Kelley, Kowino, and Woodruff Page 1 of 21
Educating Globally Competent Citizens Through Transformational Learning:
Diverse Case Studies
Abstract
The University of Minnesota has started a program of training faculty members in best practices for internationalizing teaching and learning. Authors Kowino and Kelley participated in the pilot program which was organized by author Woodruff. A primary goal of the program is to nurture University of Minnesota students as globally competent citizens. The authors contend that mere internationalization is insufficient to achieve the goal and that global subject matter and outlooks must be combined with the goal of transformational teaching and learning based on concepts advanced by Dee Fink. Significant learning in the global context requires some degree of “internationalization of the academic self” for instructors, as advocated by Gavin Sanderson. These were the frameworks used in developing Minnesota’s program
The authors will report on their progress in implementing transformational, internationalized learning based on the frameworks/methodology of Fink and Sanderson. This paper and presentation is a collaboration of faculty members working at different campuses of the University of Minnesota, in different disciplines, in undergraduate and graduate degree programs and coming to internationalized teaching with different national backgrounds. The authors will use case studies from their classes and their own transformational learning experiences to support the argument that internationalization of classes and the curriculum can and should be combined with a deep commitment by faculty to transforming their own approaches to learning and to teaching in order to nurture globally competent citizens.
Key words: globally competent citizens, transformational learning, internationalized academic self, case studies
Introduction
This article describes the implementation of a faculty development program adopted by the University of Minnesota to accelerate the internationalization of its curriculum. The University is a multi-campus public university. Its Minneapolis-St. Paul campus is a large, comprehensive organization with colleges engaged in research, teaching and outreach in the liberal arts, science and engineering, biological sciences, food, agriculture, natural resources, law, health sciences, public affairs and business. The student body comes from across the globe. The University campus in Duluth also has several colleges and serves a diverse array of students.
The Internationalizing Teaching and Learning (ITL) program was one strategy to support the University of Minnesota’s overall internationalization goals. The article begins with an overview from Woodruff’s viewpoint on how the faculty development program was designed and implemented. It then presents the perspectives of Kowino and Kelley who participated in the pilot implementation of the new Internationalizing Teaching and Learning program. Their diverse backgrounds and the different settings in which they teach illustrate the challenges facing large, comprehensive universities seeking to create transformational, internationalized experiences for all students. The article concludes with observations on the importance of setting transformational learning as the goal, even if initial curriculum changes do not achieve the full desired effect.
Overview of the University of Minnesota’s Internationalization Efforts
The University of Minnesota’s strategic positioning is to graduate “lifelong learners, leaders, and global citizens”. The institution does not offer a definition of “global citizen” and, thus, the University’s Global Programs and Strategy (GPS) Alliance[1] took it upon themselves to seek a definition. This effort was lead by the GPS Alliance’s director for curriculum and campus internationalization[2], Gayle Woodruff, co-author of this paper.
Woodruff spent two years asking guiding questions of faculty and staff throughout the whole university. The guiding questions were:
What are our definitions of “global citizen”, “global learning”, & “global competency”?
What do we want our students to learn (skills, knowledge, attitudes)?
What skills, knowledge, and attitudes do we, the faculty and staff, need in order to help students develop their competencies?
These guiding questions led to the understanding that faculty cared about the educational outcomes of their students and that there needed to be strong faculty development programs to help faculty achieve the goals they had for student learning.
A key outcome of our guiding questions is the working definition for the University of Minnesota for “global competency”. This definition was derived from about 250 faculty and staff responses to the question, “What does global competency mean for the University?” Academic units can now use this definition to guide how they build learning outcomes for their students.
University of Minnesota definition of global competency:
Students, staff, and faculty demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and perspectives[3] necessary to understand the world and work effectively to improve it.
The key strategy to achieve global competency for all students, staff, and faculty at Minnesota was envisioned as a pyramid. The student is at the top of the pyramid and the strong base is the faculty and staff - those who are the foundation of the institution. Developing the foundation ensures that the student is held up. The main operational goal of the efforts at Minnesota to internationalize the curriculum and campus is to develop faculty and staff capacity to enrich curricula and develop pedagogy with a focus on global learning outcomes. (For more elaboration, see Woodruff 2009, 2011.)
The University of Minnesota team for internationalizing teaching and learning has envisioned a continuum of offerings for faculty and staff development to address the internationalization of the curriculum. Offerings range from on-line resources to more intensive faculty professional development programs. The area that has had the most focus since 2001 has been developing structured faculty cohort programs.
Between 2001 and 2007, the University of Minnesota created the Internationalizing On-Campus Courses (IOCC) program. The program received initial seed funding in 2001-2004 from the local Archibald Bush Foundation (Bush was the founder of the 3M Company). The focus of IOCC was faculty development and transformation - by transforming their approach to teaching, they could transform student learning. Fifty faculty members participated during this time-frame. Numerous faculty members in this original project have become mentors in the renewed efforts that began in 2010.
From 2010 to 2011, the IOCC program was re-envisioned as the Internationalizing Teaching and Learning (ITL) program and was piloted with fifteen faculty members. Two of the authors of this article participated in the pilot ITL program. Faculty from the IOCC initiative between 2001 and 2007 served as mentors to the faculty who were program participants. Mentors are a critical and deliberate component of the program, as they serve as coaches and role models for program participants. Interestingly, mentors continue to return to serve in the program as they continue to see the experience as an on-going professional development opportunity. They are deeply committed to internationalizing the curriculum.
Program evaluation provided the team with baseline data and served to improve the initiative so that the scale of the program could be increased. Program evaluation continues to be an integral component of the program, and a doctoral student in evaluation studies has served as the evaluation specialist.
Based upon what was learned from the pilot program, in 2011-2012 the ITL Faculty Cohort Program was launched. Faculty members apply for the program through a competitive process and they must demonstrate support from their dean or academic head. They do “homework” for one month before coming together for a three-day intensive retreat. They then have two months to complete their final homework - a revised syllabus or course design, a reflection on what it means to internationalize their courses and curriculum, and a plan for disseminating to their peers what they have learned. The team offers two cohorts each year, one in January and one in June. Each cohort has seven faculty members, thus 14 participated this year. The future plan is to continue the current model.
At its outset, the ITL program incorporated the Fink (2005) model of course design for significant learning. The Fink model was adopted because the U of M’s Center for Teaching and Learning had significant experience working with this model and saw positive outcomes from many faculty members who used the model with course design. In addition, Woodruff attended a special training by Professor Fink to learn how to apply the model to internationalizing courses.
The ITL program adopted the theoretical framework of Sanderson (2008) and Leask (2009). Sanderson argues that teachers must understand their own cultural biases with teaching and learning in order to become effective with internationalizing the curriculum. Sanderson’s framework is based upon intercultural competency of teachers, and the University of Minnesota has had a longstanding tradition of intercultural education, training and research. Program facilitators had already built intercultural learning into the earlier program models, and Sanderson lent more depth to the program as his framework specifically addresses the internationalized academic self and the role of culture in teaching.
Leask outlines models for internationalizing the curriculum through intentional interaction between domestic and international students that focus on intercultural learning outcomes. Australian universities have significant enrollments by international students and have spent the better part of the last two decades developing models to ensure international student success. The U of M is in a good position to adopt Leask’s model as there are over 6,000 international students and scholars within our system. Both Sanderson and Leask are based at the University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Throughout all phases of the program, the faculty members have been given professional development stipends for their participation. Program evaluation reveals that this is not the critical incentive. The faculty members who participate in this program, through all phases going back to 2001, have always demonstrated that they value teaching and want to improve their teaching. They are motivated to make a difference in their student learning, and they are critically aware that university curriculum provides a venue for creating “global citizens”.
This initiative has always been a partnership between the GPS Alliance and the University of Minnesota’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Most recently the Duluth campus’ Instructional Development Service and the system-wide Office for Information Technology joined as partners. The program over the years has benefited from these partnerships. Centers for teaching, learning and instructional design, including technology-enhanced curriculum experts, provide knowledge regarding the latest methods to improve teaching and assess student learning. They are usually very oriented toward providing positive faculty development services to a wide-range of disciplines.
International programs cannot operate this type of program alone, nor can a center for teaching and learning. The budget for the program is administered out of the international programs office, and funding comes from central administration which receives tuition and public revenue. Partners provide in-kind support through staffing. The program costs about $50,000 to administer, excluding staffing.
Hilary Chala Kowino’s Teaching Philosophy
Globally competent citizens celebrate a wide spectrum of perspectives, even though they don’t agree with all of them. Given the choice between variety and uniformity, global citizens would select the former. This appreciation of variety in the education system entails considering more angles and lenses than one would usually consider. It also involves resisting the conventional binary logic of true vs false that has shaped the foundation of education by showing how meaning shifts when situated in different international contexts, and how knowledge is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. Internationalization of learning and teaching is largely based on this concept of various angles as a basis for getting closer to knowledge and wisdom. It recognizes that some angles will clash upon encounter, especially when removed from their respective contexts. It also recognizes that no matter how many angles of knowledge we include in our curriculum, we always miss some angles. In that sense, education is always already inadequate; our task is to better our inheritance to prepare us for a more interactive world. Obviously, our history of domination has made it very difficult to consider angles in dominated zones, thereby compromising our potential as world citizens. We have to find a way of helping teachers and students to unlearn what they have learned; it is time teachers and students recognized that all angles matter in the pursuit of epistemology. Global competence will remain a mirage as long as education remains trapped in a cage of the Enlightenment, and presented in form of a universal one-way traffic. Education, like utopia, is not static; instead, it is forever in the process of becoming the ideal. This ideal is enhanced by the knowledge that every period, person, culture, and position not only adds to, but also complicates, knowledge. In other words, our education benefits from going beyond its borders to engage different ways of thinking about the world. It is therefore incumbent upon us, as educators, to go out of our way to consider all perspectives as we strive to imagine a better world than what exists. Our perspective is not the only perspective; there are billions of perspectives just as there are billions of strangers in our world. A curriculum that promotes global competence recognizes the need to celebrate and learn from human/cultural differences.
My personal life and internationalized teaching share common grounds. I have fond memories of reading Heroes of History by Malcolm McGillivray and Stories of Rome by L.W. and M.G. Faucet as a child in Kenya -- thanks to my father. These stories of Greek and Roman heroes inculcated in me an international subjectivity, so I grew up knowing that there were other worlds beyond mine. I would often compare my own local Luo heroes like Luanda Magere with Roman and Greek heroes like Horatius in an attempt to understand the sources of their over-achievement. Following my graduation from high school in Kenya, I left for Zimbabwe to study an undergraduate degree in Education. Here I was, at an international Africa University, with students from all over Africa and America experiencing the real meaning of the internationalization of teaching and learning. I gained a wealth of international experience in Zimbabwe, and I left convinced that everyone needed to become a world citizen. From Zimbabwe, my journey brought me to the USA for my Masters and Ph.D. I have visited several countries (including Uganda and Australia), and I have international friends. It is not unusual for me to invite friends from different religious backgrounds -- Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, and Agnostics -- to break bread together. In these dinners, we have dialogues around the meaning of life. And we don’t kill one another. It is a fulfilling experience to think beyond my boundaries in every aspect of my life.
Anchored on transformational learning about world citizenship, ethical values, and justice for all, my teaching endeavors to develop globally competent citizens. My students and I begin the semester with an understanding that we are all one community of learners and educators, and that none of us, not even the teacher, can claim monopoly over knowledge. We concur that we cannot purport to appreciate the complexity of knowledge and meaning unless we create a congenial, respectful, and supportive environment for a diversity of perspectives. We also note how interpretations can vary depending on the historical, political, and cultural context of what is being interpreted and who is interpreting it. This recognition of epistemological complexity generates in the students a sense of urgency for a healthy community that celebrates and learns from its differences, a feeling which is critical to the class goal of reaching for a better world than what exists. My classes are designed to inspire students to reach their fullest potential, and to better the human condition; it is this sense of possibility in my classes that allows my students and me to hope for a world in which billions of strangers are committed to justice for all even when, and especially when, our globe is tragically flawed. Teaching has granted me a golden opportunity to help educate global citizens to live ethically, and in so doing rise to the challenge of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”