Global Learning Objectives

Global Learning is the critical analysis and engagement with complex, interdependent global systems, and their implications for people's lives and the Earth's sustainability. Through Global Learning, students should:

1. Become informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity across the spectrum of differences,
2. seek to understand how their actions affect both local and global communities, and
3. address the world's most pressing and enduring issues collaboratively and equitably.

Global Self-Awareness: In the context of global learning, the continuum through which students develop a mature, integrated identity with a systematic understanding of the interrelationships among the self, local, and global communities, and the natural and physical world.

Perspective Taking: The ability to engage and learn from perspectives and experiences different from one’s own and to understand how one’s place in the world both informs and limits one’s knowledge. The goal is to develop the capacity to understand the interrelationships between multiple perspectives, such as personal, social, cultural, disciplinary, environmental, local, and global.

Cultural Diversity: The ability to recognize the origins and influences of one’s own cultural heritage along with its limitations in providing all that one needs to know in the world. This includes the curiosity to learn respectfully about the cultural diversity of other people and on an individual level to traverse cultural boundaries to bridge differences and collaboratively reach common goals. On a systems level, the important skill of comparatively analyzing how cultures can be marked and assigned a place within power structures that determine hierarchies, inequalities, and opportunities and which can vary over time and place. This can include, but is not limited to, understanding race, ethnicity, gender, nationhood, religion, and class.

Personal and Social Responsibility: The ability to recognize one’s responsibilities to society – locally, nationally, and globally – and to develop a perspective on ethical and power relations both across the globe and within individual societies. This requires developing competence in ethical and moral reasoning and action. 

Global Systems: The complex and overlapping worldwide systems, including natural systems (those systems associated with the natural world including biological, chemical, and physical sciences) and human systems (those systems developed by humans such as cultural, economic, political, and built), which operate in observable patterns and often are affected by or are the result of human design or disruption. These systems influence how life is lived and what options are open to whom. Students need to understand how these systems (1) are influenced and/or constructed, (2) operate with differential consequences, (3) affect the human and natural world, and (4) can be altered.

Knowledge Application: In the context of global learning, the application of an integrated and systematic understanding of the interrelationships between contemporary and past challenges facing cultures, societies, and the natural world (i.e., contexts) on the local and global levels. An ability to apply knowledge and skills gained through higher learning to real-life problem-solving both alone and with others.

Informed Risk Taking: Integrating effective research/analysis, skills, and experiences to implement novel and compelling solutions to solve problems and/or advance the field.