Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility
General Education for Global Learning
Curriculum and Faculty Development Network
Participating Institutions
Arcadia University (PA)
Butler University (IN)
California State University-Long Beach (CA)
Carnegie Mellon University (PA)**
Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ)
Dickinson College (PA)
Drury University (MO)
Hawai'i Pacific University (HI)
Marquette University (WI)
Mesa Community College (AZ)
Otterbein College (OH)
Stephens College (MO)
United States Military Academy (NY)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NC)*
University of Wyoming (WY)*
Wheaton College (MA)
Whittier College (CA)
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (MA)**
* UNC and University of Wyoming participated in the network from 2005-2006.
** Carnegie Mellon University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute joined the Shared Futures network in 2006
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Arcadia University
To prepare its students for a world of increasing interdependence and complexity, Arcadia University has made several significant changes to its undergraduate curriculum.
Curriculum
Arcadia's new undergraduate curriculum blends general education and major courses. Among the new requirements, students must take a first-year seminar and two university seminars meant to be interdisciplinary, integrative, and creative.
Arcadia used AAC&U's curriculum development sub-award to provide stipends for faculty members developing first-year seminars with interdisciplinary approaches to themes such as coffee, chocolate, and sustainability in contemporary art.
In 2008, Arcadia established four new University Seminars that have a Global Connections orientation and combine humanities, science, and arts with STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). These courses include: Scientific Ethics; Envisioning Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Environmental Science; Mapping the World; Born Digital: How the Net Generation Lives, Works and Plays.
Experiential Learning
The Global Connections Experience and Reflection provide all Arcadia students the opportunity for a sustained cross-cultural experience. Students live in and learn about a society different from that in which they have lived previously. In addition, the Global Connections Experience includes a supervised reflection—typically an electronic portfolio—in which the students document and analyze their experiences. Through an exchange agreement with Whittier College and ANAC's Domestic Exchange Initiative, Arcadia is expanding the range of domestic global connections experiences offered to students.
To help students analyze and reflect on
Global Connections Experiences (local, national, or international), Arcadia has developed a 2-credit, online, Global Connections Reflection course that all students will take in conjunction with their off-campus Experiences. The pilot course was developed for a service learning experience in Hispanic Philadelphia during a 3-day faculty development institute, partially funded by a Title VI grant. As of spring semester 2009, Arcadia offers multiple sections of the experience and reflection courses.
Co-Curriculum
Arcadia has recently re-constituted its Internationalization Committee to be the Multicultural/International Coordinating Committee. This committee is providing input in campus strategic directions to infuse the Shared Futures work beyond the curriculum and into the overarching framework for international/global efforts on campus. In 2008, these efforts took the form of a common summer reading for first-year students emphasizing environmental sustainability. The Fall 2008 University Colloquium Speaker was Debra Rowe.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Butler University
Butler University is in the process of implementing a new general education program called The University Core Curriculum. The core curriculum focuses on student learning objectives, and it addresses civic engagement in a number of its elements. Butler University's new core has three major components:
- Common experience elements (a First Year Seminar, a second year experience called Global and Historical Studies, and a Junior/Senior Capstone course).
- Distribution requirements (Texts and Ideas, Social World, Perspectives in Creative Arts, Analytical Reasoning, and Physical Well-Being).
- Special requirements (writing across the curriculum, speaking across the curriculum, a Butler culture requirement, and an Indianapolis Community requirement).
During the summer of 2007, five faculty workshops were held to aid in the development of Global and Historical Studies courses. Faculty formed learning communities and worked on course development. These workshops were funded in part by an AAC&U mini-grant.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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California State University-Long Beach (CA)
California State University, Long Beach, intends to develop a coherent global learning focus in General Education for its large and diverse undergraduate student body. Building on the developmental emphasis of the current GE program, the focus will be on infusing global content across required Foundation courses for first-year students, including the possible reform of existing orientation and self-integration requirements into a two-semester Freshman seminar with a global theme.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
Carnegie Mellon University is committed to creating global citizens who can live, work and flourish in a broad range of contexts. The university recognizes the need to participate globally and offers its students a rich variety of opportunities to learn about people, institutions and best practices from around the world. Beginning with the 2006-2007 academic year, the university launched a series of eight “global” courses across its seven colleges, with the intent of building a community of teachers and learners who will share knowledge and experience at the local and global levels. The University is encouraging the development of courses that stress the interdependence of learning and working communities and the challenges posed by the increasing interconnectedness of the world.
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Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ)
Chandler-Gilbert Community College promotes global learning through a variety of creative and inclusive strategies and activities. Most notably, CGCC has developed co-curricular activities and an Environmental Technology Center.
Co-Curricular Activities
- Unnatural Disaster Day: CGCC has established a semesterly co-curricular event called the “Unnatural Disaster Day.” Using an environmental disaster as a theme, each faculty member guides his or her classes in a study of that disaster from their respective disciplinary perspectives. On one scheduled day, all related classes meet for a 2½ hour multidisciplinary event. Tables are organized to sit one student from each discipline. Students begin by sharing a prepared written explanation and interpretation of the disaster from their disciplinary perspectives. After that, students brainstorm and create an action plan on how to prevent these kinds of disasters in the future. Finally, students present their work to community leaders to whom this knowledge could be useful. The theme for the spring 2008 was Ecuador and Texaco’s oil drilling from 1964-1992. The Spring 2009 unnatural disaster focus is on nuclear energy.
- Peace Day: CGCC has installed seven Peace Poles at various spots on campus. (The Peace Poles are aluminum, four-sided poles that say “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in English and three other modern languages.) Simultaneous dedication ceremonies were held at each of the poles, and a film showing and cultural performance followed. CGCC hopes to turn this into an annual event.
- One Book: The CGCC One Book program for the spring 2009 will ask faculty to have their students read Lisa Margonelli’s Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank. The book is intimately connected with Global Learning outcomes and CGCC will plan numerous co-curricular events around the book.
Environmental Technology Center (ETC)
Perhaps Chandler-Gilbert’s biggest initiative is the planning of an Environmental Technology Center. The goal of the ETC is to construct a low-impact and cost efficient living classroom where students can engage in service learning and experiential learning projects focused on Global Learning/Sustainability. Using the Shared Futures mini-grant to jumpstart the initiative, CGCC hired a consultant for the construction of the floor of the ETC; there are a number of concrete sidewalks on campus that are slated for removal that will be re-used for flooring. With additional funding from the Salt River Project for putting solar panels on new classroom buildings, CGCC has hired an architect and plans to break ground in January 2009. The ETC and its surrounding gardens will provide students with a facility to experience and explore issues of sustainability.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Dickinson College (PA)
The pursuit of global learning and social responsibility at Dickinson College largely takes the form of curriculum development through learning communities comprised of seminars linked or clustered around a common theme. Recent efforts have established four new learning communities and two new course clusters. Modeled after Emory University’s Piedmont Project, Dickinson held The Valley and Ridge Project in August 2008 to develop curriculum around the theme of sustainability. Further leadership will be provided by Dr. Neil Leary who was recently hired as the first director of Dickinson’s new Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education.
Learning Communities and Clusters
The following learning communities were launched in the fall of 2008:
- Environment, Science and Sustainability:
- Green Science for the iPod Generation - Mike Holden (Chemistry)
- Sustaining Places: National Parks, Forests, Farms, and Communities - Jeremy Vetter (History)
- Ethics of Hunting and Fishing - Tim Wahls (Math/Computer Science)
- Sustaining Northeastern Wildlife - Gene Wingart (Environmental Studies)
- Perspectives on Health:
- The Political Economy of Health - Ebru Kongar (Economics)
- Growing a Health Community - Dave Sarcone (International Business and Management)
- Explaining Illness to Ourselves - Andy Skelton (Psychology)
- Literary Representations of History and Identity:
- Whose Story is it: History and Identity in Latin American Literature - Rebecca Marquis (Spanish and Portuguese)
- Language Games: Historical Truth through the Historical Novel - Jorge Sagastume (Spanish and Portuguese)
- Civil Liberties and Human Rights:
- The War on Terrorism and Civil Liberties - Harry Pohlman (Political Science)
- Theater and Human Rights - Victoria Sams (English)
Dickinson currently offers two global clusters:
- Environmental Change and Human Decisions: This cluster investigates human interactions with the natural world, emphasizing how decision-making for sustainability can only operate through a sound understanding of nature and society. By combining a lab science course with a social science course that together build a foundation for many different fields of study at the College, this cluster could lead to a wide variety of majors that address problems related to human involvement in environmental issues.
- Introduction to Environmental Science (Wilderman) provides a scientific foundation for sustainability education. Students will learn about vital natural processes such as nutrient cycles and energy flows, along with the impacts of human disturbances and decisions.
- Microeconomics (Tynan) focuses on human rational decision-making under economic constraints. By learning about general principles such as scarcity, markets, utility, profit, consumer choice, efficiency, resource allocations, and externalities, and by applying these principles to environmental problems, students will gain a solid grounding in the challenges of economic sustainability.
- Science and Sustainability:
This cluster provides a foundation for an education in local and global challenges in sustainability and to begin understanding the historical roots of problems and to facilitate developing and evaluating possible solutions. With courses in the cluster taught by instructors from a diverse array of fields, students can prepare for a wide variety of majors.
- Global Climate Change (Niemitz) students will learn how climate scientists study climate as a complex, interacting system on a global scale.
- History of Science (Vetter) students will trace major changes in how humans have understood the natural world in the context of global history.
The Valley and Ridge Project
As a result of Dickinson’s participation in Emory University’s Piedmont Project in January 2008, its team successfully designed and implemented a similar sustainability curricular workshop. The Valley and Ridge Project, named after Dickinson’s unique physiographic location, brought together eight faculty members and several additional resource persons to retool specific courses to address scientific issues of sustainability. Most of the participants were outside the traditional sciences: Sociology, French, Italian, Biology, Economics, English, Sociology, and International Business and Management. The diversity and energy of the participants is a positive sign that science and sustainability will be infused into other disciplines.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Drury University (MO)
As a result of the Shared Futures Project, Drury University made some significant changes in its curriculum by creating, revamping, and linking courses in its general education plan, Global Perspectives for the 21st century (GP21). Specifically, Drury has linked the competencies of Science & Inquiry (NSCI 251) with Global Awareness (GLST 201). Drury University also developed an interdisciplinary science course for non-majors around the topic of sustainability.
General Education Approach
Rather than view general education as an overview of diverse disciplines and knowledge of the world, Drury’s approach, The Global Pathways Proposal, emphasizes problem- or inquiry-based learning. This general education model encourages students to become globally engaged through a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary examination of a particular social question or a specific region of the globe. The pathways were intended to allow students to achieve the learning outcomes prescribed by the global studies general education program.
Awarded with seed money from the Global Pathways Council, AAC&U, and the Edward Jones Center, volunteer faculty groups developed global learning pathways prototypes around themes such as sustainability; gender, race, and sexuality; Asian-Pacific-American connection; and Latin American Studies. These pathways (and others that get proposed and developed) will be submitted to GP 21 Council, AAC&U, and then the full faculty for approval during the 2009-2010 academic year.
Course Development
Linking Courses to Improve Student Learning: Linking Science and Inquiry with Cultural Diversity was intended to create a childhood development course in the context of biology for education majors. Instead of using only science faculty to teach Science and Inquiry, teaching teams consisted of one science and one education specialist. Following its first offering in early 2008, this proved to be very effective in giving students “real world” applications in the context of childhood education. Final enrollment portrayed a wide mix of disciplines from all across campus.
Interdisciplinary Course Development: The Science of Sustainability is an interdisciplinary course designed to fulfill the Natural Sciences requirement for Drury’s GP21 general education program, the Science Division approved a interdisciplinary science course with a focus on sustainability. Goals for students include understanding the following concepts and skills pertaining to local and global sustained development: oral and written communication skills; scientific literacy; the scientific method; evaluation of science in the press; the intersection of environmental preservation, economic prosperity and social justice; and scientific principles that explain local and global environmental problems and solutions.
The class meets twice a week for 50 minutes for lecture and discussion, and once a week for four hours for field trips, lab experiences, films, and computer modeling. The course is inherently interdisciplinary in its scientific core and perspectives, but also multi-disciplinary in integrating multi-cultural, economic, political and historical perspectives. This course involves discussion (and exploration) of environmental issues relating to China, Tanzania, India, Denmark, and Brazil. During the remainder of the course, the focus will include: global climate change, regional and global water availability, and global changes in land-use.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Hawai'i Pacific University (HI)
Throughout the past three years, Hawai’i Pacific University has been working to instill Global Learning within its general education and co-curricular programs.
Global Learning First Year Seminars
Currently Hawai'i Pacific University has freshman seminars in fields such as anthropology, communication, biology, classical studies, computer science, ethno-botany, oceanography, writing and analyzing arguments, psychology, and philosophy. Each seminar enrolls 15-18 students, accommodating nearly 1/3 of incoming freshmen. These models integrate global learning objectives and transition-to-college learning experiences for freshmen students. In the process, HPU has identified “good practices” for promoting effective global learning:
- Establishment of an integrative assignment — HPU’s global citizenship short essay,“Who Am I in the World?” asks students to explain a topic of interest from a personal or hypothetical perspective. The student must then identify the values and reactions of a global citizen. Challenges have included maintaining continuity between courses, establishing a sound rubric, and managing the workload for faculty.
- Development of a “First-Year Seminar Guidebook” (pdf) to promote student engagement and integrative learning around a theme for the transition-to-college component of the Seminars.
- A faculty mentoring component.
- Journals requiring reflective analysis on learning experiences.
- Three or more community or campus activities relating to global learning.
- Staff presentations in classes from library, First-Year Program, advising and Student Success seminars, and study abroad programs.
- Student-maintained portfolios of written work.
- Instructor participation in First Year Seminar faculty meetings.
General Education Curriculum
The seminar model has been adopted and integrated into a new general curriculum: “Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the general education program provides students with a liberal arts foundation as a preparation for in-depth study in a major field and for life-long learning as a member of our global society. Courses in the general education program provide students with the breadth of knowledge and essential skills that they will need to participate as informed, responsible citizens in the world today. The program is organized around five themes: Communication Skills, Values & Choices, World Cultures, Global Systems and Research & Epistemology.”
Co-Curricular Reinforcements
Success in advancing global learning is related to support given to two strategic priorities: global citizenship and retention. To foster curiosity about the project, HPU has developed a range of initiatives and arenas. These initiatives target ways to engage students, faculty, and staff in linking global learning, sustainability, and the campus community.
- The Viewpoints film series - films with global, environmental, cultural, and/or other perspectives that provide different points of view on the world.
- Support of each semester’s Global Citizenship Student Symposium and campus speakers
- Fall 2006: Speaker – Dr. Bipasha Baruah, a colleague from the 2006 Summer Institute.
- Spring 2007: Speaker - Rebecca Schliefer, an attorney and researcher with the Human Rights Watch HIV/AIDS program.
- Fall 2007: Climate Change Speakers Stuart Scott and Rob Kinslow.
- Spring 2008:
Climate Change and Hawai‘i: How Should Higher Education Prepare Students for Tomorrow’s Challenges?”
- Campus lectures by Dr. Stephen Schneider, April 1-2, 2008, sponsored by the AACU Shared Futures Mini-grant
- The common book project, HPU Reads
- Faculty development through presentations each term at the Faculty Scholarship Day.
- Increased use of community speakers in classes.
- The formation of the campus faculty-staff Sustainability Group
- Focus on strengthening the HPU’s study abroad programs
- Increased teacher-student communication within and relating to events
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Marquette University (WI)
Since 2006 Marquette University launched several programs that are transforming the institution’s ability to promote global learning. In addition to adding seven courses to a Diverse Cultures requirement of the University Core of Common Studies, Marquette has undertaken an initiative to integrate Mathematics across the curriculum. Furthermore Marquette has embarked on a campus-wide effort to coordinate curricular and co-curricular programming around annual global mission themes, anchored by a global mission’s handbook for incoming students.
Diverse Cultures Courses:
- Africana Philosophy
- Asian History
- Latino/a Literature
- Latin American History
- Culture and Health (College of Nursing)
Who Counts: Math Across the Curriculum for Global Learning
In an effort to better integrate mathematical reasoning across the curriculum to improve students’ abilities to solve global problems, Marquette developed and launched the “Who Counts” initiative, funded by FIPSE. Marquette will implement mathematical reasoning assignments across the curriculum for global learning throughout three years. The Who Counts project is also collaborating with community businesses and education partners, including Alverno College, to create authentic learning opportunities for students’ multidisciplinary global education. Partnerships are also being pursued with Wisconsin Energies, local law firms, and affiliates of Marquette’s nationally-recognized Service Learning program.
Global Missions Guidebook
Pathways to a Life that Counts (doc) is a multidisciplinary handbook that is provided to all incoming students. The Global Missions Guidebook is a resource for instructors to contextualize global justice issues within core knowledge areas and Marquette’s Jesuit mission for global justice. It is distributed to all incoming students and integrated into the First Year Writing program and the first year leadership seminar in the College of Business Administration.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Mesa Community College (AZ)
To encourage global learning outcomes among its students, Mesa Community College (MCC) is using a professional learning community and faculty stipends to establish an assessment tool for existing global courses, a center for global learning, and the incorporation of global issues into a variety of introductory courses.
Assessment
Currently, MCC offers more than 50 classes that address global issues in some way. However, the effect of these courses on student global learning has never been assessed. In the fall of 2008, a team of 15 faculty members from a variety of disciplines began to identify desired global learning outcomes and construct an assessment tool to gauge them. Through the development of this assessment tool, MCC will gain a greater understanding of the improvements needed in our curriculum to ensure student outcomes are being met.
Center for Global Learning and Sustainability
Mesa Community College is working to establish a Center for Global Learning and Sustainability that will coordinate global learning activities within curricular and co-curricular frameworks. Until a physical space can be established, the center will act through classroom space. The courses taught in the classroom will be focused on global issues. When classes are not occurring, the room will be used to advance global and sustainability initiatives, host speakers, and create an environment for international students to connect.
Faculty and Curriculum development
Learning Community on Global Learning: Since 2006, team leader Shereen Lerner has facilitated a Faculty and Professional Learning Community on Global Learning. This has been an interdisciplinary group with faculty from various academic departments, including Economics, Anthropology, History, Political Science, English, Reading, Counseling, Sociology, Education Studies, Philosophy, and Social Work, and staff from Student Services, Technology, and the International Education Office. The team held in-depth discussions (2007, 2008) of global issues and ways to develop and enhance interdisciplinary courses and pedagogy to foster global awareness in the classroom.
Curriculum Development Stipends: Through the Shared Futures faculty development mini-grant, stipends were provided to faculty developing global content in specific introductory classes: Geology, Biological Anthropology, Forensics, Chemistry, English, Engineering, Economics, Psychology, Education, and others. MCC hopes to develop global problem-based ideas to incorporate into the curriculum to allow students to re-contextualize problems and tie to their disciplinary study. One ultimate outcome may be to bring together multiple classes at the end of the semester to discuss common themes and different disciplinary perspectives, perhaps through a student showcase.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Otterbein College (OH)
Otterbein College has made tremendous strides in embedding global learning in its general education curriculum, Integrative Studies. All students at Otterbein are required to complete ten courses in Integrative Studies through a four year developmental program. With substantial supplemental funding from the McGregor Fund, Otterbein will provide 50 competitive sub-grants for faculty for significant course and program development. through the Transformation Project: Supporting Students’ Ability to Integrate Learning.
Faculty Development: Professional Learning Communities
In addition to sending faculty to conferences and establishing panels and committees to explore implementation of global learning in higher education, Otterbein has also taken an alternative approach to faculty and curriculum development, Professional Learning Communities (PLC). This strategy offers a cross-disciplinary group of faculty the opportunity to meet regularly to study pedagogical topics of shared interest. During 2007-08, PLC participants met at least twice a month for two hours to examine existing research on their common areas of inquiry. Faculty then designed and pursued individual projects to apply and test new ideas and information about student learning.
Three Professional Learning Communities at Otterbein (Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences) have established twenty-two pilot courses in 2008-09 that model global learning outcomes throughout the curriculum. The work of these pilot courses was disseminated in several forums at Otterbein including through a presentation at a campus-wide faculty common hour, and in written form for the Center for Teaching and Learning spring meeting.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Stephens College (MO)
Stephens College has, in the last two years, made revolutionary changes in its general education program, designing and implementing a new women-centered, globally-oriented, interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Program organized around multi-year Learning Communities. As part of the Shared Futures project, they hope to successfully continue the process begun, as well as serve as a change-model for other institutions, especially other small colleges, trying to make similar changes.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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United States Military Academy (NY)
The United States Military Academy (USMA) must afford its students a broad liberal education designed to develop versatile, creative, and critical thinkers. Because of the structure and complexities of the USMA as both an academic and a military leadership institution, the efforts of implementing global learning into the curriculum have focused on developing an architecture and framework that will facilitate long term and systemic curricular reform. Working with the existing Cultural Perspective Goal and its current general education curriculum, USMA is working to effectively develop integrated curriculum and experiences, refine curriculum assessments, and equip its staff for complexities of an interdisciplinary curriculum.
Curriculum reform and assessment will depend on faculty equipped with the intellectual, pedagogical, and collaborative skills necessary to manage a complex, interdisciplinary curriculum. For this reason, USMA has invested heavily in faculty development. Based on the results of the Cadet Leadership Development System (CLDS) domain teams, goal teams, AAC&U consortia workshops, and the Project Kaleidoscope consortium, USMA established the following recommendations to effectively implement global learning goals within the curriculum
- Development of a matrix for ensuring appropriate departmental representation for the CLDS domain teams.
- Establishment of a Faculty and Staff Development Plan including:
- Disseminate published copies of the CLDS strategic operational guidance document.
- Clearly communicate faculty and staff responsibilities and goals in the CLDS.
- Revise faculty and staff rewards to align with CLDS.
- Ensure Cadet awareness, participation, and collaboration in engaging in CLDS.
- Gauging of cadet performance by evidence gathered by the Army Sustainability Committee
- Identifcation and definition of global problems that will be integrated across the core curriculum.
- Formation of new strategies to integrate global learning within the existing global perspective courses. Possibilities include linking history, economics, and geography courses around the cadet's respective language study or create a single course teaching cultural components and systems.
- Development of an external assessment of the CLDS framework.
- Assessment of the moral development of cadets over four years using the recognized Defining Issues Test.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NC)
The process of implementing and assessing the new curriculum, "Making Connections,” provides the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill an opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of the new requirements structure and to measure graduates’ abilities to act as informed, capable, and purposeful global citizens.
Interdisciplinary Cluster Programs are a central feature of the “Making Connections” curriculum. As one of the two means of satisfying the junior- and senior-level Supplemental Education requirements that apply to all B.A majors in the College, Cluster Programs provide an “integrative” interdisciplinary experience by approaching a single theme or object of study from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Students pursuing one of the cluster options will take the “core” course required of all students in the cluster and two other courses that complement the core course.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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University of Wyoming (WY)
The current global awareness component of the University Studies Program (USP) is embedded in a wide range of courses across the curriculum, indicative of the interest of UW faculty and reflecting the commitment to internalization of curriculum in the UW Academic Plan. Critical to UW is the assessment of global awareness and the development of a coherent theme of global citizenship advanced by the USP curriculum. The USP underwent a major revision in 2003 and continues to evolve into an effective and forward-looking leader in undergraduate education at UW.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Wheaton College (MA)
Implementation of global learning at Wheaton College was initiated by inspiring professors and administrators to reform curriculum and develop activities that combine global issues and science.
Curriculum
To encourage faculty to integrate the scientific approach with other modes of thought, such as writing and visual expression, Wheaton provided stipends to faculty who committed to the following global learning outcomes.
- Comprehension of the increasing interdependence between the global and the local
- Comprehension of the implication of individual and community actions of global sustainability
- Use of technology for local and global communication
- Use scientific theory, method, and data analysis in analyzing the world
- Comprehension of the increasing interdependence between the global and the local
- Comprehension of the impact of human actions of global processes, systems, and sustainability
- Comprehension of the physical and biological functioning of the earth
Course Examples
Introduction to Biology: This course involved adding a global perspective to units on nutrition and health, human population and human reproduction, the human immune system and infectious diseases, and genetically modified foods. The students learned how individual food choices impact the global environment. They researched a developed and developing country of their choice to examine the correlation between women’s education levels, fertility, and longevity. Students examined the relationships that exist in climate change, habitat destruction and newly emerging and re-emerging diseases. Lastly, students discussed issues of interconnectivity between the corporate industry of genetically modified foods and smaller developing nations.
Cells and Genes: In this course global content such as global health and burden of disease were added to the curriculum. Students examined the relationships between income levels, literacy rates, and life expectancy in eight different countries on four different continents. Films and photography were used to engage students, who reported finding the courses’ global topics the most interesting of all.
Programs and Initiatives
- Wheaton's Center for Global Education continues to work toward student and faculty development, now under new leadership .
- Two post-doctoral fellows will be hired to teach courses in Islamic studies and environmental studies. Each post-doctoral fellow will serve in two-year positions funded by new Mellon grant resources.
- The college’s president announced the formation of “an umbrella organization to coordinate sustainability efforts across campus.”
- Together with the Student Government Association (SGA), the President’s Office will sponsor an open forum on sustainability in fall 2008.
- The Sustainability Committee worked with the campus community and community partners to “effectively reduce the carbon footprint of Wheaton College."
- The SGA is creating a Green Initiatives Committee “to infuse needed resources into projects that help make Wheaton a greener campus." The stated goal is to “coordinate with the Sustainability Committee and work to facilitate student collaboration...to promote sustainable policies and practices on campus.”
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Whittier College (CA)
Whittier College is working to create a curriculum that emphasizes global learning across requirements and across disciplines. To address this need, Whittier has implemented new faculty development activities and course assessments.
General Education Requirements: Global Learning
To ensure that all students acquire the necessary learning outcomes of global learning, Whittier College has established four requirements within its general education program, the Liberal Education Program.
- Community I - First year students are co-enrolled in a writing seminar and another class. Develop freshman writing seminars that teach global learning. New courses include topics such as “Global Medicine and Chemistry,” “A World Without Us,” and “Peaceful Paths.”
- Connections I - Students are co-enrolled in two courses which examine a topic from two different disciplinary perspectives.
- Connections II - Students enroll in a course that examines the science underlying a social issue or problem or a cultural practice.
- Cultural Perspectives - Students must complete four courses from six different geographic categories including a global/comparative category.
Faculty Development
In addition to sending faculty to relevant conferences, Whittier College matched the Shared Futures mini-grants to provide stipends for faculty to develop four new Connections II courses and one new Connection I course.
Assessing Global Learning
To better gauge the scope of global content in Whittier’s courses, a survey was established to evaluate the descriptions of courses offered in 2008/09. The criteria defined global content as a comparison of at least two cultures or regions (one outside the U.S). A global curriculum should also address transnational issues such as migration, natural resources, the environment, conflict, culture, equity and health. This survey included all courses in all departments except for practicum courses, senior seminars, and research methods courses. In areas where global learning is weak, Whittier’s Educational Policies committee will begin to examine new strategies and solutions to increase global content in all fields.
Co-Curriculum
First-year required reading addresses global issues.
- 2007 reading: "What is the What” by Dave Eggers
- 2008 reading: “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Study Away/Study Abroad
To improve the affordability and quality of study abroad opportunities Whittier hired Dr. David Bachner, Scholar-in-Residence, School of International Service, American University, as a consultant on international study. His recommendations included:
- Establish the institutional-mission and budgetary priorities of international study programs at Whittier.
- Clarify the academic aspects of international study programs and related student selection issues.
- Expand January-Term Programs.
- Create an omnibus “intercultural programs” scholarship endowment to support year-long, semester-long, January-Term, internship, service-learning, and independent-study experiences.
- Consider increasing program-staff resources and tightening coordination with other campus offices.
- Establish one institutional exchange agreement on a pilot basis.
- Explore consortium options.
- Consolidate program providers and leverage the consolidated list of providers for volume discounts.
Team Leaders General Education Model
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Worcester Polytechnic Institute (MA)
Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s (WPI) curriculum development in global learning has focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines under the Great Problems Seminars (GPS). All first-year students enroll in the GPS for a multi-course introduction to university-level research and project work based on contemporary global challenges. These courses aim to help students build skills they need to succeed at WPI and in their future careers. Three seminars are planned for the Class of 2012:
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