Antoinette Tessmer is the 2025 recipient of the Special Recognition Award for Promoting International Understanding, which recognizes faculty and staff who have made significant contributions to international engagement through internationalizing campus and MSU programs globally.

Tessmer is an associate professor of finance in the Broad College of Business. She also serves as a faculty advisor for Broad International Student Council, or BISC, as a steering committee member of MSU’s Spartan Global Learning Initiative and as a faculty leader for the Global Finance Studies in Belgium Study Abroad program.

Tessmer’s contributions to the university are varied and extensive. From complete course redesigns to designing accessibility requirements for blind users to the design of collaborative online international learning activities with universities in Japan, France and Norway, Tessmer’s willingness to take on a range of pedagogical challenges works to the benefit of all her students.

Her publications are diverse, and the list of awards, honors and fellowships is long, including multiple COIL grants (2022 and 2023) and a nomination for curriculum design for the study abroad program in Belgium.

“[I]t is our responsibility to prepare all our graduates for what they will face when they enter the global work force,” said Tessmer.

Leticia Cherchiglia, faculty liaison and program coordinator for Global Youth Advancement Network in International Studies and Programs, wrote in Tessmer’s nomination letter, “Since 2022, Dr. Tessmer has been championing curriculum internationalization through high impact experiential activities such as Collaborative Online International Learning, COIL, an educational methodology focused on intentionally promoting global learning, international understanding and cross-cultural cooperation.”

In 2022, Tessmer created MSU’s first COIL Faculty Learning Community, which she co-leads with Guanglong Pang, assistant director of Education Abroad and Global Engagement in Broad College of Business.

“Group work and peer-to-peer learning have been accepted as valuable learning tools for many decades mainly because, beside the course subject, it teaches an additional set of soft knowledge that is so valuable in the workplace,” Tessmer said.

“Adding an international setting with time differences, language barriers, multiple cultural perspectives and many other technical organizational issues that occur in global collaboration, one can easily appreciate how many more knowledge dimensions are involved and practiced in a COIL project.”

Tessmer is involved in two other COIL projects with faculty in Nigeria and South Africa.

“This international award is so meaningful to me! I was an exchange graduate student many years ago, and I was welcomed by the community in such a positive way….I try to pay it forward in the classroom where, via COIL, I offer a safe, international space where students experience a new environment, ”Tessmer said.