Shared Futures

Wheaton College

Harvey Charles
Mildred Bray Dean for Global Education
hcharles@wheatoncollege.edu

Harvey Charles is the Mildred Bray Dean for Global Education at Wheaton College and is one of the team leaders in this program.  He earned his Ph.D. in Higher Education and Student Affairs with a concentration in International Education from The Ohio State University in 1991.  For the last 10 years he has worked as the Chief International Education Officer at three different institutions.  Harvey has had responsibility for a number of areas within international education over the years, including working with faculty to internationalize the curriculum, study abroad, international student and scholar advising, faculty exchanges, grant writing, international programming, international recruiting, the evaluation of international transcripts and more.  He is most attracted to and thinks that his most significant contributions involve working on the idea that global education must ultimately effect cognitive transformation among students, and bring about a shift in how they see the world.  As such, he is constantly involved in bringing faculty together to consider ways to infuse their teaching with global perspectives.  While this work is achieved to some extent through study abroad, its greatest possibilities reside in transforming the general education curriculum.

Notwithstanding the very successful study abroad programs Harvey has managed over the years, the reality is that a significant majority of US college students do not have a study abroad experience.  It is this majority that must be served by a curriculum that embraces and privileges global education.  As such, faculty need to have the requisite international teaching and/or research experiences that can inform the courses they design and academic opportunities they offer their students.  He has managed the Fulbright program for faculty for a number of years, encouraging faculty to seek funding for teaching and research abroad and/or to bring scholars from overseas to the home campus.  He has worked to create other opportunities for faculty exchanges including a Resident Director program he developed in two overseas sites for Wheaton faculty.  He is currently working on a project with coordinators to revitalize the three Area Studies programs by providing them with administrative and financial support, an effort that can do much to make the global education dimension of the curriculum more conspicuous. 

Significant gains have been made with study abroad participation under Harvey’s leadership, working hard to help students realize that study abroad is a “must do” during the college years.  Apart from the traditional study abroad programs, he has worked closely with faculty to develop short-term study abroad programs offered during the January break and the summer that are led by the faculty members themselves and have very specific academic objectives.  These programs are enormously beneficial to students and faculty, providing learning and teaching experiences that are not possible on the home campus, and deepening the understanding of and appreciation for our interconnected and interdependent world. 

Harvey is very much involved in supporting international programming.  He manages the WorldFest program, sponsors the Model UN program that he reactivated two years ago, and supports student organizations and departments in their wide range of cross-cultural programming activities.  He also collaborates with the Filene Center for Work and Learning in advancing integrative learning in an international context. 

Kersti Yllo
Associate Provost, Director of the Kollett Center for Collaborative Learning, and Professor of Sociology
kyllo@wheatoncollege.edu

Kersti Yllo serves as a change agent on Wheaton College’s Shared Futures Team and is currently Associate Provost, Director of the Kollett Center for Collaborative Learning, and Professor of Sociology.  She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of New Hampshire and has conducted extensive research on domestic violence issues, publishing numerous articles and books including License to Rape (Free Press) and Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse (Sage).

Kersti has been involved in curriculum transformation efforts for more than twenty years.  She served as a coordinator of Wheaton’s Gender-Balanced Curriculum Project that focused on incorporating the new scholarship by and about women into the curriculum in the early 1980’s and then worked on a follow-up, Ford Foundation sponsored initiative to incorporate cross-cultural perspectives into the curriculum.

From 2001-2003, Kersti co-chaired the Educational Policy Committee, which oversaw the College’s general education curriculum review.  Drawing on an initial phase involving faculty working groups, teams visiting other colleges and a full-faculty retreat, the committee developed a new, flexible general education curriculum that features interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism as defining features. In December 2001, the Wheaton faculty supported the new curriculum by a vote of 91-3.  As Associate Provost, Kersti’s primary responsibility is to support faculty as we implement and evaluate the new curriculum.  Since the Wheaton curriculum is not just a set of requirements, but rather a framework for continued transformation, the Shared Futures Initiative offers us a valuable context for more fully addressing global issues in general education.

For Kersti, the incorporation of global issues into the curriculum is important from a personal as well as academic perspective.  Kersti’s family were political refugees from Estonia in the wake of the Soviet invasion and occupation of their country.  Her experience growing up in an extended immigrant family and learning English as a second language shaped her education from the start.  The opportunity to now connect with colleagues and friends in newly-independent Estonia offers an ongoing venue for growth and change.