Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility

General Education for Global Learning

Project Rationale

Many of the questions shaping higher education today spring from an interdependent world community in the midst of profound social, political, economic, and cultural realignments. Systems are being redesigned, relationships renegotiated, and modes of commerce and communication transformed. The problems we face—as individuals and societies—are urgent and increasingly defined as global: environment and development, health and disease, conflict and insecurity, poverty and hopelessness. Similarly, the goals of democracy, freedom, equity, justice, and peace are increasingly understood to encompass the globe and play out across multiple and complex cultures. Such global challenges cut across academic disciplines and require perspectives beyond the training and experience of most faculty members.

AAC&U believes that “liberal education has the strongest impact when students look beyond the classroom to the world’s major questions, asking students to apply their developing analytical skills and ethical judgments to significant problems in the world around them.” (Greater Expectations, AAC&U 2002). To successfully engage our students with such large, unscripted, global questions requires more than a single course or even a collection of related courses. It should be the overarching goal of a well-designed curriculum. In fact, it should be a primary characteristic of a liberal education.

Recent AAC&U research shows that a growing number of colleges see themselves as educating students who will thrive in a future characterized by global interdependence. Their graduates will succeed in the global economy, they say, and will also demonstrate social responsibility and civic engagement. Despite rhetorical commitment to such a vision, however, few institutions have created new curricular structures or significantly redesigned existing ones to achieve these goals for all of their students.

According to an American Council on Education survey, only slightly more than 50 percent of four-year institutions have an international general education course requirement. At the majority of these institutions, such a requirement is satisfied by a single course; less than a quarter of schools require that students take two courses (Siaya and Heywood 2003). Additionally, such courses are overwhelmingly designed to introduce students to concepts and examples of cultural diversity. While cultural diversity courses serve an important function, they do not take advantage of the full range of framing opportunities that global learning can bring to general education. These existing courses rarely place the United States within the context of global diversity, for example. Nor do students in these courses routinely explore science within a global context (disease, environment, natural resources), apply quantitative literacy skills to global questions (demographics, economic development, immigration policy), or consider the ethical dimensions of global issues (sustainable development, religious conflict, civic responsibility).

Fortunately, some of the most creative thinking in educational reform is currently focused on general education. Innovations such as thematic learning communities (or linked courses), service learning, experiential learning, vertically integrated curricula with first year seminars and senior capstones, the teaching of science through problem-based inquiry, and undergraduate research are well established in selected institutions across the nation. These curricular and pedagogical innovations present promising new opportunities for multidisciplinary exploration of global themes.