Dr. Peredo Receives Award for Outstanding Leadership

The Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE) has awarded Dr. Ana María Peredo, Interim Director of BCICS the Internationalization Leadership Award. The award is to recognize outstanding leadership in the internationalization of Canadian education and/or the international education profession.

CBIE is a national non-governmental organization comprised of 200 colleges, universities, school boards, educational organizations and businesses. CBIE is dedicated to the internationalization of education and the expansion of educational partnerships between Canada and countries across the globe.

Dr. Peredo's approach to business education exemplifies the dedication, innovation and leadership that this award is meant to acknowledge. Drawing on her own experience working and living with communities in Peru struggling with economic poverty, Dr. Ana María Peredo aims to expose her students to community-based entrepreneurship and other alternative business models, such as co-operatives, that rely on social and cultural values of communities and embrace a diversity of economic, social and cultural circumstances.

In the classroom, Dr. Peredo encourages a critical examination of the realities of different countries and the local responses to the pressures of globalisation. In doing so, she aims to not only educate leaders but also to promote global citizenship.

Students—many of them international students—are encouraged to draw on the fact that they come from different community and cultural settings, and to see the variety of cultural heritages they bring with them as resources in devising responses to the challenges of poverty and globalization. She advocates working in small-business settings in local communities, where cultural roots are an important part of the business response. In this way, her students become open to diverse ways of seeing the world through an enlarged awareness of their roles as global citizens.

Also this year, Dr. Peredo was named a finalist in the Aspen Institute's 2008 Faculty Pioneer Awards. During the 2007/08 academic year she was a Visiting Fellow at the Global Poverty Research Group in the University of Oxford. Dr Peredo received a ‘Research Excellence Award’ from the Faculty of Business at the University of Victoria for 2005. She was named ‘Ascendant Scholar for 2007’ by the Western Academy of Management.

The Canadian Bureau for International Education has awarded her its Internationalization Leadership Award for 2008.