Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning

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

Workshops

Assignments, Assessment, and Alignment: Working against Isolationism Ross Miller , AAC&U
This session will explore oft-neglected connections among assignments, assessment, and alignment (issues frequently mentioned in teams’ summer institute plans) while considering how to foster students’ global learning. Building from the foundational question “what do you expect your students to DO?,” the session will use course descriptions, rubrics, and surveys from projects and campuses, bolstered by participants’ ideas to explore ways to build purposeful, intentional pathways to global learning. The perspectives of faculty in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts, etc., will also be explored as part of the context for general education and global learning.
Ross Miller is Senior Director of Assessment for Learning at AAC&U.

Curricular Learning Communities: A Strategy for Realizing Integrative Learning
Jean MacGregor, The Evergreen State College
“Curricular learning communities” are a variety of approaches that intentionally link or cluster two or more courses, often around an interdisciplinary theme or problem, and enroll a common cohort of students.  This intentional restructuring of students’ time, credit, and learning experiences can build community and foster integrative connections among students, faculty, and disciplines.  This workshop will focus on ways learning communities are being used to advance general education goals.  We’ll share ideas for learning community themes and goals and discuss learning community structures that might advance them.
Jean MacGregor is co-founder and a Senior Scholar at the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education at The Evergreen State College, where she also teaches in the Masters of Environmental Studies Program.

Global Climate Change: An Upper Division General Education Sequence
Anne Marie Todd, San Jose State University
Global Climate Change is a two-course sequence (6 units in fall and 3 units in spring) that meets all of the goals and objectives for the four upper division General Education areas (Earth and Environment; Self, Society & Equality in the U.S.; Cultural, Civilization and Global Understanding; Written Communication II) It is team-taught by faculty from three different discipline areas (Communication Studies, Geology, and Environmental Studies).  In developing an integrated GE course, we were tasked with developing curriculum that could be adapted and taught by diverse faculty from multiple departments. Course content on the science of climate change incorporates curriculum from a current meteorology course, which is taught by faculty in that department, and will be taught by a geology professor in the pilot. We have sought to have materials on everything from meteorology to environmental racism to policy and communication issues. Workshop participants will explore a working model; discuss methods of assessment appropriate to integrative courses; and discuss potential opportunities and challenges of adopting an integrative model for General Education on their campuses.
Anne Marie Todd is an Associate Professor of Public Communication in the Communication Studies department at San Jose State University.

“You Mean I’m Already Doing It in My Classes?”
Making Assessment Easier for Students and Faculty
Caryn McTighe Musil and Ross Miller, AAC&U
This session is a hands-on workshop designed for faculty who are going to be teaching new or revised Shared Futures courses in the coming year. Our assumption is that faculty members assess student learning regularly in every course. But we often don’t examine the evidence of student learning over time that is right before our eyes. AAC&U has designed a simple Course-level Student Learning Assessment Matrix for the Shared Futures project to make analyzing students’ progress in cognitive and affective learning more transparent both to the students and to the faculty teaching the course. We’ll offer sample matrixes of different courses and by the end of the session participants should leave with a tentative matrix filled in for one of their own Shared Futures courses.
Caryn McTighe Musil is Senior Vice President of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives at AAC&U and Ross Miller is Senior Director of Assessment for Learning at AAC&U.

Reviewing and Administering the Revised Common Global Learning Survey
Heather Deneen Wathington, University of Virginia and Caryn McTighe Musil, AAC&U
This session discussed the revised Common Global Learning Survey that FIPSE expects each of the participating Shared Futures institutions to use in one or more courses beginning in January 2008. The Common Global Learning Survey is an adaptation of a nationally tested survey designed for AAC&U by Jeff Milem, formerly of the University of Maryland and now at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at University of Arizona. It had been used successfully in another AAC&U FIPSE global project. A small group of humanists, social scientists, and scientists selected from our current Shared Futures FIPSE project have made recommendations for revisions to adapt the survey for this project. Heather Wathington and her evaluation team have reviewed those recommendations and incorporated changes as possible, while seeking not to compromise the intellectual integrity of the original survey. The first half of this session will be devoted to discussing the survey one final time for any last revisions; the second half will be devoted to addressing questions about the administration of the survey, IRBs, and analyzing data.
Heather Deneen Wathington is the FIPSE External Evaluator for Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning.

Putting a Human Face on Globalized Communities
Shaady Salehi, Active Voice
In this session, participants engaged in an interactive discussion about how to enhance a curriculum with the use of documentaries in the classroom. Led by Active Voice, a nonprofit media strategy organization that works with social issue films to put a human face on today's most relevant social issues, this session featured clips from recent and upcoming documentaries as well as an overview of best practices for incorporating film in the classroom. The documentaries are all part of Active Voice's Global Lives initiative,a curated series of films that explore the changing face of our communities in light of an increasingly globalized world. As immigration is the main theme of this initiative,a special emphasis was placed on how immigration, in particular, is prompting a reexamination of general education, not only in curriculum, but also in pedagogy. This session was part training, part presentation and part interactive discussion on how film can address the needs of our changing, global communities.
Shaady Salehi is program manager at Active Voice, serving as the central hub of most film-based projects.