Terra Gargano
Professorial Lecturer
SIS - Peace HR CR
Degrees
Ph.D, International Education Policy, University of Maryland
MA, International Training and Education, American University
Bio
Terra Gargano teaches courses in cross-cultural communication and international education. She taught English in Japan and served as the Assistant Dean for Semester at Sea before joining the faculty at American University. For the last five years, she served as the Program Director and Faculty Advisor for Online Programs in SIS, the largest graduate program in the School. During the 2019 – 2020 academic year, she was a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Teaching Research and Learning and consulted for international organizations transitioning to virtual spaces. She has received several faculty awards from the University, including the Outstanding Performance for Innovation in Online Teaching in 2021, and SIS, including the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2020 and the Outstanding Teaching in a Full-Time Appointment in 2017.
For the last three years, she taught a Complex Problem course, What does it mean to be educated?, for the Community Based Research Scholars Program, a course that critically examined the meaning of education through varied lived experiences. Her research interests reside at the intersection of culture, identity, and power in transcultural education and virtual spaces, examining the complex relationships between transnational mobility in higher education and the lived realities of academic nomads.
Throughout her twenty-five year career in international higher education, she managed dozens of institutional collaborations worldwide, conducted workshops for faculty at domestic and international organizations, and learned alongside her students about the ways culture impacts perceptions, worldviews, and communication. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a PhD in International Education Policy.
