VIRTUAL: Applying Education

Abstract

Our future world will be shaped by the students sitting in our classrooms right now. These students are more globally minded and globally connected than ever before, yet also increasingly isolated and overwhelmed. Climate change, pandemics, and war have created a context for our students that is much more complex and much more global than ever before. Giving our students the tools to address these problems, instead of drawing away from them, is the mandate that current educators are facing. The skill of global citizenship, which asks our students to critically examine their world and their place/role within it, might just be one of the most important teachings we can give our students. Our students enter the classroom open, full of curiosity and desiring to acquire knowledge. They then leave our universities and enter complex global contexts, even when they think they are “just” entering domestic industries and trades. By modeling to and teaching our students how to place themselves within this complex global context, we can create future leaders that are able to work in multiple dimensions, address interdisciplinary issues, and pull from cross-disciplinary best practices even when they are asked to function in highly specialized fields. In this talk, we will examine the key elements that make incorporating global citizenship into any classroom topic possible. Participants will leave with clear action steps that they can use to incorporate conversations about global citizenship into their own teaching, so that their students can more critically and dynamically examine their world.