A hands-on experience from the Office of Curriculum Internationalization is helping faculty and instructors deepen their students’ international, intercultural, and global learning.

During the Internationalizing Course Design Summer Institute, instructors learned about effective course design, discovered strategies and activities to use in the classroom, and also reflected on how their own culture affects their teaching.

While the institute offered theoretical frameworks for internationalization, the focus was on providing participants with practical ways to bring global and intercultural perspectives into the classroom.

“By the end of the institute, they were able to understand not just how internationalization works, but they were able to choose one learning objective for their course, choose specific teaching activities, and choose specific assessments to understand if the goal would be met,” said facilitator Yuliya Kartoshkina, program director for Internationalizing Course Design at the University of Minnesota.

Dongwook Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in political science who focuses on international relations, worked on designing an Introduction to Global Politics course, like the one he has been a teaching assistant for several times at the University of Minnesota.

“Although our field is called international relations, it is quite U.S.-centric,” Kim said. “Internationalizing the curriculum is important for people in the U.S. to understand world politics.”

The learning objective he created states that a global-ready student should know foundational concepts like power, nation, state, and identity, as well as major issues and events in global society such as migration, climate change, and nuclear weapons. But Kim said being global-ready goes beyond knowing the facts: Students should also be able to reflect on their own point of view in relation to their cultural and socioeconomic background, and be able to communicate with people that have different backgrounds and experiences.

Kim plans to use the “Global Village” teaching activity he experienced in the institute, where each student creates a persona of someone from another country. Based on their fictional self’s occupation, location, family, and more, students write response papers about how the global phenomena covered in class affect them.

Learning more about how to design a course was key for Kim as a graduate student.

“There are not many programs in the University that prepare you for teaching,” he said.

This was the first year the Summer Institute was offered, and the facilitators already have plans for an expanded version in 2025.

“It’s really exciting to have this intensive in-person event,” said Kartoshkina. “It’s exciting having all these people working together, inspired by one another, and being challenged by one another—in good ways.”