Susan Lantz, a teaching associate professor with the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, is the 2022 recipient of the Faculty Award for Outstanding Global Contributions. Each year, the Office of Global Affairs honors one deserving faculty member with the award for Outstanding Global Contributions and grants them $3,000 to help promote and develop their international efforts.
Lantz’s international efforts began in 2017 when she was asked to be a visiting professor at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics in China, a WVU partner institution. While in China for four weeks, she was struck by how different everything was from the Western world she was used to and had studied.
“Everything was different,” Lantz said. “The food was different, the architecture, the literature, the activities people took part in, the people looked different and had a completely different culture. And all of a sudden, I had this dawning on me that there is a whole world out there of non-western civilization, and it was like ‘oh my gosh’ what have I been doing my whole life?”
From her experiences in China, Lantz was eager to share her experience and provide similar experiences for WVU students. To help her students build global competency and to better understand their own cultures, they had to travel, and Lantz was going to make sure they had multiple opportunities to gain a global perspective.
Lantz soon was leading study abroad trips to Brazil and Bahrain, where she, and her students, learned to see their own cultures more clearly once they were able to study and appreciate a new one.
“It was just marvelous to watch the students learn about a new world and culture and to make friends and engage with things they never really thought about before,” she said.
Having led multiple programs abroad, Lantz was just beginning her international education efforts. She later returned to China to teach for another semester, helped recruit students from Bahrain and China to study at WVU, worked with professors in the Middle East, China and South America to help design curriculum, and started using novels in the study abroad courses within the Chambers College. Her next plan was to have a study abroad program in Dubai and Bahrain, but COVID-19 caused the project to come to a halt.
Despite the pandemic, she worked to create a series of virtual exchanges with the Royal University for Women in Bahrain.
More than 250 students from the BCOR 199 class were able to participate in mini virtual exchanges, while other students engaged in a semester-long virtual exchange and were involved in case competitions, digital narrative exchanges, and inter-school debates. The program, called “Appalachia and the Arabian Gulf: Women and Entrepreneurship Around the Globe”, was a huge success for the Spring 2021 and 2022 semesters.
Lantz’s work has innovated unique opportunities within the business communications field for students at WVU, and she has gone above and beyond to give students the tools and experiences needed to be competent global citizens, as well as help develop skills that will propel them forward in the ever-changing 21st century.
“At the end of the day we are all global citizens, and we all have to get along on this planet,” Lantz said.
“I mean, I teach business, but in this age no matter who you are or what you do, you are going to be communicating online with people from all over the world and you need to know what skills are needed in order to do that. You need to understand and navigate time and cultural differences.”