Colleges are challenged to educate global citizens
With today’s college students graduating into an interconnected world, colleges are increasingly seeking to globalize the classroom — to prepare students to communicate across cultures, understand the intersection of local and international topics, and make connections between their studies and key geopolitical and social challenges.
Fernando M. Reimers, a professor of the practice of international education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a proponent of grappling with real-world problems in the classroom, and learning from them. His students have worked with Unicef on the difficulties of instruction in conflict zones and developed curricula to help schools and colleges teach about climate change. During the pandemic, he and his students documented how Covid-19 affected education around the globe and studied how teachers and professors adopted solutions that allowed learning to continue.
“That is what connecting issues with real challenges can do for us — it can puncture the ivory tower and build a window into the real world,” Reimers said.
Reimers spoke with Latitudes about the history of academic engagement with the world, why his own discipline can be parochial, and how students are often ahead of their professors in globalizing the curriculum. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Let’s start with the basic premise. When you talk about globalizing the curriculum, how do you define it?
I think one of the goals of universities should be to help students become more cosmopolitan, global citizens. I think is very important for all education institutions to help us feel a sense of belonging in the world. Help us understand the interests that we share with others in the world. Help us develop empathy.
I think that the person who said these best was a writer 2000 years ago in Rome. He was born in Tunis and brought to Rome as a slave to a Roman senator. This guy was so talented that the senator helped him gain an education and gave him his freedom. His name was Terence. In one of his plays, Terence says, I am human and therefore nothing human is foreign to me. If you think about that idea, it’s very profound. You only achieve your humanity when you find it in another person.
In whatever course of study you’re pursuing in a university, there are ways in which you need to develop capacities that help you function in a world that is ever more integrated. In my own field, for the first time maybe in my lifetime, the pandemic gave most educators a sense that we were in this task together and that we had things that we could learn from others across geographic divides. But in normal times, especially in the United States and especially in research universities, schools of education are so parochial in their focus, are so provincial in educating students as if that they are preparing them to exist only within the confines of the United States, without realizing that the world is a huge laboratory from which we can learn.
What makes the university the place to educate global citizens?
I think it’s in the origin. Look at the etymology of the term universities — universal. There is something about this place where people come together from different places in pursuit of truth. And the assumption is that truth doesn’t have a passport. So I think if you look at the histories even of the medieval universities that had primarily a religious purpose, there were people who came from very different places. That’s probably true even for Al-Azhar, one of the earliest universities in the Middle East.
When the Enlightenment begins, the task becomes intentionally to advance truth and the pursuit of truth through science. For example, Marc-Antoine Jullien, who is the first comparative educator, thinks that it would be very useful to document the experiments in education that people are doing in different places. He writes a book about it, and he actually gives a copy of that book to Thomas Jefferson when he’s in France. He wants Jefferson to take these ideas to America, which Jefferson actually does. He begins to document different educational innovations and he begins what we would call today an annual conference, where he brings people who are writing these things to learn from one another.
You used Covid as a lens to talk about comparative and international education. How do topics like Covid and climate change foster global understanding?
Deep challenges motivate our students. I’ve been teaching for four decades, and no question in my mind that the students that we have today are a lot more interested in existential challenges than our students 30 or 40 years ago. They see the world and they see the problems. They see the problem of Ukraine. They see the problem of poverty and inequality. They see the problem of the challenges to democracy. They see the declining situation of human rights around the world. They see the challenges of climate change. They want both to understand them and to be part of the solution. I think the students more than the faculty actually want that. So when you provide in the curriculum an opportunity for them to systematically understand these things they already care about and to find an avenue to make a difference, they engage. If universities provide them the opportunity to build these skills, they are ready.
How should professors begin the work of globalizing their classrooms?
It’s very easy to become a faculty member and to engage in navel gazing without regard for how what you’re doing connects with the world. I continue to be in touch with the communities that have anchored me in real problems. Don’t just become a member of your academic societies, which I do, but also seek the company of people who are outside your field. I joined the Council on Foreign Relations. You might say, what is an educator doing in an organization of people who are interested in foreign relations? I’m learning from those people. They help me ask the question, how can my profession be relevant to political conflict?
How has being grounded outside of the classroom affected your teaching?
What my experience shows is that as you become more engaged, you actually have more resources that you can bring to your classroom. It actually grows the resources that you have to do your work. I wake up every day excited about what I have to do. When you extend yourself into the world, you bring all these connections to the classroom and that only helps you do your work.
