Teaching to Prepare Global-Ready Graduates: Internationalized Course Design

This set of online workshops is designed for instructors from all disciplines who seek to internationalize their courses. Our team has developed a model that focuses on internationalizing course design and on deepening students' global, international, and intercultural learning. By taking part in these webinars, you will become familiar with our model and learn concrete teaching activities that can help your students develop cultural self-awareness, sharpen intercultural communication skills, engage in critical and comparative thinking around international practices, and understand interdependence between local and global issues. 

Objectives 

  • Learn the UMN internationalization-at-home model 
  • Revise your learning goals to prepare global-ready graduates in your discipline 
  • Get familiar with teaching strategies that can deepen international, intercultural, and global learning of your students

Workshops

This package includes twelve online workshops, with a total of 10 contact hours.

Course Design for Preparing Global-Ready Students

How can we design a course that will deepen international, intercultural, and global learning for our students? Join us for this interactive online workshop where you will have the opportunity to expand your teaching strategies to prepare global-ready students. We suggest you focus on a semester-long course of your choosing to explore learning goals, assessment techniques, and teaching strategies that can help your students develop the skills, knowledge, and perspectives necessary to understand the world and work effectively to improve it.

 

Leveraging Interactions for Intercultural Learning

Let’s talk about how we can leverage all interactive classroom activities for deeper content learning and interpersonal and intercultural development. In this webinar, we will share considerations, strategies, scripts, and tools (including a student handout you can adapt) that can help you and your students realize the full potential of classroom interactions. When you facilitate student interactions around content area learning objectives, students are not only engaging with content, they are also engaging with each other. This affords them an additional learning opportunity to practice critical interpersonal and intercultural skills with intention. Naming these skills for students and providing periodic opportunities for reflection are all essential for building students’ global competence. We can’t assume students are aware of or thinking about these competencies. Just as with subject-area learning outcomes, we need to actively and intentionally facilitate this learning.

“I'm so glad to have a concrete framework to give students a way to think about how they engage with each other in class discussions or group work! I hadn't thought about asking them to put this into words, and I'm really glad to have a way to ask them to think about this in addition to the context we cover in my course.” — past workshop participant

Birds of a Feather: Supporting and Leveraging Class and Team Diversity

This is a fun activity that demonstrates our human tendency to gravitate to the familiar—people who look, think, and act like us, as well as the limitations of this tendency. We observe this in our classrooms all the time. Students self-segregate into their same social or cultural groups, and in doing so miss out on valuable opportunities to grow their networks, broaden their perspectives, and practice intercultural skills needed in our interconnected world.

Creating a “Global Village” in Your Classrooms

This 30-minute webinar activity is designed to help you turn your class into a Global Village, where students examine how people in different countries are affected by global issues and trends and deepen their international and intercultural learning. Whether it is for a single assignment, module, or full semester, the Global Village activity asks students to practice representing a point of view from a different country or culture. You will learn about the original activity and its adaptations to different disciplines.

Cultural Communication Styles

This 30-minute webinar is designed to help you consider the role of cultural communication styles in your classroom, so you can help your students deepen their intercultural communication skills. During the webinar, we will review high-context and low-context communication styles used in different cultures and countries and provide you with an opportunity to reflect on your own communication style. You will also experience a teaching activity that you can do with your students on cultural communication styles.

Cultural Self-Awareness in Teaching

This one-hour webinar is designed to help you reflect on your cultural identity in teaching. You will have an opportunity to think about how the culture(s) you grew up in and lived in for an extended period of time influence your teaching. We will also discuss several strategies on how you can effectively share your intercultural experiences and lessons learned with your students and what you can do to help your students realize that their culture(s) have influenced their perspectives on self, others, and the world.

Cultural Values Collage

This 30-minute webinar will introduce you to the Cultural Values Collage activity, which can be implemented in a single class session or woven throughout the semester. In this activity, students reflect on how their own culture shaped their values and beliefs and deepen their intercultural learning. You will learn about the original activity and its adaptations to different class sizes and teaching formats.

Global Learning: Changing Misconceptions About the World

This 30-minute webinar will introduce you to several teaching activities designed to help your students change common misconceptions about the world and think more critically about statistical data on global tendencies. This webinar is based on the book by Hans Rosling “Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think.” During the webinar, you will be introduced to Rosling's most important research findings, experience one of the teaching activities based on the book, and learn about other activities you can try in your class.

Jigsaw: A Collaborative Learning Activity

One challenge that many instructors face is a concern about fitting in all the required course content while also engaging students in active learning. A jigsaw activity is a way to do both by partially shifting the onus of teaching content onto the students. Come experience the Jigsaw activity with your colleagues, and consider/discuss course content that lends itself to the jigsaw approach.

Navigating the Unfamiliar: A Perspective-Taking Framework

In this session, you will learn about and experience an activity called Describe, Analyze, Evaluate (DAE). The DAE is a framework for practicing one’s ability to ‘frame-shift," or to understand a situation from another’s point of view. This involves cultivating a critical skill-set and attitudes for interacting effectively across differences. Nam and Condon (2010) explain, this “exercise is intended to foster self-awareness of personal and cultural assumptions, promote the appreciation of cognitive complexity, and the importance of frame-shifting when encountering the unfamiliar” (p. 81). The DAE can be used daily in a variety of ways by students and faculty alike—join us to learn how! This webinar references the following article: Kyoung-Ah Nam, John Condon. The DIE is cast: The continuing evolution of intercultural communication’s favorite classroom exercise. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 34 (2010), 81–87.

UN Sustainable Development Goals: Scenarios for Global Learning

This 30-minute webinar is designed to help you integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals into your courses. Integrating the goals can help your students build awareness of global issues and learn about concrete steps they could take to address them on both global and local levels. We will review several methods for and examples of integrating the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals that address various global challenges, including poverty, inequality, climate change, peace, and justice that you can include in your classroom discussions.

What’s in a Name?

Learning and using students’ names, and encouraging students to do the same with each other, is essential for building community in your class. There are many creative ways to encourage students to learn and use names. In this 30-minute session, we will experience two simple activities and discuss others.