Foreigners in Our Midst: Resources for Internationalizing the Sociology Major

Given the imperative to develop the international awareness of our students, and given the prominence of the foreign TA (FTA) on the landscape of undergraduate education, lack of attention to the role of the FTA within undergraduate instruction in sociology is surprising and shortsighted. By allowing the FTA to remain invisible, we forgo the potential contribution that the FTA can make to our educational agenda, and we allow the quality of our students' classroom experiences to be compromised in ways that, as sociologists, we could easily anticipate and avoid. We need data on the role that FTAs play in undergraduate instruction in sociology in the United States. To realize the contribution that FTAs can make to internationalizing our curriculum, we need to approach the FTA problem as sociologists, involve both undergraduates and FTAs in the analysis of this problem, and work toward incorporating both groups into a sociological community of discourse.