Members of the Council on Academic Affairs tabled the proposal Thursday for study abroad trips to serve as an alternative option for completing a senior seminar.

Wendy Williamson, the director of the Study Abroad Office, presented her two-part proposal that consists of creating a course that fulfills the requirements of a senior seminar that students would complete after completing a study-abroad trip and changing the undergraduate catalog to require three hours of an “integrative experience,” which could either be a senior seminar or the study abroad course. 

After about an hour of debating the proposals and suggesting revisions to the course, Doug Klarup, a council member and chemistry professor, moved to delay voting on the proposals until their next meeting on May 3. 

For the course, students would be required to create a project stemming from their study abroad experience such as a blog or documentary, Williamson said. 

The original course proposal stated that students would take the first four class sessions before their study abroad trip to prepare them, and then they would take the remaining 11 or so sessions after the trip. 

Until they completed the study abroad experience, they would be on deferred credit. 

During the meeting, the members suggested revising the proposal so students would have to reach 75 credit hours before being eligible to take the course, which reflects the policy with senior seminars. 

Williamson said that would not be a problem because the majority of students who study abroad are juniors and seniors. If students completed a study abroad trip before they reached 75 credit hours, they would have to wait until they had enough credits to enroll but their trip would still apply. 

“Within the last year of students who studied abroad, we had five freshman, 34 sophomores, 93 juniors and 160 seniors,” Williamson said. 

Rebecca Throneburg, a council member and professor of communication disorders and sciences, said she was worried about the second proposal to change the graduation requirement from three senior seminar credits to “integrative experience” credits. 

“There is no definition of commonality and what it is that the integrative experience makes both senior seminar and study abroad fit in this category,” Throneburg said. “I think we need some specifically stated parameters so we would know what else would qualify under this umbrella.” 

Stephen Canfield, the chairman of the foreign language department and a professor of French, said study abroad opportunities offer a similar but different cross-disciplinary quality that senior seminars do and the trips immerse students into a different place, community, and possibly language. 

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or  [email protected].