Welcome to the CEA Bulletin

Dear Friends and Colleagues: 

We’ve all spent a good deal of time online over the past two years. In March of 2020, COVID-19 forced us out of our workplaces and into our home offices, urging us to make the “camera on” or “camera off” choice before each meeting, pose the question, “Can you see my screen?” more times than we’d like to admit, and respond to the myriad of Zoom meeting invitations we received in place of conference sessions, lectures, birthday parties, baby showers, and countless other in-person events we might have once taken for granted. And yet, here we are two years later and we find ourselves in the midst of navigating all things COVID and that all too familiar feeling of being in Zoom meetings where someone inevitably says, “you’re muted.”   

We have lived so much of our lives online over the past two years that we’ve actually had the opportunity to do some critical reflection in between Zoom meetings and webinars. At CEA, we realized that we have missed the opportunity to share stories of our academic research, our conference presentations, our celebrated staff in the U.S. and abroad, and what it is that makes CEA a strong and unique academic organization. We want to amplify these stories and share them with you, our partners, so that we can continue to challenge ourselves, grow as an organization, expand access, and above all else, lead by listening.  

That’s why we’ve created this platform, the CEA Bulletin. I hope you’ll bookmark this page and come here often to learn about what CEA Study Abroad has been doing, where we have been presenting, and who we are as an organization. However, if you’re like me, you might have too many bookmarks to keep track of. We’ll send occasional Bulletin posts in our newsletter, and if there’s a certain topic you would like to see covered here, I hope you will reach out to me or your University Relations Director to put it on our radar. 

2022 is an important year for CEA, and certainly for the field of international education. In April, CEA will celebrate our 25th anniversary, bookended with gatherings at the Forum and NAFSA Annual Conferences, where we will have the chance to reunite with friends and colleagues we haven’t seen in person in years. We are reopening CEA Study Centers that have been closed since 2020, and we’re looking to expand more high-impact educational practices around the globe. We are getting back to the work we love and are so passionate about, but the challenges remain in growing back and reimagining education abroad in this new and shifting landscape. My hope is that 2022 will be the year of recovery and rebound for education abroad, and there is no question that CEA could not achieve this forward momentum without partners like you. We look forward to many more years of partnership that provides access to global learning for all.  

Onward.