Community Engagement

LOCAL INITIATIVES

CSIU is working together with The Partnership for Community Health in providing cultural competency instruction. Professor Cristina Haedo is the CSIU liaison. In the past, Cristina has worked with the Bergen Record newspaper on a special program on diversity, which received national recognition.

Professor Rich Kuiters is creating a course on Cultural Competency for Police, which he will make available to police throughout Bergen County. A seasoned professional in Criminal Justice, Rich combines real-life experience and academic depth in his work.

The Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation is a new resource at BCC that was founded to promote intercultural understanding as our global community works toward the acquisition of global peace and justice. Please see the center's web site for specific programming for the current semester.

The Literary Arts Series encourages intercultural understanding and literacy by promoting the reading of a chosen author's work (novel, memoir, play, poetry) each year. Please see the LAS web site for specific programming for the current semester or click the "Literary Arts Series" link on the CSIU home page.

GLOBAL INITIATIVES

Professor Charles Bordogna has been offering a traveling exhibition on Understanding Africa and its Art for several years. The exhibit most recently appeared in Fort Lee High School (February 2008) and in Hackensack High School (March 2008). Charles was the curator of the African Art Museum of the SMA in Tenafly for fifteen years and has written several texts on African art and culture. He has lectured extensively on the subject at numerous venues in Northern New Jersey for the past two decades.

CSIU is commited to implementing initiatives geared toward achieving the UN's Millenium Development Goals. For the past year, CSIU hasbeen 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 MDG's.

www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

*Please scroll down for a complete description of the MDG project and mission.

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 BergenCommunity 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 SustainableEnvironment, 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.