Stepping into the Work: Expanding understanding of global positionality, responsibility, and opportunity

The Opportunity

The world is interconnected. Humans move. Birds migrate. Fish swim. Seeds ride on the wind. Injustices, wealth, injury, and poverty are inheritances. Inheritance passes across generations. We are interconnected. We are complicit. We are each other’s keeper. 

We are not autonomous individuals - as so many generations of higher education teaching and scholarship have implied. One can step into considering the role of higher education in reproducing and potentially dismantling injurious worldviews from multiple vantage points. 

In the education abroad and global learning literature, Doug Reilly and Stefan Senders suggested, “We who work in the field of study abroad can begin simply—by replacing the rhetoric of “internationality” with one that is more realistic and more productive: we are all co-inhabitants of a single planet, a planet we are quickly destroying” (2015, p. 250). Our complicity is not only in separating the nation from the “global.” For more than a decade, critical scholars have identified ways in which higher education functions at the intersection of civic engagement and global learning are frequently instrumentalized in class and colonial reproduction (Mitchell, 2008; Zemach-Bersin, 2008). More recently, the focus of these critiques has expanded to wrestle with the coloniality of higher education structures writ large, including not only their off-campus and experiential functions, but expanding to consider how colonial ideology informs core operating assumptions in western higher education (Stein, 2022), informing higher education’s predominant technologies (la paperson, 2017).  

Liberal arts colleges and research universities are producing extraordinary volumes of critical analysis identifying these challenges. And it is within these same institutions that we must make applied changes to better step forward in concert with off-campus partners, justice movements, and stakeholders nearby and internationally. 

With particular attention to the intersection of expansive, liberal arts and humanistic academic curricula with experiential global and civic learning, this gathering will focus on the ways in which institutional innovations can intentionally upset historic patterns of exclusion and marginalization. Vitally, our attention is not only on disruption, but also on building forward. Building in favor of robust, critically-informed experiential learning that challenges students to live into their roles as next generation resource stewards and facilitative leaders, co-creating more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities. Drawing on many years of effort to connect civic and global learning, presentations and discussions will feature integrative learning and curricular reimagination that support students in aligning their studies, their vocational and professional trajectories, and applied values.