More than a Field Trip: Developing Student Leaders To Address Global Challenges

Monday, February 20, 2012: 9:45 AM-11:15 AM
Room 119-120 (VCC West Building)
This session will discuss approaches for educating students to understand and address global grand challenges. Analogous to international research collaborations, universities are experimenting with new approaches for international collaborative education around global grand challenges. If done well, such classes can provide passionate, motivated students with the research, problem-solving, innovation, and leadership skills needed to help address grand challenges. Developing classes to investigate grand challenges that are global, multicultural, and multidisciplinary is daunting. Speakers will discuss several aspects of the educational challenges. For example, how can students in a course work together and communicate openly across continents? How can local and overseas organizations and universities be used to help facilitate the flow of ideas and information? Large global teams in science and engineering, from industry and research, provide various lessons learned; how applicable are those lessons to globally collaborative education? How can educators transform current understandings into practical approaches for a university class? How do needs and goals differ among universities, for example, in less versus more developed countries? How can classes teach “real science” while empowering students to work toward solutions to the challenges? There are no simple, right answers to these questions. Speakers will present various approaches and foster an informative debate.
Organizer:
Julian Marshall, University of Minnesota
Co-Organizer:
Fred Rose, University of Minnesota
Speakers:
Paul Hudnut, Colorado State University
Breaking Boundaries: Collaborating for a Change
L. K. Vaswani, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology
Mainstreaming a Development Agenda for Global Challenges via Experiential Learning
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