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FACET Leadership Summer Institute
On Global Citizenship
Friday May 19, 2006
Tri-State University
1 University Ave.
Angola, IN
Best Hall 229
8:30am – 3pm
EVENT OVERVIEW
The purpose of the one-day institute was to draw together a variety of people to consider Global Citizenship, especially as it affects university-level students, teachers, and administrators. Our initial concerns were focused on these questions.
- What does democratic citizenship mean in a world context?
- How does globalization affect our understandings of this concept?
- How do “local’ ideas about citizenship support or conflict with the idea of ‘global citizenship’?
- What roles do education systems and universities, in particular, play in fostering democratic citizenship?
- How can we best prepare ourselves and others to be effective members of an increasingly interconnected world?
The conference began with a live, interactive video conference linking participants in Indiana with counterparts in Europe and Africa. Joining educators, students, and at least one member of the general public in Indiana were Doug Bourn from Development Education Associates, London, UK; Richard Obura, students, and colleagues from Uganda Management Institute, Kampala, Uganda; and Phil Butterfield, Emilija Zlatskovska, students, and colleagues from South East European University, Macedonia.
The discussion was spirited and very revealing of significant differences in the views of global citizenship people in these different locals had. The Macedonian contingent represented a predominately Albanian university eager for EU recognition of Macedonia, making it a minority within a small country, in the middle of an ethnically and culturally very diverse region of the world. The Uganda contingent likewise presented a complex set of cultural and linguistic identifications, coupled with the aftereffects of colonialization. These fundamentally different starting places were in stark contrast to the often vague sense of being “American” that the US contingent exemplified. So even before we can agree on the characteristics of good global citizens, we have to recognize that we might be viewing the “same” goals from rather different philosophical and cultural perspectives.
In the afternoon, the Indiana group broke up into several small discussion sections focused on disciplinary thinking about globalization, personal and campus action plans, and a reconsideration of the key themes of the conference in light of what had been discussed throughout the day. The evaluations of the Indiana participants were all supportive of the enterprise and enthusiastic about continuing the work that was begun during the conference.
EVENT RESOURCES
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