Educating Global Citizens in Colleges and Universities

Challenges and Opportunities

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135855208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides distinctive analysis of the full range of expressions in global education at a crucial time, when international competition rises, tensions with American foreign policy both complicate and motivate new activity, and a variety of innovations are taking shape. Citing best practices at a variety of institutions, the book provides practical coverage and guidance in the major aspects of global education, including curriculum, study abroad, international students, collaborations and branch campuses, while dealing as well with management issues and options. The book is intended to guide academic administrators and students in higher education, at a point when international education issues increasingly impinge on all aspects of college or university operation. The book deals as well with core principles that must guide global educational endeavors, and with problems and issues in the field in general as well as in specific functional areas. Challenges of assessment also win attention. Higher education professionals will find that this book serves as a manageable and provocative guide, in one of the most challenging and exciting areas of American higher education today.

1 Defining the Challenge

DOI: 10.4324/9780203885185-1

It would be hard to find an American community college, college or university that has not devoted serious new thought, in recent years, to some aspect— often, to many aspects—of global education. The need to adjust curricula and educational arrangements to the increasingly global context in which Americans operate is impossible to avoid. The idea of “preparing global citizens” may seem a bit grandiose or hollow (or to some, even threatening; the term global is not always neutral). But the notion that educational business as usual matches the many changes in the international environment is hard to defend as well. New global components relate not only to contemporary citizenship, though the linkage is quite real, but also to many workplace opportunities—again, reflecting the wider environment.

This surge of talk, and much action, means that there are a number of quite recent best practices that can be widely shared and discussed. It means, by the same token, that different institutions are at quite different stages in their global efforts—some building on an elaborate existing commitment, others just getting into the game—which is where best practices and explicit discussion can be particularly helpful. The surge also invites more systematic analysis: excitement and even faddishness sometimes outstrip clarity of goals. Innovation may misfire, or encounter unexpected difficulties—and this applies to familiar strategies, like study abroad, as well as the newer rash of efforts to form international partnerships. Here too, an up-to-date survey can help advance the field and minimize (though never eliminate) pitfalls. The sheer administration of global programs, with options ranging from specialized units to efforts to diffuse across the institution, merits assessment as well. Even accreditation procedures come into play, in an atmosphere of innovation: the delicate balance between preserving appropriate standards and developing some trust in international partners and novel arrangements is not easy to strike.

There are also, admittedly, important anomalies in the field, despite the wide discussion. As we will see, there’s a troubling American lag in some aspects of the global educational arena that must be addressed. While almost all institutions now have study abroad programs (some of them quite new), in 2005 27% of all schools had no students actually studying abroad. Foreign language attainments have sagged, and requirements of courses with a global or international focus in general education programs have dropped (from 41% in 2001 to 37% in 2006). Few institutions have a global coordinator, and fewer than 40% feature a reference to international in their mission statement (though this has increased from 28% in 2001). Wide variation in degrees of commitment and some lingering uncertainties about commitment of any sort make a new handbook all the more desirable—even as it aims at improving general awareness of what global education entails for active participants and neophytes alike.¹

For heavily involved institutions, as well as those new to the arena, the additional demands on training are obvious: though important professional associations provide guidance for international specialists, many would-be administrators are schooled on the job, and many higher education officials are called upon to deal with international issues for which their own preparation— even if honed in formal degree programs for higher education administration —provided little or no discussion. Explicit international courses are just beginning to creep into the higher education curriculum: they need encouragement, but there is also a place for materials that will address relevant topics in a format applicable to more general issues-in-education courses. There is real benefit in discussing the various facets of international or global education, their interrelationships, and their basic purposes, at a time when new issues and new enthusiasms intertwine.

This book has three basic aims, which are happily reasonably compatible. First is to provide an overview of the main facets of international education, with the goal to serve as part of formal or informal training for academic administrators who, regardless of ultimate specialty, need a sense of the key issues and opportunities in the global arena. Increasingly, it is part of the scenery in higher education administration. In the process, the book also seeks to provide guidance for the institutions that seem hesitant to commit to a global agenda, offering reasons for engagement and indications of how to get started—beyond the now virtually obligatory study abroad office. Second, as noted, is to deal with the various aspects of global education and ultimately, their interrelationships, rather than honing in on one facet alone. And third, we will seek to address basic questions of purpose in relationship to the larger American and global contexts. While it is possible, even desirable, for some international education enthusiasts simply to assume the importance of their mission, ultimately they need to be able to explain what they’re about and to persuade others; self-evident truth will not do the job. Besides, exploring the foundations of the global enterprise is interesting, the challenges involved intriguing.

***

American higher education has long been linked to a wider world. The university system itself gained much from contacts with patterns elsewhere: the modern research university, to take the most obvious example, derives directly from contacts with German and other progenitors in the late 19th century. American commitment to educate so-called international students, from countries like China, goes back to the early 20th century. Americans have been eager participants in study abroad programs, again for many decades. And in certain curricular areas the United States has long been considerably less parochial than many other countries. In both high school and college, the nation long taught English-language literature from authors both American and British; from the 1920s onward it often emphasized a requirement in European history, or Western civilization, besides the cherished American history survey—in contrast to many countries that emphasized a purely national list of great books and a purely national historical menu. Global education, in many of its aspects, is hardly a new commitment.

The commitment is changing, however, with new opportunities and new problems attached. And an increasing number of educators and educational administrators are involved in some aspect of global education, some eagerly, some swept along with the tide. This book is dedicated to a discussion of the goals and facets of global education in the early 21st century—to match the crucial changes in the field. And it is dedicated to the growing number and diversity of concerned faculty and administrators, hoping to contribute to training in specific areas and to wider debate about the basic purposes involved.

Addressing Challenges

Challenge is the key word. It would be tempting to invoke the overused “crisis” instead, but that risks crying wolf. Change, however, against a backdrop of some more endemic issues, makes challenge, and the need for both heightened attention and deliberate innovation, appropriate. The word is apt as well because it conveys both invitation and caution, and the opportunity to meet the new issues that complicate the global education endeavor.

Change includes, obviously, the power surge of regions of the world beyond Western Europe, long the center of American curricular outreach beyond national borders and the darling of study abroad programs. The growing need to deal with the rising prominence of China and India, new tensions and diversities within the Middle East, and the complexities of Africa and Latin America shake many established mindsets among international educators in the United States, though the same need creates exciting opportunities as well. International education becomes truly global in this sense, and while there were moves in this direction in American programs in the 1970s, with new federal funding for diverse area studies efforts, the full context has been installed only in the past fifteen years.

Change includes the growing international hostility to American foreign policy—possibly a short-term issue, not necessarily entirely warranted, but a fact of life nevertheless. International opinion polls, drawing from most of the world’s regions, make it unmistakably clear that various American policies have fairly steadily lowered the nation’s image abroad. Hostility to the invasion of Iraq heads the list of concerns, obviously, but disagreements over environmental policies and other issues figure in as well. In some cases, the gap here goes well beyond the specific directions of the Bush administration, to wider disputes over priorities: though recently closing a bit, for example, the gulf between American recognition of global warming as a key problem, and public opinion in most other industrial countries, has been impressively wide.

All this has several implications for global education. Anti-American sentiment invites exploration. Surely a valid purpose for global education, at least over the short term, involves helping college students understand why we have fallen into disfavor abroad—not to persuade them to agree with the critics, but to see where these critics are coming from. Yet this approach is by definition sensitive, and if clumsily handled can draw a global education program into domestic disrepute. Many Americans understandably resent foreign criticism, and many others are essentially unaware of it: how would many parents react to a course or a study abroad preparation kit that highlighted intense hostilities to the United States and the need, as part of global understanding, to grasp their bases? There are dilemmas here that are not easily resolved.

Questionable American standing abroad inevitably invites efforts to use higher education to compensate in part. To some eyes it provides an additional reason to court international students, trusting that their experience in the United States will modify or complicate their vision of the nation as a whole. Innovative efforts directly to establish educational operations abroad, though motivated by various factors, gain momentum when it becomes clear that American higher education enjoys far greater prestige in many regions than do many other national trappings. As a Middle Eastern leader noted, in discussing his support for an American branch campus, it is important to see the United States exporting something besides troops and guns (and he might have added, some questionable popular culture products). Yet anti-Americanism can challenge these same efforts. Many Americans, even amid academic ranks, become nervous about going abroad or at least about visiting certain regions: how can one develop or maintain contacts in this atmosphere? Many administrators, dealing even with friendly colleagues in foreign countries, must expect periodic harangues over deeply felt policy disputes. Again to the Middle East: a government official, generously supporting a branch campus initiative, feels authorized to deliver a 40-minute diatribe against American support for the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Tensions and anomalies now go with the territory.

Change follows, inevitably, from the reactions to 9/11 and widespread American fear of terrorism. Practical problems and contradictions abound. New visa requirements impede the entry of international students, and discourage some from applying at all. Administrative costs for international student offices soar, forcing explicit decisions about what is worthwhile. One sector in the federal government may try to encourage efforts in international education, as the basis for needed expertise or as a bridge to public opinion in other regions, while another sector sets up new restrictions and barriers. The confusions may be entirely understandable, but they unquestionably interfere with international operations in higher education. There are broader issues as well. While 9/11 and its aftermath did not jeopardize basic commitments to study abroad, it raised new questions and concerns. A problem—the terrorist threat—that invited greater efforts to understand the complexities of the global environment could also complicate these same efforts.

The reshuffling of the power balance in global affairs, with obvious implications for traditional American preferences for Western Europe; the rapid deterioration of the national standing in world opinion; and the chilling impact of anti-terrorist efforts form part of the context in which global education must respond to challenge.

There are other, more subtle challenges as well, though some of them are less novel. Global education is most often associated with the humanities and some of the social sciences, perhaps particularly the “softer” social sciences like anthropology. This means, and has long meant, that the most eager applicants for study abroad programs are self-selected for their interests in literature and culture, history and international relations. But the need to convey global issues applies to more reluctant disciplinary areas as well. Engineers and managers have just as much need, as citizens, for a grasp of global education as do Latin American anthropologists; and their work may provide at least as many opportunities, if sometimes unexpected, for international competence or an appreciation of international impacts. Yet, if only as a practical matter, it is characteristically difficult to pry open some of the curricula in the “harder” fields for much serious global exposure. Add to this the conviction in many quarters, whether justified or not, that foreign technical training is unlikely to measure up to American standards, and the makings of another global education dilemma become very clear.

A not dissimilar tension applies to foreign clients and collaborations. The keenest interest in American education, by potential international students or supporters of branch campuses, has long focused on engineering, agriculture, the sciences and—with increasing zeal—management. Nothing wrong with this, though of course some fields have in the process become dangerously dependent on international recruits given waning national interest and competence. But American higher education normally prides itself on more than professional training; it vaunts the exposure it provides to various disciplinary approaches, through general education programs and beyond, and the contributions it makes to critical thinking. Some of us would contend that the real strength of the higher education system rests strongly on these features, and that this is where we can make the greatest contribution abroad. But this is not what many foreign students or potential international partners look to when they seek access to American or American-style education. The result is not only an abstract confusion about educational principles, but some very practical dilemmas, for example, about what requirements should be imposed on international students at various levels or how “real” American degree programs can be marketed abroad.

This book will not pretend to resolve all the complexities of this sort. It will, certainly, add a few more—for example, the enticing confusion between multicultural educational efforts, often resolutely American despite international derivations, and global exposures. But it will explore the complexities, and it will offer some potential steps toward reducing them, based wherever possible on best-practice examples. The obvious point is that one does not enter the global education arena blithely, whether the subject is curriculum, or study abroad, or foreign collaborations. Good intentions—and they often burn bright in this field, where so many academics and administrators seek to use education to improve international understanding—do not suffice. The following chapters will seek to juxtapose desirable goals with some obdurate realities, with suggestions about how to win through.

The Parochial Challenge

Arguably the biggest challenge—and here we step deliberately into risky territory—involves the tension between global education needs and goals, and a strongly parochial American society. This challenge, to be sure, is not new at all. The United States has long manifested inclinations toward isolation along with a (less unusual) mixture of apprehension and superiority concerning things foreign. But the inclinations become more troubling as the global environment intensifies. And they have some new enhancements. The end of the cold war, in 1991, measurably reduced global coverage in the American news. Media of various sorts cut back the number of international correspondents and the space allotted to developments abroad; news about health and medical developments expanded, as one result, in a society that was becoming more self-preoccupied. And while events forced some restoration of international coverage after 9/11, the expansion remains characteristically narrow, with little sense of what is happening outside the range of American military efforts. Higher education itself was hardly a global leader, overall, in the 1990s; only a minority of institutions gave the subject any recognition in mission statements and many participated in reductions of programs in areas like language training—which means that the more recent surge of interest follows on the heels of a real deficit in institutions themselves, and not just the wider national culture.²

Reactions to 9/11 could feed parochialism as well. Some Americans, including educational leaders, saw the terrorist attacks as a reason to circle the wagons around national values and national educational emphases; the wider world, visibly hostile and dangerous, simply did not merit much classroom attention. The sense of the world as a fearsome place, while understandable, did not grip all Americans, but it generated some new impulses toward ostrichism. Other changes may contribute, if unintentionally, to parochialism: the reduction of attention to the social studies in the primary grades, for example, in favor of skills training in reading and math, means that many students over the past decade are encountering schooling on global topics later and more incompletely than was once the case.

But the basic dilemma, again, is not new. The United States has long been a big country, with less need to think about or depend on relationships with other countries for economic or cultural purposes than, say, most European countries or (since 1853) Japan. The country’s New World remove from battlefields in Asia, Africa or Europe can also feed a withdrawal impulse (here, Latin American countries can join in as well). The fact is that the only major war fought on American soil for over 200 years was a domestic conflict, not imported from abroad—and no major European or Asian power can make that statement. The attack of 9/11 surfaced a widespread claim of violated innocence—we’ve never before been assailed like this, why does the world hate us—that was I believe somewhat forced and inaccurate—after all, cold war threats and fears had been both real and legitimate for several decades—but whether justified or not the claim revealed a sense of or hope for global immunity that few other societies would advance.

The nation’s immigrant past, or its management of immigration, ironically contributes to a sense of remove as well. The United States has been comparatively friendly to immigrants, despite some obvious blots of racism and exclusionism. But its friendliness has typically been predicated on a belief that immigrants could and should be quickly Americanized, stripped of their most blatant foreign qualities. They should shed their language, their socialism (if that was an issue), and their dress, in favor of the national embrace. Sure, after a certain interval immigrants could be indulged references to Italian-ness or Irish-ness, with the kids dressed up for a harmless ethnic dance festival or even a more blatant celebration like St. Patrick’s Day. And, a huge point, they could keep their religion. But they should stop being foreign and, with a few exceptions and with allowably nostalgic trips back to the old country, they should largely cut off ties with the wider world as well. Language was an obvious case in point: most immigrant groups were pressed to shed their language of origin and, by second or certainly third generation, most did so, a process that national officials are, in the main, still trying to urge on immigrant groups even today. Immigrants did not, of course, fully comply. Far more simply returned home than national imagery of successful assimilation acknowledges. But most did come to accommodate, because of the benefits of national participation and, often, a real sense of gratitude for the material and political advantages of American life. Some would become fiercer parochialists than the suspicious nativists who pushed the Americanization process in the first place.

Signs of parochialism abound, some charming or harmless, some neutral, some more clearly questionable. The nation participates very incompletely in the world’s leading sports interest, soccer football. It clings to non-decimal measurements in a decimal world. Until 2006 it was for several decades one of only two countries that did not sign an agreement not to impose capital punishment on minors. Its widespread hostility to seriously learning foreign languages has become legendary. The joke goes: what’s the word for someone who speaks three langu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Defining the Challenge
• 2 Goals: Where We Should Be Heading
• 3 Contexts for Global Education
• 4 Curriculum: The Foundations for Global Education
• 5 Education Abroad: Redefining a Staple
• 6 International Students and Global Education
• 7 Branch Campuses and Collaborations: A New Frontier
• 8 Leadership and Administration: Bureaucratic Innovation without Bureaucratization
• 9 Assessment
• 10 General Observations: Some Underlying Issues
• 11 Conclusion: The Global Mission
• Notes
• Further Reading
• About the Author
• Index