your life in this way. To sum it all up, there is nothing more valuable than being given the chance to study abroad, experience the world through someone else's eyes, all the while expanding your own knowledge and outlook of the world."
"I traveled to Dubrovnik, Croatia to study the Violent Dissolution of Former Yugoslavia. Going into the trip I wanted to gain insight into a new culture. I found that I gained much more than I expected. Traveling to Croatia and studying the history of the region, the current people, and their culture impacted me emphatically. One quote summarized the understanding I gained “Out of tragedy you can find beauty.”"
"I really loved having the opportunity to be able to explore another country and its history in a political context, especially from an instructor who actually grew up there - if added another dimension to the experience for me. I think the work load was a bit hard at times, but it is easy to keep up with as long as you participate in the class discussions and talk to the other students who are with you. I also think the grading was fair, and while I wish sometimes the questions for the readings had been posted earlier, once we got caught up with being in a different country, it was a lot easier to keep up. Overall I really enjoyed the course and felt as if the readings went along well with what we discussed in class, along with the amazing tours from Ivana that we got to take as well!"
"Being able to study abroad at such a young age and for such an affordable price was nothing compared to witnessing up close what recovering from violent conflict looks like. Talking with real people from the Yugoslav collapse - not just reading about it in a textbook - gave me a lot of
insight about how I want to do my part in shaping the world. Since then, I've been accepted into one of the best public policy graduate programs in the country where I'll be furthering my research on how conflict and political instability impact peoples' lives."
Since Fall 2014, my students in POLS 140 Introduction to International Relations are given the opportunity to learn about and engage in cross-cultural communication with the help of trained facilitators. After careful preparation, my students engage in 8 weeks of facilitated dialogue with students from the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Europe to allow for constructive engagement with difference and deep intercultural learning. Student go through a 6-step process (see below) over the course of the 8 weeks of Soliya's amazing curriculum that has been developed since 2001. This experience often has quite transformative impacts on my students and changes how they interact with each other in the classroom. On the left you see a short slide show
that highlights the impacts of the program among SUNY Potsdam students based on pre- and post surveys. Since many students do not have the means to study abroad and only have limited opportunities to interact with people with other cultures in a meaningful way, this program is one of the most important foundational building blocks of our high quality International Studies and Politics majors.
If students have already taken Soliya's Global Connect in Dr. Hinckley's class, my students participate in the follow-up program called Global Collaborate, where students again engage in dialogue and then develop a collaborative approach to spearhead a public information and social media campaign. By now around 600 students have benefited from participating in facilitated dialogue and some of our students have been trained as dialogue facilitators. I have myself gone through the facilitation training and help facilitate dialogue groups (my groups never include SUNY Potsdam students) most semesters. As long as I teach this course and as long as Soliya provides us with seats for our students at no cost, I will continue to include this applied learning activity. This program is connected to both our antiracism dialogues and the First Year Connect (1YC) Program.
Stage 1
Orientation
Low trust, high anxiety, getting to know each other
Stage 3
Learning Through Difference
More trust, relationships build, difference is experienced, communication skill building
Stage 5
Forward-looking Brainstorming
Practice more dialogue, brainstorm how this can be applied to their lives
Stage 2
Group Definition & Polite Moderation
Trust builds, polite shallow conversations, community building
Stage 4
Sincere Transformation
Trust high, dialogue becomes mode of conversation, deep learning and sharing
Stage 6
Winding Down
Time to further the relationship friendship building, reflection
Politica -
International Relations Simulation
In my POLS 140 course, my students get the opportunity to engage with each other in 5 rounds of an international politics simulation in the world of “Politica”. These simulation allow students to apply concepts/strategies learned in class. Based on the simulation in “International Relations in Action. A World Politics Simulation” by Brock Tessman, I have created new scenarios myself for this class such as immigration and COVID-19. In small groups, student represent different countries in specific roles such as diplomat and chief decision maker. After they complete each round of the simulation, students write a short paper in which they use concepts and theories from class to analyze what occurred during the simulation. The introduction of the simulations and the corresponding reflection papers have worked extremely well. Students report repeatedly how much they enjoy the simulations, and the reflection papers provide them with a non-test-based way to show me what they have learned. In addition, students mention the value of being able to interact in such an ongoing way with their peers in class.
Border Course
Crossings: Borders, Communities, and Lives
This course is designed after my highly successful travel course to Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It provides students with an opportunity to experience what they have learned in the real world within my area of expertise. In this two-week travel course, we compare the northern to the southern border of the United States by looking at the different immigration histories and forms of securitization of migrants. First we travel along the northern border of the United States in
the North Country where we will visit U.S. and Canadian border enforcement, refugee and migrant organizations in Cornwall and Montreal, and the Akwesasne on both sides of the border to better understand the lives and dynamics along the border. Next, we will travel to NYC to focus on the immigration stories and historical sights. During our time in NYC students get to experience a variety of ways of learning ranging from a conversation with Assembly Woman Rodneyse Bichotte to talking about the immigration challenges of Haitian immigrants, to a visit Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the Tenement Museum, to immigration-themed walking tours through NYC neighborhoods exploring the historical living conditions of migrants from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The second part of the travel course takes us to the southern border cities of San Diego and Tijuana and their surrounding regions. In Tijuana students will get to stay and volunteer in a migrant shelter by aiding in food preparation, and assisting lawyers, medical staff, and social workers in the provision of services to the migrants. In Tijuana and San Diego, students will get to visit and volunteer with refugee and migrant organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of San Diego, and the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans. Through my contacts at the American Bar Association Immigration Justice Project, my students will get to visit a detention center and will be allowed to listen to immigration court proceedings. We will again visit U.S. Border Patrol and will be allowed to go out into the field with them one afternoon. Students will also volunteer with the organization Border Angels and will participate in a water drop to help traveling migrants survive in the California desert.
I had originally planned this course for Spring 2020, but both the escalating situation at the border as well as COVID prevented me from offering the course. I will try to offer the course after my sabbatical in 2024.
Presentation summarizing the travel course and the exploratory trip I took 2018 to San Diego & Tijuana at the FSCC at SUNY Potsdam, organized by Dr. McGuire in 2018
Internships
I supervise internships most years and advise the vast majority of International Studies students in their planning for their Intercultural Experience requirement of the major. I have supervised domestic and international internships as well as virtual ones, again both domestic and abroad. In addition to individual internships I also maintain our relationship with Dr. Ş. İlgü Özler, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Global Engagement Program at SUNY New Paltz. This relationship allows us to ensure that all International Studies students can fulfill their requirement as the costs are very similar to being at SUNY Potsdam even though the program takes place in NYC. Our students have been placed numerous times in highly competitive internships that are outstanding resume builders such the United Nations Permanent Mission of Costa Rica, United Nations Department of Public Information, United Nations Permanent Mission of Fiji, Human Rights
First, World Policy Institute, and Foreign Policy Association. I am providing examples of a typical individual internship syllabus and a student reflection after an Intercultural Experience internship. In addition, I am including a link to the Global Engagement Program (above) and a letter of recommendation
from Dr. Özler.
Letter of Recommendation
Dr. Ş. İlgü Özler
"Professor Popovic’s students have always been exceptionally well prepared to participate in the rigorous academic requirements of the GEP. The level of enthusiasm from these students on global affairs were instilled through his teaching."
Dr. Ş. İlgü Özler, GEP Director, SUNY New Paltz
"Professor Popovic has also worked to establish connections, such as with SUNY New Paltz and the director of their Global Engagement Program. On his advice and with his letter of recommendation, I applied to this program. This, I learned, went a long way in getting me accepted. After participating in the program, I gained some insight into its recruitment process as someone who was temporally hired to set up information sessions at various SUNY campuses. The director of the program made it known that SUNY Potsdam was not a concern because she trusted Professor Popovic to recruit and send deserving applicants. This demonstrates the reputation Professor Popovic has established for himself and the doors he can open for students."
Scott Boyce, Class of 2019
In an ideal world, I would ensure that all of my students and especially my International Studies students would have the opportunity to study aboard for a semester or at least travel with a faculty-led course and visit a new culture. Unfortunately, many students on our campus do not have the means, primarily financial, to afford them such an opportunity. Since many of my students have never had the opportunity to work and meaningfully collaborate with people from another country, I was thrilled when I heard that Dr. van Blommestein was appointed to the newly created COIL Coordinator position. With her help, I was able to integrate my first COIL experience into my WAYS 103 Immigration in the United States course during Fall 2021. I partnered with my friend Audrey Fausser, who is an English language lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Over the second half of 2021, we created a meaningful 4-week project that our students, in my WAYS course and their language course that extensively covers immigration issues, worked on together. Students were tasked with identifying a problem in the U.S. immigration system and then suggesting the creation of an NGO that would try to help alleviate the consequences of the issue identified. Students had to develop a detailed plan and presented their NGO and approach in a panel-style presentation at the end. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the students and were satisfied with the learning outcomes achieved when it comes to intercultural competencies, collaboration skills, and knowledge acquisition related to immigration, integration, and acculturation. For further details, such as session plans and examples of student assignments, please visit the course page for WAYS 103.
Based on the overwhelming success in this pilot for me, I will try to introduce COIL experiences in most of my upper-division courses in the Politics Department. Since students have the Soliya Connect and potentially even Collaborate experiences already under their belts, they will be well prepared for COIL projects. I will promote the integration of COIL among other International Studies faculty as well. This should further increase the quality of our International Studies education in the major. Lastly, I had been waiting for almost 20 years to collaborate with Audrey Fausser in this way and I am thrilled we did it as well as we did.
Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL)
In connection with the First-Year Connect (1YC) program, I wanted to ensure that students will receive the opportunity to get trained as a cross-cultural and intergroup dialogue facilitator. To learn more about the 1YC program, please check out this link here.
The training program to become a dialogue facilitator is rigorous and involves a 20-hour plus homework asynchronous introductory training followed by an advanced synchronous virtual training that requires about 40 hours of training sessions plus preparation and debriefing. In addition, students have to go through semester-long anti-racism dialogues themselves to ensure the appropriate consciousness to facilitate potentially difficult conversations. I was in the process of institutionalizing a credit-bearing student facilitator training program when our efforts were stopped by the administration. Since I already had students going through the training process, I enable students to complete the training they had started through tutorials and donated labor. By now a few students have completed the program and I hope that we will re-engage with the 1YC program and many more students will be able to acquire these highly relevant and exceedingly important skills. Some of the students who have completed the training and have started to facilitate in the international Connect Program and the domestic 1YC Program are:
Windila Balbone
Essance Farrell-Artis
Rama Muhammed
Africa Kogno
Monisse Cueva
Dialogue Facilitation
Kilmer Apprenticeship &
Presidential Scholar
Over the years I have supervised countless student research projects, senior seminar projects, senior honors theses, and other capstone projects at SUNY Potsdam and St. Lawrence University. Be it in the context of an individual project or a research class, I am able to mentor my students through the process successfully. While providing a complete list of projects is impossible, I want to highlight two of my most recent projects where I engaged one-on-one with students in research.
Over the last couple of years, I have supervised Rama Muhammed's Presidential Scholar's project in which Rama tried to better understand how post-colonial practices and laws keep Puerto Rico in a state of uncertainty regarding the seemingly never resolved question of statehood. Rama focused in her research on economic policies and studied both their history and contemporary context. In order to understand her research question better, Rama conducted interviews in Puerto Rico during Winter 2019/2020 with policy makers, policy advocates, lobbyists, think tanks, and business owners. Due to my extensive interviewing experience I was able to aid Rama before, during, and after her research trip. Rama completed her project successfully in Spring 2021.
During Fall 2021, Dr. Jessica Rogers (Environmental Studies) and I were able to work with Quinn Graziano as our Frederick B. Kilmer Research Apprentice to help us with data work and analysis in Geographic Information Systems software. Quinn was able to format the data so analysis was possible and Quinn also generated maps in GIS for us. As our research on environmental migration moves forward, I am looking forward to working with additional students by allowing them to gather valuable practical research and analytical skills.
Study Abroad
Scott Boyce Chile
Erin David Ghana
Essance Farrell-Artis South Korea
Bailey Koen Ireland
llys Lamarque South Korea
Jaylene Lopez Mexico
Edward Macari Portugal
Rama Muhammed United Kingdom
William Rogozinski United Kingdom
Matthew Seaman China
Allison Yablonski Spain
Throughout my academic career I have encouraged students to study abroad, if their financial circumstances allowed them to do so. I participated in student exchanges both at the high school and college levels and know from personal experience how foundational such experiences can be in the development of a young adult. While at SUNY Potsdam, I have helped prepare and successfully execute many study abroad experiences. This entails quite a bit of work that requires precision to avoid creating difficult moments for the student abroad and back home. I ensure that students choose classes during their time abroad that are both interesting for the student and valuable to the completion of their studies. I am very hands-on with my help and assist the student in every step from slecting the classes to ensuring they count after their return. Here is an incomplete list of students who I have helped with their study abroad and the destinations they chose for their experiences.