View All Pages

Consider Globalizing Your Curriculum

Image of glass globe in front of a mountain scenePhoto by Alin Andersen Links to an external site. on Unsplash Links to an external site.

These modules were made during my fellowship with Stanford University's Education Partnership for Internationalizing Curriculum (EPIC Links to an external site.). This fellowship brought together an interdisciplinary cohort of community college professors for one year to focus on various projects that focus on "internationalizing core curricula and developing global competencies among community college students". To that end, I have used globalized research examples in each of these modules and would like to give you some examples of globalized research ideas that might appeal to your students:

  • Take an item on the shelf and map where it came from, how many countries has it gone through to get to you and what is the climate impact?
  • Decolonizing fashion history (for example: reframing what fashion means, it used to mean white, european high fashion, now what does it mean?)
  • Fast fashion
  • Pick a company and research its environmental impact
  • Food, take an item that you eat regularly, a simple item like a piece of fruit and look at how it gets to you and its impacts
  • Track where diamonds come from and their global effect on the planet
  • Fatbergs (what are they? Why are they? What can reasonably be done about them from the consumer to the corporation?)
  • Electric Vehicles (positive and negative impacts on the planet)
  • Is organic really better or is it a marketing ploy. Does buying organic have a positive global effect.
  • Is cage free really cage free? What are the positive or negative effects of "cage free"?
  • Research how traditional African dance moves have made there way into 21st century popular western culture.
  • Green Washing
  • International social injustice topics
  • Land acknowledgements, why do we have them and why do many consider them important. Is there a debate about this?
  • Carbon offsets (carbon credits)
  • Femicide around the world
  • Volunteer Tourism
  • Medical Tourism
  • Environmental Racism
  • Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) (this is a regular part of the curriculum in Japan)

Do you have more examples that could be added to the list? Let me know in the feedback form Links to an external site..