Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility

Invitational Global Learning Forum March 19-21, 2009 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania CONTENTS Rationale Forum Design Who Should Attend? Logistics Registration

Rationale

Over the past three years, AAC&U’s Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning, has brought together colleges and universities that were selected through a national call for proposals. They have focused on developing curricular models and faculty capacity to help students engage some of the most pressing questions of our time: What does it mean to be a well-educated and responsible citizen in today’s global contexts? And how should one act in the face of large, unsolved, global problems?

Over the next three years, AAC&U will create a national Global Learning Leadership Consortium (GLLC).  Working together across institutions, GLLC participants will create cross-disciplinary, problem-based, in-depth models for globalizing general education.  Such models will include

• overarching global learning frameworks for general education;
• topically linked courses (introductory to advanced);
• certificate programs;
• thematic minors;
• field-based designs with experiential learning; and
• undergraduate research.

Global challenges cut across multiple disciplines and require perspectives that most often lie beyond the training and experience of faculty members.  Institutions increasingly recognize the need to engage these challenges, but as they pursue reform strategies, they often find that pathways to global learning are poorly mapped.  The GLLC will seek to move problem-based, thematic topics to the very center of the general education experience.  Such a fundamental shift in organizing student learning, however, will require expanded study opportunities for faculty who will need to become familiar with new scholarship, new pedagogies, new curricular architectures, and new leadership strategies.  The GLLC will be organized to address these four dimensions.

The Global Learning Forum will lay the foundation for the Global Learning Leadership Consortium.  Participants will share the lessons learned from Shared Futures—not as a final product of that project, but as catalysts for generating the broad general education reform that our campuses need to educate students for the 21st century.  In this way, participating institutions will frame a national agenda that sets the contours of the next generation of global learning, general education, and liberal education.

Forum Design

The Global Learning Forum is an invitational “working meeting” supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the Henry Luce Foundation. The Forum seeks to provide faculty and administrative teams the opportunity to

• define, refine, and map global learning goals;
• study key frameworks that may contribute to advanced interdisciplinary teaching;
• share promising practices; and
• brainstorm administrative solutions to the challenges of cross-disciplinary, problem-based models for globalizing general education.

Each participant will select an interdisciplinary topical study group that aligns with his or her own interests and curricular needs.  The proposed study groups are:

1. Health and Social Justice
2. Sustainability
3. Globalization, Wealth, and Poverty
4. The Ethics of Global Citizenship
5. Identity, Culture and Border Crossings

Sessions/Workshops will be offered on structural curricular approaches to these topics (such as first-year experiences, course clusters, capstones, etc.) as well as on pedagogical strategies (e.g. experiential learning, undergraduate research, learning communities, etc.).  The primary goal of these sessions will be to identify the critical issues currently at play and to set the agenda for future curriculum and faculty development efforts.  Consequently, structured opportunities to share with and learn from colleagues at different institutions will be a central element of the Forum. 

Who Should Attend?

The Forum participants will include teams from the sixteen Shared Futures institutions and up to seventy five additional institutions that have been selected based upon leadership for global learning. Faculty members, student affairs professionals, and administrators with responsibilities in general education and global learning are invited to attend.  The composition of individual teams should reflect specific institutional priorities.

Logistics

The Forum will open at 7:00 pm on Thursday, March 19, and end at noon on Saturday, March 21. Included with registration are a reception on Thursday night, continental breakfast and full lunch on Friday, and breakfast on Saturday. The meeting will be held at Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing, (215) 928-1234 or (800) 233-1234. Special conference rates: Single/Double: $189, Triple: $214, Quad: $234.

Registration for this Forum is now open.

For more information, contact Caleb Ward.