Maintaining Global Consciousness

A culturally competent community member will examine one’s work and professional standards, assumptions, and practices within an international context. This includes considering how economic, cultural, and political globalization has an impact on one’s self-definition, purpose, role, and function.

Alvina and Natalie – Shifting Mindset for World Travel

Alvina is a U.S. citizen who is preparing for her first trip abroad. She will be traveling to Indonesia and the Philippines for work and has decided to extend her time away by a week to continue to travel in the region.

Alvina has been busy reading about the region, drafting travel plans and making lists of places she wants to visit and sights she wants to see. Alvina has been talking to her friends with more travel experience for advice and guidance for her time abroad.

Steven – Diversifying Media Exposure

Steven attended a community event hosted by the university to listen to a talk by a popular writer whose scholarship considers the interactions between technology and society. The speaker focused the discussion on how the algorithms that underpin social media platforms create and sustain political and ideological echo chambers, where social media users are often unconsciously sorted into invisible online communities where they more often interact with ideas and people that confirm their current thinking and worldview.

The LGBTQ Resource Center Team – Attending to World Perspectives on Gender Identity

Staff and student leaders of the campus LGBTQ Center have successfully launched an inclusivity campaign centered on the needs of transgender and non-binary students. The campaign titled “My pronouns are …” seeks to normalize pronoun sharing in institutional spaces like classrooms, meetings and other public events to raise consciousness to community members who live outside the gender binary and to intervene the harmful effects of mis-gendering.

Magali and the Student Life Team – Reorienting Services for Global Orientations

Magali is the associate dean of students responsible for student transitions. She supervises the directors of orientation, conduct, first-year programs and transfer programs. Among strategic priorities for her direct reports is relationship-building with international programs and expansion of services to better serve international students.

Stephanie and Adam – Discerning Organizational Implications of Public Policy

Stephanie is the department chair for Mechanical Engineering. Her duties include faculty and graduate student payroll and budget administration. Stephanie’s administrative assistant, Adam, calls her to inquire whether she is aware of the rollout of travel restrictions issued by the federal government and its potential impacts on graduate employees. She was not. Adam explained that the federal administration would shortly announce a formal travel ban that would prohibit immigration of Iranians to the United States.

Bill and Carina – Connecting the Global with the Local

Bill is a dean in the College of Education and he is preparing to set the agenda for the upcoming all-hands faculty and staff meeting. Over email, one of the faculty suggests an agenda item to discuss recent incidents of terror in Nigeria, which are targeting schoolgirls. In reviewing the request, Bill is confused and does not regard the events as a faculty and staff matter.

Janet and Lu – Raising Consciousness to the Influence of Individual World View

Janet is a doctoral student in Humanistic Engineering. She is a United States citizen who has extensive international travel experience. Since she was a young child, she has travelled abroad with her family on Christian mission trips, a practice she continued to facilitate for herself through adulthood. Her lifelong travel experiences have informed her research agenda.

The Philosophy Team – Expanding the Team to Expand Perspectives

The faculty of the philosophy department set time on the agenda to discuss an open letter received from graduate students earlier that month. The open letter, which was co-authored by several of their graduate students and received signatures from dozens of current students and alumni, details student concerns with the lack of representation in the department, making reference to both issues of identity and epistemological diversity.

Linus – Centering International Students in Lesson Planning

Linus is an instructor in environmental science who teaches a general elective course on sustainability. As a standard practice, Linus implements a simple bi-weekly formative assessment in which he passes out note-cards to his class and asks them to respond to two prompts on either side of the card: (1) “What’s working for me.”; and, (2) “What’s not working for me.” Linus finds that his notecard feedback helps elicit valuable insights on his teaching strategies, as well as uncover underlying confusion or tensions in the class.

Phoebe and Aya – Inviting World Perspectives into the Curriculum

Phoebe is a kinesiology professor responsible for a class with several units on dietetics. She has taught the course for more than 10 years. Phoebe is currently supervising Aya, a doctoral student in kinesiology, and has invited Aya to review her syllabus and course curriculum. Phoebe is aware that Aya has taught similar courses during her master’s program and welcomes her feedback on the content and assigned readings.

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