Your Name and Title: Nicole Lamers, Visiting Assistant Professor
School or Organization Name: Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, College of Education, University of Illinois. Champaign-Urbana
Co-Presenter Name(s):
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Illinois
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): Teachers, Curriculum Designers
Short Session Description (one line):
This session will discuss a variety of strategies and approaches to internationalizing the curriculum, using the example of global water issues to illustrate the multiple ways in which to promote a more global perspective in curriculum design.
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
As a result of a push for increasing internationalization efforts, institutions of Higher Education in the U.S. have begun promoting a wide range of efforts toward campus internationalization. This study has looked at three traditions of these internationalization efforts to examine the potentials and pitfalls of the various approaches. These include an information-based, an experiential and a spatial approach. These modes of engagement are examined through the lens of a set of epistemic virtues, meant to complexify and deepen the meaningfulness of the experience, which include historicity, relationality, reflexivity, criticality and imagination.
The first part of the study looks at an information-based approach, in two pedagogic formats, a cognitivist and a constructivist. The other two traditions are examined through case studies in practice. The first case study involves a study tour which focused both on issues of water, but also on issues of study abroad as well. The second case involved an on-campus elective undergraduate course that I taught called ‘Understanding Global Water Issues’.
What this study shows is that effective internationalization must occur at multiple levels and that these levels can reinforce one another. However, an ‘add-on’ approach to internationalization without a comprehensive plan or structure and without elements of criticality will not be as effective, and has greater potential to be ‘mis-educative’, which in turn closes down future possibilities to engage and learn. Finally, the mode of internationalization efforts is, in the end, not the primary issue, so much as the purposes and the processes involved.
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