What is SUSI?

The Study of the United States Institute for Secondary Educators (SUSI) is an intensive, six-week Institute intended for teachers and scholars who are devoted to learning about and increasing their understanding of U.S. society and culture. The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs sponsors the program.

For over fifteen years, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has had the honor of hosting scholars from around the world through this program. At UIC, participants of the SUSI program explore various discipline areas including law, politics and literature with the aim of not only understanding American culture, but also, how the U.S. manages to bring together the diverse groups who inhabit the nation.

Over the fifteen-year life of the Institute, participants from more than 60 countries have asked variations on the same questions: How does America manage to make its various competing interests cohere? What are the institutions, rituals, traditions, laws and artifacts that make e pluribus unum, of this many, one? The Institute will examine these issues in its six-week summer program, offering the materials for a discussion that might lead to the many answers that exist for that two-centuries-old question.

The Institute’s educational program examines the United States through multiple lenses formed by the disciplines of study that have grown up around various parts of American culture: law, politics, art, literature, geography, urbanism, education, sociology and economics. Dividing the four-week residency into three intensive segments – one historical, one thematic and one focused on contemporary life – faculty and participants study specific examples that reveal the larger themes and ideas to provide not just overall insight but a practical body of useful, teachable materials that participants can bring back to their home countries and introduce into the curriculum with immediate and longer-term benefits. Throughout the Institute, classroom work is divided among lectures, discussions and small-group workshops; classroom work is balanced by field work ranging from tours of farms and suburbs to home visits. Faculty routinely team-teach so that participants encounter a variety of perspectives; this approach also allows for on-the-spot creation of outlines and content that are then honed, corrected and returned to participants at the next session as reinforcement. The classroom pedagogy is enriched when the Institute moves on the road; Director Eric Arnesen and faculty tour participants, Katrin Schultheiss and Peter Hales, provide several lectures and/or discussions each day during the tour, and participants have the opportunity to apply their theoretical and book-learned, in-residence training to a wide variety of specific cases.