Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning
2006 Summer Institute
Institutional Sharing
What’s Your Footprint?
Social Responsibility and Individual Choice in a Global Context
As part of Whittier College’s mission and Quaker heritage, we prepare students to be responsible members of the local and global community. This session focuses on various uses of a powerful paradigm deployed in courses fulfilling Whittier’s Cultural Perspectives, Community, and Connections requirements—the “global footprint.” We borrow the term from the “ecological footprint,” but extend its application; the global footprint not only marks the effect of our lifestyle choices on the natural environment and its resources, but also acknowledges the sociological and cultural impacts of those choices on a global scale. It encourages students to examine and research their individual choices, and makes sustainability and human rights issues of individual responsibility.
Cheryl Swift, Associate Professor of Biology; Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez, Assistant Professor of Sociology; and Lana Nino, Assistant Professor in Business Administration—all of Whittier College
Worldmindness as a Developmental Goal
In his seminal essay, An Attainable Global Perspective, Robert Hanvey imagines a process by which a student might acquire—and, more importantly, claim—a global consciousness. While his model is not a lockstep one, Hanvey does argue that a meaningful global perspective is made more likely when a student comes to see global learning as a constructive process.
As we revisit and revise our general education curriculum, we are mindful of the way that the goals of global learning might be constructively and developmentally sequenced. Borrowing from Hanvey’s model (and later revisions of it), we are working to lay a foundation for learning that moves our students through increasingly complex, interdisciplinary, and engaged work in global studies. Put another way, we are looking for our general education curriculum to build, rather than impose, world-mindedness. If your institution is interested in discussing how to scaffold such a curricular goal, please join us for this conversation.
Tammy Birk, Academic Teach Staff, English and Integrative Studies Program; Lyle Barkhymer, Chair, Integrative Studies Program—both of Otterbein College
Institutional Change and Global Learning:
Beyond Curriculum Development
California State University Long Beach provides students a rich choice of globally informed courses in its General Education program. The challenge is less the creation of new courses (which faculty will undertake on their own initiative in any case) than the quest for coherence in the way students experience General Education. Coherence requires significant institutional change, especially in collaborative work across departmental and college divisions. In this session we will discuss using the accreditation process to guide conversations and establish coherent global programs as well as using Interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Communities as a promising starting point for such efforts.
Kenneth Curtis, Professor of History and Liberal Studies; Teri Shaffer Yamada, Associate Professor of Comparative World Literature and Classics—both of California State University Long Beach
Teaching Science for Global Citizenship
Spanning disciplinary boundaries between science and social science is a means to develop courses that combine “fundamental and technical literacies” that address disciplinary content knowledge and “citizenship literacies” necessary for active, informed participation in scientific questions and controversies. The University of Wyoming has created courses that with the goal of increasing student capacity for ethical reasoning and a sense of social responsibility backed by sound scientific reasoning. These courses engage students in problem solving, group learning, presentations, and contested discussions involving social policies and scientific fact. Team participants will discuss an existing Earth resources courses as well as possibilities for adopting this design for courses in biology, geography, and other fields.
Debra Dawn Paulson, Associate Professor of Geography; James Myers, Professor of Geology and Geophysics; Mark Lyford, Director of the Biology Program; and Garth Massey, Director of International Studies and Professor of International Studies and Sociology—all of the University of Wyoming
Getting Away From Internationalization:
Developing a Culture of Worldmindedness on Campus
As part of its ongoing general education reform efforts, Arcadia is infusing worldmindedness into the fabric of the curriculum in such a way that it takes the place of internationalization as a defining characteristic of an Arcadia education. The new curriculum will focus on interconnectedness and inequity, thus replacing the domestic/foreign, us/them, Western/non-Western dichotomies. In this session, participants will learn about initial efforts to reach this goal and be invited to discuss strategies and challenges in reaching similar goals on their campuses.
Jeffrey Shultz, Associate Dean for Internationalization and Coordinator for General Education; Ellen Skilton-Sylvester, Associate Professor of Education; and Thomas Hemmeter, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program—all of Arcadia University.
Nature of Science, Global Learning, and Sustainability
Faculty Learning Communities at Mesa Community College
Last year Mesa Community College created “Nature of Science,” a learning community that encompassed faculty from a variety of disciplines who all engage in teaching scientific inquiry. Faculty spent the year discussing scientific concepts, how they are applied across disciplines and how to teach the nature of science in ways that students can understand its applicability across disciplines. The success of this group encouraged us to develop a number of new learning communities for the upcoming year, including one on sustainability and another on global learning. This session will discuss key challenges in creating such interdisciplinary perspective and pedagogy.
Brad Kinkaid, Director, Center for Teaching and Learning, and Biology Faculty; Shereen Lerner, Chair, Cultural Science Department and Anthropology Faculty; and Jonelle Moore, English Faculty—all of Mesa Community College
Tending the Fire:
Challenges and Opportunities in Preparing for the Second Decade of Global Studies at Drury University
Drury University will identify the challenges they encountered in revising their global studies curriculum and explore some of the strategies they have adopted in response to these challenges. In particular, they will discuss re-working their global studies capstone, promoting study abroad, assessing global learning, and creating a second generation of faculty leaders for the program. In addition, this session will consider how to create structures for maintaining excitement, energy, and financial support for global studies even after the program has been implemented.
Jayne White, Professor of Education and Child Development and Director of the School Development Program; Richard Schur, Director and Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Coordinator, “Global Perspectives for the 21st Century”; and Rebecca Anne Denton, Director of Southwest Missouri Center for Economic Education and Director, Drury University Diversity Center—all of Drury University.
Freedom Songs:
Interactions between the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the South African Liberation Movement
Designed as a template for a model class, this workshop examines two movements that influenced one another: the U.S. Civil Rights movement and the South African liberation movement. In both, music was a central means of transmitting the spirit and values of the movement to its participants, and often musicians would turn to available musical repertories (traditional, religious, and protest) for both inspiration and material. These borrowed songs were sometimes revised to fit the social circumstances and political needs of each movement, a process that allowed musicians to connect the current movement to familiar musical tropes and/or political and religious ideas.
Presenters will provide a brief historical context of Civil Rights and South African liberation movements; musical examples of seminal protest songs and their pre-existing sources; and cultural analysis of the textual/musical revisions. They will also address the pedagogical advantages and challenges of approaching history via cultural sources, including such issues as traversing multiple cultural contexts, developing global awareness through comparison of cultural practices, and the complications of genealogical readings of texts.
Jeremey Ball, Assistant Professor of History; Kim Rogers, Professor of History, and Amy Wlodarski, Assistant Professor of Music—all of Dickinson College
Developing Informed, Self-Directed Learners for a Changing World
How does an institution of higher education prepare students for the challenges of a changing world? At West Point we seek to establish well-defined breadth and depth components in the curriculum, designed to develop students as self-directed, informed, and empowered learners. We are incorporating strategies to align these components, placing greater emphasis on global learning without adding new core courses to the students’ already demanding load. While the core curriculum is likely to remain intact, we seek to reinforce linkages between language and culture in ways that are presently overlooked: expanding foreign-language instruction from alternate days to every day; transforming the world history core course into a two-semester comparative history sequence that provides regional context for the study of foreign languages; and placing greater emphasis on the importance of culture in a variety of core courses. Additionally, we are expanding the size and scope of our cultural-immersion program, with opportunities for up to fifty percent of our students to spend from three weeks to a semester studying in another country. All of these efforts are guided by clear standards and assessed routinely using multiple approaches. The assessment results help decision-makers determine the extent to which students are meeting institutional learning goals.
Bruce Keith, Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, The United States Military Academy
Globalizing the Core Curriculum at Stephens College:
Successes and Challenges
Stephens College has developed a new and required core curriculum—a women-centered, globally-oriented, interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Program—organized around multi-year Learning Communities. Courses include:
A year-long first-year course in critical reading, research, and writing and its link to Heifer, International;
• Sophomore Seminars in “Government and Economics” and “The Global Village”;
• Social Science courses in Peacemaking and Terrorism;
• International Literary Studies courses;
• Cultural Studies courses in aesthetics (Seven Pleasures) and “Women in Music”; and
• A Historical Studies course on International Perspectives on the 1960s.
Presenters will highlight (and share syllabi from) existing courses and invite participants to discuss a senior-level capstone course, “The Ethics of Globalization,” to be offered for the first time in Spring 2007.
Tina Parke-Sutherland, Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of English and Creative Writing; James Terry, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology; and Alexandria Zylstra, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies—all of Stephens College
Building a Global Core
Marquette University is weaving University Core of Common Studies (UCCS) courses throughout students’ entire careers so that they will experience multidisciplinary approaches to learning as an intrinsic feature of problem solving in a global context. By integrating global issues into strong diversity, service-learning, and justice education initiatives Marquette furthers its commitment to the global missions of Catholicism and Jesuit education. This session will focus on five interdisciplinary learning communities designed to help faculty acquire expertise across disciplines, collaborate on shared global content, and develop multidisciplinary and collaborative learning opportunities for students.
Deirdre Dempsey, Associate Professor of Theology; Christine L. Krueger, Co-director, Global Core Education Project and Director, University Core of Common Studies; Lawrence LeBlanc, Professor of Political Science; and Anne Pasero, Associate Professor of Spanish—all of Marquette University
Self, Community, and World:
Butler’s Approach to General Education
“Self, Community, and World” is the over-arching theme of Butler’s new core curriculum. Each of these three components constitutes roughly one-third of the new Butler core (general education program). Activity in globalizing the new curriculum is most evident in the First Year Seminar, Global and Historical Studies, a Capstone for upper division students, and through an expansion of student and faculty exchange programs. This session will focus on the multiple strategies Butler is employing to address globalization through the new core curriculum, “Self, Community and World”.
Robert Bennet, Professor of Business Law; C. Montgomery Broaded, Director of International Programs; Michelle Jarvis, Professor of Dance; Joseph Kirsch, Associate Provost and Professor of Chemistry; Tara Lineweaver, Assistant Professor of Psychology; and David Mason, Professor of Political Science—all of Butler University
A Curricular Architecture for Interdisciplinarity and Global Education
Wheaton College will present on its curricular initiatives known as Connections and Infusion. Connections are clusters of two or three courses linking any of six areas (creative arts, humanities, history, social sciences, natural sciences, and math/computer science.) Connections are designed to expose students to a breadth of disciplinary perspectives by comparing their approaches to a specific topic, issue, area or period. The Infusion Program is a curriculum transformation effort designed to emphasize race/ethnicity and its intersections with gender/sexuality, class and religion in the US and globally. We will outline Wheaton’s approaches and then welcome a collaborative conversation with colleagues about how our model may inform other practices and how we may adapt work from other institutions into our own efforts. We especially hope to learn from others who have developed evaluation approaches for reflecting on such curricular initiatives.
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Kersti Yllo, Professor of Sociology, Associate Provost, and Director of the College Learning Center; Harvey Charles, Mildred Bray Dean for Global Education and Associate Professor of Education; and Darlene Boroviak, Chair and Professor of Political Science—all of Wheaton College
What Do You Mean This Isn’t a Global Issues Course?
Defining “Global” at UNC
This session will focus on a single new requirement in the new General Education curriculum at UNC—a “global issues” requirement—in order to think through three distinct but related obstacles to globalizing curricula at large institutions: 1) linguistic or definitional ambiguity; 2) variations in disciplinary perspective; and 3) the customary conflation of area studies with all things international. At UNC, the designers of the global issues requirement (articulated in the course of the 2002-3 academic year) worked with a set of assumptions that, it later became apparent, were not shared by all faculty and academic units across the campus. Our panel discussion will focus on several exemplary definitional problems and exchanges that emerged out of the implementation process in 2004-5 in an effort to identify strategies for overcoming miscommunication and divergent perspectives in the pursuit of a globalized curriculum.
Jay Smith, Professor of History and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Curricula; Bruce Fried, Associate Professor and Director of Master’s Program, Department of Health Policy and Administration; and Jonathan Weiler, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor, International and Area Studies—all of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Institutional Change:
Strategic Planning on Global Learning at Mesa Community College
Four years ago, Mesa Community College developed a Certificate of Global Citizenship. This certificate was designed to direct students to think about the world around them as they consider their course work at the college. Ten Mesa faculty members attended the Salzburg Seminar (over two years) to learn about Global Citizenship on a larger scale. This year we are tapping these experiences to develop a Strategic Plan for the college community—faculty, staff, and students—to consider how global learning can be incorporated into all facets of the college—curriculum, student services, and administration. This session will highlight the progression of events leading to the Plan, the elements contained in the Plan itself, and our efforts to implement the Plan.
Andrea Buehman, Dean of Research and Planning; Paul Harasha, Sociology Faculty; Shereen Lerner, Chair, Cultural Science Department and Anthropology Faculty; and Jonelle Moore, English Faculty—all of Mesa Community College
Institutional Structures and Integrative Learning
Dickinson College has a strong track record of creating learning models that effectively engage students in integrating global and local experiential learning. These are programs in which students can cross boundaries—the boundaries of race and ethnicity (both domestically and internationally), of individual academic disciplines, of institutional segmentation of "academic" and "student life," and of campus and community. The success of these efforts lies in the coordination of multiple partners—varying combinations of faculty, administrators, student life staff, and off-campus community partners—and administrative structures that support these integrative approaches.
In this session, faculty and administrators will draw from their direct experiences to lead discussion of conditions and strategies that support faculty and administrators in creating and sustaining integrative learning experiences on-campus and in the larger community.
Joyce Bylander, Associate Provost for Campus Academic Life; Susan Rose, Professor of Sociology; and Shalom Staub, Academic Affairs Fellow—all of Dickinson College
Building an Institutional Infrastructure for Global Learning Through a Campus-Wide Theme
Chandler-Gilbert Community College’s faculty-development theme, SEE Your World, cultivates an exploration of social, environmental and economic concerns in our community and world. This session will trace the evolution of the theme on campus, from concept to initial marketing and promotion to its present incarnation which involves development in the following areas:
• faculty’s ability to sustain difficult conversations;
• a venue for students developing as global learners to find and express their voice;
• increased partnerships between faculty and campus programs (the International Education office, service learning, student life, the Honors program, etc.);
• administrators serving as advocates for global learning;
• and growing interdisciplinary connections between faculty members.
Chris Schnick, History Instructor; Paul Petrequin, Residential Faculty; and Pushpa Ramakrishna, Biology Faculty—all of Chandler-Gilbert Community College
Global Citizenship:
Using the University Mission to Guide Curriculum Renewal
This session will provide an overview of how Hawai‘i Pacific University’s mission to foster global citizenship is providing the basis for curriculum renewal (general education), curriculum innovation (a first-year seminar) and strengthened opportunities for cultural immersion (language studies, travel abroad, campus activities). Hawai‘i Pacific University’s goal is to help students create informed commitments and personal definitions of global citizenship. One advantage the global citizenship mission is the way it expands the concept of diversity beyond the usual commitments to justice associated with assuring access and opportunity. The commitments we are encouraging students to make as global citizens will lead them into roles of advocacy for access and opportunity to freedom and to quality of life for people around the world; this is diversity at its best.
Nancy Hedlund, Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice President of Planning and Assessment; Michelene Soong, Assistant Professor of English; and Carlos Juárez, Dean of the College of International Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science—all of Hawai‘i Pacific University
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