Learning the world by living in it
New programs in Norway and Northern Ireland expand the global footprint of Augsburg’s Center for Global Education and Experience.
Written by Jordan Osterman. Featured story published on Augsburg Now on March 26, 2026.
The ferry moves quietly through the fjord, the water dark and glassy beneath steep rock walls. Waterfalls cut silver lines down the cliffs, dropping hundreds of feet straight into the sea.
For students in the Center for Global Education and Experience (CGEE), this isn’t a postcard moment or a pause between lessons. It is the lesson.
Whether the view is in Norway, Guatemala, or South Africa, this is what learning looks like through CGEE: Students stand inside the geography, systems, histories, and questions that shape a place, rather than studying them from a distance.
For more than 45 years, CGEE has built semester-long, customized short-term, and summer programs supported by its long-standing study centers across Africa, Latin America, and Europe—including a new program in Norway and recently expanded offerings in Northern Ireland and Italy. Rooted in community-based learning, long-term relationships, and intentional reflection, CGEE’s model feels especially resonant, both globally and here in Minnesota.
“[CGEE] offers the opportunity to develop relationships with people across lines of difference, to truly engage,” says Ann Lutterman-Aguilar, who has worked with CGEE since the early 1990s and now leads its longest-standing program in Cuernavaca, Mexico, which started in 1979 and focuses on themes of religion and social change, migration and human rights, among others. “Not to just be a tourist somewhere, read about something in a book, but to hear people’s stories, get to know those people, and put human faces and voices to social issues.”