BC admins, profs attend national forum

While students returned to their families during spring break, a team of Barnard faculty and administrators trekked to Philadelphia, Pa. and participated in the Global Learning Forum to share strategies concerning the incorporation of global learning into higher education.

The trip aligned with Barnard’s recent slew of initiatives to further connect with the world outside its gates. These plans came to the fore last spring when Hilary Link took on the newly created position of assistant provost and dean for international programs and when Gretchen Young was appointed dean for study abroad in Link’s place. For her part, Barnard President Debora Spar—who is now in China for the opening of Columbia’s office in Beijing and to connect with alumni and prospective students—stressed in her inauguration speech that she prioritized internationalization.

Representing Barnard were Link, Stephanie Pfirman (interim associate dean for grant support and interdisciplinary initiatives), Guobin Yang (associate professor in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures) and Peter Connor (chair of the department of French at Barnard College).

One issue that posed some difficulties was the question of how global citizenship should be defined. “People raised issue about what we mean by global citizenship—who are the global citizens?” Connor said. “We have to understand that there are issues of inequality of gender and class and region and so on and how to incorporate these issues into understanding global citizenship.”

But Yang was struck by the lack of discussion about the role of foreign languages in higher education.

“The discussion about foreign language teaching was really quite missing from the forum,” he said. “Foreign language is supposed to be very important in this process, but there was very little discussion about foreign language learning and translation.” Connor agreed, stating “My concern was that globalization is taking place in English ... That’s a matter of concern to those of us who feel that monolingualism is a limitation and a potential problem to global learning.”

Overall, the team was pleased that institutions nationwide were concerned with the issues commonly discussed among Barnard administrators. Link said that meeting with representatives from other institutions opened the representatives’ eyes to other concrete ways of approaching global learning and “how different institutions are grappling with the idea of ‘how do we prepare our students to be global citizens?’”

According to Connor, the ultimate goal is to ensure that students are prepared for the real world. “We’re all trying to work together to equip students in a world that is very different from the world we came out of. We need to do a lot of catch-up, a lot of reading, a lot of thinking.”