Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility
Rationale
From 2005 to 2008, AAC&U’s Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning brought together colleges and universities that were selected through a national call for proposals. They focused on developing curricular models and faculty capacity to help students engage some of the most pressing questions of our time: What does it mean to be a well-educated and responsible citizen in today’s global contexts? And how should one act in the face of large, unsolved, global problems?
The Global Learning Forum was an invitational, agenda-setting meeting to create a national learning community of educators who create cross-disciplinary, problem-based, in-depth models for globalizing general education. Such models include
- overarching global learning frameworks for general education;
- topically linked courses (introductory to advanced);
- certificate programs;
- thematic minors;
- field-based designs with experiential learning; and
- undergraduate research.
Global challenges cut across multiple disciplines and require perspectives that most often lie beyond the training and experience of faculty members. Institutions increasingly recognize the need to engage these challenges, but as they pursue reform strategies, they often find that pathways to global learning are poorly mapped. Shared Futures will continue to move problem-based, thematic topics to the very center of the general education experience. Such a fundamental shift in organizing student learning, however, will require expanded study opportunities for faculty who will need to become familiar with new scholarship, new pedagogies, new curricular architectures, and new leadership strategies. Future efforts to create a consortium around global learning will be organized to address these four dimensions.
To continue the work of the Global Learning Forum, AAC&U has launched a professional development social network for educators interested in global learning to collaborate on further innovations.
At the global learning forum, participants shared the lessons learned from Shared Futures—not as a final product of that project, but as catalysts for generating the broad general education reform that our campuses need to educate students for the 21st century. In this way, participating institutions frame a national agenda that sets the contours of the next generation of global learning, general education, and liberal education.
Forum Design
The Global Learning Forum was supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the Henry Luce Foundation. The Forum was designed to provide faculty and administrative teams the opportunity to
- define, refine, and map global learning goals;
- study key frameworks that may contribute to advanced interdisciplinary teaching;
- share promising practices; and
- brainstorm administrative solutions to the challenges of cross-disciplinary, problem-based models for globalizing general education.
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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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