Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning

Shared Futures/Common Ground:
2007 Shared Futures Faculty and Curriculum Development Institute

July 15-20, 2007
Sonoma State University
Rohnert Park, California
Funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)

Overview

Shared Futures/Common Ground was the second summer institute of AAC&U’s Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning project.  It was designed for faculty members and administrators from the sixteen Shared Futures member institutions to benefit from the collective experience and expertise of nearly one hundred colleagues.  During the institute, participants shared ideas about how to use global learning goals, within and across courses, to bring greater coherence to general education curricula.  Such global learning goals shape course designs, classroom practices, and assessment strategies, even as they influence broader conversations about general education reform.

Shared Futures/Common Ground worked to increase attention to the critical, but often underdeveloped, role of required general education science courses in providing students with rich opportunities to explore critical issues of global interdependence.  Simply put, in the real world, complex global issues require students to understand and apply scientific analysis to questions within social, political, and cultural contexts.  Our shared future demands this kind of learning.

The Institute, however, was about much more than creating excellent and engaging science courses.  The summer institute also encouraged faculty members from different disciplines and divisions to search for common ground—shared courses, curricula, and co-curricular experiences—where the complexity of global challenges is matched by the power of multiple intellectual approaches and disciplinary perspectives.  It is on this common ground that faculty expect students to test their developing understanding of the world.  Also from this common ground come assessment tools to document the impact of this curricular change on student learning.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan was the primary common reading for the summer institute, and the text around which AAC&U built the three Case Study Seminar sessions. Starting with simple, yet compelling questions, Pollan moves quickly from food to pressing current issues.  Each new question requires new complexity of thought and opens new avenues for global learning.  Each theme opens new territory requiring multiple disciplinary approaches and perspectives. The intent was that conversations would spill over from the seminars and challenge our thinking about individual campus projects.

We supplemented the book with several additional articles that further illuminate some of the themes of Shared Futures: globalization, human rights, social justice, democracy, migration and immigration, and sustainability, just to name a few.  We asked that each seminar group view the readings as a starting point for their own search for alternative paths leading to additional important topics.

Grant Cornwell, in “Science and Citizenship: Habits of Mind for Global Understanding,” echoes this call for perspective when he tells a story about farmers, flowers, and elephants in Kenya.  As Cornwell points out, “global problems are a tangle of issues that call for scientific, social-scientific, and humanist analyses that are not undertaken in isolation or in competition, but instead are done with a kind of mutually informing systematic collaboration.”  In other words: from a common ground, with our shared futures in mind.

On the dust jacket of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a dictionary definition of omnivore.  The second entry reads: “somebody who has very wide interests and will read, study, or generally absorb anything that is available.”  The summer institute aimed to satisfy the participants' own omnivore’s dilemma in a full, and filling, week.

More Information is available about the plenary sessions and workshops offered at the 2007 Summer Institute.