MISSION:

The Education for Global Citizenship Committee is committed to promoting and supporting international and global education initiatives that foster cross-cultural awareness, understanding, appreciation, and cooperation throughout the IU Bloomington curriculum. We recognize that global perspectives are critical to solving contemporary problems, ensuring academic excellence, and preparing the leaders and scholars of the new millennium to become globally competent citizens.

HISTORY:

In 2004, the Faculty Colloquium for Excellence in Teaching (FACET), an IU Presidential initiative, chose the theme of “ Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century World” for its Leadership Institute. Each of the eight IU campuses sent a faculty team of five members to participate in the institute and subsequently assume the leadership role on their campus in relation to the project developed during the institute. The FACET Leadership Institute's three-year plan was to explore issues related to developing civic and moral responsibility in a global, as well as local context, and also promised long-term outcomes and results that would impact the university and beyond. Each campus team was to generate an action plan for initiating conversation among their campus colleagues to influence curricular content and pedagogical strategies.

Each team was to identify specific goals that have emerged from campus conversations, and develop a product-oriented strategic plan for the ensuing year, based on campus-specific missions and goals. The Bloomington campus team, based on these conversations, initiated a “Global Citizenship Summer Institute” in May of 2006. Supported by FACET, the Center for the Study of Global Change and by the Bloomington campus Dean of Faculties, our institute introduced faculty, students, and members of the general public to a number of pedagogical and theoretical issues in international education.  A major feature of our institute was the participation of colleagues through real-time video links from Macedonia , Uganda , and the U.K. , proving the usefulness of connecting with institutions and scholars across borders.  The institute thereby showed, in both substance and method, the meaning of democratic citizenship education within different national contexts in a global era. This year, our plan is to build upon the expertise and ongoing activities of the University 's various area studies programs to foster new curricular modules as well as new courses based on transnational, environmental, economic, political, and socio-cultural issues.  

In 2007, we will expand the initiative further, with another summer institute that follows a similar format but contains additional features such as expert speakers in the field, the sharing of pedagogical strategies for integration of global and international understanding into the various disciplines, and plans for expanding the conversation of the institute into the general IU Bloomington curriculum. We also will also offer, in conjunction with the area study centers, course development grant awards to faculty who propose innovative courses and/or pedagogical enhancements of existing courses to introduce and study international and global issues and affairs.

REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS:

Global Citizenship Course Development Grants rfp	[download]	[download]
Thematic Thinking about Globalization	[download]	[download]