Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility
Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility is a multi-project, national initiative of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It is based upon the assumption that we live in an interdependent but unequal world and that higher education can help prepare students not only to thrive in such a world, but to remedy its inequities. AAC&U seeks to support the academy in its vital role of expanding knowledge about the world's peoples and problems and developing individuals who will advance equity and justice both at home and abroad.
The 2009 Shared Futures Global Learning Forum is the vehicle for expanding and extending this support. This invitational event brought together a community of about 300 practitioners at 80 colleges and universities to exchange strategies and conceptual framings of global learning, ultimately building an agenda for the next stage in this national movement.
The Global Learning Forum featured the emerging curricular designs from participating colleges and universities in Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning, a three-year project begun in 2005. This project builds upon previous Shared Futures programming to expand and extend the role of global learning in general education curricula, with specific emphasis on developing science pedagogies that foster global learning. It currently consists of a network of 16 institutions, supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the Henry Luce Foundation.
Rationale
A successful liberal education today prepares students to live responsible, productive, and creative lives in a dramatically changing world. A quality undergraduate education in the 21st century provides students with opportunities to examine the world’s major questions from multiple perspectives, to integrate learning across the curriculum by following the threads in an increasingly complex reality, and to wrestle with the ethical implications of differential power and privilege.
AAC&U’s Shared Futures initiative places questions of diversity, identity, citizenship, and responsible action at the heart of global learning. This approach challenges students to explore the relational nature of their identities— identities that are variously shaped by the currents of power and privilege, both within a multicultural U.S. democracy and within an interconnected and unequal world.
The Shared Futures vision of global learning offers one way to engage all students with questions arising from some of the most pressing historical trends of our time. Shared Futures asks of students “What does it mean to be a citizen in the evolving global context?” and “How should one act in the face of large unsolved global problems?"
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