“I started to meet students who spoke Spanish, and I just really wanted to be able to communicate with them,” Knorr said.

Those multicultural experiences in her neighborhood stuck with Knorr. She studied Spanish in college, including at UNC-Chapel Hill as a graduate student, and worked in Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Spain and Ecuador.

Since 2010, she’s been teaching Spanish at Carolina, where she is now a teaching associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Romance studies department.

“I was drawn to the service-learning component,” says Knorr ’06 (MA).

No class better embodies Knorr’s love for Spanish and service learning than SPAN 329: Spanish for Professional and Community Engagement.

A capstone course for students minoring in Spanish for the professions, the class prepares scholars to use their language skills professionally, whether it be in the legal, health or financial fields.

“In a couple of years, they’re going to have to either do a presentation or have to communicate with a Latino member of the community, whether it be an adult or a child,” Knorr says. “They’re going to need to use clear, concise, kind and welcoming language to connect with their patients and clients.”

The course’s trademark project — writing children’s books in Spanish and English — is great practice and an example of Knorr’s willingness to get others involved. Their bilingual stories are published digitally and printed at the UNC Print Stop and given to children to read.

The origin of the assignment dates back to Knorr’s daughter taking dual-language classes in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. Knorr says the books her daughter brought home were mostly “just bad Spanish translations” of commonly read stories without diverse characters.

Knorr told her Carolina students they could write better books themselves. “They took that as a challenge,” she says.

That challenge blossomed into a popular project with a new twist each year. Students earn APPLES Service-Learning credit for writing and, in some cases, illustrating the books.

Past books written by students in Knorr’s class include stories about Latin America’s version of the tooth fairy, a day-in-the-life of a dentist at Carolina and an Afro-Cuban Olympian. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

The first time, students wrote books on topics local teachers suggested and delivered them to classrooms. Another year, the class collaborated with the UNC Adams School of Dentistry on books covering dental topics.

The collaborations are now international. Using Collaborative Online International Learning funding, Knorr’s class is teaming up with professor Álex Loeza Zaldívar and his advanced literature students from Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mexico on books about topics of interest to children there. Knorr will deliver the books when she visits Mexico later this month.

“We kind of went into it like, ‘OK, this is just another class project,’” says Daniel Gulisano, a senior business administration major in SPAN 329. But as the semester and his book have progressed, “it’s been really neat” to regularly Zoom and work on the project with his counterpart in Yucatan, he says.

Gulisano’s book focuses on Hanal Pixán, a Mayan-rooted holiday popular in Yucatan that’s like the Day of the Dead. Among the other topics covered by Knorr’s students: a mouse named Pérez, Latin America’s version of the tooth fairy.

Beyond the books, Gulisano says the course will open doors for him. “When you have that Spanish know-how, you can understand the culture better, and all sorts of opportunities arise,” he says.

That’s an outcome Knorr hopes for in a class that she calls “una colaboración internacional con nuestros vecinos Latinos.”

Or, in English, “an international collaboration with our Latino neighbors.”

Daniel Gulisano has enjoyed forming what he calls a “cross-border connection” with students from Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mexico. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

A group of UNC-Chapel Hill students will explore more than just sports during a trip to the 2024 Paris Olympics.

This month, historian Matt Andrews will take students on a study abroad program to London and later Paris to witness the Games and to study their cultural impact. The group will not only enjoy the festivities of the Paris Olympics, but also get a history of the Games themselves by visiting stadiums that housed prior Olympic ceremonies in London.

“As someone who teaches a course on the global history of the Olympic Games, I thought London was a good place to focus on,” said Andrews, a teaching associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ history department. “They’ve hosted the games three times, and we’ll be talking to a lot of locals who believe that the Games were such a vital part to the revitalization of East London.”

As part of exploring Olympic history, the students will tour the two remaining London stadiums that hosted the Games. They will also take a day trip to Oxford University, visit the Lord’s Cricket Ground — which hosted the 2012 Olympics archery competition — and even play a game of cricket.

But the Burch Field Research Seminar, presented by Honors Carolina, is not a vacation. Carolina students receive honors history credit for joining Professor Andrews on this in-depth exploration of the games. When it comes to the Olympic Games, that means going beyond the surface level pageantry and competition.

Andrews wants this group of students not only to enjoy their time in Europe, but also to consider how the Games affect the host cities’ culture, both positively and negatively.

“While we’re talking to many people who support the arrival of the Games in their hometowns, we’ll also be meeting some people that feel a different way,” Andrews said. “Some see the Games as just another example of gentrification and pricing out the working class. You really start to ask yourself, ‘Is it a good thing?’ and ‘Who benefits from this?’”

On Aug. 2, the class will board the train from London to Paris with those questions in mind. While Andrews wants these students to be excited for the opportunity more than anything else, he also hopes they gain a different perspective about the greater meaning and impact of the Games.

As a professor, Andrews studies the links between sports and American history and culture. This will be the first time he’ll be attending an Olympic event since he was a teenager and went to the track and field and basketball competitions at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. After years of fandom and deep academic study on the subject, he wonders how his feelings about attending the Games may have evolved.

“I’m a sports fan, for sure. When the Olympics fanfare plays, I’m programmed to get goosebumps,” Andrews said. “But the more you study, the more of a critic you become. I’ll be wrestling with that while I’m watching the games. And I’m looking forward to it.”

Several of her students got excited about the African garment, but one little girl in particular couldn’t stop beaming. That girl’s parents hail from Ghana, and she had traveled to the country a few times to visit family.

“She was really excited when I was telling her about my trip,” Roberts said. “She was just like, ‘Oh, I love this dress,’ and just feeling a sense of representation to see that I was going to teach the class about her culture.”

That kind of poignant student-teacher connection was made possible by a comprehensive UNC-Chapel Hill project designed to create digital lesson plans on contemporary Africa for elementary school students.

Funded by a $500,000 grant from the Oak Foundation in 2021, the project is led by Carolina’s African Studies Center. Other collaborators include University Libraries, the UNC School of Education, faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences and elementary school teachers across North Carolina.

Teachers of social studies, arts and music, like Roberts, had the opportunity to travel to Senegal and Ghana to tour the countries, interview locals and gather information, as well as photos and videos, to create lesson plans. Those lessons live in a digital repository, available for any elementary school teacher to use.

“There’s been overwhelmingly positive responses to this material,” said Laura Cox, outreach manager for the African Studies Center. “I think it does what the center hoped to accomplish, which was addressing misconceptions, inaccuracies and stereotypes about the African continent and replacing them with something deeper and doing that in creative and accessible ways that encourage hands-on and tactile learning.

“Even though these are digital resources, you have students who are making art or making music, who are drawing connections between their lives and lives of people in West Africa.”

Teachers have been creative with how they share the material, like Roberts wearing a Ghanan-made dress before teaching about the country’s music and dance.

Erica Luetzow-Coward, a cultural studies teacher at Club Boulevard Elementary in Durham, said she was inspired by seeing cocoa production during her trip to Ghana and knew her students would love to learn more about it. She also taught a lesson about Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said, who was enslaved from West Africa and brought to America. Luetzow-Coward told her students about the mosque named after Said in nearby Fayetteville and pointed it out to them on a map, creating a connection between their state and Senegal.

The UNC School of Education vetted the lesson plans before turning them over to faculty experts in African studies in the College for additional screening. Later this summer, a group of educators will return to Ghana and Senegal to workshop their lessons for local teachers and ensure that the material is authentic.

These fact-gathering trips equip teachers with recent, accurate material to share with their students, and those lessons help students expand their worldview.

“I think we should be doing anything we can right now to be promoting kids making those connections, not being isolated, realizing that you’ve got a lot to learn from other people,” Luetzow-Coward said.

“They see different things, and then they start reflecting on what their town looks like or why we do things this way. We always talk about how something isn’t better or worse – it’s just different.”

Read how African studies librarian Joanneke Fleischauer helped with the project.

Lauren Leve, an associate professor of religious studies, and Jim Mahaney, a research scientist in the computer science department, started the long process of capturing the data needed to create an accurate 3D model of the entire temple complex. One of the project’s goals is to allow UNC-Chapel Hill students a chance to visit Swayambhu in virtual reality.

The project leverages the distinct skill sets of Leve and Mahaney to both access and capture this sacred site. Leve and Mahaney are using a three-pronged data capture approach, combining 3D laser scans, photogrammetry and drone photography to create three separate models of the temple complex. The three models will then be combined to form one photorealistic model of the temple complex which will be viewable on multiple device types, so that access to the model is not limited by the technology available in different parts of the world.

Crowds, monkeys and lots of data

One challenge of capturing Swayambhu was working around crowds of people and animals. Typically, a historic site would be closed to allow for scanning and photogrammetry, but as an active temple, Swayambhu could not be closed and is visited by worshippers and tourists nearly 24 hours a day.

While the humans could be reasoned with, a local population of more than 400 rhesus macaque monkeys also has free range over the entire site. The monkeys refused to take direction from the team, often flaunting their independence by climbing about in the background of the scans. This interference will require hours of additional post-processing to remove monkeys from the 3D model.

Because of the task’s immense scale, Leve and Mahaney partnered with a local heritage preservation group, Baakhan Nyane waa (which translates from the Newar or Nepal Bhasa language as “Come, listen to stories”), and the Kathmandu Engineering College. Raj Maharjan from Baakhan Nyane waa worked with Mahaney to teach graduate students from the college in a seven-day course on laser scanning and photogrammetry, which included many hours of hands-on fieldwork at Swayambhu.

During the course, the team completed 92 scans and took thousands of photos from the ground and hundreds from the sky. The work of combining these into a 3D model will take many months and will provide opportunities for UNC-Chapel Hill computer science students to work with this dataset not only on editing process but also to explore various advanced techniques in virtual reality, such as redirected walking.

Students in Nepal will also continue to work with the data, making this an international collaboration that not only works to create an outstanding model of the site but considers the subtle nuances of how the site is viewed by the Nepalese.

While the amount of data collected on this first trip is vast, additional visits to Nepal are necessary to capture the entire temple. In a planned trip in October 2024, the team will begin expanding the model to include more of the structures located adjacent to the main temple.

This work is supported by a CFE/Lenovo Instructional Innovation grant with additional hardware support from Nvidia and the School of Data Science and Society.

Read more about this trip and the precursor to it.

When Jim Appiah, a senior from Ghana studying chemistry, and Satvik Chethan, a junior from India studying business and information science, first came to UNC-Chapel Hill, they struggled to adjust.

Appiah had never left his home country until he came to Chapel Hill and lived off the biscuits and hot chocolate he had packed in his suitcase for the first few days after he arrived.

Chethan had been to the U.S. before but found living here very different from visiting. “The scariest part was, I think, the social aspect. I’m generally a very social person, but when I first came, I would be so wary and be so confused, I didn’t know what I could say or how to approach people and how they would perceive me.”

Both students were overwhelmed by all they had to do upon arrival: opening a bank account, securing a visa, registering for classes, finding housing, getting a SIM card. Their shared experience led Appiah and Chethan to help other international students find their place on campus.

Separately, they brought their ideas for forming an organization to support international students to International Student and Scholar Services. This campus unit handles international student and scholar advising, immigration compliance and support for adjustment to life at Carolina.

Appiah focused on professional development and acclimating international students to the U.S., while Chethan wanted to form a social network and a stronger international community. They fused their ideas, wrote a constitution and got approval as an official student organization. The new International Student Organization is open to all students at Carolina.

“I am delighted by the opportunity for ISSS to collaborate closely with the new International Student Organization,” said Ioana Costant, director of ISSS, which will advise and work closely with the new organization. “This partnership reflects our dedication to fostering a vibrant and inclusive global community on campus.”

“We really just want to create a space for everyone and create a solid system to help people adjust and find a community,” said Appiah. “We are here to create a cohesive environment to bring everybody together and help support each other.”

Chethan and Appiah hope this new organization will provide a meaningful place for students to connect with each other and acclimate to life away from their home countries.

“I want to cement what I’ve started by creating this organization,” Appiah said. “I hope that this mentorship will be sustained, and new international students who come in won’t feel alone.”

Appiah and Chethan want to host student-led cultural potlucks, language exchanges, professional networking events, fashion shows and an annual cultural carnival to celebrate the different cultures of the international community at Carolina. They encourage U.S. students to join to increase cultural exchange and promote a global mindset for everyone on campus.

They have already had a positive reaction from the international community. “I know 100 years from now if these students are asked how their experience was at UNC, I know I’ll definitely be a part of their stories and that is so satisfying to me,” Appiah said.

Carolina students who are interested in joining the new organization can contact Appiah at ajim@ad.unc.edu or Chethan at satvik31@ad.unc.edu.

Read more about the International Student Organization.

Learn about three students and their experiences in St. John, South Korea and Spain.

Lauryn Lovett

Lauryn Lovett ’24 traveled to South Korea for the Media and Culture in South Korea Maymester course through the Hussman School Journalism and Media. During the two-week trip, Lovett and her 16 classmates visited ad agencies and media organizations to learn more about journalism, media, advertising and public relations in South Korea.

“For me, having a concentration in broadcasting, getting to go to several stations was super cool, especially the ones where I was able to sit at their desks and really manifest that for myself one day,” said Lovett, a journalism and political science major.

The students spent most of the time in Seoul but traveled to Busan for a few days to tour a local university and its media program. They also visited several cultural locations, including Gyeongbokgung Palace, where they watched the changing of the guard and rented traditional Korean clothing.

Lauryn Lovett (submitted photo)

Erika Munguia

Erika Munguia ’24 traveled to Sevilla, Spain, for five weeks to take Carolina biology courses with other Carolina faculty members and students. She studied stem cells and evolutionary biology and says she instantly connected with her classmates because of their interest in science. For both of her courses, she read and presented on research papers.

She also visited the cities of Cordoba, Granada, Malaga and Madrid. The group took a trip to a research lab called Centro Andaluz de Biologia del Desarrollo.

She said her favorite experience was a spontaneous trip she took with friends she met while abroad.

“Last minute, I joined a group of girls going to Faro to kayak through the Benagil caves in Portugal at 8 a.m. It was one of the most chaotic and fun trips I did during the program,” Munguia said. “I remember that on that Friday, we had our program’s excursion to the Cathedral of Sevilla. Right after the excursion, we came back to our dorm, finished packing and took a bus to Faro.”

Erika Munguia (front) (submitted photo)

John Swinea

John Swinea ’26, along with 20 other Carolina students, traveled to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands for two weeks in May for the Coral Reef Ecology in the Caribbean class. The course is offered through the Institute for the Environment and the Environment, Ecology and Energy program.

Swinea said the class on coral reef preservation and management aligned perfectly with his majors in pre-business and environmental studies. He and his classmates spent a lot of time snorkeling near the reefs, where they saw sharks, rays, large fish and coral. They took quizzes in the water to test their knowledge about what they were learning.

Along with snorkeling, the students also rode in open air taxis, shopped and took sailboat rides. In the evening, the students returned to their campsites, where they reviewed what they had learned and socialized.

“Not only was this an unbelievably beautiful place, but it had amazing people who were so kind and welcoming. I enjoyed experiencing not only the beautiful beaches but the cultural experiences we had as well,” Swinea said.

John Swinea (submitted photo)