Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility

General Education for Global Learning

Project Goals

Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning will directly benefit sixteen selected institutions and their students and will also serve as a model and resource for the broader higher education community.

Participating institutions will be expected to:

• define global learning outcomes appropriate to their institutional mission and vision;
• make global learning outcomes a central component of their undergraduate general education curricula;
• move global learning from the confines of one or two cultural diversity distribution requirements to a broader framework that shapes all, or significant parts, of the general education curriculum;
• ensure that attention to the United States is part of the global framework;
• improve coherence within general education curricula by making the connections between courses more intentional;
• make the connections between a global general education and majors more purposeful and recognizable;
• equip faculty with the intellectual and pedagogical skills needed to creatively design and teach the complex interdisciplinary courses that global learning requires;
• measure and assess the efficacy of strategies for achieving the above stated goals;
• serve as national models for general education and global learning innovation.

Students at participating institutions should:

• gain a deep, comparative knowledge of the world’s people and problems;
• explore the historical legacies that have created the dynamics and persistent tensions of the world;
• develop intercultural competencies so they can move across boundaries and into unfamiliar territory to see the world from multiple perspectives;
• sustain difficult conversations in the face of highly emotional and perhaps uncongenial differences;
• understand, critique, and redefine overarching framings such as democracy, human rights, and sustainable development within a global context;
• gain opportunities to engage in practical work with fundamental issues that affect communities not yet well served by their societies.

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.