Educating Global Citizens in Colleges and Universities: Challenges and Opportunities (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Educating Global Citizens in Colleges and Universities: Challenges and Opportunities
"Global competency" has become a common phrase in American educational discourse, yet a common definition of the term is hard to identify. Furthermore, while many American universities these days strive toward producing graduates with "global competency," very few have a uniform strategy in place for how to do so.
Peter Stearns's Educating Global Citizens in Colleges and Universities: Challenges and Opportunities explores what encompasses global competency and its multiple facets. It offers an extremely comprehensive account of the various initiatives of U.S. colleges and universities to internationalize and extend their global reach. Each chapter of this detailed book focuses on different aspects of global efforts. These include study abroad, international students, international collaborations, and branch campuses. Each chapter also provides an in-depth analysis of positive trends and continuing challenges facing universities involved in international initiatives.
Chapter 1 sets the stage by identifying many of the challenges for internationalizing in today's climate. After 9/11, visa requirements became more stringent for international students making it more difficult to recruit students from abroad. At the same time, many Americans have grown uneasy about going abroad themselves, making it more difficult for some study-abroad programs to promote their offerings. In fact, in 2005, more than a quarter (27%) of all American colleges had no students studying abroad, and foreign language attainments have also sagged (p. 1). Perhaps as a result of these two-way constraints, Stearns points out that today's American college students know less about other parts of the world than their international counterparts know about the United States.
Chapter 2 discusses two fundamental goals of global education. The first goal, in extending U.S. higher education into the global arena via branch campuses and the like, is to offer a "genuinely American" product that provides real social and individual benefits. The second goal, in bringing international students into the United States and sending American students abroad, is to train American college students to comprehend global issues. As Stearns notes, however, not everyone shares the enthusiasm of global studies professionals for the importance of these aims. In fact, [End Page 508] fewer than 40% of U.S. higher education institutions feature a reference to "international" in their mission statements, indicating that the interest in promoting "global competency" is not universal (p. 2).
Chapter 3 identifies constraints for international initiatives, which may also contribute to the lack of clear vision for international programming present in so many tertiary institutions. Included among those discussed is the lack of a centralized government agency responsible for global education projects and public disagreement over curriculum content. Stearns discusses curriculum in more detail later in Chapter 4, where he emphasizes that a global education requires connections across the curriculum, not merely the addition of a single course.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 offer practical examples of best (and in some cases, worst) practices in global efforts. As discussed in Chapter 5, studyabroad programs have grown in number and scope. A variety of organizations now support international exchanges as a "cornerstone for the global competency of American citizens" (p. 67). Nevertheless, these opportunities for exchange are unevenly distributed. Students in a number of fields are very unlikely to participate in studyabroad opportunities because the programs do not fit neatly into their undergraduate requirements. Students from majors in the sciences and engineering, for example, show only modest participation. Perhaps most disturbing, only 4% of education majors study abroad (p. 76). Given that teachers will likely have more contact with the youth of future generations than people in most other professions—and therefore will likely have a greater impact upon them—this gap is perhaps indicative of a low priority on global competency across the P-12 and higher education spectrum in the United States.
As Chapter 6 describes, more foreign students seek American education than vice versa. The influx of visiting international students presents opportunities to increase international exchange among a...
