December 4, 2024

Libraries In the Classroom: International Edition

The University of Washington has a long, productive history of collaboration with the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia’s flagship research institution, going all the way back to the 1960s (see side bar)!  In 2019, UW Study Abroad decided to formalize a student exchange with Ljubljana, in part to provide UW students with a more personalized, high-quality alternative to other typical European study abroad programs based out of “mega-cities” like London, Paris and Rome. While the launch of the new program was interrupted by the pandemic, it is now back,  and drawing student participants. This past September’s UW Early Fall Start (EFS) program in Kamnik, Slovenia, provided an opportunity to showcase Slovenia for prospective participants in the academic year exchange.

In September, UW Libraries’ Michael Biggins (Affiliate Professor; Slavic, Baltic, and East European Studies Librarian) designed and led 14 UW students on a 3-week, 5-credit intensive study abroad program titled Slovenia: Language, Culture and Society at a Crossroads.  The home base for the program was a former Ursuline convent built in 1682 on the outskirts of Kamnik, a picturesque town set against the bucolic backdrop of snow-capped mountains and lush landscapes.

Each day, students divided their time between classroom learning and field trips.  Every field trip was preceded by a classroom module that had something to do with the selected destination, providing students with some background and cultural context ahead of each new experience. Through this multi-modal approach, students explored the geology, geography, archaeology, history, art history, and current affairs of the country, as well as Slovene literature (in English translation) and introductory Slovene language skills.

After a recent presentation to UW and Libraries colleagues on the new program, we caught up with Prof. Biggins to ask him about this inaugural study abroad experience in Slovenia.

How often do you teach/lead these types of trips?

“I’ve been on study or research trips to Slovenia some 15 times, and I’ve led student groups to Russia, but 2024 was the first time UW offered this particular program.  We’ve planned it again for August-September 2025, and are excited by the initial response.”

What inspired you to create this unique study abroad program?

“One of my goals was to engage UW students from a wide range of disciplines with a broad cross-section of the humanities as manifested in a context completely new to them, enriching their perception and understanding of the world. I was especially interested in raising awareness of and respect for the many small, distinctive cultures around the world that have survived the vicissitudes of history and the pressures of globalization and continue to thrive. I wanted to offer an opportunity for students to step away from the continuous feedback loop of American mass culture and to see, from close-up, how very differently and distinctively another society can function.  And, amidst that difference, to keep an eye out for what may well be widespread — if not universal– patterns and dynamics common to most or all societies, in hopes of using those insights to become wiser about our own.”

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FUN FACT: The UW Libraries has one of the three most outstanding research collections for Slovene studies in North America numbering around 8,000 volumes, which Prof. Biggins drew on heavily to prepare course material for the program.  Many new additions to these collections are purchased with funds from UW’s Boniecka Slovene Studies Endowment.

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How are study abroad experiences like this beneficial for students and the faculty who lead them?

“Purposeful foreign travel and study abroad can be transformative for students.  The mere fact of living in a non-English environment where the operative language is not one of the better-known world languages, but a small, obscure, unique, yet absolutely thriving, dynamic and creative medium of communication for a community of just two million, supported by an omnipresent linguistic ecosystem (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, film, theater, a massive (for the country’s size) vernacular book industry, and of course signage everywhere) is somehow mind-blowing for Americans, or at least it should be.  We’ve come to take English for granted as the world’s lingua franca and expect everyone to speak it.  Many do, but it’s not the language of their heart and soul – the domains that are by far the most interesting, that we can truly connect to only by trying to inhabit their language with them.

What’s more, in a compact society like Slovenia’s, you as a visitor are at barely more than one degree of separation from the country’s leading experts in virtually any discipline that matters to you.

Over the decades that I’ve been engaged with Slovenia, I’ve made the acquaintance of creatives with ease — artists, writers, scholars and scientists who produce world-class work, in part because the scale of the place means that you inevitably know someone who knows those people.  That scale works to the advantage of our students, too, since it’s so much easier to facilitate mentorships for them with leading experts in the fields that interest them.”

Did you know? UW has longstanding cooperative relationships with the University of Ljubljana, which began around 1963 when UW specialists in nuclear physics and engineering began a series of reciprocal research visits.  Our ongoing UW-University of Ljubljana Scholars Exchange, which grew out of that first encounter in the 1960s, sends 2 to 3 UW faculty and PhD candidate researchers from all over campus to the University of Ljubljana and we host 2 to 3 of their faculty members here. As a result, UW has a wide and constantly expanding network of U of Ljubljana faculty with longstanding ties to UW – in fields ranging from biomedical informatics, aeronautics, astronomy, human centered design, and law to music, English, classics and, of course, Slavic languages. Ask any past UW participant in that exchange what they thought of it and they will tell you at a minimum two things – that their Slovene colleagues were outstanding, and that they fell in love with Slovenia.  In many cases, the collaborations have continued for years.

What were some of the highlights of the trip from your perspective? 

• Student presentations: “As part of the course, each student was tasked with keeping a journal in which they recorded their observations on some aspect of their academic major or a non-academic pursuit of considerable interest to them – as it’s manifested in Slovenia. Students had the opportunity to connect with Slovenian experts in these fields, including at the University of Ljubljana. At the end of the program, each student gave an oral presentation to the class on their exploratory topic (as we called it). The presentations were quite good, and I enjoyed seeing each student’s individual discoveries through the lens of topics that were of paramount interest to them, personally.”
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  a day-long tour of Trieste, Italy, and its Slovene communities

  Trieste Commemoration: “Along with a few thousand local Slovenes and Italians, we attended the commemoration ceremony on the Bazovica village commons in observance of September 6, where, in 1930, Italy’s Fascist authorities executed four young local Slovenes who were members of an underground Slovene organization that resisted Fascist Italy’s policy of ethnocide of its large Slovene population.  Those four became icons of Slovene resistance and remain so to this day.  While some minor Italian-Slovene interethnic tensions remain in greater Trieste, the legal framework for European Union member states now guarantees that autochthonous ethnic minorities– like the Slovenes of Italy—have full human and civil rights, which is a monumental achievement.”

• Access to natural environment: “I think the students were impressed with the proximity of extensive natural environments even in the largest cities, where you can walk to the end of your street and enter a forest or begin ascending a mountainside. A corollary to this is the apparent attention given by public policy in Slovenia to preventing urban sprawl and protecting the country’s spectacular natural environment.

…Slovenia has been a major innovator in sustainable forestry practices for going on a century, something that several UW Forestry faculty members have investigated on site.”

Prof. Biggins plans to continue leading trips to Slovenia for the foreseeable future.

“I would like to make this course and trip an annual feature of UW Study Abroad’s Early Fall Start offerings,”  says Biggins.

“My hope is to continue organizing, leading and teaching this program or variants of it for the rest of my UW career and well into retirement, and to encourage other UW faculty to participate.”   

Prof. Biggins also is encouraged by the prospect that, over time, the program will serve a secondary function of generating student interest in UW Study Abroad’s new academic year student exchange with the University of Ljubljana.

Learn More:

• UW Early Fall Start Slovenia Program (describing the September 2024 iteration)
• UW’s University of Ljubljana Student Exchange
• UW-University of Ljubljana Scholars Exchange

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