So much has been written about service learning and community engagement: the opportunities service learning creates, the enriching qualities it provides, and the impact on students and the communities they serve. This ground has been covered. Service learning has become an important part of the educational experience of many students and hopefully of many more in the future.

What I want to share is a bit about what service learning looks like from a dual perspective of someone who participated first as a student and now as a community leader who regularly supervises service learning students from the very same program in which I received my degree. This is a story about Lowell Community Health Center and University of Massachusetts Lowell and the partnership they have created. It is also a story about how institutions grab hold of the opportunity to adapt to changing demographics when the “world” comes to their door.

The world has come to Lowell’s door. Lowell, Massachusetts has always been an immigrant city, but this has become even truer in recent decades. Lowell is now home to families from Africa, Asia, Central and South America. All of the countries in Africa are represented by families living in Lowell. Lowell has mutual assistance associations of Cameroonians, Liberians, Sierra Leonians, and Kenyans, just to name a few of the many immigrant communities in Lowell. Perhaps most notably, Lowell is home to the second largest Cambodian community in the United States (the third largest in the world).

As a health center, Lowell Community Health Center — where I work and am Director of Community Health Promotion?is directly confronted with a diversity of health needs. Many of the immigrants and refugees now living in Lowell come from countries that are suffering through civil wars. People arrive with great health care and social needs. They come with very different experiences of health care and often differing beliefs about what constitutes responsive health care. How then can service learning students in health be brought on board to be a part of LCHC and through their experiences at LCHC learn to become the kind of providers that are responsive to and respective of diverse health needs that may be very different from their own experiences?

When I was a student I was very fortunate to discover UML’s Community Health program and my mentor Professor Nicole Champagne. All through high school, I thought I wanted to become a physician. That was my aim. I started taking the required premed courses such as organic chemistry. But at the same time, I volunteered to help with HIV/AIDS outreach and education programs helping some of the most vulnerable individuals I have met become self-sufficient. Here, I discovered that there was another way to have enormous impact and that was through health education. I fell in love with the feeling I had every time someone said “Thank you Misi,” Misi was a dear name clients called me which they used to demonstrate respect and appreciation. I changed my major to health education and discovered a program that has aspects of service learning built into nearly every course. Early courses started with small, limited components upon which students reflected. The program then culminates with an intensive service learning experience in the senior year in which students spend 32 hours per week for a full semester in the kind of setting in which they eventually hope to work. I carried out the service learning at Lowell Community Health Center doing HIV Counseling and Testing and HIV Case Management. In this capacity, I was able to see and experience many of the theories that we spoke about in our classes and was able to test my own assumptions about what would be effective or not. Creating lessons for HIV 101 Education classes, creating spreadsheets to collect process data, and seeing the holistic nature of helping someone were a few of the knowledge and skills I used during my service learning semester. Had I been thrown into the experience without all of the gradual steps that are the hallmark of the community health program’s approach to service learning I likely would not have understood the complexities in designing effective messages for LCHC’s patients and clients. But I was prepared for the experience by all of the earlier, smaller steps in the program. These included the designing of health education boards and the delivery of educational lessons on topics such as healthy relationships for teens, HIV/AIDS prevention for high risk individuals, proper nutrition and even tenant’s and landlord’s rights and responsibilities for new immigrants arriving to the area.

When I first came to my role at LCHC, I began to reflect a great deal on my service learning experiences as a student. What made these work? How could they have been even better? One of the conclusions I drew from my service learning experience as a student was that if students had a great experience, their interests were captured. They would want to continue the kind of work they did in service learning. But if students had bad experiences at an early stage they never seemed to recover. They seemed to be turned off from service learning for all time.

And what were some of these bad experiences? Some (but not all) seemed to reflect the preparation/receptiveness of the community partner. Was the setting such that the students had few enriching things to do? Was there little in the way of a reflective piece built into the experience? Were the tasks appropriate to the student level?not too hard, not too easy, not too big, not too small? Most important?if we are thinking about global issues?how did the setting set these cross-culturally experiences up? How as a site supervisor could I develop creative and effective involvement of students so that they would better prepared to contribute to the future?

I found that if I was to be effective at my job and there effective as a supervisor of service learning, I needed to learn much more about the communities we serve, cultural health beliefs and how these interact with the health care system. One extended experience at LCHC was key to my learning: the Cambodian Community Health 2010 partnership. This is a CDC-funded program that happens to include much in the ways of activities and initiatives that could provide opportunities for students to engage in service learning. CCH2010 is a multiyear program. It is a partnership program. My role in the project was as staff development coordinator. I am not Cambodian. To assist the staff in their growth I needed to listen closely and learn, while using and adapting my skills learned. The staff and partners in CCH2010 taught me so much about the Cambodian community, the coalition building process and the importance of obtaining community feedback in program design and evaluation.

So, I wanted UML community health students to be a part of and learn from CCH2010. But how? Let me describe one experience. Two students from the Community Health Education program asked to do their service learning semester with me working on the CCH2010 project. After thinking through the possibilities, I gave them the task of creating a heart disease newsletter that would be produced first in English and then in Khmer, the Cambodian language. The first impression the students had was that this task was much too easy and would not take much time. At CCH2010, we needed this task done. We did not have the time or staffing. The students at first assumed that they could simply find the relevant information in the literature and then write the text themselves, place a few pictures and send the newsletter to print. Wrong. They found that they needed to facilitate a process. They needed to listen to CCH2010 staff and participants to identify what should be included and how the information should be presented. Only then would the science, audience, and prevention come together. The students needed writing skills, but they also needed to find the people who would suggest ideas and approaches to be included that would effectively reach out to the Cambodian community, particularly to elders. To do so, the students had to build trust; they had to go to meetings and listen. They did all of this. And they ended with a wonderful newsletter and template that CCH2010 continues to use and an incredibly rich cross-cultural experience that will be with them forever.

There were many points in this process of involving students in CCH2010 that things could have derailed. However, since I was fortunate enough to have experience with service learning as a student, I was able to have some say in the approach we took. I found that I could frame the student tasks at the appropriate level and could anticipate the inevitable problems that emerge. Many of these challenges had to do with cultural competence. How do students begin to approach learning about cultural competence? Learning about cultural competence is important in this new world in which we live but this kind of learning is subtle.

How do we prepare students and shape the request for their involvement at the right level? Often this is very challenging. Perhaps I can illustrate this with a “midsemester” example. Dr. Champagne called me to see if two of her students could be moved to LCHC; they were in placements that were not working out. In their current placements the students were learning little and they were not being challenged to apply their knowledge or reflect on what they learned. I agreed to have them come to LCHC to work on a pressing issue for us. We were in need of a detailed literature review of African immigration and its impact on host community.

This topic was important for LCHC because we were undertaking a much-requested new program that would focus on torture survivors and their needs that could be met through health programs. The students had little previous experience in carrying out a literature review where the focus was not strictly academic. They asked about the parameters of the review. They asked many questions about how to do. If I had not had my own service learning experience I would have been unprepared for the degree to which the students needed initial coaching to succeed at a task that looked relatively straightforward. The students underestimated difficulties, for example; they underestimated how hard and how time consuming this task would be. Yet, once they completed the review, they were very appreciative of having been given this opportunity. They said that they, prior to the service learning experience, had no ideas of how serious and widespread torture is an issue worldwide.

Was their literature review of the highest quality? Perhaps not. But it provided LCHC with useful information and, perhaps more importantly, it changed the way these students viewed health care and health education. The students are eager to find post-graduation positions that would bring them into the world of diverse health needs.

One of the things that we are learning at LCHC is how much we have to offer. Lowell Community Health Center was chosen as one of the top five culturally competent health centers in the nation in a report commissioned by the Office of Minority Health. We are realizing the degree to which we can be a resource. In the past we have not thought of ourselves in this way. I now go into UML classrooms to lecture about what we do, how we do it and why we do it, particularly utilizing real scenarios based on our experiences. This is one way to close the gap and create a feedback loop. As a result of these service learning experiences, we end up with better employees and better health care is offered.

LCHC is good site for service learning because we provide preventive and corrective perspective. We are both a community based organization and a health center. Students are able to see a continuum of activities. They see diversity and see how much their skills are needed and they are able to see people through a continuum of care and on the road to becoming healthy individuals. Students see all the pieces coming together at LCHC from social case management, to health education, to treatment of chronic disease and treatment for mental health.

At LCHC, we see ourselves as continually learning from our patients, our clients and community. Becoming culturally competent is, as one of our LCHC colleagues has stated, a journey and not a destination. As our communities evolve, so do our practices and our approach. This makes service learning in this type of setting even more important and valuable. We are aware that realities are different for each individual and we do whatever it takes to meet them where they are. Because of this, many see LCHC and its leadership as teachers and mentors. Our executive director stills sees herself as a learner, yet, someone like me, who is much newer in the field, sees her as a teacher. Her passion for greater good for everyone is contagious ? this is vital in any service learning experience. This is the experience I have had at LCHC and continue to pass on to many of the students that have walked through our doors. Now I am ‘passion’ contagious.

This ability to share our experiences with students also has a positive effect on our staff at LCHC. Aside from learning from our students, our staff morale raises knowing that they can now teach others about what they have learned. As an example, two of our community health education service learning students shadowed one of our Community Health Workers for a week. The students wanted to learn what “outreach” was all about. Did it work? Do people really listen? What is outreach? So they went out to conduct street outreach. Street outreach basically consists of going to the street and speaking with random individuals as they walk by. After a few attempts, the students quickly learned that engaging people takes skill and practice. The students were shocked to see how well our Community Health Worker stopped people and asked them about their primary care and whether or not they had health insurance. In many instances, the health worker would use her own cell phone to make a supported referral to the health center to assure that people got connected with a primary care provider. One student said, “it’s as if she knows the people,” the reality is, she did not. Through this activity, the students realized the level of skill needed to conduct outreach and developed an appreciation for the work. So much, that both students were hoping to be employed at LCHC to do the same.

The previous example demonstrates how service learning is so important to a student’s vision of her or his future. What happens in service learning can make or break student interest. If early service learning does not work well, student interest can be soured. Yet at the same time, what they learn, what they take away from the experience can’t always be predicted. As I mentioned earlier, some of the learning is subtle. This is particularly true when testing our own biases and assumptions we make. One time a student who was at our site observed a case management session between a gentleman, a health worker and a financial counselor at the health center. The student was attentively listening to the man who was seeking assistance and listening to his story of how he was thrown in jail, and what he was trying to accomplish now that he was out of jail. The student later approached me and said “Sheila, I never knew that people who went to jail looked like that [normal]. I thought people were dirty and on the street.” Such experiences, such as simple observation, have the wonderful side benefit of making it hard for students to stereotype others. Additionally, it helps students realize that their realities are not necessarily the realities of their ‘target audiences’ ? as we called them in school.

As should be apparent, much of this is a partnership between LCHC and UML. LCHC gives feedback. LCHC gets feedback. We are asked about and are thinking about what needs to be changed in or added to the UML curriculum. For example, many students I have supervised do not seem to understand that the production of materials and development of programs takes money. For this reason, I feel since it is important for the curriculum to include classes that speak about grant writing, the importance of obtaining funding and even how to write the grants or grants basics. At times, this lack of understanding has become an area of frustration for them in the beginning of the internship. In the end though, the students realize how things work and how things come together in the ‘real world’ and know that things do not just happen, but instead, things are skillfully created through a detailed process that includes time, a lot of effort and creative thinking.

I’ve been changed by fulfilling these dual roles?student and supervisor?and having them take place in the LCHC-UML partnership in the very diverse immigrant city of Lowell, Massachusetts. I no longer think that things like service learning are one-sided with only the student undergoing learning. I no longer assume that you can put things in place at the outset and they will simply run themselves. Increasingly I think of service learning opportunities as a bit like “gardens” that take tending by experienced “gardeners” who initiate the involvement of people who are new to gardening. These are master gardeners in the sense that they have lots of knowledge that they are ready to test out under the various weather and soil conditions that can unpredictably but regularly occur. The community of Lowell continues to provide all of us opportunities to learn and change as we try to meet the needs of all of the people who find their way to Lowell.

Natural disasters shake us out of our complacency, creating a burst of energy that overrides our comfortable inertia; faced with forces totally outside of our control, we are, ironically, inspired to act. The South Asian tsunami, the Pakistan landslides, the Gulf Coast hurricanes — the very magnitude of hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted, of towns destroyed, of regions reconfigured — have recently energized thousands of students from our campuses to try to help. The bigger, more immediate, and less tractable the problem, the more urgent is our impulse to rise to the occasion and to find some means to demonstrate our common humanity, to mediate the forces of nature, and to act with immediacy and spirit.

In a world where a billion people lack clean drinking water, where smoke from indoor cooking kills thousands of children each year, and where poverty, persecution and illiteracy are a fact of life for millions, there is no lack of problems of great magnitude. We have no need to wait for natural disasters to create conditions that require our participation. If students are inspired to act by their realization of acute human suffering, blatant inequities, and desperate situations, the world presents a constant array of such inspirations.

As experiential educators, we help students learn from the opportunities that the world presents. Typically, we work concentrically, starting with our immediate neighborhood, our city, our region, our country. Typically, we lack the resources to extend our reach to opportunities to serve overseas. As humanitarians, we deplore the shocking conditions that affect most of the world’s poor; as administrators, we carefully steward our scant resources. Typically, those resources do not stretch far enough to provide programs that enable students to address global issues.

However, failing to engage students with global issues, global partnerships, and global literacy in our increasingly interconnected world is as risky and limiting as ignoring computer literacy. As anyone who has tried to learn computer usage from a textbook knows, computer literacy requires hands-on experience; so too does global awareness. The world is a potent teacher, and students are exceptionally sensitive to its lessons, which last a lifetime. The responsibility of higher education in the next twenty years will be to educate ourselves and our students in resourcefulness and ingenuity to enable access to the opportunities that distant, international communities represent, where the unexpected is a given and the typical experience is transformative.

“Why” is a much easier question to answer than “how.” Clearly, helping American college students to gain international service experiences will be educational for those students, whose perspectives will be broadened, whose observations and memories will enrich their thoughts and conversations for years, and whose attitudes and expectations will be reshaped by their exposure to cultures and people both similar and very different from themselves. The same is often true of community service work done in disparate communities within the United States, but the degree of impact tends to be significantly higher for international experiences, if only because the students are keenly aware of being in a foreign environment.

Besides the education in external factors — the cultural, geographic, political, social, economic, and technical influences that shape communities and countries — students also gain internal, personal insights. They learn about their own principles, preferences, tolerances, assumptions, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as the hallmarks of their own culture and country. Thus, an interesting benefit of educating students as global citizens is that they consider seriously, sometimes for the first time, their role as US citizens as well.

Also good for US students and communities are the understanding of social responsibility and the activation of problem-solving capacities that international public service experiences engender. Professionals who understand their capacity to create positive change are a powerful force for good; such professionals were often students who actively experienced their own powers and limitations within a challenging context. Working on diverse teams, learning to respect and collaborate with indigenous people, negotiating foreign terrain both literally and figuratively, dealing with cultural and ethical dilemmas, understanding contextual perspectives of global issues, struggling with language barriers and inadequate resources, being truly self-dependent or dependent on strangers: experiences like these create self-knowledge, stimulate mature understanding of broad social contexts and the roles of individuals within them, and provide the foundation for self-confidence, reflection, and critical thinking.

While it is easy to accept that American students and communities will gain from international service experiences, it is more challenging to ensure that international communities will benefit. Many international opportunities may be accurately termed “service tourism,” as students provide token services in programs that exist to give American students a taste of international experience. As with other forms of tourism, the major benefit of such programs may simply be tourist dollars that stimulate local economies, while American students in fact become the service recipients, benefiting from the time and efforts of the NGOs and communities that host them while having little impact on real community needs.

In my view, neither service tourism nor exhaustive preparatory cultural emersion courses are optimal to facilitate effective international service experiences. The latter may be too costly, both in terms of time and funding. Two key premises of experiential education and public service within a college context are that students learn by doing and that education outside the classroom can be as potent and valuable as education within the classroom. It is ironic from that perspective to delay on-site education in international service for lengthy preparatory coursework. Certainly, students should receive appropriate guidance and encouragement to seek out opportunities to prepare themselves for overseas work; courses in language, culture, politics, social systems, economics or other aspects are undoubtedly valuable. However, value should not be confused with necessity, and teaching should not be confused with learning. Providing opportunities for on-site supervision of longer-term projects may optimize the learning situation more fully as they effectively prepare students for the needs of that specific community.

Funding is, of course, a challenge that is never far from the minds of concerned administrators. While the financial constraints are real and significant, we should not consider them prohibitive or absolute. In truth, if our aim is to empower students to act as change agents, our focus should be to “teach them how to fish” for the resources they require — after providing them with the equipment to get started effectively. If institutions can motivate students with passionate intent, empower them with strategies and confidence, instill a commitment to social responsibility, model the willingness to take appropriate risks, and offer them some portion of seed funding to get started, the students may themselves raise the rest of the funds they need to do effective international service. Our aim is not, after all, to support passive learners but rather to cultivate change agents — people who have the vision, daring, drive, entrepreneurship, and collaborative strategies to create positive change in communities around the world. If we trust them to change the world, it seems that we should also trust them to build on our useful but modest financial support. Whether a particular project succeeds or fails to acquire needed resources, the students will become educated in the challenges of international development work, of which fundraising is an inevitable part.

As educators, our focus cannot be on programmatic development and resource acquisition alone; our main task is to find ways to convince students that they can effectively work as collaborative change agents abroad, to figure out streamlined ways to prepare them to do so, and to enable effective integration of lessons learned when they return. Given financial constraints, we must ourselves envision new models and work to motivate, facilitate, and celebrate student initiative, ingenuity, and resourcefulness as well. In many ways, international public service is not a test of financial standing but a challenge to our imagination and creativity.

While many creative institutional models exist, at MIT we have developed opportunities that attract students to an array of choices yet require shared responsibility. This model arose through equal parts of philosophy and necessity, though not necessarily in that order. As many of you know from your own experience, a lack of funding often stimulates creativity; we generously share that condition with our students as part of the invaluable training we offer.

The array of opportunities for international service experiences at MIT includes grants, Public Service Fellowships that offer modest stipends or that pay for basic expenses, service learning classes, and the IDEAS Competition, which challenges teams of students to invent programs, processes, and technologies that meet community needs. The service learning courses include D-Lab, which combines classes on engineering and cultural issues with fieldwork opportunities. Other service learning courses are available in a variety of disciplines, including Urban Studies and Mechanical Engineering. The motto of one of the most effective engineering courses echoes our working premise of preparing students by enabling them to share in the challenges, boasting “a problem too big, a time too short, a team too large, and a budget too small.” Despite these challenges, or perhaps because of them, 2.009: Product Engineering Processes has produced highly inventive and effective technologies for communities as well as excellent and confident engineers. A recent survey indicated that the course’s service learning focus effectively renewed students’ interest in engineering as a career because it demonstrated the social relevance of mechanical engineering.

Like 2.009, the IDEAS Competition invites students to rise to a daunting challenge: to learn about the needs of a community anywhere in the world and to form a team that creates an innovative, feasible, and effective solution that addresses those needs. The Competition supports student efforts with a series of events, feedback sessions, mentoring opportunities, and small grants that enable students to get effective help in developing their community connections, proposals, and projects before the final events. At that point, the projects are judged by an independent panel of experts from the faculty and community, and winning teams receive modest awards to continue to develop their projects. They are also required to attend a retreat that assists them in planning and team building.

IDEAS (an acronym for Innovation, Development, Enterprise, Action, and Service) is in itself a challenge: it is run by a half-time staff person and a group of volunteers that includes students, alumni, and staff. It receives no Institute funding unless a particular department or office chooses to sponsor one of the awards, as the Graduate Students Office has done for the past few years. Like all of our international public service programs, we raise all other funds each year (including the salary of the staff member who runs the programs) from grants, corporate sponsorships, and private donations.

Now in its fifth year, the IDEAS Competition seems to be a popular and successful means of inspiring student participation in community innovation. Interestingly, most of the projects are internationally focused, so students have to overcome challenges of distance, communication, and intercultural partnerships. IDEAS has produced both social programs and technologies. Though none of the IDEAS awards even comes close to fully financing the winning innovations, many teams have succeeded in gaining significant external funding to enable them to develop and disseminate their innovations to the communities for whom they were intended. To date, IDEAS winners have accrued well over a million dollars in external funding, and their innovations have helped thousands of people worldwide. The IDEAS Competition model has also been adapted and adopted at other universities in the US and abroad.

I believe that the success of IDEAS and the other MIT programs stems from the way these programs support students while they challenge them to become partners in their own development and in that of communities worldwide. A high bar and a small purse signal to students that we trust their abilities, and the support and mentoring systems we have put in place demonstrate our willingness to work with them as they face their own challenges.

Essentially, we provide expectations of success and some scaffolding on which to build it. Motivated as we ourselves are to take risks and to act despite the lack of resources, we can be empathetic advisors to our students. I would like to point out that although we are making a virtue of necessity, we would nevertheless prefer full funding; I would like to assure MIT and wealthy people everywhere that we would endeavor to do just as good a job with the handicap of a $10 million dollar endowment. Until that is forthcoming, however, we will continue to try to find ways to inspire students to become active global citizens who are aware of devastation regardless of the news and who dare to respond to human needs regardless of the challenge.

Global citizenship would seem a recent concept, but its origins can be traced back to at least 4th century Greece when Diogenes declared himself a cosmopolitan ? a citizen of the world. At the time, the earth’s shape, the configuration of the vast majority of its surface, and even the existence of its varied peoples and cultures, would have been largely unknown to him ? or anyone. The idea of global citizenship, then, emerged even before there was a clear understanding of just what the globe entailed or who populated it. Though the concept of a global citizen dates from antiquity, the full realization of that vision probably remains a dream, even in the present day. This paper will briefly explore how global citizenship might finally emerge, what might characterize a global citizen and, how Civic Engagement offers some of the most effective means for bringing that result to fruition.

At Home in the World

My own introduction to the notion of global citizenship came through service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, Africa, where I coordinated a water well construction project. Before becoming a Volunteer, I had been vaguely aware of a Peace Corps recruitment slogan: “You can never go home again.” At the conclusion of my two-year tour, when I returned to the U.S., I found myself reflecting on that catchphrase. I was happy to be back and yet, I found myself strangely disturbed and ill at ease. The disoriented feeling was reminiscent of how I had initially experienced my assignment in a remote corner of the Sierra Leone bush. I had been conscious of my many differences, and I had the feeling that I did not really belong. As time passed, however, my language and cultural competencies increased, and meaningful friendships developed. A sense of deep connection replaced my earlier doubts.

Jack Mezirow (1990) describes how transformative learning begins with a “disorienting dilemma” ? through an experience that creates a powerful sense of disequilibrium such that unexplored assumptions and beliefs are ultimately replaced with new perspectives and behaviors. In my own case as a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, the learning had come full circle, and I had experienced the cycle of both being a stranger and of belonging on two separate continents. The bittersweet implications of the slogan now held meaning for me, and I recognized that something profound had indeed changed. My sense of place in the world had both expanded and become inaccessible to me all at once.

Accidental Citizens

Even in the present day, people in much of the world are enculturated to identify themselves primarily in terms of social systems that are far smaller than nation-states, including: family, clan, tribe, community, region, and religion. Such a limited sense of affinity, while understandable in a historic context, does not always correspond with the reality of our contemporary lives. For instance, energy and water shortages, global warming, poverty, and terrorism are but a few examples of the challenges we face as a world community. Moreover, the most economically significant entities on our planet are increasingly made up of corporations, not nations. The world, then, is becoming more interconnected, and also vastly more complex.

Psychologist Robert Kegan (1995) suggests that many of us are unable to effectively learn from and handle the ambiguity and complexity of modern life. This puts us at the mercy of events, without capacity to move beyond a nagging sense characterized by a feeling of being “in over our heads” as we react to new circumstances with a repertoire of old behaviors and emotions (Kegan, 1995).

In the face of such complexity, we tend to look to familiar answers. It seems especially natural for Americans to assume that technological changes could be the key to bringing about greater awareness of and participation in a global community. Advances in information technology in particular do have the effect of making the world smaller in very real ways. Yet, greater access to information does not on its own lead to greater understanding or deeper relationships. Moreover, the powerful influence of technology has also concentrated the influence of economic and financial factors in our lives. In turn, our role as consumer and worker is emphasized over that of community member or citizen. William Harman, author of Global Mind Change, explains that we define behavior by “economic consumption, so much so that citizens, especially in the United States of America, refer to one another as fellow ‘consumers.’” (Harman, 1998, p. 123).

If technology and economic factors do not ultimately develop our capacity to see ourselves as global citizens, some might look to government for inspiration and support. But government at a global level is just barely in its infancy. The United Nations and its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, were established as a direct consequence of horrific world wars. Consequently, the U.N. focus is on the affairs of nations and governments. The existence of the U.N. is tremendously important and brings great benefit to the peoples of participating countries, but such relationships do not, as yet, significantly involve direct, widespread, interaction between citizens.

In short, governments may eventually confer citizenship at a global level, or technology may eventually join us in a deeper form of world community, but both possibilities share basic assumptions: that change happens to us and that others (mostly above us) must do that work. But citizenship surely requires more from us than the role of passive consumer, isolated internet surfer or affiliate of a distant international body. Citizenship requires a capacity to think beyond one’s own needs and experiences, and it requires taking responsibility for oneself AND others. Influential system theorist, Peter Senge (1996), asks: “Why do we cling to the view that only the top can initiate significant change? Is it just our unwillingness to give up a familiar mental model? Is it the fear of stepping out of line without the imprimatur of the hierarchy? Perhaps, also, there is… the comfort of being able to hold someone else… responsible….” (Senge, 1996, p.42).

Making the Road Together

When knowledge of the world is primarily mediated, observed rather than experienced directly and personally, complexity tends to be interpreted in terms of competition, separateness and even danger. But this can be dangerous thinking in an increasingly interconnected world. Global Citizens, then, are inherently engaged citizens. Margaret Wheatley (1999), another prominent systems thinker, observes that when systems are fragmented and distressed (as our worldwide human system surely is), the essential strategy for healing is to create more connections, to increase the system’s knowledge of and relationship with itself. For any human system, Wheatley emphasizes the critical importance of creating and nurturing relationships as the way toward greater understanding and meaning ? and ultimately, wholeness.

It is in this way then, that Civic Engagement becomes critical for the development of our students and future global citizens. Engagement provides the opportunity to learn the skills and perspectives to literally engage with a variety of communities, to learn to trust the humanity and capabilities of those who are, at first appearance, different, even strange. Engagement provides an opportunity to work directly on the challenges of our time, and in the process, to actively construct new relationships, connection, sensibilities, commitments and affinities. Gandhi’s oft-repeated notion that we can participate in the change we hope to see in the world, to literally be that change, is a philosophical and deeply moral position. It is also a practical reminder that change and action are inevitably linked. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian scholar paraphrased the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado by observing: “…[W]e make the road by walking” (p. 6).

Senge, adds to this constructivist sentiment, explaining: “People often believe that you need to know how to do something before you can do it. If this were literally true, there would be little genuine innovation. An alternative view is that the creative process is actually a learning process, and the best we can possibly have at the outset is a hypothesis or tentative idea about what will be required to succeed. Robert Fritz characterizes the essence of the creative process as ‘create and adjust.’ We learn how to do something truly new only through doing it, then adjusting” (Senge, et al., 2004, p. 153).

The notion that we can and do create our own reality is a central tenet and rationale for encouraging Civic Engagement opportunities in our institutions of higher learning. Engagement in the lives of our fellow citizens, in the workings of our governments and institutions then, provides the opportunity to help directly, and to more deeply learn about them, to influence the course of events (and be influenced by them) and to literally construct a different future.

Principles for the Emerging Global Citizen

It seems, then, that being a global citizen is a choice, a state of mind and being each of us is capable of manifesting in our own lives. At this time in our history, it is not an inherent condition and is not conferred in some official, formal way. But it can be realized through action and reflection. What then might be some of the key elements that characterize the global citizen? At least eight principles seem to be essential for any would-be global citizen. These are:

• Holistic and collaborative approaches win
• Change is not loss
• Relationships deepen humanity
• Difficult problems require collective action
• Respect for others is golden
• Contribute where you live
• Find comfort with ambiguity
• Take responsibility

These principles are the most obvious to me, and I imagine others leap to mind for the interested reader. In order to reveal my own thoughts a bit more fully, I will discuss each of the eight principles briefly below

Holistic and collaborative approaches win

First, the global citizen must be able to see and experience life holistically, in something other than zero sum terms. Mary Parker Follett (Graham, 1995) spoke of the profound transformation that can be achieved when dominant mental models concerning “power over” others shift toward an aspiration to have “power with” others. A holistic perspective embraces the understanding that ultimate success is achieved primarily through collaboration and never when there are winners and losers.

Change is not loss

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky observe: “People do not resist change, per se. People resist loss” (Heifetz and Linsky, 2002, p.11.). It is an important insight, as it helps explain a central challenge to realizing the notion of the global citizen: we must believe that the opportunity ultimately adds to who we are, rather than erasing or making our current identity irrelevant. This is true at all levels, from our personal self-concept, to our sense of membership in a community or society.

Relationships deepen humanity

A global citizen will intuitively understand the power of relationships, that they can move each of us closer to our common humanity without taking us farther away from our personal or cultural identity. Wheatley explains: “The participatory nature of reality has required scientists to focus their attention on relationships. No one can contemplate a system’s view of life without becoming engrossed in relational dynamics. Nothing exists independent of its relationships, whether looking at subatomic particles or human affairs….” (Wheatley, 1999, p.163).

Difficult problems require collective action

Persistent, intractable problems are only solved through collective action. For Ronald Heifetz (1994, 2002) such “adaptive challenges” may not even be recognized as problems and therefore solutions will not have been developed. In such circumstances, no single person has sufficient insight into the problem, much less the creativity to image the full solution. Thus, adaptive challenges require both a collective and constructivist response. Paul Loeb, who understands a great deal about citizenship, adds: “…our most serious problems, both the public ones and those that seem most personal, are in large part common problems, which can be solved only through common efforts. The dream of private sanctuary is an illusion. It erodes our souls by eroding our sense of larger connection: (Loeb, 1999, p. 7).

Respect for others is golden

Effective participation in a world community surely requires an appreciation for the essential value of what is often called the “golden rule,” a common principle of diverse societies over time. Loeb describes it as a kind of “mutual respect.” He refers to Rabbi Hillel, who over two thousand years ago stated clearly and simply: “What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary” (Loeb, 1999, p. 284).

Contribute where you live

Even a global society is mostly experienced at the local level. Global citizens will feel a deep commitment to and responsibility for the civic life of their own community ? whatever its size ? knowing how this effort contributes to the greater good. The environmental maxim to “Think globally, act locally” reminds us that we are part of a larger system, and that we must consider large and long-term consequences while being actively engaged and aware of the daily choices we make. Systems scholars, like Wheatley (1999), simply point out that systems are “nested” and so a change at one level invariably has an impact on other, even higher levels.

Find comfort with ambiguity

A global citizen will be comfortable with ambiguity and demonstrate a spirit of experimentation. Such a flexible approach is congruent with the emerging paradigm in which our world is a mutually constructed and change and modification are inherent and ongoing. Paulo Freire declares: “… [I]n order for us to create something, we have to start creating…. If you don’t have any kind of dream I am sure that it’s impossible to create something” (Horton and Freire, 1990, p. 56). Freire further adds: “…without practice there’s no knowledge; at least it’s difficult to know without practice” (Horton, M., and Freire, P., 1990, p. 98).

Take responsibility

Article 25 of U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that: ‘”everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for … health and well-being … including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one's] control’” (Chomsky, 2006, p. 231). These principles are incomplete and untenable unless we take responsibility ? as fellow human beings and citizens of the world ? to ensure that they are fully manifest. We are often said to have inherent rights as human beings. It is our commitment to take responsibility for ourselves and others that may most definitively characterize us as citizens.

Conclusion

This last point clearly links Civic Engagement with the principles of global citizenship. Students learn all eight principles (and probably many more) when they actively participate in their communities, in making the lives of their fellow citizens better and more meaningful. In turn, they are molded and even transformed by the experience, remade as they help remake the world. And this journey of discovery begins only when we and our students understand that we are responsible.

References

Chomsky, Noam. (2006). Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Graham, P, ed. (1995). Mary Parker Follett Prophet of Management: A Celebration of Writings From the 1920s. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Harman, W. (1998). Global Mind Change: The Promise of the 21st Century. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Heifetz, R. A. (1999, April). Leadership vs. Authority. Across the Board, April, 1999.

Heifetz, R. A. and Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Horton, M., and Freire, P. (1990). We Make The Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Jarvis, P. (1999). The Practitioner-Researcher: Developing Theory from Practice. San Francisco: Josse-Bass.

Kegan, R. (1995). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA, US, Harvard University Press.

Loeb, P. (1999). Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. New York: St. Martin’s Grifin.

Marsick, V., and Watkins, K. E. (1990). Informed and Incidental Learning in the Workplace. London: Routledge.

Revans, R. (1982). The Origin and Growth of Action Learning. Bickley, England: Chartwell-Bratt.

Senge, P. (1996). Leading Learning Organizations: The Bold, the Powerful, and the Invisible. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, R. Beckhard (Eds.), The Leader of the Future. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Senge, P. et al. (2004). Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning.

Wheatley, M. J. (1999). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler.

We get the scripts for handling life’s challenges from folklore, fables, and fairy tales. Tales from around the world admonish us to fear the unknown and the darkness from tales of terrible things lurking there. In Xhosa folklore he is called the tokoloshe; in North America he is called the Boogyman. Other bedtime stories tell us how to treat our mother, brother, sister, wife, or father. In Umdhlubu’s tale, the frog taught townspeople and the girl’s father that the privileges of peaceful community life also carry obligations, one person to another.

To speculate that the tales may illuminate global citizenship, I must first explain my perception of what the term means. Though the definitional arguments currently rage in the theoretical literature, in a very practical sense a global citizen is a person with the ability to work, play, and live somewhere other than the land of their birth. Beyond simply having multiple addresses, this person exhibits agency (is proactive and engaged in civic life) and primacy (has the capacity to make change happen). At the emotional and philosophical level, the global citizen considers herself to be transnational: committed to the human issues no matter in what nation state they occur.

If we begin with this definition, one truth — with a lower case ‘t’ — is that as human beings we have shared experiences. The ideals and values these stories impart highlight our shared humanity. This obvious truth bears repeating: As we are all human beings, we share experiences and issues in common. To internationalize service-learning, therefore, we need to connect with this shared reality and explore its foundations. We will need to understand how we came to this place in our social history to see clearly what direction to go from here.

My own discipline, psychology, has long insisted on using rigidly controlled methodologies to expand our understanding of the human experience. This disciplinary stance is rooted in historical links with fields such as agronomy, biology, and chemistry. For a doctor, a heart is a heart and it is never a liver; the agronomist can reasonably expect lettuce seeds will never produce radishes; and the chemist can safely presume that gases, solids, and liquids have predictable qualities. Strong voices in psychology’s literature advocate for research that will allow the same specific classification systems for mental health. Hence, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, now in its fifth edition, has evolved from 350 categories to over 600 main categories, with accompanying subcategories, which are cross-referenced with still other qualifying information.

To generate data with this level of presumed specificity, the discipline relies on experimental methodology. In its strictest form, an experiment involves random assignment of subjects to condition (treatment) groups which are compared to control (non-treatment) groups. Factors are identified, numbers are assigned, measures are taken, and the results are analyzed using sophisticated statistics. The objective is to determine the degree of confidence one can have that the outcome did not occur by chance (p-value).

According to this philosophy of discovery, only knowledge generated empirically is valid. With our scientific lens firmly set on what an elite few define as “normal,” monolithic thinking and ethnocentricity are raised to the status of Truth — with a capital “T.” Service-learning’s emphasis on reflection-action and social constructivism has pried open the discussion. Tensions still remain in the discipline that can be traced to the original question about defining knowledge. The debate’s epicenter is whether priority should go to educating students — academic knowledge dispensed in classrooms — or creating social change — ordinary knowledge held by everyday people living with the issues at stake¹.

Academic knowledge can be acquired through intensive study and systematic investigation. It is quantifiable in the sense that one can learn an amount sufficient to be declared an expert. As proof of our intellectual prowess (or personal stamina!), we receive degrees, certifications, accreditations, and licenses. Consequently, academic knowledge is standardized and routinized. When students ask, we can provide the technical distinction between a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a clinical social worker, an applied sociologist, and a social psychologist.

By contrast, ordinary knowledge is a tapestry, a kaleidoscope, a maelstrom of sights and sounds and memories and emotions. It is socially constructed and embedded in this thing we all call culture. We can agree that culture is shared, we believe that it is homogenous, and we imagine we who adhere to its norms are a community. But, many times, we cannot agree what all that means. Ordinary knowledge is subjective and idiosyncratic and nearly endlessly diverse regarding gender, race, social class, ability, religion or creed, to name just a few distinctions.

The debate about the legitimacy of knowledge highlights why considering a global dimension to citizenship stymies so many social scientists. To understand how acting locally is the same as acting globally, we must examine what some have called modernity or instrumental rationality. Contemporary life has given us access to knowledge and resources beyond the wildest imaginings my parents’ generation could have conjured. Using cell phones and the Internet we can access knowledge in bytes and megabytes and sound bytes. At our morning breakfast we can be global consumers with biscotti from Italy, coffee from Brazil, and English marmalade on Texas toast. Or we can take advantage of cheap international travel to turn destination posters into Kodak moments.

Because we are enmeshed in this market economy, our first tendency is to interpret all of life using the language of buying and selling and zero-sum games. Even psychology’s technical jargon for helping people connect with other people is not immune. One theory of attraction is called the exchange theory: in relationships, we give only as much as required to receive what we want. The cost-benefit theory of attraction is even more calculating: we decide what we will give based on its value in relation to what we are likely to receive.

International scholars such as Alberto Guerreiro Ramos have posited that we cannot think clearly about globalization until we set aside not only the language of the market economy but also its accompanying assumptions about privileges and duties². The result is our reliance on images and languages that have been misappropriated from their original purposes. The Zulu practice of lobola is an excellent example. This is a complex practice of exchanging goods at the time of a wedding. Historically, this has meant cattle were given to the family of the bride when she left for the home of her new husband. But more than the exchange of property was at stake. The practice also created a web of affiliations across generations and social circles. Families, thus united, solidified communities and became the source of identity, connection and symbolic capital.

South Africa’s colonial history codified lobola, a rich and complex cultural tradition, into static customary law with the Native Land Act of 1913. The result was that the Zulu peoples were pushed off their land where communities shared (or bartered) and into an economy where outsiders paid them wages. Over time the new language of the market economy was used to reinterpret lobola. The practice shifted from its relational purpose to being wage-based and driven by the market, not by tradition. During apartheid, the practice eroded further until it became perceived by many as a remittance paid to the woman’s family for her care and feeding while in their house. The ideals of relationship building and community development were increasingly obscured by the language of buying, selling, and profiteering. In post-apartheid South Africa, the practice is caught in the crossfire of debates that pit feminist ideology against traditional practices³.

The disconnect between the language used to describe practices such as lobola and the tradition itself helps us understand the phenomena Richard Kiely calls the chameleon complex⁴. A returning Traveler hides the new insights and revelations gained as she went about her international work. She has discovered that international service-learning is about recognizing substantive rationality; that is, social experience is socially constructed and, therefore, defies the neat categories that academic study has taught her to expect. The Traveler’s struggle is about making the choice to take on the hard social and moral questions. In the case of lobola, feminist literature may rail against its bride payment and gender obligations. The Traveler may know from talking with rural African women that many still perceive its value as a means of building social affiliations and solidifying communities. Are these women deluded and oppressed, as feminist literature would suggest, or are they seeking a new balance between traditional and modern social realities?

The heart of the matter, quite literally, is the critical and complex nature of reciprocity. If everyone, everywhere can be said to have shared experiences, then they also have valuable knowledge about what engaged citizenship requires. To acknowledge the overlapping aspects of our shared human experience, we have to let go of cherished taxonomies. Tapping into this information can only be done by decolonizing methodologies so that others beyond an elite few can articulate the nature of these moral dilemmas⁵.

Today’s language of stereotypes and zero-sum gamesmanship has deep historical roots. We can see the difficulty in overcoming its influence in the case of Sarah Baartman, a Khosian woman who died in 1815. Her life is important because, like so many other Black Africans, she was taken to colonial Europe and put on display to affirm her racial inferiority. We remember her name, unlike so many others, because she became the focus of a court case when England outlawed slavery. The court decided that she, who was a slave, was nonetheless a willing participant and so was the author of her own fate. Her public display was decreed to be indecent but not unlawful. Sarah Baartman died under mysterious circumstances. Her death is important because of its aftermath: her body was dissected, preserved, and displayed in a Paris museum until 1974. Her remains were not repatriated to South Africa until 2002.

Sarah Baartman has been claimed as an icon of suffering and deliverance by some African-American feminist writers. The colonial attitudes she faced are seen as the prototype for stereotypes Black women still endure of the over sexual woman with abnormal genitals. Yet writers from South Africa posit that western activists claiming her as an act of defiance are also forcibly (and erroneously) interpreting her unique Khosian experience in the western context. In the process of claiming her, western activists are usurping her story. Thus, despite their best intentions, Sarah Baartman’s unique, complex, and historically situated human story has been reduced to a collection of ideological categories.

Academics are too often guilty of the same unintentional destruction, in the name of value-free research initiatives. In reality, research is never neutral. The language of investigation is based on assumptions drawn from academic knowledge gathered from a particular cultural and historical context. Take, for example, the psychological literature on race, gender, and class. Until the consciousness movements of the 1960s and 1970s, theories of personality development presumed a white male CEO; his Hispanic female secretary; the Black servers in the company cafeteria,; and the Native American groundskeeper all had the same psychosocial experience. Ostensibly neutral research was designed — and in significant ways is still being designed — using the unspoken premise that a single standard exists that we could call “normal” and that all individuals can be measured against it.

When ordinary knowledge is ignored, however, the result is that prevailing terminology and theoretical jargon replace individual stories. To many in my profession, this is the ideal state of affairs because — presumably — the resulting conclusions can be applied to everybody precisely because they relate to nobody in particular. Research that asks the CEO, the secretary, the servers, and the gardener to tell their individual stories inserts too many uncontrollable variables into the analysis. Such research flies in the face of the precision experimental designs seek and so methodology trumps contextualizing.

Yet our individual, everyday stories are far more than a collection of spurious variables. They can teach about humanity and citizenship and global citizenship just as the mythical characters teach Truth — with a capital “T” — in cultures around the world. Perhaps we must, as some have suggested, detach the term “citizenship” from the discussion. The term historically has implied nationality but no single nation holds sway over a global citizen. Her activities are transnational and her commitment is to the human issues, not the nation state. Therefore, whether nationality is central to world-mindedness is questionable. One could defend national identity as the springboard for global participation since we tend to view the world through our own cultural lens. Still, the global citizen will have the moral equivalent of photogrey lenses that respond to changing environmental realities.

The global dimension to citizenship is that The Everyone, everywhere is in the global village. We need to advance the discussion of how to promote a global conscience. Precedents already exist outside economic and political institutions, brought about through grassroots activism. These global citizens can be seen at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle (1999) and Genoa (2001); in the women’s movement from the first wave to the third wave; in the Infant Formula Action Network that organized the boycott against breast milk substitutes; and in faith-based initiatives like KwaSizabantu Mission that feeds, houses, and clothes anyone from anywhere in the world who comes to their doors⁶.

Clearly this discussion requires a strategy for doing the emotional work involved with moral and identity questions. Service-learning’s emphasis on reflection-action and social constructivism can also be used to pry open this discussion. Now we will move into unknown territory, especially for social science’s pathological obsession about legitimate knowledge.

The past few days I have been mulling over the sights and sounds of Durban, South Africa in 2006. As my research team has made its way to appointments and from various community events, I have tried to let events simmer in the back of my mind. This is the best way for me to allow insight to take its own shape rather than my forcing it into something that is comfortable for me (and potentially fraught with ethnocentric inaccuracies). Several realizations have made themselves known, but they all lead to the same conclusion that is so common as to be a cliché: People are the same all over the world.

As part of our work on this biennial trip, my team and I are writing blogs. I spoke in an early blog about how the city seemed to have changed since our visit in 2004. How people appeared to be more wary and weary, that tensions and paranoia were higher, and that the general climate less friendly or animated. My impressions have been confirmed as we’ve talked to people during our travels around the city by bus and on foot. A general theme has emerged about the declines in everything from the quality of consumer goods to the condition of the roads to the rate of unemployment. People point out the number of homeless “come down from Jo’burg” as evidence of the general malaise that has gripped the country.

Our community partners running NGOs (non-governmental organizations) describe how hard it is to find funds or keep volunteers or maintain participation from their constituent groups. They also raise questions about the very notion of a constituent-group, considering the fact that everyone is affected by the -isms of society. We’ve traded war stories about unruly boards of directors, endless meetings, and paperwork that never dies. The research project I direct is somewhat unique within the NGO community in terms of the Institutional Review Board requirements. However, our partners have their particular oversight requirements to manage as well.

As activists and social change agents, we are of like minds in our passion for social justice and our impatience for posturing. We have shared frustrations and disappointments when those who worked alongside us vanished or (even worse) sabotaged or (worst of all) attacked. We discussed the importance of taking care of our relationships. What good is it to save the world at the cost of relationships, marriages, and family? Some of us recognized taking care of ourselves is also crucial. You can’t give to others if you don’t take time out to refuel and regenerate.

In many ways these realizations are ordinary, almost mundane. Yet they have started me considering the human aspects of citizenship. That is, isn’t there a dimension of citizenship that is about what it means to be a human being no matter what nation-state we call home? We have found experiences on both sides of the ocean that look different on the surface, but about which we can swap stories by only changing the names and places.

So, is there — as our experiences imply — an aspect of global citizenship that is less about politics and economics and more about the human spirit?

I do not know the answers to these questions, but I will keep thinking about them. Like the frog in Umdhlubu’s story, I am searching for a way home. In my case, the journey leads me through the maze of competing schools of thought and across warring professional turfs. Still, I also believe that ordinary experience will lead me to greater understanding.

¹ As a 2004 Campus Compact Faculty Fellow, I co-authored a paper to introduce the conceptual model for supporting the continued development of service-learning as a pedagogy of engagement. A logic diagram was used, among other goals, to illustrate potential tensions within the field that merit ongoing discussion amongst those committed to the continued development of service-learning in higher education. The article, entitled A Logic Model of Service-Learning: Tensions and Issues for Further Consideration appears in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (Spring 2006, pp. 47-60). back

² For an excellent review of Dr. Ramos’ thinking, see a recent article by Curtis Ventriss and Gaylord Candler entitled, Albert Guerreiro Ramos, 20 Years Later: A New Science Still Unrealized in an Era of Public Cynicism and Theoretical Ambivalence. The article is in the May/June 2005 issue of the journal Public Administration Review. back

³ Some have said that this is a false debate because this cultural practice, like so many others, cannot be interpreted dichotomously. It is a complex practice that has changed, is changing, will continue to change as social realities respond to the encroaching western influence. The periodical publication Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity (a project of the Agenda Feminist Media Company, Rm. E320 Diakonia Centre, 20 Diakonia Avenue, Durban, 4001 South Africa) regularly features articles addressing the traditional-modern clash in the nations of Africa. Janet Hinson Shope’s article entitled, Lobola Is Here to Stay: Rural Black Women and the Contradictory Meanings of labola in Post-Apartheid South Africa is one such writing. back

⁴ Richard Kiely. (2004). A Chameleon with a Complex: Searching for Transformation in International Service-Learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Spring, 5-20. back

⁵ Linda Tuhiwai White presents an inspirational and humbling analysis of how well-intentioned social science has intruded upon Australian Aboriginal peoples. Her book is entitled Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. back

⁶ The KwaSizabantu region is in the eastern cape region of South Africa. The Kwasizabantu Mission was established in the 1960s and has since grown from one building on an acre of land to a booming complex on 700 acres. The mission’s services and rituals are ecumenical, with equal attention being devoted to the individual’s creature needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. Its farms make the mission self-sufficient while its contracts for bottled water, dairy products, fresh produce, and baked goods are income-generating. The mission has recently opened an AIDS clinic for women and plans a similar facility for men in the near future. back

New communication tools are fundamentally altering the way our society reads the news, expresses creativity, socializes and shops. Just as with the development of every new technology, these same communication tools can be used for enhancing community understanding, citizenship and service-learning. If the campus is the microcosm that prepares students for citizenship in diverse and increasingly globalized democracy, campus leaders, including students and educators, should take the lead in utilizing these new communication tools for global learning and citizenship. This paper aims to examine these new tools and suggest how students and educators can use these tools to better prepare students for citizenship in a globalized world.

By every conceivable measurement, the era of ‘mass’ media is over. Major newspapers and network news, where professional journalists interpret the world for millions of readers and viewers, are quickly losing readers and viewers. In its place are the tools of what can be deemed ‘participatory’ media. Blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis and vlogs are all characterized by low barriers to access (you don’t need to pay to create or consume them), and the ability to unite people with various interests around the globe. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet- from text to pictures, music and video.’

Even technophobes have some understanding that new technologies are changing the way the world works. However, just because the medium of communication changes doesn’t mean society changes, right? Wrong. The immersion of ‘participatory’ media fundamentally alters the connection between how we understand the world (media consumption) and how we decide to take action in the world (citizen activity).

Here are two brief examples (one global, one local) to illustrate the pervasiveness of this phenomenon:

Afriblogosphere

One reason African countries have failed to develop is that their competent practitioner and intellectual elite have lacked networks and access to good ideas. Blogs about Africa have changed this. There are two type of blogs about Africa: practitioner blogs and cultural blogs. Practitioner blogs are written by concerned communities of professionals around the world who are serious about helping to solve Africa’s vast challenges. They exchange ideas and best practices, and engage in a debate about the biggest issues facing Africa. These ideas are often adopted with local twists to creatively solve public problems.

The Online Election

Never again will an American gubernatorial or national candidate ignore the extraordinary organizing and fundraising power of the Internet. This is exemplified in the commonly known story of Howard Dean. Dean’s campaign utilized a tool called Meetup.com, which allowed citizens to meet locally to support their candidate. By the end of the campaign, Dean had 189,040 Meetup supporters in 1,100 locations across America¹. The 2008 elections will no doubt see a massive increase in this phenomenon.

Many of the traditional tools of citizen organizing are becoming obsolete. How can the campus prepare students for global citizenship in a world whose civic infrastructure is so rapidly changing? The remainder of this essay will outline the three most prominent ways phenomenon that campus leaders (both students, educators and service learning professionals) can utilize to encourage global learning and citizenship. Most of the tools of this list are in very early stages of development, and it is up to collaboration amongst service learning advocates, educators and students to improve and enhance them.

It is important to note that we have purposefully not separated tools for the classroom and tools that can be used for extracurricular purposes. We have done this because we believe in campus/community collaboration, and have noted an increasing interest amongst students in merging what they do inside and outside of the classroom.

Increase Campus Engagement in Global Issues- Participatory Media

Since 9/11, students around the world have used technology to further deliberative democracy. Most universities now have videoconference labs and student groups have already begun to utilize them to host conversations. For example, Americans for Informed Democracy² can host a forum on America’s foreign policy towards Africa with participants in Indiana, California, Mali and Ghana. Also, online forums like Global Voices Online have been created to create a community of ‘bridge bloggers’, those who are talking about their country to a global audience. This helps balance global media coverage, which has long ignored nuanced issues in much of the developing world. Engaging in these conversations, both inside and outside of the classroom, will create a more informed global citizenry.

Increase Collaboration on Practitioner Projects- Open Source Production Model

The open source movement uses internet based tools to provide useful, free knowledge and tools through the collaboration of many people giving their time and expertise. We should recognize in this movement a powerful new form of service learning. The most prominent open source tool is Wikipedia, the biggest and most accessed encyclopedia in the world. Many fields use open source technology to improve practical, public knowledge. There is a wiki for best practices in international development, a free wiki tourism guide, as open source media, commercial and health products.

If research institutions should ‘develop knowledge for the improvement of communities and society’³ educators should make the classroom a place to begin that contribution by encouraging student contribution to open source tools.

Increase Student Preparation for Tackling Global Challenges- Classroom/(Global) Community Collaboration

Students feel a strong desire to contribute to solving international problems. However, neither the Paul Farmeresque life of the Peace Corps nor simply giving $20 to UNICEF appeals to them. Smart, skill oriented students need outlets to collaborate with their counterparts in the developing world to solve these problems. Universities, who can equip students with the practical skills to take on these challenges, are beginning to create programs that allow students to plug into solving global issues.

Programs that address these needs are emerging in vivid variety. Global Youth Partnership for Africa’s⁴ Student Global Ambassador program brings talented American students with specific interests to Uganda for a two-week program to engage and learn from talented young Ugandan social entrepreneurs. Then, the Americans return home and through technology continue to collaborate on various projects. Also, Northwestern University is developing a hybrid program fusing classroom knowledge, service learning and international volunteering. This program provides practitioner training, community awareness and fundraising skills for one semester and then provides placement in a skill-specific project in the developing world for a second semester.

Each of these three areas has exciting opportunities for growth, and surely each category could be a paper in itself. The goal of this overview is to provide a bird’s eye view of the potential of these new tools, and introduce service learning professionals, educators and students to new communication tools that will alter the way we contribute to public knowledge, engage in service learning and enhance deliberative democracy.

¹ The Empowerment Age: Why the Internet Matters. Situation Analysis by EchoDitto, Inc. A 2004 Year End Report back

² www.aidemocracy.org back

³ Campus Compact. Wingspread Declaration on the Civic Responsibilities of Research Universities back

⁴ Full Disclosure: Josh Goldstein is Associate Director and Jeremy Goldberg is Executive Director of GYPA. back

Twenty-eight years ago a young man from a small dairy farm in Minnesota boarded a plane for Sweden. He had never been outside the boarders of the United States and had only been out of his home state a number of times. His only language was English and the community in which he grew up was overwhelmingly White and Catholic. He rarely let anything other than meat and potatoes cross his lips. He would spend the next twelve months living in Sweden as an exchange student. It would be an experience that would change the direction of his life. That young man was me.

It is said that the world is getting smaller. For me, study abroad made the world a whole lot bigger. Before going to Sweden the world looked like a very limited place. In many ways that little dairy farm was. But my time in Sweden introduced me to a world I knew little about. I learned a new language, tried new foods, made new friends. I began to see and understand events at home and around the world in new ways.

But I was not the only one beginning to see and experience the world in a new light. Advances in technology and the ever expanding world economy were rapidly changing they way we lived our lives. Market forces were beginning to bring about the end of the family farm in America. The Twin Cities was seeing the first wave of new Hmong immigrants. In Iran the U.S. supported Shaw was losing his grip on power while the Ayatollah Khomeini was gaining converts. The Soviet Union was preparing to invade Afghanistan, an act that would cause the U.S. to withdraw from the 1980 Olympics.

We didn’t refer to it as such then but we were in fact witnessing the affects of globalization. Different individuals and organizations place emphasis on different aspects of globalization but to me it is simply the increasing interaction of individuals and organizations across national, cultural, economic, and political boundaries. It is a process that began the first time two tribes encountered one another for the first time. Modern technology has accelerated the process by giving us the ability to travel anywhere in the world in a matter of hours and communicate with anyone instantaneously. Increasingly open markets and expanding population migration has further accelerated the process. The number and types of encounters we now have with people different from ourselves is at an all-time high.

As a nation of immigrants, the United States has one of the most diverse populations on earth. We are 64.4% White, 14.1% Latino, 12.8% Black, 4.2% Asian, and the remainder Native American, Pacific Islander, or people of multiple races. Eleven point one percent of us are foreign born and 17.9% of us speak a language other than English at home. While we are still overwhelmingly Christian, the numerical increase in non-Christians is growing significant. Here in Chicago, there are 26 different ethnic groups with populations of at least 25,000 members and over 100 languages are spoken. This city has the second largest Polish population in the world and the second larges Mexican population in the United States.

What does it mean to be a nation of immigrants? It was once thought that people would leave the old world and their old ways behind when they came here to begin life anew. America was a melting pot. A place where people of diverse backgrounds came, cast off their native costumes, and became “Americans”. This of course was never entirely true. My father, a second generation American, continued to speak Czech with his parents and extended family throughout his life. My wife, a 4th generation American, continues to celebrate her Irish heritage with music, dance, and family traditions.

More recently some have described the United States as a salad bowl; a place where people of diverse backgrounds live together while maintaining their own traditional culture and ways of life. Ideally this produced a harmonious blending of flavors; a single society of diverse individuals and cultures living and working side-by-side. While I like this analogy better than the melting pot, it too is not entirely true. When immigrants come to this country they do change. They do become more “American.” At the same time, however, they change us and what it means to be an American. Reality is a mix of the melting pot and the salad bowl. I like to think of us as a soup & salad country. Immigrants add new dimensions to the flavor of the soup while at the same time adding another element to the salad.

We are a global nation. Economically, culturally, and yes, militarily we span the world. We touch and are touched by virtually every part of the globe. Because of our tremendous diversity and reach, one might think that managing an increasingly global environment would come naturally to Americans. And yet huge numbers of us don’t know Vietnam from Venezuela or French from Farsi. The National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study’s final report stated that young people in the United States “… are unprepared for an increasingly global future. Far too many lack even the most basic skills for navigating the international economy or understanding the relationships among people and places that provide critical context for world events.” How can this be? And what is to be done?

It must be remembered that while this nation was born of diversity we, like many people, have and continue to struggle with it. Encounters between European settlers and Native Americans were often confrontational. While the Civil rights movement has made tremendous inroads to racial divisions, we still have a very long way to go. Gays and lesbians have earned a place at some table but remain excluded from many others. Today’s immigration debate is charged with contentious racial, economic, legal, and cultural issues. Learning how to understand and manage diversity and change is the key to success on the global and local level in the modern era.

How do we improve our abilities to live and work affectively in an increasingly diverse and global environment? I believe that any examination of global citizenship must begin with a long look in the mirror. Who am I? How did I get here? What influences have shaped my life? Being a global citizen is not a rejection of our own nationality, race, religion, or anything else that makes you, you. Each of us has a unique background and unique perspectives on the world and it is from that position that we engage the rest of the world.

It is from my unique perspective that I view the world and my role in it. I am a 3rd generation descendent of Czech and German immigrants. As I stated earlier, I grew up on a farm in Minnesota and was an exchange student in Sweden. I have also lived in Warsaw, Poland, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. I used to say that the experience of living and studying in Sweden did more to make me the person I am to day any other experience in my life. That is not true. Like all of us I am the sum of many factors and experiences.

My experience as an exchange student did set me on a career path where international issues were central. Most of my professional life has been spent with international education and training programs. I’ve worked with hundreds on individuals from all around the world. I helped introduce them to this country and understand the differences they found here. More recently I moved to the world of philanthropy where today my work focuses on enhancing the way individuals engage and participate in our social and political institutions.

I feel lucky to have had these personal and professional experiences. What have they taught me about global citizenship? The most mundane, perhaps, is that no two people or organizations are completely alike and none are truly unique. As simple as this sounds, understanding this is the foundation of success in a diverse global environment. If we are to work affectively we must understand and manage our differences while at the same time appreciate and leverage our commonalities.

I have also learned that when it comes to intercultural understanding you can’t beat first-hand experience. I could have read all I wanted about Sweden but I never would have learned as much as I did about Sweden, Swedes, and myself had I not lived there. The same is true for the students and professionals I have worked with over the years. You just can’t beat being there and doing things. This might be living in a foreign country or working on a service project in a community different from your own.

Most lessons I learned through my work in the nonprofit sector are not limited to global citizenship but are really universal. The ones I will mention here are the importance of leadership, focus, partnerships, and mentoring. I have worked with organizations with strong leaders and weak ones and believe me, leaders make a difference. Leaders provide vision, motivation, and a sense of common purpose. Martin Luther King is a fine example. It was his ability to lead and mobilize thousands of individuals and get hundreds of smaller organizations to join the struggle that made the civil rights movement successful.

Another simple lesson is that no individual or organization can take on all of the world’s problems. It is critical that we focus our efforts. Nonprofit organizations, for example, don’t try to tackle every problem in their communities. They tend to pick one or two. They have specific mission statements, and hopefully strong leaders, to guide and direct them. They have boards of directors to ensure that they do not stray from the mission. They are focused.

Even when individuals and organizations are focused, they won’t maximize their impact if they try to go it a alone. They need to form partnerships. This is seen clearly in the relationship between a foundation and a nonprofit organization. Foundation assets are worthless if they can not be invested in strong programs run by well-run nonprofit organizations. I am not saying that individual people and organizations can’t make a difference. They can. But given the scope and complexities of many of today’s problems we need to work together if we hope to solve them.

Going hand-in-hand with partnerships and leadership is mentoring. Mentors are essential to building better students, employees, and citizens. My exchange program was introduced to me by one of my high school teachers and coaches; an adult who took interest in me and wanted me to make the most of my life. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations is currently studying the future of Chicago’s Mexican population. Mentoring is key to several of their recommendations. They are urging Chicagoans both within and outside of the Mexican community to step forward to help nurture and develop the next generation of leaders.

What can higher education do to produce better global citizens? Yes, we must improve our teaching of second languages, geography, history, and world politics, religion, and cultures. But this is only the first and easiest step. Students can only learn so much about the world through text and photographs. They will only come to truly know and understand our world through direct contact and interaction.

Colleges and universities must expanded international study and professional training opportunities. They must create more joint degree options that allow American students to complete part of their degrees overseas and have overseas students do likewise here in the United States. Our colleges and universities must increase the linkages between classroom and “real-world.” Being a global citizen is not a spectator sport. We must expand our approaches to education to create a constantly evolving learning environment. Without these types of experiences, we will not be able to communicate and work affectively in today’s multilingual, multicultural environment and will not succeed.

Most importantly they need to create more opportunities for their students to gain experiences working with diverse populations. If it is to be successful higher education must expose students to the broadest possible range of ideas and experiences. We must move beyond the limiting walls of our academic institutions to explore the full range of the human condition. There has to be real face-to-face interaction and experience. We must integrate traditional forms of teaching and learning with real-world experiences that provide essential skills of interaction and competition.

Higher education must accept the fact that their role in developing strong citizens includes citizenship on the global level. This must become part of its mission. But higher education does not have to take on this new challenge in isolation. It needs to develop partnerships with organizations that focus on this full time. And they need to identify mentors on campus and off that can help lead their students into the global arena. Foundations and nonprofit organizations can be important partners in this effort. We can help to break-down barriers, create and facilitate partnerships.

Being a affective Global citizen is all about how you view the world and interact with it. Interacting with it is no longer an option, it is a daily reality. Developing individuals to be affective citizens globally is really the same as helping them be affective locally. That’s why empowering individuals for effective civic engagement on the campus, community, state, and national level goes hand-in-hand with empowering them for civic engagement on a global level. And, given the diversity of our communities today, to be civically engaged locally is, in a sense, to be engaged on the global stage. Isolating one from the other is no longer possible.

Visit Minnesota today and you will find one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Hmong in the United Sates. You will also find a large Somali population. The farm on which I grew-up no longer exists. My home town, while still largely White, includes people from many religious and ethnic backgrounds. The world is no longer “out there.” It is right here in our back yards. We are citizens of the world with connections throughout. It is our challenge to understand and manage these connections if we hope to succeed in the years ahead.

Global citizenship in the making

I went to college considering my time in activities outside of the classroom to be the more practical and useful education I received, but with every intention to sync my studies with parallel practical application in order to continue engaging in what I now learned was referred to as “service-learning.” Already a student of the Humanities, I self-designed my International Social Policy double major by taking advantage of the opportunity to cross-register for courses at neighboring state universities as well as studying abroad and away. The local institutions provided me enhanced studies of policy and politics and my time with outside programs helped me develop cross-cultural competencies both domestically and internationally.

Being previously able to move from group to group without accountability to a single core organization in my prior activist experiences, I lacked mechanisms to analyze how I was growing or benefiting as a result of the overall experience. When I studied abroad in Cuernavaca, Mexico, however, I shared my reflections and insights on my experiences, asked others their opinions, and shared how I was changing based on what I was learning, as part of the living and learning community the other students and I made up; I suppose I learned to speak English during my time in Mexico. Through structured classroom discussion and free time with friends, I found my voice while studying abroad and questioning what I was then experiencing versus what I already knew.

Participation in that service-learning based program with a focus on social justice informed my decision to pursue a year away from my home institution, first as a Citizen Scholar at the Institute for Civic Leadership at Mills College in Oakland, CA, during the fall semester of my junior year, and then with the Center for Global Education’s “Nation-building, Globalization, and Decolonizing the Mind” program in Namibia and South Africa in the spring. The similarly styled service-learning based approaches underlying each of these programs gave me an ability to compare and evaluate their varying structures and components. After all, to be able to see across trends is to be able to assess and critique comparatively.

While the semester in Mexico focused heavily on issues of social justice and U.S. hegemonic practices towards their neighbor to the south through structured time spent listening to speakers in the community and site visits, my time with the Institute for Civic Leadership emphasized intentionally building a community of women students engaged with democratic leadership and group process and work. My experience with the Center for Global Education focused on nation-building after civil wars and apartheid. We visited museums, toured neighborhoods, and spent time with our internship organizations to get a sense of the institutionalized racism that we could see not only in the slums and townships in which the black Africans have continued to dwell since their initial residential segregation, but also in the lack of power the government had when negotiating with the wealthy Group of 8 nations.

My home stays with families in Namibia and South Africa opened my eyes to the fact that perhaps our lives, families, work, and dreams aren’t all that different. I cooked with my auntie by helping grind millet into a fine powder to be made into mahangu porridge and clapped along as my meme (mom in Oshiwambo) and younger sister danced to traditional Namibian drumming, but I also played soccer with my younger brothers when they arrived home from school, watched television with tate (dad) after we finished supper in the evenings, and my Namibian family and I celebrated my birthday with a delicious cake from the local store. While the language was new to me and the national challenges unique, several of the flavors and aromas reminded me of my own mother’s Vietnamese cooking and somehow, the joy of family road trips next to siblings in the back of a large vehicle seemed to transcend cultures.

My return home at the end of each program consistently imparted a deep personal desire to ensure I could integrate the new learning, understanding, and habits I came away with. From the moment I walked into a new situation, I became hyper-observant, more acutely aware of the differences in lifestyle, culture, speech, and more, between this new place and that from which I came. I became mindful of the impact of the words I chose to use, the clothing with which I presented myself in certain situations, and the type of attitude I portrayed. Traveling, whether to a new city or a new continent, illuminated that which I didn’t know to appreciate or recognize previously in my home life. Not only did my experiences abroad and away deepen my intercultural competency, they also highlighted my understanding of what shaped my own country’s norms and values.

I began to see how my home culture defined my view of reality and how that reality is produced. I realized that I, being exposed to several distinct cultures, now had the opportunity to compare the varying lifestyles and personally choose how I wanted to live. I realized if I chose some of the values I saw more prominently in Namibian culture, it might be difficult to maintain those practices at home, because U.S. culture would not necessarily be already in support of this value. I knew though, through my work with activist groups, that as long as a community exists to support the valued practices, it is possible to carry out values in cohesively. I would need to make sure I found such the people and places to support my ideals.

The beginning of my senior year in college was also the beginning of my commitment to being in the country, at home, for an extended period of time, and acting on the recognition that I did not have to leave home in order to change the world. I once again took the post of Reading Buddy to a kindergartner and a fifth-grader at a nearby elementary school collaborative, which I viewed as an extension of my work on international children’s health and rights issues with the Student Campaign for Child Survival. I resumed volunteering with the English as a Second Language program local to my school community, and in listening to the stories of immigration, heard insights into what may have characterized my own parents’ arrival in the U.S.

Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted, “The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” As a proponent of service-learning, I argue that once education and practical application are integrated, they can never be disintegrated for a student. We recognized that the programs we had taken part in combined an active reflection that analyzed our changed environments as well as changes within ourselves. We learned we are only as important as we are in this world in relationship to each other and to the communities in which we dwell. The support we had in the programs we participated in were a group of students committed to engaging in a semester-long experience of growth and challenges. In continuing our local and international activism, we wanted to take the time to transform our beliefs and new insights into mindful, daily action. We sought to intentionally create a similarly supportive and globally-minded community in our own college home.

Putting the pieces together

I intend to detail the process we undertook in putting this community together, in this part of the paper, to demonstrate that it was with specific intention that our program looks precisely the way it does. It asserts that where we sit now is merely the experience of being on others’ shoulders. The recommendations at the end of each paragraph can be viewed as part of a brief lesson plan on creating a globally-engaged and student-centered learning community. These can also be seen as key ways for higher education to revision the scope and components of their service-learning and international programs.

1. Recognize students as key stakeholders in the success of the learning community.

While we knew up front that certain factors could not be accounted for while trying to meet our objectives, we realized that developing a strong core that invites dialogue in response to conflict can help to foster equity in access and group cohesion. Planning a group to be open, honest, and responsible to one another, we decided a student-led program that went beyond a traditional discussion or writing group would meet our objectives. Global citizenship education would be an inherent part of the process, as students shared their different perspectives and paradigms, giving voice to their concerns and engaging each other in dialogue.

I remembered a professor who presented an agenda before the beginning of each class and asked for amendments before asking for agreement. Once she had unanimous approval she would begin class. Though the agenda is generally a tool of meetings rather than classrooms, it struck me as democratic and participatory that she included every student as a key stakeholder in their own engagement and ultimately, learning.

2. Trust students to take action if you foster the questions and provide support as they work to answer them.

One of my college professors on the study abroad program in Mexico admitted she was also learning alongside us. She shared that she used to teach elementary school and would have the students read older children’s level books and they would respond with so many questions. Then she started teaching university students and they would never have questions. She wanted nothing more than to work to recapture whatever was lost in between childhood and college for those university students.

We thought back on courses we had taken and the mechanisms they had provided us for learning. After our initial service-learning experiences, we all realized that we asked more questions and thought twice about whether or not to immediately accept what a professor — or any other authority figure, for that matter — told us. We asked ourselves who had the power and privilege to write the texts and newspapers we read. After all, that determined from whose perspective and biases we were receiving information. We intended to make sure we would support paradigm-shifting, as well as basic learning questions, and allow them to be asked in a non-confrontational setting.

3. Give them context and history and they will give you the vision.

Without larger comprehension that the world has been changed many times over, that it is still continuously changing, and even that the change they make will someday likely be changed by another, how is a young person to realistically understand where to use his/her energies most effectively and meaningfully? Students benefit most from an understanding of how to learn themselves.

The most important instrument in coming years recognizes the increasingly globalized and cross-cultural society that shapes politics and international relationships. This tool is of cultural competence. Students must be able to work with any groups they come across, ethnically and culturally, but also be able to cross sectors and be able to get along in business, academia, public, and governmental sectors. Given a context, they’ll get you a vision for how to foster those relationships into a meaningful collaboration.

4. Schools must be open to dialogue; they must respect and genuinely respond to critique. They must give serious attention and funding to student-initiated projects.

There is a tension I have perceived, from both angles, in working to empower a disadvantaged group by providing them with tools, critical thinking, and movement-building skills. This tension arises since it may lead to providing the newly empowered group the power to restructure or critique the organization. Critical thinking, however, is one of the desired outcomes of higher education. It seems that there is a paradox within the institutional education system that in order for its students to fully realize its teachings; it must ultimately give up a share of its power.

At the end of a one day, student-led conference on campus, a professor attended the afternoon student-led panel sessions and remarked that students giving papers to each other in such a manner prompted him to ask the question, “What do they need us [professors] for, anyway?” His words demonstrated acknowledgement that faculty can place trust in students they teach by giving them ownership over their own education and the ability to advocate for themselves.

For universities to seriously invest in service-learning and student empowerment, however, it will take much more than mention in the college handbook or a couple more activities each school year. Students must have support and tools available to them, as well as money to fund their endeavors. If students surmise a meaningful vision to enhance their local or global community, the university’s role is to provide for their genuine contribution to bettering society. Students can no longer be given an unfunded and unserious mandate to volunteer in the community; they must be funded and acknowledged as a real way in which the college relates to the community in which in dwells.

Setting the course

The student-led Social Justice 101 course was housed in and served as a program of the Center for Just Living in the fall of 2005. 9 students met weekly for one hour for 10 sessions. A regular format of: agreement on the agenda, announcements about members’ activism events, personal check-in, critical analysis of reading, personal reflection and application of the reading and a skill demonstration or exercise was democratically led each week by a different member of the group. Short essays and articles challenging commonly accepted notions around community service and social justice engaged students in discussion and critique of current social change work.

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s mantra, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” the course evolved from its original title into a more appropriate fall Be the Change: Seminar and a spring Be the Change: Practicum. The fall Seminar focuses on analyzing specific examples of social change in readings and critiquing the motivations for and methodologies of social activism. The spring Practicum is a further exploration of the theology and motivations behind social justice, combined with an active implementation of learned reflection techniques in an Action Project. Housed in the Honors Department, the courses were approved by the institutional Curriculum Committee by the end of the school year.

The Big Picture

Students graduate to positions of change-makers and leaders of the U.S., and the world. Whether they are nurses or managers or teachers, they must agitate to create a world that we envision and believe should exist. Schools must teach their students how to vision, how to imagine a world different than one in which they currently live. As the global reality in which we live continues to change, so too, must teaching be transformed in order to accommodate the new competencies required for intercultural and inter-sectoral exchange. It is hard to equip students with the tools to ask critical questions or visualize something new when they have only ever been told how things work and have been. Students must be fully supported in learning that persons in power or many people with collective power created the past. Similarly, they can now gain power, not necessarily through money or force, to be able to, in community, create the world in which they wish to live.

Sustaining Institutional Focus

In 1988, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) published a report entitled, Building Community which identified new imperatives, including the accelerated development of international education, for America’s two-year colleges. The report provided a powerful, sustainable definition of “community as both a region to be served and a climate to be created.” In 1990, AACC received substantial funding from the Kellogg Foundation to support “Beacon Colleges” which would lead multi-campus consortia in advancing the identified imperatives.

Kapi’olani was selected as a Beacon College in international education, collaborated with nine other 2-year colleges in Wisconsin, Michigan, California, Hawai’i, and the Northern Marianas, and produced a four volume series entitled, Beyond the Classrom: International Education and the Community College (Franco and Shimabukuro:1992). The four volumes focused on the integration of intercultural and international content into the curriculum and campus environment, international institutional partnerships, and international business in continuing education programs. These volumes served a major bridge-building function for the College. Of the 500 sets of volumes produced, half of were disseminated nationally and half were shared with Asian and Pacific international institutional partners.

In spring 1995, the College initiated its Service-Learning program with funding from the Corporation for National Service, AACC, and the Campus Compact National Center for Community Colleges. In that summer, a two-week Service-Learning faculty institute attracted many of the same College faculty who were advancing intercultural and international learning on the campus. We debated what would make Service-Learning distinctive at Kapi’olani and agreed that we should use Service-Learning to understand and celebrate the diverse traditions of service represented in our community, and in the ancestral Hawaiian, Pacific, and Asian cultures of our students and faculty. Thirty key faculty reached consensus that Service-Learning should enhance students’ understanding of their social and civic responsibilities, while at the same time enhancing skills valued in the local workplace, skills such as reliability, willingness to learn, communication in all forms, sensitivity to diverse clients, and teamwork.

A decade of innovation, program assessment, evaluation, commitment to improvement, and tactical budgeting, has resulted in the institutionalization of both International Education and Service-Learning as cross-curricular Emphases at the College. Each Emphasis engages dozens of faculty across the Liberal Arts and Careers curriculum, and many faculty are engaged in both Emphases.

National Recognition and Enhancement of Engagement

In the 2001-2005 period, the College was selected to participate in the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Greater Expectations initiative which featured our Service-Learning Emphasis, and the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Promising Practices initiative which featured our institutionalizing of international education. Participation in both initiatives inspired greater campus attention to the focal question of “what do we want our students to be and become”? Our response was that we wanted our students to be socially responsible and economically productive members of their communities, locally, nationally, and globally.” Service-Learning, Community Engagement and Integrated International Education are now woven to produce these kinds of students for our local community, nation, and world.

Strategic Planning, 2003-2010

The College engaged in institutional strategic planning from fall 2001 to spring 2003.
The College’s Vision which is inspired by the legacy of Queen Julia Kapi’olani and drives both mission and strategic plan goals states that Kapi’olani Community College “prepares students for lives of critical inquiry, active participation and leadership in careers which strengthen the health, well-being, and vitality of

• the individuals, families, and communities that support all of us
• the cultural traditions that shape and guide all of us
• the land and sea that sustains all of us.

The peunultimate draft of this Vision statement was reviewed by Dr. Edgar Beckham, a leading expert on cultural diversity learning, at an AAC&U Greater Expectations Summer Institute. He and others who reviewed this draft strongly urged the inclusion of the two words “all of” in the final draft, which we did. These two words result in an assertion of absolute inclusion, and though subtle, set the foundation for further development of global citizenship as a learning outcome, not just an abstraction.

Two mission statements also drive Global Engagement strategic plan goals. The first mission statement asserts that the College “prepares students for lives of ethical, responsible community involvement by offering opportunities for increased civic engagement.” This mission statement directly aligns with regional accreditation requirements for general education. The second mission statement emphasizes that the College will continue to “lead locally, nationally, and globally in the development of integrated international education through global collaborations.”

Goal 4 of the strategic plan is “To Champion Diversity in Local, Regional, and Global Learning” and is unique within the ten-campus University of Hawaii system. The goal has three objectives which result in an integrated approach to indigenous, intercultural, and international learning. The first objective recognizes the College’s responsibility to honor and strengthen Hawaiian language, culture and community. The second objective serves and respects the diverse peoples and cultures of our communities. Under this objective, Service-Learning is identified as a central strategy to promote intercultural and intergenerational learning in these communities. The third objective strengthens the College’s role as a bridge between “Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, and the world.” With the completion of the strategic plan that the College began to reframe its focus around “island roots” and “global reach.” Island roots are celebrated and implemented through Goal 4, objectives one and two, and “Global reach” is celebrated and implemented through Goal 4, objective 3.

National Work and Enhancement of Global Engagement

While institutional strategic planning was underway, the world of higher education was continuing to spin in the direction of greater accountability to student learning and stronger campus-community engagement. In 2004, the College was recognized as an Exemplar of Civic Engagement in the Campus Compact publication, The Community’s College: Indicators of Engagement at Two-Year Institutions. The College also participated in a yearlong AAC&U Greater Expectations working group focused on “Civic Engagement in a Diverse Democracy.”

At the College, major new work is underway in collaboration with an ACE-FIPSE funded consortium focusing on international learning outcomes assessment. In the earlier ACE project on institutionalizing international education, ACE external reviewers were impressed with the College’s competency-based curriculum, and specific learning outcomes delineated in our General Education program as well as in our Asian Studies and Hawaiian-Pacific Islands Studies Certificates. In the General Education program, Standard Six is entitled, “Understanding Self and Community” and states that the College “emphasizes an understanding of one’s self and one’s relationship to the community, the region, and the world” and has a specific learning outcome “to demonstrate an understanding of ethical, civic and social issues relevant to Hawaii and the world” (KCC General Education Standards are available at www.compact.org, Senior Faculty Fellow).

ACE gathered the intercultural and international learning outcomes from documents at the six colleges and universities participating in the FIPSE consortium, categorized them into knowledge, skills, and attitudes, and sent them to 60 international subject matter experts for priority ranking. Fifteen Kapi’olani faculty were identified as international subject matter experts and their priority rankings exactly matched the rankings of the larger sample of 60.

ACE collaborating faculty then developed a comprehensive and detailed set of intercultural and international learning outcomes. These outcomes represent the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of “the globally competent student.” The ACE collaborating faculty also developed an assessment rubric, a rubric rater training handbook, and eportfolio instructions to students. Participating campuses are now piloting these outcomes and products.

A large number of these outcomes can be achieved through service-learning pedagogy and civic engagement commitment. Selected outcomes are listed below:

Knowledge Outcomes

1. Demonstrates knowledge of global issues, processes, trends and systems
   1. Basic concepts (e.g., political events, major world organizations, major trends such as globalization, the role of non-governmental organizations.)
2. Demonstrates knowledge of other cultures
   1. Cultural practices (e.g., religious, secular, political, governmental, educational, family structures.)
3. Understands his/her culture in a global and comparative context
   1. Self in cultural context (e.g., aware of one’s own origins, history, ethnic identity, communities, etc.).
   2. The history of his or her own culture.
   3. The history of his or her own culture in relation to the history of other cultures.
   4. Understands his/her historical space and place in a global and comparative context (e.g., geography, migration, diasporas, exploration, regional identity, etc.).

Skill Outcomes

1. Uses knowledge, diverse cultural frames of reference, and alternate perspectives to think critically and solve problems.
   1. Recognizing the importance and validity of others’ perspectives
   2. Providing culturally-grounded evidence to make points (e.g., recognizes the cultural underpinning of evidence, opinion, and arguments).
   3. Identifying solutions to social issues and/or global challenges that take cultural considerations into account.
2. Uses foreign language skills and/or knowledge of other cultures to extend his/her access to information, experiences, and understanding.
   1. Using foreign language skills to locate and use resources (e.g., foreign language texts) in various disciplines.
   2. Using foreign language and cultural knowledge gathered from a fluent/native speaker.
   3. Using foreign language skills and knowledge of other cultures in experiential learning (e.g., service-learning, internships, study abroad).

Attitude Outcomes

1. Demonstrates a willingness to seek out international or intercultural opportunities.
   1. his or her experiences with individuals from different cultures.
   2. the desire to participate in international or intercultural experiences in the future.
   3. the ways in which his or her thinking has changed as a result of exposure to different cultures.
   4. feelings or emotions that he or she experienced as a result of an international and/or intercultural learning experience(s).
2. Appreciates different cultures (e.g., language, art, music, religion, political structures, philosophy, and material culture).
   1. the language(s) and/or literature(s) of the culture(s).
   2. the arts and performing arts of the culture(s).
   3. the systems or structures (e.g., political, social, economic, etc.) of the culture(s).
3. Accepts cultural differences and tolerates cultural ambiguity.
   1. the similarities and/or differences among cultures.
   2. the nuance and complexity evident among various cultural perspectives.
   3. the potential legitimacy of both majority culture and minority culture beliefs and values.
   4. the importance of providing comprehensive and balanced support for his or her conclusions regarding cultural differences and similarities.
   5. the importance of interpreting cultural events and experiences “through the eyes of” individuals from different cultures.
   6. cultural experiences that are different from what could be experienced in one’s “home” culture.
   7. the process of reflecting upon his or her own thoughts and feelings toward different cultures.
   8. the specific ways in which he or she has been changed and/or transformed as a result of cross-cultural experiences.
   9. his or her own biases, prejudices, or stereotypes in relation to a different culture.

The Bridge Ahead: Island and Global Solutions

As the College pilots the ACE outcomes and products, we are focusing attention on our Freeman Scholars, a group of 30 UH community college students who, with complete financial support from the Freeman Foundation, have completed a semester of intensive language learning in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and then studied and service-learned for a semester in one of these East Asian countries. Some of these students are completing eportfolios of their intensive learning experience and then continuing to take international studies courses. We will be tracking six student cohorts in the ACE FIPSE project.

A second and more difficult assessment task is to follow students who are taking international courses integrated into the General Education program. We are intending to use the international Service-Learning pathway to help identify these students and encourage them to create eportfolios which will include their Service-Learning reflections and other learning artifacts for assessment.

Currently International Students can take Japanese, Chinese, or Korean 298 to meet their second language requirement. Dozens of these “298″ students serve in our International Cafe helping local students learn East Asian languages, while local students help East Asian students learn English as well as adapt to Hawaii and American culture.

With new Corporation for National and Community Service funding, Hawaii-Pacific Islands Campus Compact (HIPICC) , which support Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, is moving to a new emphasis on intergenerational solutions in island societies. Annually, an “Island Solutions” project and conference will bring one faculty member and two students from each of the Hawaii-Pacific institutions to Honolulu where they will complete service-learning projects on a shared civic issue (egs, environmental sustainability, literacy, health) and then discuss this issue in its global context.

HIPICC is also taking the lead in developing a national initiative to enhance Service-Learning in indigenous communities, locally, regionally, and nationally. Also, in spring 2006, the Hawaii legislature provided more than $215,000 for the development of a new Long-Term Care Resource Initiative at Kapi’olani that will, in part, engage older Hawaii residents in active aging, service-learning collaborations. Project RESPECT (Respected Elders Serving in Partnerships for Educational and Community Transformation) is integral to our new CNCS-funded program, and will enable our respected elders to share their traditions of service with our students, creating an intergenerational bridge for intercultural learning, and improving the quality of life for all.

With an ACE mini-grant, the College helped establish a small consortium of colleges and universities to initiate a “Global Solutions” project in Honolulu in May, 2006. For seven days, five institutions, Park University (MO), St. Mary’s University (TX), the University of Kansas, the University of Hawaii, and Kapiolani Community College, each had one faculty and two students working on service-learning projects in health, education, and bridging the digital divide in Palolo Valley, a low income, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual valley near both UHM and KCC. After this week of service-learning, and collaboration with community partners and experts, the students, faculty, and community partners participated in a three day “Global Solutions” conference at Tokai University’s Honolulu campus. At the conference students unveiled a Healthy Community website that provides important preventive health information and educational materials for children, teens, adults, and the elderly. Students also were led through guided reflection sessions to help them make explicit links between the problems and solutions in Palolo Valley and in developing countries around the world. Global Solutions students made future commitments to maintaining the website and to writing grants that would support a community health center in Palolo Valley public housing.

Our objective was and is, as we intend to sustain and grow the consortium, to use local problems as a link to global solutions that address the 8 UN Millenium Development Goals which are to:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

Conclusion

Simply stated, hundreds of American communities are confronting one or more of the issues that also severely impact a community or nation in the developing world. American college students who service-learn on a local problem can reduce the severity of that problem and reflect upon it as a local, national, and global concern. Local solutions, such as web-based environmental and health information, can simultaneously contribute to reducing the severity of the problem locally, nationally and globally. Students from developing countries on our campuses can be engaged to translate web content into their native languages, languages spoken in the home country and in a community, like Palolo Valley, only miles away. Integrating solutions-focused local and global service-learning can bring new intentionality to study abroad and its learning outcomes.

Preparing students for citizenship in a globalizing age requires a significant transformation in how we answer the question, “what do we want our students to be and become?” Surely we still want them to be socially responsible and economically productive members of their communities, locally, nationally and globally.

But the way ahead is filled with risk and danger and one senses a growing despair in America’s youth. We need to talk of American college students who are better prepared to act and think, learn and lead locally, nationally, and globally. It is simply not enough to produce problem solvers always responding to some new escalating threat. Our colleges and universities, locally and globally, must produce students and citizens that can assess the pluses and minuses of this globalizing age, and engage other citizens in productive action on the pluses and halting actions on the minuses. A new generation of “problem avoiders” must create a global community that is inspiring and meeting the hopes and dreams of all in a new millennium. Colleges and universities around the world can collaborate to create this global community, while at the same time playing a greater role in creating stronger civil sectors in their own nations and local communities.

In their framing essay for this collection of articles celebrating the 20th anniversary of Campus Compact, Barbara Holland and Liz Hollander list three crucial challenges for the engaged university in the next twenty years; it is the third of these, educating students for global citizenship, which I will address briefly in this essay.

At the same time that U.S. colleges and universities are emphasizing their engagement with domestic communities and issues, more and more college and university presidents, boards of trustees and others are emphasizing the importance of “internationalizing” their campuses, and exposing as many students as possible to some sort of international experience during their undergraduate years. Realizing the goal of “internationalization” has not been an easy task, however. In particular, too little attention has been paid to identifying the kinds of skills and learning outcomes that are most likely to lead to college and university students who are well-prepared to live and act as “global citizens”.

Service-learning, the pedagogy that links academic study with the practical experience of community service, has been embraced by Campus Compact and many Compact member institutions in recent years. I believe service-learning as it has also been applied internationally offers much promise to campuses seeking to define skills and learning outcomes needed for effective global citizenship. Service-learning has become an international movement that offers new approaches to teaching and learning and to the civic engagement of institutions of higher education. It provides students with an education that meets the highest academic standards and delivers meaningful service that makes a difference to the well-being of society. It can promote not only a greater commitment to improving conditions locally but also an understanding of the inter-relatedness of communities and societies across the world.

In 2003, the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership (IPSL) issued a “Declaration of Principles” in which it outlined essential elements in structuring effective international service-learning programs as well as the learning outcomes that are likely to result. According to IPSL, the best-designed and executed international service-learning programs ensure that:

• There is reciprocity between the community served and that of the university or college, and their relationship is built on mutual respect and esteem.
• The learning is rigorous, sound, and appropriate to the academic level of the students.
• The studies do not offer foregone conclusions but rather, in the spirit of academic inquiry, expose students to a wide range of points of view, theories and ideas, asking that they critically examine these ideas and their experience in service, reaching their own well-considered conclusions.
• The service is truly useful to the community or agency. Experience has shown that the agency or community is best qualified to define what is useful. The time and quality of the service must be sufficient to offset the time spent in planning and evaluation; otherwise the institution and student are exploiting the very people they intend to assist.
• There is a clear connection between the studies and the service. The studies may focus on the general culture of those served or be more specific in relating subject matter and the service experience. Either pattern is effective.
• Students are allowed and indeed encouraged to develop and demonstrate leadership skills, using their own initiative when appropriate, bearing in mind that they should first listen to the community and be responsive to its values and needs.
• Opportunity for personal reflection on the meaning of the experience in relation to the student’s values and life decisions is built into the program in a structured way. The keeping of a journal is a common means of providing this opportunity for the students to connect what they are learning and experiencing with their own lives.
• Support services are provided. Students are prepared for their service and the community in which they will serve. Provision is made for their health care should it be needed, and students are advised on issues of safety. Ongoing advising services are available.

The IPSL Declaration then offers a set of learning outcomes that are most likely to result for students participating in international service-learning programs. These include:

• Deeper student learning of academic subjects. Theory is field-tested in practice and is seen and measured within a cultural context. Because the learning is put to immediate use, it tends to be deeper and to last longer.
• Development of leadership skills as students learn to work collaboratively with the community. They learn that the most effective leadership is that which encourages the participation?and indeed leadership?of others.
• Promotion of intercultural and international understanding. Particularly in international settings, the service almost always occurs with people whose lives are very different from that of the student. By working with them, the student comes to understand and appreciate their different experiences, ideas and values, and to work cooperatively with them. Service-learning nurtures global awareness and socially responsible citizenship.
• Fostering greater personal growth, maturity, the examination of values and beliefs, and civic responsibility, all within the context of a community and its needs. Students explore how they may use their education for the benefit of the community and the well-being of others, especially those in need.
• Advancing an understanding both by students and their faculty members involved in such programs of societies, cultures, and world issues by testing scholarship against immediate practical experience and theory within a cultural context.

There are also important benefits for academic institutions as a result of engagement through international service-learning. In particular, international service-learning sets U.S. academic institutions and their students in a more balanced relationship with international and/or intercultural communities. In today’s world, with pressing needs in every community and nation, academic institutions are called to apply their knowledge and resources to problems and needs that no longer respect local, much less international, boundaries. Moreover, institutional engagement in international service-learning provides help to service agencies and to communities, addressing needs that would otherwise remain unmet.

At the same time, there are a number of practical steps (and barriers to overcome) for U.S. colleges and universities to engage fully in an international service-learning initiative. I will focus on just a few in the hope this incomplete listing will stimulate further discussion during the Campus Compact 20th anniversary gathering:

• A lack of administrative integration at the campus level. Offices that support study-abroad and community or volunteer service too often live in separate “silos”; staff members rarely if ever meet to learn about each other’s initiatives, even though many of the students they serve are now seeking more opportunities to combine international and volunteer service experiences. Likewise, other campus offices that have essential knowledge and/or skills?ranging from financial aid to legal affairs, from alumni relations to development?often are not engaged in discussions about how best their efforts might support an international service-learning initiative. The unfortunate result: many students never learn about opportunities for learning and serving internationally or interculturally; or they find insurmountable barriers to using their financial aid for such programs; or they can’t transfer the academic credits in ways that will help them fulfill major requirements or even graduate.
• A mismatch between academic calendars and the service needs in international contexts: Although traditionally “study-abroad” was done in a student’s junior year, the new trend is the development of short-term experiences in another nation or culture; many institutions now offer alternative spring breaks, for example, or overseas trips during winter breaks or “J-terms”. The potential upside of this trend? More students may be able to participate in such an experience. A significant downside, however, is that many of the service needs in communities do not lend themselves to short-term student visits; indeed, service agencies in many developing nations (and elsewhere) may end up spending more time and resources trying to organize themselves for short-term volunteers than they receive in return. If international service-learning is to be based on the principle of reciprocity between the institution or person providing the service and the institution or person being served, the challenge before the engaged university is whether or not such reciprocity can be achieved in short-term projects and trips.
• A mismatch between broadly stated institutional goals and academic constraints at the campus level. Most institutions (and particularly those active in the “engaged university” movement) include in their mission statements a strong commitment to international engagement, community service, and the creation of graduates who are “global citizens.” Nonetheless, in addition to the administrative and time barriers mentioned above, there are often departmental and disciplinary requirements and expectations that restrict or make impossible student participation in international service-learning initiatives and thus limit the institution’s ability to fulfill its stated mission. These range from faculty misconceptions about the academic quality of study-abroad and/or service-learning, to narrowly-defined requirements for majors (particularly in the sciences and engineering) that may not match offerings available in a course of international study, to an understandable but sometimes misguided belief that only programs led by a local faculty member are worthy of academic credit.
• The narrow demographic range of undergraduate students engaged in international service-learning programs. For example, the “typical” U.S. student in many international service-learning programs (and in study-abroad programs as a whole) is a white, upper-middle-class female in her very early twenties from a small independent liberal-arts college or university. When one surveys the typical undergraduate across all institutional types in the U.S., however, the student is likely to be older, working, with family responsibilities, and (particularly in urban institutions) a student from a minority group. For minority students and those who are the first in their families to participate in postsecondary education, there may also be family or cultural barriers that make it difficult for students to consider an experience overseas even when economic resources may not be a problem. As the United States becomes increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural in its own demographic makeup, it becomes increasingly essential that all students in the “engaged university” have access to and support for participation in international service-learning programs.

There are no easy answers to overcoming institutional barriers and developing practical strategies for engaging more students in international service-learning. Nonetheless, international service-learning remains a very promising tool available to U.S. colleges and universities in their quest both to “internationalize” their campuses and to instill in their students [the knowledge and skills needed to function as “global citizens” in a new century. I have attempted here to offer a very brief overview from the perspective of one organization (IPSL) of some of the structural approaches needed and some of the likely outcomes both for students and for institutions as a whole. It is my belief that Campus Compact’s member institutions are particularly well-positioned to take the lead in expanding our vision of the engaged university in a world in which boundaries of all types are becoming less and less relevant.

Reference

“Declaration of Principles”. (2003) New York: International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership.

Campus Compact’s next twenty years hold extraordinary opportunities to elevate education for global citizenship. Daily newscasts are a painful reminder that active, effective global citizens are in short supply — both in the U.S. and around the world. U.S. colleges and universities have developed an impressive array of programs that are strengthening the international dimensions of civic education. These developments occur in the context of a growing global movement in the civic engagement of higher education. One of the best opportunities for U.S. institutions of higher education to elevate education for global citizenship is to participate vigorously in this expanding international movement.

With concerted action and strategic support, the civic engagement movement can create a global community of active citizens. In addition it can leverage major contributions to the social and economic development of communities.

There is a general tendency for U.S. institutions of higher education to approach global citizenship with an exclusive focus on the development of U.S. students. We should strive to strengthen education for global citizenship in our individual schools, but do so in ways that contribute to, and are informed, by the civic initiatives of sister institutions in all parts of the world. A more fully international perspective on global citizenship can yield greater educational outcomes and community outcomes — at home and abroad — and also can guard against a developed countries bias with respect to the nature of the values and skills of global citizenship. Global citizenship should be about equipping students from all countries to be responsible and effective community leaders and policy advocates.

A Growing International Movement

There is broad public awareness of, and support for, the civic engagement activities of U.S. colleges and universities — symbolized by the celebration of Campus Compact’s 20th anniversary. Much less visible is the recent dramatic upsurge in civic engagement and social responsibility by universities in other parts of the world. An invisible revolution is underway in higher education on all continents — a growing movement to educate active citizens and to apply university resources to community needs. Civic engagement is reaching significant scale in terms of amount of activity and extent of impacts, a scale of impacts that is far greater than is commonly understood. The university engaged in and with its community is replacing the old, faded view of the university as ivory tower.

To cite just one example … Professor Ruth Cardoso, a Brazilian anthropologist (and former First Lady of that country) has led the organization of a National Literacy Project, a network of over 250 universities to combat illiteracy in the Northern and Northeastern sections of Brazil. Working in partnership with local government agencies and with private corporations, thousands of university students and faculty have trained residents of these poor communities to become local literacy teachers. To date they are trained and provided follow-up support to over 20,000 literacy teachers who have taught 4 million young adults to read. The National Literacy Project demonstrates how the person power of university students and professors can tackle a tough and important societal challenge. The experience has had a transforming impact on participating students and faculty, reinforcing their personal commitments and sharpening their skills as agents of social change.

Individual universities around the world have multiplied several-fold their civic engagement activities. Notable examples range from Methodist University of Piracicaba in Brazil, to The Open University in the United Kingdom, from Al-Quds University in Palestine to the University of Haifa in Israel, from An Giang University in Vietnam to the Aga Khan University in Pakistan. The proportions of students and faculty who are participating in these activities are far greater than one might assume. Over 75% of students participate in civic engagement activities at Afsad University for Women in Sudan, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Indonesia, the University Development Studies in Ghana, the University of Havana in Cuba, and the University of Western Sydney in Australia. Regional networks of universities have coalesced to support these efforts. And civic engagement is becoming a higher priority of major international education associations and initiatives, including the Association of Commonwealth Universities (500 members strong in 23 countries); the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education; the International Consortium for Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy; and the Australian Consortium for University Engagement.

This is still a young movement characterized by impressive energy, ambitious plans and an appetite for increased collaboration among institutions. In most of the Global South, university engagement emphasizes efforts to alleviate poverty and to improve public health. In addition, a good deal of activity focuses on building the capacity of non-student constituencies such as the staff of Non-Governmental Organizations and local government personnel. This movement shows the potential to achieve critical mass and is no longer isolated from the central mission of many universities.

Opportunities to Expand University Civic Engagement

Three converging trends make this a unique moment of opportunity to continue to expand university civic engagement internationally:

1. The growing scale of higher education. Today there are approximately 100 million university students worldwide, half of them in developing countries By the year 2030 that number will have doubled, to 200 million, with most of the growth occurring in the developing world. Think of the incredible person power and the knowledge resources that this figure represents.
2. Increasing demands from outside of institutions of higher education that universities contribute much more substantially and directly to the development of their communities and societies. As national governments, Non-Governmental Organizations, and other groups wrestle with immense unmet social needs — and do so in the content of limited resources — they are demanding more from local universities.
3. An expanding set of models, of approaches that work and that other universities can learn from and implement. There is increasing awareness of the effectiveness of higher education’s civic work as the evidence of educational outcomes and community benefits grows.

Where will this movement lead? How far will it develop? There is, in all parts of the globe, a compelling opportunity to harness and channel the intellectual resources and human energies of university students and faculty to both serve society and at the same time to elevate what students learn in the process of doing community service and social change work. If managed creatively, this process can enhance university education on core subjects, not distract from them. As Juan Vela Valdes, Rector of the University of Havana, has stated, “Civic engagement means that the students learn more, the teachers are more profound in their thinking, and the university is more useful for society.” Monica Jimenez de la Jara, President, Catholic University of Temuco in Chile, comments that through community engagement “our students learn more and better, and our society benefits from our research.”

This movement ultimately can be about nothing less than renegotiating the social contract between society and higher education. The new deal can be: increased public support for higher education tied to increased community benefits provided by universities.

The Talloires Declaration on the Civic Roles and Social Responsibilities of Higher Education

Last fall Tufts University, in conjunction with Innovations in Civic Participation, convened an historic first gathering of the heads of universities from 23 countries on six continents to advance the civic mission of higher education. The participants forged a consensus vision and issued the Talloires Declaration on the Civic Engagement and Social Responsibility of Higher Education, committing to a series of action steps. The Declaration states “Our institutions recognize that we do not exist in isolation from society, nor from the communities in which we are located. Instead, we carry a unique obligation to listen, understand, and contribute to social transformation and development.” The conferees established the Talloires Network, a collective of individuals and institutions committed to promoting the civic roles and social responsibilities of higher education. All parties interested in promoting the civic roles and social responsibilities of higher education are invited to join the Talloires Network. The Network fosters exchange of best practices and collaboration on a common global project to reduce illiteracy.

A Future Vision

In the spirit of exploring possible visions for the future, I offer the following the suggestions about what the international civic engagement movement of higher education could look like and achieve in the next two decades. Some of these snapshots extend components of the Talloires Declaration. Each of these is a practical vision because each already has started to develop.

• Thousands of universities in all countries of the world are engaged significantly with the communities in which they are located. They support programs to prepare future community leaders. They are partnering at wholly new levels with governmental agencies and NGOs to build civil society and to promote social and economic development. This phenomenon is notable both for its quality and its scale.
• The visible community impacts of civically engaged universities have elevated dramatically the public support for higher education sectors around the world. Their achievements in preparing community leaders and in accelerating community development have built a shared sense that universities are a good investment. In the many nations that are financially strapped, civic engagement has built a new rationale for increasing the public budgets to universities. A growing number of foundations and international NGO are investing in the civic engagement work of third country universities.
• In universities around the world, institutional rewards criteria and systems — including those that relate to faculty tenure and promotion — have evolved to support excellence in civic engagement. Civic engagement activities are featured regularly in university publications and websites. Annual awards recognize outstanding community contributions of students, staff and faculty, and community partners.
• Universities have developed and are maintaining networks of partnerships with community organizations to enhance economic opportunity; empower individuals and groups; increase mutual understanding; and strengthen the relevance, reach and responsiveness of university education and research.
• Universities have established partnerships with primary and secondary schools and other institutions of further and higher education, so that education for active citizenship becomes an integral part of learning at all levels of society and stages of life. Students matriculate expecting that active citizenship be part of their university experience, as well as an important part of how they will live their lives.
• Civic engagement has become an attractive dimension of many international exchange programs. Students from South Africa who study for a term at Charles Darwin University in Australia participate in the community partnerships there. They both share the experience of community practice in their home institutions and bring back with them new insights and perspectives.
• Scholarship programs support young people who excel both academically and in terms of their potential as community pleaders.
• After vigorous debate over the internet, students around the world have made the Graduation Pledge, started in the U.S., a fully global initiative. (“I pledge to explore and to take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of any organizations for which I work.”)
• In the majority of countries where university alumni associations previously did not exist, or were very limited in scope, civic engagement activities have helped to organized ongoing alumni groups. Why? Because the civic engagement programs of their alma maters are a resources to the community work of alumni and because alumni are contributing to those programs.
• Increasingly, professors in diverse disciplines bring to their faculty roles the transforming life experiences they had doing community service while they were university students. This experience is part of who they are, part of their skill-set, integral to their strengths as teachers and scholars. The professorial ideal has shifted from teacher-scholar to teacher-scholar-citizen.
• Through the Talloires Network tens of thousands of students, and their professors, at hundreds of universities, are collaborating on a global assault on illiteracy. Mobilizing their resources as editors to teach people, young and old, to read. In the process these tens of thousands of students have strengthened their values and skills of community leadership and social change.
• An annual international survey of university students shows a steady increase in their commitment to civic values and a steady rise in the proportion of students who are planning to incorporate active citizenship in their professional careers, whether they are headed into engineering, business or government service.

In 1807, nearly 200 years ago, William Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us, late and soon getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Has much changed in the last 200 years? The answer to this age-old question depends on one’s perspective, but Wordsworth describes a dilemma that continues to mold the American culture. Indeed, the four “C’s,” creativity, capitalism, commercialism and consumerism, are such driving forces that any personal or corporate goal must be filtered through them. What the mind can dream of, the investor can finance, the entrepreneur can produce and the public demands.

From the youngest to the oldest, Americans are steeped in a message that “more” is desirable, and the timeline is “now.” From education to economic security, “more” is the goal and in achieving that goal, all too often, little regard is paid to the long term ramifications for self, which includes family, or country—or as Wordsworth put it, “…we lay waste our powers.” Every empire has met its demise. None has maintained supremacy. How long will America maintain its position as a superpower with influence over the globe? That question can only be addressed through education—preparing citizens with 21st century skills.

Despite the diversity of older and younger people, i.e., traditionalists, Boomers, Xers, Millennials, and the youngest, the Gamers, each has a responsibility to be forward thinking. In the twenty-first century, opportunities abound for those who understand the dynamics of the global connectivity and that understanding comes through education and international experiences. It would be an easy thing if preparing citizens for the 21st Century was the only goal to achieve and there were no proximal influences to distract. If our public schools and colleges had a clear directive to focus on global skills (i.e. language acquisition, creativity, flexibility, technology, world cultures and history, adaptability, etc.), the pedagogy and instructional path to get there would be more clear. But the fact of the matter is that immediate exigencies prevent clear focus for future opportunities. Case in point is the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind which have the potential of producing a lock-step generation who have little background or experience in the creative world.

In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman makes the point that “In the future, globalization is going to be increasingly driven by the individuals who understand the flat world, adapt themselves quickly to its processes and technologies, and start to march forward…”

The clinical model, assess, diagnose, prescribe, modify and implement, describes the adaptive qualities of a 21st Century citizen. The foundation of this model is education —”life-long learning.” As John Wooden, 20th Century basketball coach, admonished, “Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.” Educating for global citizenship must be a priority if America is to continue to be preeminent.

Oklahoma’s Initiative

Motives.

The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education have embarked upon a mission in collaboration with other state entities to capitalize upon a myriad global initiatives to enhance Oklahoma’s global perspective and role in the next 25 years. Oklahomans have been actively engaged internationally for over 20 years through sister city and sister state relationships. In 1985, then-Governor George Nigh brought Oklahoma governmental agencies together with officials from Japan and China. In 1990, the Oklahoma Department of Commerce began opening offices in China, Korea, Nigeria, Israel, Vietnam, The Netherlands, and Mexico. Oklahoma was the first U.S. state to actively engage international governments in state trade initiatives at this level.

By 2000, it was clear that governmental efforts to develop trade relationships could not be successful in isolation. Oklahoma business owners were uninformed about their international partners, which limited success as business partners. Oklahoma leaders knew a more integrated understanding of global competitiveness was needed. That same year, the, Preparing Oklahoma for Global Competitiveness in the 21st Century: an International Strategic Plan for Oklahoma was approved. The plan included goals with objectives and strategic actions to make Oklahoma a leading state in the global community. Subsequently, in 2002, an invitation from the Asia Society to then-Governor Frank Keating resulted in a four member team, representing the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, the Oklahoma State Department of Education and the Tulsa Public Schools, determining that the fourth of the five goals would be the focus of a major effort to infuse international studies throughout the K-16 curricula. The five goals of the plan include:

• To promote and expand Oklahoma’s international trade;
• To expand foreign direct investment in Oklahoma;
• To increase Oklahoma’s public awareness and active support for globalization;
• To ensure a workforce prepared for global competition; and
• To build advocacy for international trade in the federal, state, and local governments.

As mentioned, the fourth goal has been the focus of the educational community. One strategic objective under this goal is to increase understanding of international issues among K-16 students and faculty. This objective is supported by the following rationale:

Sustainable economic development requires the availability of a workforce that understands the economic threats and opportunities of the global economy and is prepared for productive performance in such a setting. Education is the key to such understanding. Attention must be directed both to current employees as well as students at all educational institution levels who will become the workers of tomorrow.

International Strategic Plan for Oklahoma, 2000.

To address this goal, there are efforts underway at all levels of Oklahoma’s educational system. Public schools, technology centers, colleges, and universities all recognize the global nature of their students’ futures and are working to address appropriate preparation. For public schools, the focus is on internationalizing the curriculum. Infusing international content and perspective into all subjects in tandem with required academic skills and content is key. The Oklahoma Associations Supporting International Studies (OASIS) is a collaboration of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, the Oklahoma State Department of Education, and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, funded through a grant from the Asia Society and the Longview Foundation, to provide resources to teachers and students. Teaching tools and resources are available to add an international perspective to subjects that meet Oklahoma’s academic content requirements. The initiative promotes infusing international contexts into current teaching patters rather than adding “international” as another content area for teachers to try to fit into the current curriculum.

In addition to providing resources to current teachers, OASIS provides international opportunities to students in teacher preparation programs at Oklahoma universities. For example, Northeastern Oklahoma State University hosted a delegation from Sichuan Province China and plans are underway for course and faculty exchanges. The education faculty developed teaching and learning modules focused on Japan and collaborated with international students to present cultural lessons in local public schools. Additionally, teacher candidates viewed and discussed films which promoted an understanding of different cultures, i.e., Children of Heaven to Social Studies for Elementary Teachers classes, The Way Home and Not One Less to Language Arts classes.

Much work is underway, but the reality of this system wide initiative is that it is not a mandate. The impact of each of these collaborations, therefore, is difficult to assess at this early stage. On the positive side, the number of international/global related activities, the easiest to count, has increased. The type of activities varies even within an institution. The demand for accountability has seriously impacted teacher preparation and teachers’ practice. Accountability and mandates make it difficult for teachers to add anything else to the curricula. Assessing, collecting, and analyzing data which conform to set standards often have curtailed too much of the flexibility teachers need to be innovative. It was a conscious decision by the Oklahoma collaboration to encourage infusing international studies throughout the curricula rather than mandating.

Beyond teachers and teacher preparation programs, the Oklahoma global initiative is permeating other college and university programs. Many of our schools have some international students and study abroad experiences, as well as international events on campus. However, the campus investment into staff and resources for these activities varies greatly. The two research institutions have strong infrastructure in place for faculty exchanges, student exchanges, and sufficient populations for international student organizations and events. Unfortunately, many of our smaller campuses do not have the resources to devote to these efforts. In response, the State Regents have teamed with the Oklahoma Department of Commerce to leverage our resources together and promote Oklahoma colleges and universities abroad. As the State of Oklahoma, we are broadly recruiting international students to our institutions. In 2004, a delegation of 11 Oklahomans traveled to Vietnam and Taiwan to promote Oklahoma higher education. Individual schools, both public and private, went on the trip, and the State Regents’ staff represented the smaller colleges and universities that could not send representatives. Statewide materials were made available to students, parents, and business leaders. During this 14-day trip, the delegation made contact with 3,500 students at three student recruitment fairs, made faculty presentations to over 400 students and faculty, and conducted ten meetings with Vietnamese and Taiwanese governmental leaders, university officials, industry leaders, and U.S. diplomatic staff. Discussions included student recruitment, faculty exchanges, workforce training and development contracts, and articulation agreements. Our partnership with the Oklahoma Department of Commerce to open specific doors to business training needs in these countries has been invaluable. Linking education, training, and business ventures together in an integrated way has been a key to our success.

Oklahoma motives for these efforts are multiple. We see global relationships as critical for future growth in our state, both as individual Oklahomans, as business leaders, and as global community members. We see economic benefit to offering Oklahoma as a source for education and training. In economic terms, this is one of our leading exports. We also see Oklahoma alumni and global friends leading businesses and governments abroad, and looking favorably back to Oklahoma. Finally, we hope to develop citizens that can see past the Oklahoma state line, as well as the U.S. coastline to know and value the other peoples, cultures, and nations in the world we share.

How must international study change from traditional modes?

We live in an age when the amount of information is expanding exponentially. Not all of this knowledge is in traditional sources. Examine Wikipedia which is the sum of over 50,000 contributors in a hundred different languages (Wired, April 2006). That information is leveraged by unbelievable technologies and has the potential to expand the world of our campus, while not having to necessarily leave the campus environment. Most models of international study in Oklahoma have been microscopic in nature. A teacher in a public school will spend one week and examine one small segment of some country, as if under a microscope, showing a few words and numbers in the language, showing the national flag, and learning a few isolated facts and figures. Then, that segment is over. At our colleges, a few students with healthy resources will travel with a group on a whirlwind tour through Europe or well informed students will see the signs for free food at the international fair scheduled for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon on campus. These experiences have value, but are not always connected with any sustained program to change attitudes and perspectives about our global neighbors. In Oklahoma, we see international study changing from an “add on if time allows” to an integration and engagement. We see every student on a college campus receiving international perspectives in general education courses, in language acquisition opportunities, in campus mission statements, ongoing travel and study opportunities, lecture series by international faculty, and broader impact of international campus events to the local community.

A new initiative underway in Oklahoma is promoting the notion of “stewardship of place” and the value, along with responsibility, the campus has in relationship to its local community. To be a good steward of the campus and local community, there are things the campus should provide. Global understanding and practical ways to embrace globalization are issues the campus can contribute to its students, local citizens, and local business leaders. This would change the microscopic model of international study to an integrated model of collaboration and action.

What role should teachers and faculty play in incorporating international content throughout the curricula? How can students’ global experiences be incorporated into meaningful learning experiences which reinforce twenty-first century knowledge and skills, both at home and abroad?

How to proceed? To prepare individuals to understand and adapt to global perspectives can be accomplished through inquiry based experiences utilizing these new dynamic technologies. Inquiry based learning relies on skills which promote problem solving. Problem-based learning provides students with loosely structure real-life problems that form the basis for their exploration of various content areas. For example, video conferencing has been used be several universities and small school districts in Oklahoma to discuss specific topics or debate international subjects.

What will success look like some years from now?

Global understanding may be seen in concrete ways, such as increased numbers of international students, increased numbers of study abroad students, increased numbers of faculty participating in international faculty exchange programs, and increased participation in campus events and activities with an international focus. These will be the easy measurements of change. More substantive, yet difficult to measure, will be the individual changes. Would we not see less racial tension on our campus because more understanding of our global neighbor will provide more understanding of our neighbor next door? Will our graduates reminisce about their international experiences to others and spark conversations that ripple their understanding on to others? Will our graduates not seek offices as our local, state, and federal legislators and leaders, bringing their broadened view of the world with them to influence their decisions on our behalf? Will our international graduates not be leading countries and international businesses around the world, filtering decisions through experiences they had in Oklahoma? Will our campuses not be the foundation of international economic activity and provide resources to local businesses working globally?

These are just a few of the opportunities before us as we lay the foundation for global engagement in our public schools and colleges in Oklahoma. But the only way to realize this future is to commit resources, time, talent, and energy to this goal. Through these commitments, we will drive towards integrated engagement rather than episodic, microscopic, and fragmented efforts. In Oklahoma we have only begun this journey. We hope to share our successes, and learn from others about their successes that we might emulate.

References

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Introduction

Anniversaries are special events. They are foremost opportunities to celebrate our collective achievements. They are opportunities to reflect critically on who, what, and how we arrived at this point. Anniversaries are also opportunities to scan the signs of the times, the horizon before us, in an effort to discern what lies ahead. My task as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of Campus Compact is to write a “provocative” essay on the pedagogy of engagement and global citizenship to “stimulate a visionary discussion.” It is particularly difficult to summarize the collective struggle (lucha) to transform what and how our students learn; changes within higher education institutions promoting pedagogies of engagement for global citizenship; and growing involvement in the local and global communities in which our students and institutions are embedded. At the risk of being misunderstood because I will be painting this visionary picture in broad and bold strokes I would like to begin by returning to another critical moment in American educational history.

Nearly 75 years ago another educator-provocateur, George S. Counts, had a similar assignment. His speech entitled “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?” was so powerful that they suspended the rest to the 1932 convention of the Progressive Education Association of the convention so the delegates could reflect on his presentation (Counts 1932). This speech, along with two others, was published as “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order” (Counts 1978). I have adapted my title from this earlier and more renowned educator. Counts’ insight into the strengths and limits of Progressive Education has much to offer us as we reflect on the future of the engagement movement in American higher education and the promotion of global citizenship. In his talk Counts affirmed progressive education’s impulse as being “the most promising movement above the educational horizon” (Counts 1932:257). I am interested most in Counts’ challenge to the movement because they provide fruitful insights into the current context of pedagogies of engagement during a time of increased economic, technological, cultural and political globalization.

Counts’ offers a broad critique of some of the most cherished assumptions of Progressive Educators including: (1) that Progressive Education is too naïvely optimistic, (2) too narrowly understands education, (3) emphasizes the individual too much over the social context, (4) lacks an articulated social theory, (5) reflects the “romantic sentimentalist” class bias of the growing economic elite (Counts 1932:257-8). In short he writes:

If Progressive Education is to be genuinely progressive, it must emancipate itself from the influence of this class, face squarely and courageously every social issue, come to grips with life in all of its stark reality, establish an organic relation with the community, develop a realistic and comprehensive theory of welfare, fashion a compelling vision of human destiny, and become somewhat less frightened than it is today at the bogeys of imposition and indoctrination.
Counts 1932:259

In the current context I would adapt Counts’ challenges to include: (1) whether the engagement movement too narrowly focuses on education as what happens in the classroom, (2) emphasizes student activity over the context within which that activity is embedded, (3) is too discipline based, (4) lacks a compelling vision of human destiny, and (4) is too frightened at the issues of imposition and indoctrination. I will examine these challenges from the perspective of my educational praxis using and developing community-based learning pedagogies in both domestic and international contexts.

In the Service of Whom?

Pedagogies of engagement cover a wide range of experiential instructional strategies from service- or community-based learning, problem-based learning, and collaborative learning (Colby 2003):134-36). All of these instructional strategies use the world outside of the classroom both as content and as process. Instructional strategies which incorporate applied research and learning focused on the most significant social issues is one of the most important ways American higher education can contribute to our local and global communities. But is this conventional description of the role of the university in society sufficient?

Ignacio Ellacuría, the murdered Rector of the Universidad Centroamerica José Simeon Cañas (UCA) in El Salvador, articulated a vision of the engaged university based on the traditional dual roles. The university, he wrote, “deals with culture, with knowledge, and the use of the intellect,” and the transformation of the social reality within which it exists (Ellacuría 1982:2). As a leading educator, both as the leader of the education community of the UCA and a leading educational voice in El Salvador, Ellacuría argued that the pressing reality (realidad) of a social context which is “characterized more by oppression than by liberty, more by a terrible grinding poverty than by abundance” shapes the university’s social obligations and therefore its manner of engagement. By this he does not mean that the university is to become a political party or a labor union (Ellacuría 1982:2), but that the university cannot be disengaged or neutral in the midst of a social and cultural reality marked by injustice and violence. In fact, the way universities fulfill this social obligation, Ellacuría argues, is precisely by appreciating the scope of its social competency:

we as an intellectual community must analyze causes; use imagination and creativity together to discover the remedies to our problems; communicate to our constituencies a consciousness that inspires freedom of self-determination; educate professionals with a conscience, who will be immediate instruments of such a transformation; and constantly hone an educational institution that is both academically excellent and ethically oriented.
Ellacuría 1982:2

Thus, Ellacuría’s vision of an engaged university challenges the engagement movement in the United States. The question “are American higher education institutions engaged in their local, national, and global communities” is not sufficient. Clearly American higher education institutions are engaged as contributors to the regional economic base, economic incubators, and providing research and development services to private corporations and to a variety of government sponsored projects let alone to the types of engagement activities resulting in transforming neighborhoods. Some of the ways higher education is engaged occasionally impacts student learning and it certainly shapes the way our students come to understand and actualize a notion of global citizenship through the lifestyle they choose to live, their consumer choices as well as political preferences.

What does engagement for global citizenship look like in the context of educational institutions who serve the world’s privileged, a people whose economic and social lives reflect the experience of a small minority of the world’s population? That American higher education is engaged in the world is a fact. The challenge is to reflect as a guild of scholars or as industry (you pick your preferred metaphor) on how are we engaged in the world and on whose behalf. To fulfill its promise, to turn a phrase from Counts, the engagement movement in the United States must answer these questions more forthrightly than it has done up to the present time.
In the Promotion of What?

As national and professional accrediting bodies incorporate standards of engagement in their assessment processes, what kind of learning is promoted out of the engagement strategies we employ? Returning to the design of our instructional strategies of engagement if the content and process remains classroom focused, that is the location where “learning” takes place, and the “world” becomes merely the backdrop to put the learning in perspective, then what and who have we engaged? In this instance engaging the community or “the other” is notional at best; and, it does little to close the gap between the object(s) of study and the subjective experience of the learner. The community in this case provides the data for more abstract analysis, which constitutes the real learning. Is it possible that in the well-intended effort to incorporate pedagogies of engagement as an element promoting a sense of global citizenship that one of the results is the creation of a checklist of engagement activities without pedagogical purpose?

There are many motivations for using pedagogies of engagement to promote global citizenship. The choice of which motivating factors influences one’s adoption of an engagement perspective may depend upon the role one plays in the university. For some the language of engagement and citizenship may be embedded in the university’s mission or the tradition that animated the institution. For others more practical or instrumental reasons may motivate such as public or private funding sources, external promotion or rewards structures. The data on learning outcomes and the use of engagement strategies to promote global citizenship is promising, but not conclusive (Galston 2001: 217-34). Regardless of the factors motivating one of the difficulties may result from the fragmentation within the university curricula and operations. The engagement movement began primarily by changing the way we teach and presumably the way students learn. The movement’s earliest adopters were innovative faculty who incorporated excursions into the reality of local neighborhoods into the classroom. Often the responsibilities to execute engagement pedagogies fell to colleagues staffing volunteer centers or campus chaplaincy offices in student affairs divisions. These discrete efforts sometimes supported the continuing compartmentalization or ghettoizing engagement efforts. Sometimes this fragmentation was based on differing educational ideologies informing the pedagogical practice (Robinson 2000:142). The transitional issues with particular institutions perhaps reflect more developments resulting from the initial conditions. The next phase is the recognition that this is more than an instructional innovation. Once engagement pedagogies begin to show signs of achievement and success the next phases involve incorporating this vision into the university’s curricula and strategic vision. Ultimately, the challenge is to change the institutional conditions for learning. This is accomplished by redefining the university’s engagement in the local and global community by creating integrated systems of engagement in the academic, student life, and to create ways of including the various religious chaplaincies.

What we promote through engagement is also a question for the community as well. This is an incredible resource and neglected dimension in research. How do we incorporate the issues and needs of our communities and which issues and needs do we give preference? In a society that likes to characterize itself as “egalitarian” the notion of preference is a difficult concept. How can all people be equal while at the same time some are given some kind of preference? This issue becomes more complex when taken in a global perspective. Are there limits to our engagement and who we consider global citizens? I do not have an answer to these questions, though I will admit to a preferential bias in favor of those who are voiceless or marginalized in the dominant cultural and economic system, the poor and vulnerable. This bias certainly has its roots in a faith tradition which animates my values, but it can also be found, in a more public tradition which animates the Republic we call the United States. Regardless of the private or public context of the university, advocates for engagement pedagogies and global citizenship should be key players in the university’s discourse about its mission and identity.

The Educational Pilgrimage to Global Citizenship

If the engagement movement is to contribute to the promotion of global citizenship among the well-schooled youth of the United States then perhaps we need to broaden our understanding of education and find more inclusive metaphors. To push matters more perhaps it is time to open a more constructive dialogue with colleagues who study human religious experience. Because of the current political and cultural environment the latter suggestion may be the most difficult. Religion is vulnerable on two counts; the first being too closely aligned with privileged claims available only to private individuals or members of a private association. The second problem is the tendency in some religious movements towards the sectarian at best and intolerant at worst. On the other hand, religious experience is pervasive and enduring. Regardless of one’s assessment of its truth claims religious experience lived either individually or collectively also has the tendency to inspire, motivate, organize and sustain public communities with countervailing visions promoting justice. There may be helpful root metaphors which come out of human religious experience and tradition that are useful to the engagement movement at this point in time. The least we can do is talk and learn from each other. I will offer two brief, but fruitful illustrations.

Learning as Pilgrimage. Educators are fond of the metaphor of journey. It is popular in lifespan literature as well. Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks make a powerful and limited case for the notion of journey to describe personal changes and transformation over time (Daloz, et. al. 1996:31). They offer another root metaphor which might be more descriptive of the process of change intended by engagement pedagogies:

In contrast to a journey, which could be unending, a pilgrimage requires both venturing and returning. A good pilgrimage leads to discovery and transformation, but it isn’t complete until you have returned home and told your story. “Home” is where someone hears and cares about that story, helps you sort out what you have seen, heard, and done?whether it be a triumph, a defeat, a high adventure, or a wash.
Daloz, et. al. 1996:38

Perhaps the phrase “engagement” pedagogy only “brings into the picture but one half of the landscape” (Counts 1932:257). Engaging out in the world is only one part or phase of the movement. We often speak of the second phase as reflection, but the other phase of this learning process might best be described as accompaniment. Just as how we engage is a critical factor promoting any sense of citizenship, including global, how we accompany students upon their return from being involved in the world is just as critical a factor (Santilli & Falbo 2000). What the pilgrim brings with her or him on their journey is often as important as what they encounter along the way and what they do upon their return (Pace 1989:242-3).

Learning as Gift and Solidarity. Every form of engagement in the world, albeit commercial, friendship, or familial involves an exchange (Komter 2005:34-55). This is certainly true in engagement pedagogies. The encounter between learner, instructor and community member involves the exchange in a form of service to each other. In a volunteer context a student fulfills a task needed by the school, organization, agency or community member. Philanthropy involves the exchange of capital or goods. In service learning the exchange involves embodied knowledge resulting from the experience of encounter. The exchange resulingt from service is the educational pretext for encountering others whose life circumstances may be radically difference than one’s own. For the most part faculty members see their students as the gift offered to the community who consumes it with gratitude. But this pattern of gift giving is risky. “Gifts,” Komter observes, “can sere as instruments of power, status, and honor and be used to fortify one’s own position” (Komter 2005:193) The gifts we offer to the community through our expertise, deep social networks, or our students can be patronizing or emphasize the university elite’s noblesse oblige (Gerics 1981:261-61).

Educating for global citizenships involves knowledge, skills, and values. It also involves a pedagogical process that promotes solidarity. The work of Komter and Sabbagh (2003) provides an excellent summary and update on the notion of solidarity. In the future Sabbagh’s sttributes of solidarity offer a more promising line for research on the impacts of engagement pedagogies especially relating to global citizenship. Briefly, do engagement pedagogies change the students perceptions of the person(s) served as playing a certain social role or do they begin to see them as persons? How does engagement as encountering real people and situations reduce the psychological distance between themselves and those they are serving? Are engagement pedagogies that directly incorporate the affective climate of the student-community member relationship increase the student’s sense of positive emotional relations? Finally, as a result of engagement pedagogy employed result in further exchange of resources such as further advocacy, philanthropic efforts, etc.

The engagement movement has much to offer educating for global citizenship and the timing could not be more critical (Galston 2001, and Lee 2006). Most young adults we serve when put in the context of their global cohort are privileged. The challenge for the next anniversary celebration of Campus Compact is how will we use our privilege? During this difficult time for the peoples of this world, many American students enjoy the privilege of international travel. Whether they travel to Mexico or simply visit a neighborhood of immigrants in any urban city we meet people whose lives and cultures are different from our own. How will we proceed to educate the world’s elite to live lives of meaning and commitment? One step is by creating universities where the brokenness of the world is honored as a rightful topic of study and place for learning. More importantly, that the way we engage and encounter others, especially the poor and vulnerable in our country and around the world, is also honored as a rightful place of learning, discovery and solidarity.

Literature Cited

Colby, A., Ehrlish, T., Beaumont, E. & Stephens, J. 2003. Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Counts, G.S. 1978. Dare the School Build a New Social Order? Carbondale, IL: S. Illinois Univ. Press

_____. 1932. Dare progressive education be progressive? Progressive Education 9:257-263

Daloz, L., Keen, C. Keen, J., Parks, S. 1996. Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World. Boston: Beacon Press

Ellacuría, I. 1982. Commencement address to Santa Clara University. 1-4

Galston, W. A. 2001. Political knowledge, political engagement, and civic education, Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 4:217-34.

Gerics, J. From orthodoxy to orthopraxis: Community service as noblesse oblige and as solidarity with the poor. Religious Education 86:250-64

Komter. A.E. 2005. Social Solidarity and the Gift. Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge Univ. Press

Lee, J. J. 2006. Global citizenship: Extending students’ knowledge and action to the global context, Journal of College and Character 7:1-5

Pace, E. 1989. Pilgrimage as spiritual journey: an analysis of pilgrimage using the theory of V. Turner and the resource mobilization approach 32:229-244.

Robinson, T. 2000. Dare the school build a new social order? Michigan Journal of Service Learning 7:147-57

Sabbagh, C. 2003. The dimension of social solidarity in distributive justice. Social Science Information 42:255-276

Santilli, N.R. & Falbo, M.C. 2000. Impact of volunteering and community service on facilitating tudents’ civic engagement. In J.A. McLellan (Chair), Community Service and Citizenship in Youth. Symposium conducted at the Biannual Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Chicago, IL

In today’s rapidly changing world, the skills and sensibilities of “citizenship” are evolving along with technological and economic advance. Communication technologies enable communication across the globe at the speed of light. This reality means that ideas of democracy, theocracy, compassion, and hate can all find instant audiences. This profound freedom and speed of information dramatically increases the demands associated with contemporary citizenship and raises the stakes for the schools and institutions that prepare young people to effectively take advantage of this new freedom and responsibility. What it means to be a good citizen in America and in the world today is very much in flux — in some circles, there is a sense that American civic life is in decline. Whereas a large part of the academic discussion regarding civic participation and social capital focuses on the younger generation’s rejection of traditional institutions, this work examines new means of participation and association, fostered by technology and animated by a younger generation currently assuming new leadership positions. As Millennials (those born after 1981) rise and Baby Boomers retire, the frequently maligned generation in between — Generation X (born 1960 — 1980) is beginning to leave its unique stamp on our social, political and economic spheres. That stamp, this work argues, has implications for civic life and social policy over the coming decades, particularly for areas as critical as public education.

These ideas are drawn from a study I conducted with 40 young people in Austin, TX from 2000-2003 to look beyond the typical characterizations of Generation X and Robert Putnam’s well-known definitions of social capital described extensively in his book, Bowling Alone. To bring a fresh view to the generational perspective, rather than casting all Generation X actors into a single group, I parsed them based on the nature of their involvement in the technology sector, yielding four distinct groups: Tech Elites, Cyber-democrats, Wireheads and Trailing Xers. Elites lead technology companies; Cyber democrats work at the intersection of politics and technology; Wireheads are cubicle dwelling functionaries; and Trailers are college students. Rather than accepting the singularly quantitative and generally pejorative descriptions of Generation X and Putnam’s argument that social capital is in decline because younger generations were not joining old institutions, this study asked: Are new citizenship values driving the participation, involvement, and philanthropy of this generation and thereby changing how they live, what they value and how they govern themselves?. Perhaps Putnam and other scholars have developed such a bleak interpretation because they attempted to judge civic life through the lens of “old lifestyle + new technology”, rather than adopting the insight that techno-skeptic and educator Neil Postman provided, which posits that when revolutionary technologies are introduced into a culture they ultimately yield something fundamentally new.

Through written surveys and oral interviews drawn from a range of well-known civic and political instruments, I found that these young respondents generally thought quite deeply about public life and civic involvement when given the opportunity. They reflected many of the attributes and sensibilities advanced by democratic and social capital theorists. Affirming Postman’s insight, my respondents re-arranged and recast many of their behaviors and sensibilities in ways that reflect more contemporary values, lifestyles and norms. This is not to say that all is right with American civic life. Instead, it is to argue that America is in a time of significant economic and generational change. As a result, measuring societal health with traditional measures overlooks the creative evolution of civic relationships and institutions underway among young people, especially those between ages 20 and 40.

Respondents did not see themselves as revolutionaries, but rather as separate from the old social structure. Contrary to some popular treatises, these actors are generally not particularly cynical, ill-informed, or disengaged, and they certainly do not see themselves as such. Instead, they have a distinct set of values about citizenship and civic virtue that can, perhaps, provide insight into prospects for civic life and progress on social issues in the coming years. Some of these values include the following:

• They engage in similar activities but have different priorities. The citizenship activities of high tech, Gen Xers are similar to classic understandings of civic duties, but the virtues and behaviors they champion fall in a different order of priority. Where classic notions of democratic citizenship posit the primacy of the vote, these actors place greater value on the work ethic and on being politically informed and active.
• They reject formality and structure in favor of greater responsiveness. The institutional arrangements of this age group are less formal, ritualistic, and hierarchical than were civic institutions in the past. Instead, they are more project/task/need-based and tend to organize and disband depending on local conditions, all of which reflects both Gen X’s “creative” sensibilities and the changing norms of the contemporary workplace, where workdays are long and varied and productivity is tied to the creative impulse.
• They see technology as a powerful tool but not as revolutionary. Technology provides an organizing and informational tool to make these organic associations agile and effective — an update of the telephone more than a tool of revolution or a virtual destination that replaces real communities. This is not to say that they see technology as insignificant. Quite the contrary, technology has enabled them to be more successful and effective in their work and in their communities of interest.
• They are creators rather than joiners. High tech Generation X actors are entrepreneurs, creating new businesses, new policies and new means of association. This creative process has greater urgency than joining old institutions for this cohort. There are likely both structural and rhetorical reasons for this. In the same way that women avoid the glass ceiling of large corporations by starting their own companies, Gen Xers start their own community efforts to bypass what they view as mindless hierarchies and barriers to entry of old-line institutions. This dynamic may have significant implications for the survival of seniority-based institutions from civil service occupations to labor unions. Even among Tech Elites, those most concerned with “pleasing their parents’ institutions,” there is greater energy spent considering new means of service and participation in old institutions as opposed to maintaining their current ways of operating.
• They privilege personal choice over transcendent obligation. Activities for Gen X’ers are increasingly based on choice rather than duty, affirming Wolfe’s findings about both the American middle class (1998) and moral freedom (2000). As higher levels of education and changing economic norms have resulted in increased mobility, Gen Xers have come to expect increased choice in where they work, how they live, and how they participate in civic life. Respondents across all categories rejected the notion of transcendent or external obligations. However, they felt a strong tug to respond to requests for community help, both large and small.
• They turn traditional reciprocity norms inside out. Respondents affirmed Putnam’s view on the critical role that reciprocity norms play in the creation of social capital. However, among this group, reciprocity operates differently from Putnam’s description, which assumed that social capital is animated in a general way— i.e. do good in the world and others will as well. Respondents, in contrast, embraced a more personal sort of reciprocity somewhat akin to Cialdini’s (1984) reciprocity of concession: Ask for help to animate a personal cycle rather than do something nice and animate an abstract social cycle.
• They embrace weak ties over strong ties. In this high tech era, Generation X lives with high levels of professional mobility and therefore looks for low social barriers to entry and exit, but also looks to technology to maintain weak social/professional ties active — those ties that are not tended to every day or week or in person, but rather a broad web of contacts to be tapped for episodic social, civic or professional activities. The dynamics that foster the maintenance of weak ties — technology and mobility — are actually drivers of contemporary social cohesion, which counters Putnam’s definition, which asserts those traits deplete social capital.
• They enjoy creative work, easily blurring the lines between job and community. A strong work ethic was a common theme heard throughout most of my interviews, but hard work is also a concept whose definition is evolving. As Florida illustrated in his “thought experiment,” work does not take place only in the workplace between the hours of 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. As a matter of fact, a number of my respondents claimed that such demarcation (or “clock-watching” in their lexicon) was actually bad citizenship. For them, lines are blurred between work time, social time, personal time, and community time.
• They want to make a difference but they think work is the place to do it. These Generation X actors want their ideas to have an effect on the world, affirming Florida’s understandings. But rather than engage in traditional social activism, they see change happening as a result of “working hard on cool stuff with great technology” rather than in the political world. Obviously, the Cyber-democrats are a unique case, but even they have chosen to be political technology professionals rather than social activists. More simply, this generation tends to give at the office rather than take to the streets.

Far from being disengaged, nomadic losers or Cyber-selfish narcissists, these respondents are actively involved in their work and, often unconsciously, use their creative impulses to stimulate a new civic life that is more consistent with their values and the changes that lie in the wake of technological and social advancement. These means of association are still very much in flux, consistently evolving as technologies and related enterprises advance. Further, as a new younger generation moves into the adult ranks, these distinctions among Boomers, both Xers and Millennials may keep these changes in civic values and related behaviors in play for many years ahead. Indeed, Putnam’s lament about the passing of standing associations and mid-century socialization patterns will only grow more acute if the respondents prove at all representative. These new generational norms demand a fresh look and conceptualization of what constitutes civic strength. What kinds of organizations have developed to meet the needs of this cohort? Do they have the capability to provide the sinew that holds humanity together, whether in Putnam’s terms or de Toqueville’s? Must ongoing, official organizations exist to constitute civic strength or can something more organic better serve communities and capture the desire of young people to be engaged? Have the excesses of contemporary activist groups, whether animal rights or anti-WTO soured thoughtful people on the very idea of “activism” as practiced by the retiring Baby Boomers?

Moving beyond these abstract academic questions of definitions, what might we do with these insights about the evolving nature of economic and civic life? My observations and recommendations fall into two broad categories: things that we can we do as individuals, writers, civic actors and policy makers to reduce cynicism while increasing the production of new social capital that resonates more clearly with young people today; and secondly, observations for what these insights might mean for contemporary social policy issues.

Promote the real efficacy of young people. Studies of political efficacy show that low levels of efficacy promote disengagement and cynicism. Respondents in this study affirm those findings. The less efficacious and informed respondents were, the more cynical and disengaged they were. To promote real efficacy among young people, it is necessary older adults and institutions to be authentic in their interactions with them. This insight was recently affirmed by Washington Post columnist David Broder in a panel discussion where he predicted that partisan rancor in the nation’s capital could not be solved by those who came of age in the 1960′s, but would instead require an infusion of a younger generation of leaders more authentic and candid and less ideological, a posture typified by prominent Generation X leader Barak Obama.

Be authentic. As generational marketers, Harwood (2002) and others have found, Americans are starving for authenticity, and that is especially true among young people. Throughout my interviews, respondents repeatedly remarked how much they enjoyed having a meaningful conversation about important things and how seldom they had the opportunity to do so. Research in secondary education underscores the power of this simple recommendation. In smaller, thematic learning communities, such as the Minnesota School of Environmental Science, High Tech High or the MET school in Providence, young people are given a “seriousness of purpose” (the quality most credited with the collegiate success of GI Bill recipients) by embedding their academic learning with real work opportunities in the adult world. As a result, young people in these schools show lower levels of cynicism, higher levels of community engagement and eschew the ersatz clique drama, bullying and other pathologies of the traditional American high school.

Break down rigid barriers between young people and adults. Closely related to the arguments for authenticity outlined above, there could be a range of venues for such meaningful conversations, both formal and informal. But perhaps the key component is to try to break down the physical and bureaucratic barriers between young people and the adult world they will be entering. There are a range of ways to make the barriers between schools and the community more porous, including internships, externships, mentoring programs, service learning, and alternative certification that allow professionals from a range of adult pursuits the opportunity to interact with students and to help students draw connections between their studies and adult life as they exist in their communities and nation. There are signs that Right has met Left in this realization in recent days. Forty-six year old Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, whom Neil Howe has called the “first Gen X cabinet secretary” (although she is technically slightly older than the typical marker for the beginning of that generation) has called for an Adjunct Teacher Corps, where literally tens of thousands of math and science professionals to teach their craft in our nation’s high schools. Instead of corralling young people on campuses removed from authentic adult experiences, perhaps accelerating the sense of efficacy and optimism found in older respondents in this study would help inculcate a meaningful civic ownership in younger people.

Help young people learn to be citizens. While immigrants to America receive a citizenship handbook to help them understand the nation they are joining, native-born young people do not. Just as typical education removes experience from learning (and young people from the larger community), we often expect young people to know how to be citizens without ever teaching them. The landscape of civics education is often typified by insular disciplinary arguments within the education establishment that tend to be ideological or discipline-based rather than focused on the larger goal of imbuing young people with the knowledge and sensibilities needed to be an engaged and productive citizen. Further, much general education has been reduced to mere “workforce development”- the narrow teaching of skills designed to prepare someone for a particular job. Job skills are important, but what contemporary enterprises are demanding of young employees today looks more like the skills and sensibilities of citizens than cogs in the corporate machine. Respondents understood this implicitly and characterized it explicitly — their workplace has become their community and their notions of good citizenship manifest themselves there.

Consider the traits Oblinger & Verville (1998) found in her survey of senior business people regarding what they looked for in prospective employees: critical thinking skills; the ability to work in teams; excellent oral and written communication skills; and multi-cultural sensitivity. That description (or prescription) sounds much more like the Jeffersonian ideal of public education — the creation of a polity capable of self-governance — rather than the current construction of schooling as a collection of disconnected academic disciplines.

This dynamic of current isolated approaches to secondary schooling may help explain the decline in cynicism I found in my sample as they got older. The most cynical were the youngest, those still in school and subject to these conflicting cultural and educational messages and removed from authentic and efficacious opportunities to engage in the activities of citizenship and work. Once these Generation X actors arrived in their late 20′s and 30′s, their sense of efficacy improved and their levels of cynicism were considerably lower in both the classical survey questions and the more open-ended interviews.

As adults, animate reciprocity — interpersonal and societal. Respondents in this study affirmed Putnam’s argument about the centrality of reciprocity to notions of social capital. What this group also showed is that reciprocity can cut both ways, creating a vicious cycle as well as a virtuous one. Further, this group turned Putnam’s notion of societal reciprocity inside out. Rather than doing good and awaiting a generalized social benefit, this group reflected Chris Matthews’ fundamentally political insight — if you want someone to be loyal, ask them for a favor.

As civic actors, ask for help. High-tech Generation X actors feel little transcendent civic obligation and further, resent the idea that such a thing even exists. However, they feel a strong duty to respond to a societal need and are often quick to organize and mobilize in order to provide an effective response. Where Putnam and others argued that people should go out and do good to animate social capital, my study suggests that people should go out and ask for help with something. Instead of just volunteering on one’s own, perhaps asking friends to join in to help on a project is the more compelling service impulse for young people today. This posture toward organizing is consistent with the entrepreneurial nature of Gen X found by Florida, who argued that this cohort is more likely to start something than to join an organization that already exists.

As policymakers, seek out innovation in the civic sphere (as we do in the economic arena). Putnam’s measures of social capital focused heavily on joining existing institutions or socializing in ways common to the 1950′s. The social institutions and practices of those days obviously reflected the norms and values of the times, factors that are now dissipating due to a range of social, economic and technological changes. In the wake of that change, new skills and people are being privileged and new means of social cohesion are coming to the fore. We need to capitalize on these shifts in emphasis, and scholars should seek to identify them and test their effectiveness in the civic sphere. Putnam’s Bowling Alone follow up took him to communities to look at community activities today, but he still privileged those things that looked most like what he chronicled from mid century — traditional forms of activism — unions, church groups. This study indicates that the vibrancy of American civic life may be in the creation of new forms and mechanisms of association not “renewal” of old ones, particularly because those old types assume a less mobile population.

As civic and economic thinkers, embrace mobility. In the contemporary economy, increased mobility is a fact of life. Increasing educational levels have long been associated with higher levels of social involvement but also with higher levels of mobility, all of which create a drag on Putnam’s conception of social capital. With many communities working to become the next Seattle or Austin, (and not the next Peoria or Detroit), more “creative class” or “just-in-time” social capital activities will become the norm. Embracing those means and considering ways to encourage, reward and (from a scholarly point of view), measure those types of social capital activities will help us move from tired laments about the dying past to more productive discussions about the communities of the future. Such relentless negativism about the current state of communities and sensibilities of Generation X would seem to stoke cynicism rather than reduce it. Putnam clearly identified important social trends and nicely captured the unease people felt as a result of the upheavals occurring in a time of technological advance. But we need to move beyond these concerns by identifying the kinds of social capital suitable to a new age and new people.

Implications for Research and Social Policy.

Certainly this group of 40 young people in Austin is not a representative sample of a generation. However, the civic insights that they provide should be fodder for additional research as well as new approaches for political and civic engagement and the resonance of ongoing policy debates:

Systemically investigate the effects of mobility on civic involvement.

As noted earlier, mobility is only going to increase with higher levels of education, the decline of fixed benefit pensions and increasing globalization. Social capital definitions that rely on more stable residency patterns put them at variance with individual realities and engines of economic growth. In addition to mobility, a key issue uncovered in this study is the ephemeral nature of many community activities — they begin with email trees to organize participants, execute a task in response to a community need, then disband until the next need arises. Research should consider ways to study and quantify such things — new ways of defining and measuring civic/social activity— and to develop techniques that do not privilege rigid delineations of time and place.

Study new civic organizations, large and small.

This study found that young adults are often creating their own non-profits while the wealthier ones were creating their own philanthropies, bringing a more outcome-focus and problem solving sensibility to philanthropy and non profit efforts. In essence, this generation does not embrace the fixed hierarchies of traditional civic organizations nor the cause or protest based activism that had its roots in the anti-war movement in the late 1960′s.

Consider the implications of this generation’s focus on personal choice and accountability as key elements of good citizenship.

There are implications for making progress in thorny social policy debates in these values. For example, this generation and the one behind it believe in the primacy of personal choice — and see both a right to have choices and the ability to make them well as cornerstones of contemporary citizenship. While school vouchers have rabidly ideological supporters and critics, the idea of being able to choose the school that is right for your child is an idea that would appear to be highly resonant to Generation X parents. Further, this generation’s preoccupation with accountability, self reliance and work ethic, national efforts to improve transparency of school results would also be expected to gain traction. These sentiments pose interesting political challenges for unions and other seniority-based occupations, such as federal and state civil service. Already the federal government is making moves towards performance and incentive based pay to try and recruit and retain younger staff. It is important to note that these respondents did not eschew these dynamics (seniority, union protections, work restrictions, absence of performance reward) as uninteresting or unappealing — they view them fundamentally as bad citizenship.

Finally, the post-ideological bent of these respondents could also have implications for political parties. The popularity of “mavericks” such as John McCain and the excitement of young people for the unsuccessful (some would argue because of his excessive candor and authenticity) candidacy of Howard Dean reflect the findings from this study — a considerable segment of this generation believes in independence, the primacy of the individual, the importance of choices, hard work and merit. This curious mix of liberalism and libertarianism across all political identifications, provides a wealth of areas for additional academic and political research as well as the possibility of transcending some of the day’s most persistent ideological stalemates.

Sources

Cialdini, R. B. (1984). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New York: Quill William Morrow.

Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class: And how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. New York: Basic Books.

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.
Harwood, R. C. (2002). A new political covenant: America’s aspirations for political conduct. Bethesda: The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation.

Howe, N., Strauss, W. (1993). 13th Gen: Abort, retry, ignore, fail? New York: Vintage.

Howe, N., Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials rising: The next great generation. New York: Vintage Books.

Matthews, C. (1999). Hardball: How politics is played-told by one who knows the game. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Oblinger, D. G., Verville, A. (1998). What business wants from higher education. Phoenix: Oryx Press.

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Knopf.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Putnam, R. D. (Ed.). (2002). Democracies in flux: The evolution of social capital in contemporary society. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Putnam, R. D. (2003). Better together: Restoring the American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wolfe, A. (1998). One nation, after all: What middle-class Americans really think about, God, country, family, racism, welfare, immigration, homosexuality, work, the Right, the Left, and each other. New York: Viking.

Wolfe, A. (2001). Moral freedom: The impossible idea that defines the way we live now. New York: W.W. Norton.

In Trustworthy Leadership: Can we be the leaders we need our students to become?, Diana Chapman Walsh, President of Wellesley College, argues that we need “our graduates to become active participants in the world, potent advocates for human rights, confident leaders willing to take risks in pursuit of intellectual honesty, of freedom to disagree, of justice and fairness, global citizenship and mutual responsibility.”

Kalamazoo College embraces this challenge in its mission statement, Kalamazoo College prepares its graduates to better understand, live successfully within, and provide enlightened leadership to a richly diverse and increasingly complex world. As we move from mission to action, we at “K” recognize that it is our responsibility to prepare students to exercise ethical leadership in a strife-torn world that is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent; a world in which the economic, political and military preeminence that has been a part of our most recent history can no longer be guaranteed; a world in which the sustainability of our planet is in question.

We believe that the ability of our graduates to meet the demands embedded in our mission is dependent on their capacity to be “at home in the world.” By this, we mean a sense that wherever they find themselves they can be at home and make a home because they respect difference, can view the world from multiple perspectives, can adapt to new situations, and have the ability to put themselves at the margins. Embedded in being at home in the world is the ability to cross boundaries: real boundaries of language, nationality, geographic region; and personal boundaries of faith tradition, sexual orientation, mental health, and physical ability. Moreover, at this moment in the history of our nation and the world, the capacity to cross boundaries of culture and inequity is of critical importance. Those who are at home in the world also make connections: between theory and practice, between the classroom and the real world, between policies and people’s lived experience; and they forge authentic personal relationships across difference. Thus, Kalamazoo College’s concept of being at home in the world embodies Campus Compact’s commitment to civic engagement and global citizenship.

At Kalamazoo College we attempt to enable the development of these dispositions and capacities through our unique curriculum known as the K-Plan, an education of rigorous liberal learning deepened and enriched by experiential, international, and multicultural dimensions. (See www.kzoo.edu/pres/plan.) The combined experience of service-learning coupled with an extended period of study abroad that often includes a service component, we believe, provides a powerful tool for engendering a commitment to civic engagement and global citizenship.

With the adoption of the K-Plan in 1962, all students were required to complete a senior individualized project (SIP) and the overwhelming majority was expected to participate in both a study abroad and a career development experience. Currently, approximately 85% of our students study abroad, most (88%) on programs which last at least two academic quarters. While abroad, students explore new cultures, refine their language skills and hone their capacity for intercultural communication. In the 2005/06 academic year, 248 students studied abroad in 26 countries, 48% in non-European settings.

Recognizing the importance of assisting students to develop the knowledge, skills, sensitivity, and commitment necessary for a lifetime of meaningful and effective participation in their communities, the College, in the last decade, has embraced another component of experiential education: service-learning. Under the auspices of the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning, the College has developed and supported over 20 different service-learning courses and nine ongoing co-curricular programs, in which over 400 Kalamazoo College students work each year with thousands of community residents and over 30 different organizations. Each of these efforts is the outgrowth of a carefully crafted and sustainable college/community partnership that engages students, faculty, and community members in relationships that foster collaborative learning and civic participation among a diverse group of constituents. These partnerships build a more vibrant community while helping our students to develop a sense of respect and humility as they work collaboratively to solve public problems with individuals from a variety of economic and cultural backgrounds. Sustained collaboration in such pluralistic settings is often a new experience for many of them. In 2005/06, students in these combined programs gave over 24,000 hours of “service” to the community — and were rewarded with the mastery of academic material and with the acquisition of profound new understandings of the community and contemporary social issues based on real world experience. Moreover, and of great importance to Kalamazoo College, these experiences provide for more sustained interracial and cross-social-class experiences than the current demographics of our student body could sustain.

The primary vehicles through which the College implements its civic engagement and global citizenship initiatives are the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning and the Center for International Programs. The Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning promotes civic engagement through academic service-learning and co-curricular service-learning initiatives that are built upon reciprocal community partnerships, and also fosters opportunities for student and faculty scholarship within the realms of citizenship, community engagement, and service-learning pedagogy. The Institute collaborates with the community and its representatives to assure that projects and programs meet the needs and recognize the assets of both campus and community constituencies through equalitarian and reciprocal planning, implementation and evaluation processes. In our most complex and longest continuous partnership (established in 1997), students work in five to seven different Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS) as tutors, mentors, health educators and researchers, with a particular emphasis on bilingual education.

The Center for International Programs implements the College’s study abroad initiatives, including the Integrative Cultural Research Project (ICRP) and the more recently developed Kalamazoo Project for Intercultural Communication (KPIC). In 1993 the ICRP was created to foster greater cultural integration of study abroad participants into the everyday life of the host culture. All ICRP students select an activity (often a service or volunteer project, a cultural internship or the collecting of life histories) that will require them to interact closely with local people. Through a structured process of observation, interaction, research and reflection, students, ideally, undergo a change in perspective from “they do things this way/we do things that way” to “it makes sense to do things this way.” The Kalamazoo Project for Intercultural Communication (KPIC) builds on the ICRP model and provides for a selected group of students the opportunity to place their study abroad experience within a larger framework that allows them to connect lived experience with theoretical understanding, the host culture with the home culture, and personal experience with the articulation of that experience to others. The project incorporates a pre-departure course that exposes students to basic principles of intercultural communication and encourages them to begin thinking about the nature of the Integrative Cultural Research Project they will execute; a series of writing assignments completed while the student is abroad that helps her/him become aware of the evolution of the study abroad experience; and a course for returning students that encourages reflection on the study abroad experience and provides venues in which students may share their experiences with others through a series of speaking engagements. The ICRP and the KPIC are vehicles through which the study abroad experience aims to create new generations of leaders endowed with the type of transnational competence that will be necessary to function effectively in an increasingly interconnected world.

In full recognition of the developmental nature of the undergraduate learning experience, the College structures service opportunities in a sequence that offers students progressively more responsible service-learning and leadership experiences in culturally diverse settings over the full four years of the academic program. For example, many students are introduced to academic service-learning during their first quarter at the College through a first-year seminar that has a service-learning component. In most years approximately 25% of these seminars are service-learning courses. Other first year students may participate in co-curricular programs as volunteers at one of KPS sites where they serve as tutors, mentors or cafeteria buddies. This experience often motivates them to enroll in an academic service-learning course during the winter or spring quarter of their first year. For many, it is during the academic service-learning course that they begin to develop new perspectives as they link the immediate experiences of the students with whom they are working to the larger socio-economic and political context that circumscribes the lives of these children and their families. The Underwood Stryker Institute participates in two Americorps Service Scholarship programs, one specifically for first-generation students, which builds mentoring, leadership and community service-learning into the first-year experience for eight to ten students selected for the program each year.

During the sophomore year, students have an opportunity to assume greater responsibility in terms of the nature of the programs in which they participate as well as the level of leadership they may assume. Students may participate in community-based learning as volunteers or may earn their work-study award in our co-curricular partnership programs. These include programs with the Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home, KPS, Family Health Center, the Spanish Medical Interpreter program, and others. With many other agencies, they conduct community-based research, gather oral histories, raise funds to fight hunger and raise awareness of its causes, develop public art with juvenile offenders, strengthen city neighborhoods, promote local farms and community gardens, design lead remediation strategies, or develop city plans. Through a series of endowed scholarships and fellowships that support work in social justice and community action, students whose commitment and capabilities have been previously demonstrated, receive support to design, implement, and sustain innovative community projects by collaborating with their peers and a community partner. One such cohort of students, the LaPlante Scholars, shoulders primary responsibility for coordinating Institute co-curricular programs and developing peer mentor networks. They also design and lead workshops to promote reflection and action on the pressing social issues with which students are engaged.

Service opportunities in the sophomore year also anticipate study abroad. Students have opportunities to immerse themselves in local immigrant communities as bilingual tutors and as Spanish medical interpreters at the Family Health Clinic. After identifying their study abroad sites in the winter quarter, sophomores have an opportunity to participate in KPIC or to begin to craft the Integrative Cultural Research Project that will comprise a significant part of their study abroad experience.
Through other important components of the K-Plan, namely career development and the senior individualized project (SIP), students are afforded additional opportunities to extend the depth and breadth of their understandings and their capacity to engage in the work of social justice and community transformation. For example, this summer a K student is completing an externship at an international health organization that develops global and local partnerships to enhance the quality of health care services for women and families in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. Another student completed an internship at the World Bank in Washington, DC, where she worked on projects related to the economics of supporting an initiative to eradicate three infectious diseases in central Africa. She then designed her senior individualized research project to allow for more in-depth examination of this issue at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Kalamazoo College alumni, many of whom have benefited from our experiential education programs, play a central role in facilitating these internship and SIP research opportunities.

When service opportunities are structured in developmental sequences, students can engage in progressively responsible, aware, and challenging actions that address structural injustices in our society. We have learned that in-depth experiences in other countries often provide a context for students to better understand privilege and injustice in this country. Thus, students who return to the campus from study abroad bring with them a greater understanding of the immigrant experience and an increased commitment to galvanize other members of the Kalamazoo College campus to work with local immigrant and low-income communities. Just as importantly, we have also learned that civic engagement in Kalamazoo before the international experience helps prepare students for those life-changing experiences — providing a lens from which to view the events that unfold abroad. Students who have worked with local farmers on a “Farm 2 K” program bring a critical lens to their examination of sustainability while on study abroad in Thailand and then return to the campus with an enhanced perspective of issues of hunger and sustainability and the intersection between the two as both a local and a global phenomenon.

Service-learning can create defining moments in students’ lives. Through Kalamazoo College’s sequence of interconnected, if not always fully coherent, developmental experiences, ideally, our students complete the progression that includes failure to connect, questioning, discomfort and sometimes guilt, recognition of privilege, and feelings of powerlessness to emerge with a sense of efficacy that enables them to become those confident agents who will take risks in an effort to promote a world that is both just and sustainable. Hopefully, they have become at home in the world.

It is imperative that leaders in higher education take seriously the responsibility to assist our students to become effective agents of change in a world that is deeply troubled. On each of our campuses we must provide vision and support to the efforts of faculty and staff who design, implement and examine pedagogies that promote students’ informed and ethical engagement to build a more just, equitable and sustainable world.

Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
John Dewey

The world is being flattened. I didn’t start it and you can’t stop it, except at a great cost to human development and your own future.
Thomas Friedman

This paper series seems especially significant this year, as Campus Compact celebrates an important milestone. The context has certainly changed over the decades since the founding of Campus Compact twenty years ago. For while Campus Compact has grown impressively to more than 950 member campuses with 31 state offices under the leadership of Elizabeth Hollander, there is also a sense that service-learning is at a crossroads. At least one dimension for educators to consider is the connection between the local and the global, and the importance of global citizenship and democratic practices which promote global citizenship. To be engaged and relevant requires that service-learning includes a large vision, along with democratic practices for acting locally with global intentions.
The “flattened world” which Thomas Friedman has popularly termed for the rapid rise of globalization since the start of the 21st century has important implications for service-learning educators trying to implement John Dewey’s vision of building democratic, neighborly communities. It requires us to ask: if democracy “begins at home,” what does this mean in the context of an increasingly global society?

In this paper we examine this question through the lens of what it might mean to frame efforts in service-learning under the broader conception of “global citizenship.” We examine how an explicitly local and democratic pedagogy and approach to public problem solving not only can, but must, co-exist with an increasingly globalized world. We make the following claims:

• The changing nature of globalization requires service-learning practitioners to think about the global context and global implications for local efforts;
• Working in civil society offers students the opportunity to experience the global value of interdependence, gain essential skills for public work, and help build a civic global network;
• Community-based efforts give students necessary global knowledge through the local wisdom obtained through active engagement with local communities; and
• Service-learning can help students navigate the interconnections and potential tensions between global and local cultures.

After we suggest ways to frame issues of service-learning in the context of a global society, we will conclude (in the appendix) by reporting on efforts at three universities attempting to act globally through local community engagement.

Changing Context

The roots of service-learning are grounded in the progressive tradition of education that “protested a restricted view of education,” as Jane Addams argued. Perhaps the most significant contribution that service-learning has made to the academy is the importance of expanding the boundaries of where learning occurs. This idea catalyzed a generation of faculty, staff, and students to engage in community-based work and then reflect on these experiences through the lenses of a variety of disciplines.

Service-learning, however, was never meant to be simply a technique to help students better understand a set of concepts, theories, or practices. Rather, service-learning has always tried to be a rich, democratic pedagogy that transforms students and the broader university, while solving public problems. It has always sought to embed experience in a local context of place, public institutions, and interpersonal relationships.

Since the founding of Campus Compact and the birth of the contemporary service-learning movement, we’ve seen the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War; the start of a new “war on terrorism;” the popularization of the Internet and a technological revolution; and a movement toward free trade and neo-liberal policies, along with counter movements against globalization that are not only reshaping the world economy, but also the social, political and cultural life of all communities.

Each of these events, for better or worse, has led to the “flattening” of the world and requires us to rethink what we mean by “education for citizenship” in a democracy. At the same time, many of our nation’s finest universities continue to live side-by-side with some of the most economically depressed neighboring (not neighborly) communities. There is perhaps no more important time for colleges and universities to play a leadership role.

Today’s gravest public problems, including rising inequality and expanded areas of concentrated poverty, pernicious racism, a global environmental crisis, and increasingly overburdened and marginalized public institutions, require engaged universities. For educators to respond to these problems, to be relevant to students in the increasingly competitive job market, and to attempt to give public purpose to the increasingly privatized university, education must include a global understanding and critique. In short, service-learning practitioners must be global citizens.

Contributing to a Global Civil Society

One way to frame global citizenship efforts connected to service-learning is through the lens of “civil society.” In recent years political and social theorists have examined the importance of a robust civil society to democracy (e.g., Barber, 2003, 1998; Havel, 1992). For these theorists, democratic citizenship outcomes are not to be sought in the increasingly bureaucratized and privatized arenas of government or the private sector, but rather, in the mediating institutions of civil society.

When service-learning is seen as a democratic practice, it offers students the opportunity to work with a diverse group of fellow citizens in these local institutions. By connecting them to a variety of voluntary associations, colleges and universities connect students to a global movement to strengthen civil society; and give them experiences with this powerful alternative to both big government and large corporations.

Through working in after-school programs, public libraries, health clinics, locally-owned businesses, churches, synagogues, mosques, or other grassroots organizations, students experience the civic values of interdependence. At the same time, they build civic confidence and a civic identity as they gain essential skills for public work and democratic social change. Finally, students building a robust civil society through their common local actions actually play an important part in the international network connecting the local with the global.

Global Knowledge from Local Wisdom

Another way that service-learning can lend itself to conceptions of global citizenship is in its capacity to deepen “global knowledge,” by deepening students’ understandings of global issues through the lessons of local wisdom. There is a rich discussion in the recent literature of higher education of what our students need to know about world affairs, and what kind of curriculum will achieve these critical global objectives (e.g., Bok, 2006).

While there is much that students can learn about global trends and issues through direct instruction, supervised research, and global simulations, service-learning provides a kind of “local wisdom” to supplement this “global knowledge.” What service-learning offers is to move students beyond disinterested knowers of global economics and institutions or disembodied theorists of international human rights. By connecting them to the civic spaces of local communities of which their campus is a part, students can come to a deeper appreciation of the impact of global forces on domestic society.¹

As we show in the appendix, students working with new immigrants, for example, are able to deepen their understanding of the global issues of migration and international market forces through relationships formed in community-based service projects. Likewise, the impact of the changing economy and job loss on manufacturing towns can be understood through collaborative work in American communities, along with relationships with people from countries where cheap labor is being exported.

Conclusion: Navigating Local and Global Culture Clashes

The rise of the global, of course, raises serious issues about the loss of the local. You see the potential for tension between these trends playing out in every aspect of our world, from where we work, to how we spend our time, to the ways in which we solve public problems. Students involved in service work in their local communities are sure to encounter libraries struggling to refine their missions in an age of Google, local businesses struggling with Wal-Mart and other big box stores, and contingent communities in transition socially, culturally, and economically because of globalization. They are also likely to experience conflicts between the preservation of local culture and values and the implementation of universal principles through international organizations. In recent years we have seen clashes, for example, between traditional local cultures and the promotion of international women’s rights, between families attempting to instill traditional child raising values and international conventions on the rights of the child.

We believe that service-learning offers an avenue not only to understand these competing forces, but also to help revitalize local culture with an understanding and respect for the global. Students can come to appreciate and yet critically examine local practices in light of global principles like those found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And service-learning, done well, can move students beyond the potential acquiescence that often accompanies passively acquired knowledge of global problems, to an informed activism that comes from the development of local relationships informed by global contexts. In the appendix that follows, we offer examples of three different campuses that are attempting to creatively connect the local with the global through community-based civic engagement. These are obviously not the only examples of good practice in this area (we are beginning to document others as well), but they will give you concrete illustrations of what is possible at different institutions.

Appendix: Innovative Academically-Based Campus Models

Macalester College: A New Institute for Global Citizenship

“Global citizenship begins at home” is the mantra of Macalester College’s recently launched Institute for Global Citizenship. The Institute, which is the flagship initiative of new president Brian Rosenberg, attempts “to forge the college’s work on internationalism, multiculturalism, and service into a more compelling, integrated, and intellectually powerful whole” by combining Macalester’s International Center with the Community Service Office.

While the international studies program and community service programs were both nationally recognized, explains Andrew Lathom, associate dean of the Institute and professor of political science, “they never talked to each other.”

The Institute has sponsored a high-profile speaker series that includes U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Aside from attempts to bring visibility to the concept of global citizenship, which also includes advertising on Minnesota Public Radio, the Institute is focusing on its urban location through place-based community-based learning. Macalester students learn about globalization through the lens of two Twin Cities neighborhoods with large immigrant populations: Lake Street in Minneapolis and the West Side of St. Paul.

Providence College: Partnering Public Service with Global Studies

In 1994 with a $5 million gift from a local philanthropist, Providence College’s Feinstein Institute for Public Service created the first interdisciplinary major and minor in public and community service in the country. The course sequence for majors and minors, which includes the study of service, community, diversity, democracy, along with organizations, history, and ethics, has historically made attempts to include an international perspective. The interest in global citizenship was especially emphasized by students who organized international service trips and then requested special topics courses to analyze and reflect on their international experiences.

Connecting the local with the global became a more central feature of the Feinstein Institute with the development of a new major in global studies in the fall of 2005, which “stresses an active learning approach” to develop “a global understanding of social, economic, and political issues.” Substantial partnerships between the Feinstein Institute and global studies program have developed enabling public service students to develop a broader global perspective, while global studies students engage in the local community. The strong relationships with the local community and expertise at campus-community partnerships the Feinstein Institute has developed over the past decade has been especially valuable for the collaboration.

Students in the Introduction to Global Studies, for example, learn about issues of globalization and are encouraged to develop their own philosophy of global citizenship. Many do their community service work at English for Action, a local not-for-profit organization, using popular education to educate new immigrants from Latin America. Their work at English for Action allows students to deepen their understanding of the issue of immigration in the context of a global labor market, by giving them the “local wisdom” that comes from developing relationships with recent immigrants. Students’ written reflections on their experiences at English for Action have stressed the richness and diversity of the countries from which their immigrant families come, the opportunities and challenges they face in the United States, their struggles with learning a new language, separation from family, and the discrimination they face in their daily lives. In all of this, students are mentored by upper-level public service students who serve as “community assistants” at the global studies students’ community service sites.

Moreover, this fall the Introduction to Global Studies course is being co-taught by a local community partner, a pioneering teaching model of faculty and community partners co-teaching together initiated by the Feinstein Institute. Finally, students from both majors are working with staff and faculty to organize international service-learning trips with follow-up courses on campus.

Miami University: Acting Locally, Civic Learning, and Civic Leadership in Southwestern Ohio

Aware that communities across Ohio are struggling to adapt and respond to local manifestations of globalization, Miami University has developed a multi-year community-based research and learning project that explores the intersections between globalization and local transformation called Acting Locally: Civic Learning and Civic Leadership in Southwestern Ohio.

Housed in the department of American Studies, Acting Locally was launched in the fall of 2006 in collaboration with the Wilks Leadership Institute. A cohort of almost 30 students is taking 4 interdisciplinary, team-taught courses that each connect learning and leadership in the local community, along with an intensive summer research and action workshop.

The project partners with three communities in Southwest Ohio — the Over-the Rhine neighborhood in downtown Cincinnati, the city of Hamilton, and rural Butler county — to examine the impact of globalization on a decaying urban center, an expanding post-industrial metropolitan area, and a rural agricultural community.

¹ In Northern Ireland, the recently approved curriculum for youth civic education is titled “Local and Global Citizenship.” The new initiative seeks to combine understanding of local culture, history, and civic institutions with knowledge of global institutions, such as international conventions on human rights. back