Posts Tagged ‘global learning’
By: Shyam Sharma, University of Louisville
When I look at the description of events in the schedule of the AAC&U Annual Meeting this year, images of my undergraduate students cross my mind. I begin to think about what use my students from the English 101 class in fall 2007 (my first semester of teaching college writing) made of the “critical thinking skills” that I taught after they left my classroom. I wonder if my students from the advanced writing course that focused on global citizenship last year continued to “pause to look at two more perspectives” before beginning to argue and defend their own positions. The events in the schedule represent big and often abstract ideas emerging from the experience and wisdom of scholars who are intellectual leaders in higher education. But when browsing the themes and descriptions in the schedule, my mind turns toward the students from the past and students I will teach in years to come. Has my teaching helped them become productive citizens in their communities and work? How much am I helping them become the digital and global citizens that they need to be today? What else do I need to do in order to shoulder the responsibilities of an effective educator of the twenty-first century—and what does it mean to be an effective teacher today in light of the changes, challenges, and opportunities that are created or complicated by the forces of economic crises around the world, advancements in information technologies, and the growing interdependence of knowledge (and other) markets around the world? I will be seeking answers to these questions in the many exciting discussions that I look forward to attending at the AAC&U Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.
The sessions that I am most interested are concerned with what I call digital-global citizenship. (And, by the way, the schedule that I carry is not in a diary, nor a printout: it is, thanks to AAC&U, a mobile “app.”) For me, integrating technological skills into teaching does not mean just including “cool” new technologies: I help students use new technologies to achieve and enhance the age-old mission of liberal arts education, of critical thinking, finding and synthesizing information, enhancing their civic awareness and developing in democratic engagement. I help students develop and maintain broad and deep “personal learning networks”—webs of places, resources, and people where they receive and also share knowledge. My students use technology to learn, write, solve problems, and develop new ideas, often collaboratively. Their collaboration is facilitated and enriched by technologies like wikis and blogs; they seek to understand the perspectives and practices of apparently universal phenomena in different cultures and societies around the world by using multimedia in their research, critical analysis, composition, and presentation of ideas and practices. Read the rest of this entry »
AAC&U’s upcoming Annual Meeting, Shared Futures/Difficult Choices: Reclaiming a Democratic Vision for College Learning, Global Engagement, and Success, will challenge the current dangerously narrow vision for higher education that seems to value degrees exclusively for their economic and individual benefit rather than for higher education’s contribution to the common good.
One precedent for a broader democratic vision of college learning is the 1947 Truman Commission Report, Higher Education for American Democracy, which linked education to “a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living”; the development of “international understanding and cooperation”, and “the solution of social problems.” Of course, such a democratic vision emerged alongside a Cold War strategy for global engagement that emphasized American dominance and containment. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I attended the 2011 National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) in San Francisco, California. The conference explored some of higher education’s most pressing issues—diversity and access, social justice, and inclusive excellence. Speakers challenged attendees to revise our thinking about how we educate students and to what ends.
On Friday morning, Daniel R. Wildcat, Director of the American Indian Studies Program at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, gave the keynote address. In his talk, “Diversity: An Issue of Life-Enhancement for the Planet,” Wildcat called for a paradigm shift in the ways we think about place, power, and human personality. He explained that in his native language, there is no word for “resources,” but instead, the word for materials drawn from the earth is closer to the word “relatives.” It is not acceptable, Wildcat asserted, to treat family and relatives as we would “resources” or ATM machines, so why should we continue to treat the environment in such a way? He emphasized the need for restoring the symbiotic bond between people and place, and for reconceptualizing “wealth” as the number of strong relationships we maintain with people and not as the amount of resources we can gather.
By: Edmond Chang
Transformation is hard, and looking back to last week, I appreciated the opening plenary’s vision—which both Mark C. Taylor (Columbia University and Williams College) and respondent Michael S. Roth (Wesleyan) agreed is needed to change the business and culture of universities. You cannot have a future if you cannot imagine one. But to be honest, even as a “digital humanities guy,” I am uncertain and uncomfortable with the plenary’s broad technological and globalizational fixes. It comes as no surprise then, given that I am an English major, that I want to frame my response as a close reading, particularly of the metaphors invoked by all sides last night.
It is important that AAC&U Senior Vice President Caryn McTighe Musil who introduced the opening forum, spoke about the conference’s theme of “global positioning,” of “navigation,” of “maps,” of “movement” and “progress,” while being mindful of the histories, legacies, and violences of imperialism, capitalism, and global domination. Nonetheless, the rhetoric is a convincing one—one that echoes President Barack Obama’s recent State of the Union address where he, too, challenged the nation to “win the future,” to take back time, space, and choice as American birthrights. But these metaphors of trade, of transnational flows, and of nostalgic exploration are now linked up to new formations and logics, new metaphors that deploy technology and the twenty-first century as both an unavoidable, uncharted territory and a “new world” ripe for colonization and conquest. The immense potential of computers, the Internet, and mobile technologies are undeniable, and they must be heeded. But these very potentials for democracy, liberation, and flexibility can also (and already have) serve hegemony, unfreedom, and the intensification of the now mouthful military-prison-industrial-entertainment-educational complex. Let us not forget that telecommunications and computer networks were the product of military and security programs. Let us not forget that digital imaging and global positioning systems are leveraged to police and surveil bodies and populations. Cooperation often becomes cooptation. Qualitative often is simply disguised quantitative. Vision often becomes (a single) somebody else’s vision. These are the very lessons I have learned from looking at and experiencing firsthand the struggles for democracy by minorities and the disenfranchised and the marginalized. These are the very informatics of domination that Donna Haraway presaged in her influential “A Cyborg Manifesto.”
Thomas Friedman’s satirical column in yesterday’s New York Times, written as a mock cable from Chinese diplomats, makes it painfully clear how different America is compared with other nations in terms of our priorities—including the need to raise the bar on educational achievement. Friedman writes, in jest, of course, that “we [meaning the Chinese] at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how ‘exceptional’ they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying ‘American exceptionalism.’ The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself ‘exceptional,’ only others can bestow that adjective upon you.”
New data on the existing state of educational achievement show just how unexceptional the United States really is, at least in terms of preparing our students for college. No one should miss the recent study from ACT examining whether the increasing numbers of students taking the ACT college entrance exam—most of whom say they aspire to attain at least a bachelor’s degree—are ready to succeed in entry-level college courses. The numbers have barely budged in recent years, and they aren’t good. Only about one-quarter of those taking the ACT are college-ready, based on all four benchmarks (reading, math, English, and science). Twenty-eight percent met none of the benchmarks. Only 4 percent of African Americans and 11 percent of Hispanics were judged college-ready in all four basic areas!
AAC&U recently announced the selection of the thirty-two colleges and universities that will be participating in General Education for a Global Century, the latest part of our national initiative, Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility.
These thirty-two institutions were selected from more than 140 applicants and span all regions of the country and all institutional types. Reading all 143 of the proposals for participation provided a fascinating (though obviously self-selected) snapshot of how campus leaders are thinking about global learning and general education as they create and implement new curricular designs in an environment of financial uncertainty. Shared Futures staff members are currently analyzing these proposals more systematically, but I’d like to share a few obvious insights today.
In a recent interview in Inside Higher Ed, where author Paul Gaston discusses the subject of his new book, The Challenge of Bologna: What United States Higher Education Has to Learn From Europe, and Why It Matters That We Learn It, Gaston urges engagement with developments in Europe:
We share most of Europe’s priorities for higher education. We believe that increased accountability should support responsible comparisons of programs and institutions, that students should have less difficulty in transferring academic credits, that the credentials we offer should be more easily understood by the public, that teaching should be more intentional in the light of a consensus on outcomes, and that as a nation we should remain highly competitive in attracting international students. We have important initiatives under way in many of these areas. But the Bologna Process represents a coordinated commitment to such reforms that is monitored continually throughout the continent. With one decade of progress to report, Europe can offer us a useful example.
The 2010 edition of the College Sustainability Report Card was released last week and provides additional evidence that colleges and universities are taking seriously the challenges of community, environment, social responsibility, and interdependence.
While it is worthwhile to recognize the schools that best match their rhetorical commitment to sustainability with campus practice, the sustainability categories that make up the grade remain incomplete. Institutions are graded in the following areas: administration; climate change and energy; food and recycling; green building; student involvement; transportation; endowment transparency; investment priorities; and shareholder engagement. What they are not yet judged on is the very heart of the higher education enterprise—teaching and learning. Read the rest of this entry »
