Developing Global Studies Across the Curriculum at CA Community Colleges

The 2017 EPIC fellows

How is your problem solving or decision-making influenced by culture in this ever-globalizing world? This is a question that Susan Thomas, who teaches psychology at De Anza College, asked her students during the social behavior unit of general psychology. “Each of us has a unique perspective and style when it comes to interacting with our world and the people in it,” Thomas observed. This perspective is influenced by several factors, she explained, including culture.

Thomas was one of 10 community college faculty who participated in a year-long fellowship through Stanford Global Studies’ Education Partnership to Internationalize Curricula (EPIC). The community college fellows worked closely with Stanford partners—The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education and Lacuna, an online annotation platform—on a variety of innovative projects that spanned disciplines, from history and economics to poetry and language courses.

“Global issues affect our daily lives—through travel, workplaces, climate change, income inequality—are we preparing citizens for these challenges?” Asked Judith Hunt, an Associate Professor at the College of San Mateo, where a new global studies associate’s degree program was recently approved. As part of her fellowship project aimed at teaching for global competencies, Hunt created a thematically driven world history course to replace the standard western civilization that is traditionally taught either temporally or regionally.

Danni Redding Lapuz, the International Education Program Manager at the College of San Mateo, created a campus-wide global event series for her fellowship project. “My hope,” she said, “is that students will gain cultural competency and a greater understanding and awareness of global issues, ultimately preparing them to address the problems that we face in our world.”

The fellowship culminated in a symposium in May, where the fellows presented their projects to more than 80 California community college faculty and administrators. At the conference, Stanford Global Studies Director Jeremy M. Weinstein emphasized the importance of incorporating global issues into teaching. “Students need to understand contemporary issues,” he said. “They need to engage as citizens of the societies in which they live.”

Weinstein pointed to the issue of migration as an example: “An issue like migration is one that has a profound local context, that our students will be confronting as they think about the politics of everyday life where they live,” he explained. “Using that as a lens to open up bigger questions about other contexts, about drivers, about the international system and how it’s structured. That’s why global studies is needed.”

Throughout the conference, participants discussed the opportunities and challenges of internationalizing their curricula at community colleges, such as collaborating across academic departments, and a decrease in federal funding for such programs.

The challenges of incorporating global studies across the curriculum are not unique to community colleges, explained Weinstein, who has been thinking about the challenges of internationalizing the curriculum at Stanford. “There is a real need for innovation,” he said, “to show how an understanding of these global issues is relevant for training in all fields.”

View the 2017 EPIC projects, Professor Weinstein’s presentation, and related resources online.

The Education Partnership to Internationalize Curriculum fellowship program is supported by the U.S. Department of Education through Title VI of the Higher Education Act. This grant was awarded to the Stanford centers for East Asian studies, Latin American studies, and Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies.