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Faculty Resources
CSIU sponsors and encourages intercultural initiatives in the classroom. The classes at Bergen are characterized by a diverse student body. Our goals are twofold: to increase communication and empathy among the students and to encourage faculty to identify curricular material that enhances intercultural understanding. Bergen Community College is emerging as a major player in supporting intercultural understanding in pluralistic Northern New Jersey. CSIU is dedicated to creating an educational learning environment approriate for a multicultural society.
Given the diversity of the student body, CSIU realizes that there are multiple ways that students view the world, both emotionally and intellectually. A "one shoe fits all" type of education is no longer appropriate or desirable. The diverse cultural identities of students at Bergen (coming from 140+ countries) require that we better clarify the issues with which they struggle as they try to participate in remarkable heterogeneous classes. How does the traditional teaching methodology and pedagogy impact such classes? Diversity today is more than a mere recognition of minorities; it requires creating a climate that welcomes heterogeneity.
CSIU seeks to assist professors as they work with issues of diversity in their classrooms.
CSIU encourages faculty to examine their curriculum to identify what diverse traditions might justify inclusion.
CSIU encourages faculty to explore research opportunities, seeing the environment on campus as a living laboratory for scholarly inquiry.
FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
The Center works with individual faculty providing stipends for projects that result in pedagogical approaches which develop intercultural understanding between and among students. Stipends depend upon the scope of the initiatives. Faculty may receive funding for the development of specific modules or units that have application not only in their own classes but also in those of their colleagues. Such modules may be posted on this website for the benefit of all faculty.
Initiatives such as developing a specific course in cultural competency can receive a larger stipend.
ONGOING RESEARCH
The CSIU Video Project is an effort to document and describe the exciting intercultural environment on campus. CSIU encourages the assessment of all of its sponsored initiatives to empirically validate what is effective.
TEACHING/LEARNING RESOURCES
A major initiative of CSIU is to support the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015). The goals are:
To eradicate extreme poverty
To provide universal primary school education
To work to end gender inequality
To reduce child mortality and improve children's health
To improve maternal health care
To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases
To promote environmental sustainability
To build global partnerships
Using the Millennium Development Goals to Build Intercultural Understanding
How can we involve our students intellectually and emotionally in the greatest issues of the day? How can we stoke the embers of idealism that lay smoldering within their hearts? We have before us a remarkable opportunity - the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. In the year 2000, leaders from over 180 nations in the world signed on to a vision – a vision that said extreme poverty is not inevitable, that world hunger is not beyond our control, and that diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis need not take millions of more lives. This vision says that universal primary education is not only possible but a birthright of being born, that gender need not be destiny for women, and that the environment can be redeemed from pollution. This vision called for new partnerships with developing countries and freedom from the cynicism of the failed foreign aid programs of the past. This vision became known as the MDGs or the Millennium Development Goals, and the countries of the developed world have given themselves fifteen years to accomplish these ambitious tasks. These eight Goals transcend racial, religious, ethnic, or political barriers. They focus on the commonness of our humanity and on improving the human condition.
At Bergen Community College, the MDGs were adopted by the College’s Center for the Study of Intercultural Understanding in 2007. The Center, or CSIU as it is known, has been in existence since 2002. Its goal is to create “an inclusive and robust intercultural learning environment.” To further this mission, CSIU engages the College in three areas – Curriculum and Teaching, Co-curricular Programming, and Community Engagement. In particular, CSIU works to encourages tolerance for and appreciation of diversity, especially considering that Bergen has students from 140 countries in attendance. Of the many initiatives CSIU currently is involved with, none is more exciting than working with faculty who are using the Millennium Development Goals in their classrooms.
The MDGs can be a key instrument in developing intercultural understanding on campus and focusing students on the global issues of our planet. They bring out students from their own, somewhat insular lives, into an encounter with the major challenges facing the world, such as poverty in world cities, unclean water, and the need for good governance in emerging states. Presently, students in several English Composition Two classes are doing their research papers on the lives of the slum dwellers in mega-cities of the world. These students, many of whom are international students, are exploring what life is like for the billion people on the planet who live in slum settlements, like Kibera in Nairobi where 600,000 people live on 300 acres without electricity, sewage, sanitation disposal, quality health care, police protection, employment opportunity, and education. Today, more than 1/6 of all humanity lives in makeshift informal settlements with no legal claim or protection to their dwellings. Such settlements are characterized by bribery, drugs, prostitution, impure water, no plumbing, and the presents of HIV/AIDS. Students are researching these settlements which exist in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Seoul, Mumbai, Moscow, and in dozens of other urban areas. They are describing the living conditions, identifying the challenges, studying the programs that currently exist to improve conditions, and arguing for the programs that would best meet the needs.
In the past, to prepare students with sufficient background for such research would have been daunting. Today, excellent resources are available through the United Nations’ websites. These include their MDG site, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the UN Development Fund for Women. Add to these sites the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and World Atlas and you have substantial resources that can quickly inform even the most inexperienced of students. In addition, students can read Dispossessed by Mark Kramer, a text which describes the author’s travels and personal connections with people living in informal urban settlements in Manila, Cairo, Nairobi, Mexico City, and Bangkok.
For the past year, CSIU has been encouraging BCC faculty to explore integration of the MDG units into their classes. We are interested in creating pedagogical applications that have instructional usefulness. CSIU works with faculty who build into their courses units on the MDGs. For example, two of our Biology professors, Barbara Downes Davis and Mary Flannery, have been applying the MDGs with Service Learning as tools in Microbiology. To engage students, they have developed units on Environmental Sustainability and the world water pollution crisis, HIV/AIDS, and Tuberculosis. Rooted in the classroom, Davis and Flannery have developed co-curricular programs that have drawn widespread campus attention. For example, in April, 2008, they brought Dr. Lee Reichman, head of the Global Tuberculosis Institute at UMDNJ to speak. Instead of limiting the presentation to Allied Health students, we opened the presentation to all students and had an overflowing attendance. Lectures are scheduled during class periods, which helps faculty to bring their students. Faculty across disciplines work together to increase the learning potential of the program. For example, more than 300 students were present for Dr. Reichman’s presentation. To measure the impact, Davis and Flannery have also surveyed students to assess the learning impact of their efforts. Surveys have revealed positive results in all categories. The MDGs have stimulated student interest in course material and have enlarged their understanding of the material. Davis and Flannery have concluded that the MDGs provide “an excellent framework to study microbiology in the context of global problems….”
The Millennium Development Goals can be explored through other disciplines as well. These include International Business and Economics (with a focus on poverty and the World Bank’s loans to developing countries and microloans), Oral Communication (focusing on the operation of NGOs and situations such as the refugees in Darfur), English Composition (focusing on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger in the slums of the world), Journalism, Nursing and Allied Health (focusing on combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis and other diseases), Political Science (focusing on good governance and corruption), and Women’s Studies (focusing on gender inequality).
The MDGs can be the essential core of developing Global education. Since, they come from the United Nations, they can lead to study of the UN itself as an institution. At BCC this has led to student trips to the UN and to participation at student conferences held there, such as the ATHGO conference (The Attempt to Harness Global Organization).
If you are interested in promoting student involvement, the MDGs are excellent in inspiring commitment and purpose, especially in individuals who make lack a sense of direction or purpose. About two years ago, CSIU sponsored a presentation of Africa that dealt with health and poverty. In reading the responses of the students, I was especially impressed by one student who said that he now had a direction. He wanted to join an NGO and work for a period of his life in Africa.
In examining the MDGs, we also look at the role of the United States government and other countries in providing aid. Students come to see the limitations of government in reducing global problems and eventually realize the importance of NGOs in combating the world’s challenges. A favorite story comes from the Wall Street Journal, telling of a former Miss Playmate who now is working in Haiti developing schools and advocating for orphanages. The transformation of this individual and the achievements of her life are inspiring to my students. The message: one person can make a difference.
Because the MDGs are interrelated they encourage inter-disciplinary study and break down the silos of separate courses, encouraging students to make connections and see interrelationships. As they look into the MDGs, students see who is being affected by what, such as the effects of war on the civic population. Students see the connection between rising prices for commodities and the farming for biofuels. They explore the fragility of those poor who live from week to week with no savings, and they learn to avoid superficial answers.
Most dramatic is the study of comparison data between life in a developing country and life in the United States. Glaring differences appear when we look at issues such as life-expectancy, education, literacy, and per-capita income. Identifying solutions to endemic problems is also challenging. Students learn the futility of just throwing money at a problem without accountability and proper checks and balances.
One of the benefits of studying the MDGs is that costly textbooks can be avoided since much information can be obtained online. Students work with electronic databases such as Lexis-Nexus and Proquest. Then learn the evaluation the types of articles they find in academic search engines as opposed to Google. Students judge the merits of articles which they find and present them in class. Students also learn to carefully take notes and to paraphrase.
Changing a curriculum in college is very difficult and adding a new course to a host of required classes is also not feasible. The MDGs enable teachers to focus on themes that emerge naturally from the content of a course. Issues such as racial inequality, health care, the rich and the poor, sustainable development, and human rights can be dramatically enhanced by the MDGs.
The Center for the Study of Intercultural Understanding has also sponsored workshops and symposia on the MDGs. These include programs on Developing a Sustainable Environment, Water Pollution and Human Health, Malaria and its Eradication, and Genocide and Darfur. CSIU also sponsored a photographic-narrative art exhibition entitled Faces of Diversity and another on Darfur combining poetry and posters.
The results of the infusion of the MDGs into the core curriculum is that our students are developing as informed global citizens more prepared to face the challenges of globalization in their lifetime. Students are learning to be participatory citizens for whom global concern and social involvement is a natural development. The Millennium Development Goals can awaken the latent idealism of our students and give them a direction and purpose for their own lives. Well presented information of the MDGs engenders personal transformation.
A major resource for faculty who wish to teach the Millennium Development Goals is the website www.bergen.edu/foa. This website, entitled Focus on Africa, provides information on how the MDGs are affecting the African continent. It also includes numerous website links for additional research. An additional source is the united Nations: www.un.org/millenniumdevelopmentgoals/
CO-CURRICULAR EVENTS
In the fall of 2008, CSIU will be a sponsor of the poet Martin Espada, who will be coming to the college to give a presentation and to work with students. Internationally acclaimed poet and essayist martin Espada will read from his new, award-winning poetry collection, The Republic of Poetry, On Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 6 p.m. in the Anna maria Ciccone Theatre on the paramus campus of the college.
Raised in brooklyn, New York, Espada recalls in his poetry his Latino and Puerto Rican heritage through tales of struggle and resistance. Among the many honors he has received, Espada was given the American Book Award for his collection Imagine the Angels of Bread in 1996. Following the reading, Espada will sign copies of his new collection as we as his 2002 collection Alabanza. For more information, contact Professor Stacey Balkan at sbalkan@bergen.edu.
CSIU supports the Heritage Week events planned by the Office of Student Life. To encourage faculty application of these events in their teaching, CSIU offers stipends for initiatives that link co-curricular events and classroom instruction. Faculty are encouraged to plan ways to incorporate the event or artist with classroom instruction. They are also encouraged to have their classes attend the events to enhance the goals of the currciulum and courses. CSIU is eager to brainstorm with professors to explore how co-curricular events can complement their instruction. This would involve setting specific learning objectives and measuring the results. CSIU also encourages collaborative efforts among professors to facilitate the integration of activities into classes to enrich instruction.
CSIU Sponsored Seminar: Cosmopolitanism & Globalization
This series of six seminar discussions will entertain questions of pedagogy, diversity, and cultural theory that reflect the current global field in which academia resides. The seminar seeks to interrogate the usefulness of cosmopolitanism as a concept for understanding and contributing to our current historical, cultural, and political moment. Using philosophies of cosmopolitanism in the context of higher education, we will focus specifically on the classroom as the most cosmopolitan of places today.
There will be: (1) Stipends for participants (tenure track first priority); (2) Three meetings a semester, and (3) Possible publication. For more information contact Dr. Diane Krumrey x3630 or Dr. Jessica datema x7039.
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