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Educating globally competent citizens in increasingly interconnected world
By ANN RICHARDS
To thrive in an increasingly interconnected world, today's students need to be confident in unfamiliar and challenging situations. They need to be as comfortable, says Jack Kay, interim chancellor of the University of Michigan-Flint, speaking to strangers from far away as with acquaintances from their own neighborhoods.
“Nowhere in the world is this understanding more important than in those areas striving to reinvent their economy -- areas such as Flint,” Kay said. “We are here to introduce students to the global community and show them how they can become entrepreneurs, explorers and leaders.”
Honing the analytical skills that American undergraduates need to build a forward-looking, broad-based world view is at the core of a three-year effort being launched by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), The New York Times and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).
The project, which received $180,000 in multiyear support from the Mott Foundation, will develop and disseminate educational materials based on global trends identified by CSIS through its “Seven Revolutions” research.
“As the ranking of American students and young adults relative to other countries continues to deteriorate, efforts to develop a globally competent and competitive citizenry among American students are all the more important,” said Erik R. Peterson, CSIS senior vice president and director of the “Future Bound” project.
CSIS, founded in 1962 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., is a public policy research organization that maintains resident experts on the world’s major geographic regions.
In 1993, the center began to explore, identify and analyze the most important forces shaping the world through the year 2025. Seven areas of “revolutionary” change it identified are population, resource management, technology innovation and diffusion, information and knowledge creation and dissemination, economic integration, conflict, and governance.
In 2005, Peterson presented the research to more than 300 members of AASCU,which represents more than 400 public colleges, universities and systems of higher education -- including UM-Flint -- throughout the U.S.
Building on a favorable response to the presentation, AASCU assembled a group of provosts and senior academics to explore the possibility of a partnership to integrate the “Seven Revolutions” research into their curricula.
“This is a remarkable opportunity to contribute to the thinking of an important cross-section of students in the United States on a number of critical global trends that will affect their lives,” Peterson said of the partnership.
Epsilen, a Web-based distribution platform, will be used to organize content for different curricula, each geared to serve students at various points in their higher education experience. Online resources will include an audio/video library with interviews of leaders in government, business and civil society; a database of CSIS reports; a multi-tiered forum for information exchange among faculty and students; and links to information and analysis on current events across the world through The New York Times’ Web site and its historical archives dating back to 1851.
“Professors need a wealth of resources on global issues to infuse into both traditional and new academic courses, but the inherent … changeability of the subject matter can complicate the search for reliable materials,” Peterson said. “Our goal is to provide a one-stop shop for professors to access high quality, timely, user-friendly education materials on global issues.”
Mott funding will support this work as well as AASCU faculty development workshops, publication of monographs based on the “Seven Revolutions” framework and stipends for intern-scholars.