Solheim honored with Global Engagement Award

Catherine Solheim, professor and Family Social Science director of graduate studies, was honored during International Education Week with the all-University Award for Global Engagement. 

The award is presented to faculty and staff members in recognition of outstanding contributions to global education and international programs at the University or in their field or discipline.  The award honors individual faculty and staff who have distinguished themselves in their work and serves as a resource and inspiration to other faculty and staff.  

Catherine Solheim was honored for her commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, enacting those values through conducting research that benefits immigrant and refugee communities, leading study abroad courses to develop students’ cultural humility and sense of global citizenship, and serving in the community. 

Regarded by peers as a global scholar, she received the 2016 Jan Trost Award for Lifetime Achievement International Scholarship by the National Council on Family Relations for her career-long commitment to advancing international family research and teaching.

Her scholarship centers on understanding how culture and context shape family experiences, as well as ways that migration creates complex transnational family systems connecting global and local communities. Solheim’s early research focused on the strengths and family-related challenges of Minnesota agricultural workers from Mexico. Results were translated into videos and discussion guides for workshops with farmers who employed Mexican workers.

She has also studied how Southeast Asian refugee families resettle and adjust to new lives in Minnesota. These results have helped refugee-serving organizations to improve their services and helped community leaders to shape policies. In addition, her collaborative research with Cambodian Americans in Minnesota examined stresses and ambiguous losses of families with a deported family member.

Solheim’s study abroad courses are grounded in an experiential learning pedagogy that engages students with family realities in northern Thailand. While abroad, she asks students to complete a journal with activity-specific prompts to document observations, feelings, and questions, then come together with classmates for a debrief. The students also create a personal digital story reflecting on what they learned about themselves as cultural beings through their interactions with differences.

In her free time, Dr. Solheim volunteers with Green Card Voices and Minnesota’s Thai Cultural Council, both of which share similar missions of working toward multicultural understanding through connecting immigrants with their neighbors.

Additional awardees were Katy Chapman, associate professor and director of sustainability, Math, Science & Technology, Crookston; Philip Pardey, professor in Applied Economics, and Robert Blanchette, professor in Plant Pathology, both in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS). 

(Content for this story courtesy of Global Program and Strategy Alliance with some edits).