FOREIGNERS IN OUR MIDST - RESOURCES FOR INTERNATIONALIZING THE SOCIOLOGY MAJOR

Given the imperative to develop the international awareness of our stu dents, and given the prominence of the foreign TA (FTA) on the landsca pe of undergraduate education, lack of attention to the role of the FT A within undergraduate instruction in sociology is surprising and shor tsighted. By allowing the FTA to remain invisible, we forgo the potent ial contribution that the FTA can make to our educational agenda, and we allow the quality of our students' classroom experiences to be comp romised in ways that, as sociologists, we could easily anticipate and avoid. We need data on the role that FTAs play in undergraduate instru ction in sociology in the United States. To realize the contribution t hat FTAs can make to internationalizing our curriculum, we need to app roach the FTA problem as sociologists, involve both undergraduates and FTAs in the analysis of this problem, and work toward incorporating b oth groups into a sociological community of discourse.