When Laura Miller-Graff traveled to Mexico City this past summer to teach a class on mental health to Notre Dame students, it wasn’t the first time she had taken her work in psychology abroad. She’s been doing it for the past 13 years. During that time, Miller-Graff, a professor and associate department chair in the Department of Psychology, has been drawing on Notre Dame Global’s locations as essential resources for both scholarship and student education.
Not only has she found a way to effectively leverage Notre Dame Global’s extensive network, but she has also partnered with the directors and colleagues in several of those locations to expand her research, teach innovative courses, and encourage her students to think beyond South Bend.
Course in Mexico City introduces student growth, kindred spirit of scholarship
Leveraging the Notre Dame Mexico location in Mexico City, Miller-Graff taught a course titled Mental Health and Public Psychology in Mexico in partnership with Universidad Iberoamericana, a Jesuit institution with a strong psychology department, also in Mexico City. This course integrated classroom instruction, visits to cultural sites, and independent student exploration of the city, as well as community-based learning assignments that included regular collaboration with Catholic Relief Services as the students supported them in considering how best to capture changes in social cohesion associated with their programs.
The collaboration provided opportunities to co-teach and to share scholarly work between the two universities. Faculty from Iberoamericana presented their own research to the students throughout the course, exposing them to new scholarly ideas on key mental health issues in Mexico and how researchers are working to address them.
“It’s important for students to see that there are meaningful things that we share, but there’s also very meaningful cultural variation in how people experience mental health and how different mental health care systems work,” said Miller-Graff, who is also the director of the Shaw Center for Children and Families.
Introducing her students to stereotype-busting ideas, while also teaching a course that aligns with their majors, could not have been possible without the guidance and daily cooperation from Notre Dame Mexico staff and faculty. Miller-Graff said they played a central role in shaping the course curriculum, coordinating the university partnership, and ensuring the course ran smoothly and effectively.
“The Notre Dame Mexico staff was absolutely incredible to work with—delightful, supportive, and extraordinarily knowledgeable,” she said. “It’s really a special thing for our students to be able to interact with the staff at our global locations, but it’s also a huge support for faculty as well. The amount of support they provided for the course was completely invaluable—and the course would’ve run nowhere near as well without them.”
Not only were the local staff able to assist with logistical concerns in the city and surrounding areas as the students traveled and explored, but they also helped create the course syllabus by pairing particular activities that worked well for them in the past. This, said Miller-Graff, enabled her and her teaching team to provide an exceptional learning experience for the students.
“I loved hearing about the research the other faculty had done and what they were finding, and what they themselves found most interesting and innovative about their work,” Miller-Graff added. “Sitting there with my students, I found that to be an incredibly enriching experience. And that partnership was all coordinated by Notre Dame Mexico.”
Collaborative work brings healing, intervention to Palestinian families
One project that has occupied Miller-Graff and colleague Mark Cummings, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology, for more than a decade is the Promoting Positive Family Futures program. Developed in partnership with the Palestinian Counseling Center and further adapted in partnership with Catholic Relief Services, this family-focused intervention program addresses the mental health needs of Palestinian families living under chronic conflict in both the West Bank and Gaza.
In response to a community- identified need, Miller-Graff and Cummings worked with the Palestinian Counseling Center to co-develop the program to support mental health, coping and well-being, communication, and family relationships between Palestinian parents and their adolescent children—many of whom have endured chronic and sustained violence.
After conducting successful pilot studies with 25 families in the West Bank in 2017, supported in part by a Notre Dame Global grant, the team moved forward in collaboration with Catholic Relief Services to conduct a second study in Gaza in 2019 with 62 families. Eventually, the project secured National Institutes of Health funding for a larger-scale trial involving 300 Palestinian families. Data collection and analysis for these studies are currently underway, with Miller-Graff and Cummings hoping to publish later this year, in collaboration with their research team.
“Our focus was to get to know the community and understand some of the mental health needs of Palestinian families,” Miller-Graff said. “Beyond crisis support and emergency response, we wanted to know what was going well in terms of provision of mental health services and what were some of the more critical needs.”
Notre Dame Jerusalem, located at Notre Dame’s Tantur campus, served as a home base for the team, providing practical and intellectual support throughout the study and offering meeting spaces, logistical coordination, and a interdisciplinary scholarly community.
“The staff at Notre Dame Jerusalem are just exceptional in every sense of the word—thoughtful, engaged scholars who are really thinking through in a meaningful way what these global centers can be in terms of teaching and research,” Miller-Graff said.
For Miller-Graff, working with Notre Dame Global allowed her to take her work in directions she never anticipated, helping her grow and establish meaningful and long-lasting connections.
“Notre Dame’s sustained commitment to these locations is of huge value in terms of doing international work,” she said. “They provide faculty an opportunity to enter into global research without having to start from the ground up, which helps remove barriers that might prevent them from participating.”