Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility
Design
The primary goal of the topical study groups is to identify critical issues within broad interdisciplinary global topics and to set the agenda for future curriculum and faculty development efforts organized around these themes. Few faculty members are currently trained to teach these topics within the context of their disciplinary graduate education, yet exploration of such topics is often the focus of undergraduate global learning— within both general education and the majors. To supplement AAC&U's support for structural and administrative development of global learning, these study groups are meant to provide opportunities for faculty members to engage in the rich intellectual debates that are at the heart of such interdisciplinary topics. Consequently, we hope that one of the products of this Forum will be the development of faculty learning communities that will meet periodically as well as share ideas and advice via our website.
How can faculty members bring their multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on complex global questions? How can they translate their expertise into learning pathways and experiences that undergraduate students can follow? What are the “big ideas”? What are the key questions and methods students should understand? These questions will be addressed in relation to six broad topical categories.
Topics
Group 1. Health and Social Justice
Global Health issues are also entangled with questions of human rights, gender, democracy, wealth, power, poverty, and civic engagement. Issues raised by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, food supplies and security, pandemic influenza, are rich areas of interconnected global learning that allows student to link knowledge and experience gained in diverse disciplines and disparate courses—courses that allow for increasingly sophisticated work appropriate to advancing levels of skill and intellectual development.
Group 2. Sustainability and Interdependence
The United Nations defines sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While sustainability is often understood primarily in terms of the environment, a broader definition allows faculty members to make connections with poverty, economic development, health, human rights, scarcity, conflict, democracy, etc. Sustainability and interdependence have proven to be popular topics with which colleges and universities reinforce the importance of scientific literacy, interdependence, social responsibility, and civic engagement in the curriculum.
Group 3. Globalization, Wealth, and Poverty
Globalization, like sustainability and health, is a complex, useful framework for placing moral and ethical questions within interconnected economic, cultural, political, and social contexts. Debates surrounding the potential of economic globalization to reduce poverty underline the importance of numeracy and basic statistical literacy when students are asked to formulate and defend value-laden positions around contested global issues.
Group 4. The Ethics of Global Citizenship
This phrase caused a firestorm of debate when Martha Nussbaum called for cosmopolitan global citizenship to counteract the sometimes narrow self-interest of national citizenship. While some think the term suggests a new level of attentiveness to interdependency, others are wary that the term might mask a new version of economic and cultural imperialism. Lifting up ethics as the focal point of investigation promises to link the earlier scholarly debates with more recent examinations of universal values and social responsibility as expressed in a global context.
Group 5. Identity, Culture, and Border Crossings
One of the salient features of global interconnection is the flow of people across increasingly porous borders. By exploring the scholarship of diaspora, hybrid cultural forms, and other examples of border crossing, students can begin to see how their own identities are related to currents of power and privilege, both within a multicultural U.S and within an interdependent and unequal world.
Group 6. Religion in Global Contexts
There is a sense that growing levels of religious intolerance are shaping the nature of global interdependence in profound, if not fully understood, ways. Consequently, when talking about global learning, we ignore religious questions at our peril. Examination of the relationship between religion, democracy, and civil society raises questions about one source of potential conflict and reconciliation in a shared future.
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This project is made possible by support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). For more information about FIPSE, please visit http://www.ed.gov/fipse.
For more information about Shared Futures, contact Chad Anderson. |
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