Giving students a holistic view – how we’re both interdependent and integrated is essential both for their futures and their ability to positively impact the world.
Ellen Schlosser is the Foundation Director of Global Connect and the Curriculum Development Advisor of the GlobalScope Curriculum Guides at University California Irvine.
Talking points
Working on something with meaning beyond the campus
Learning from experience fundamental to developing leaders and developing activism
Bringing social sciences to high school…information about the 21 Century world.
Telling stories that students could both academically and personally invest in.
Giving students a holistic view – how we’re both interdependent and integrated is essential both for their futures and their ability to positively impact the world.
You are not only a member of your local community, you are one of the seven billion people who inherit and are charged with caring for the earth.
We do need to challenge the American Dream. We can show inequality in America.
When things come close to home, they are much more easily understood.
The Project of Change is our call to action book…we help them to set up their own NGOs to address the Millennium Development Goals…it is really a recipe for action.
Agent of Change is one of our lessons.
Science is being shared as a global commodity
We have to change thought in order to change practice, to improve the environment
We’ve done such a good job of marketing science and social science separately, we’ve forgotten how to integrate the disciplines
We need the science…but to activate – to help a country in need, you need the humanities, you need the social sciences to help develop the narrative, to have a real impact, to really change the way we look at the world. It needs to be both.
(Success?) Being recognised as a viable course, acceptable, and building the bridge can open it the pathway for other projects
I would like to write a biographical sketch of what the students involved in this project have gone on to achieve…it’s amazing what they have done.
This programme honours serious students, but with communication skills to bring it to the high school classroom.
(Activist?) A late blooming activist? We have to start early on. Being of service to others should be taught in the home and carried through in the schools.
(Motivation?) Education – how your life can be transformed through school. When you write something that makes sense to someone else, enlightens someone, this is a great gift that I had no idea I would be academic. So I want to hold the light out for everyone.
(Challenges?) I would like to use my energies to help share this material
(Miracle?) I would love schools across the world to tell their students that they live beyond their immediate surroundings. And to enlighten them about others. You can’t keep your children hidden from the realities of the world, they’ll never function if you do. Enlighten the kids through global studies, and 21st Century – let’s not teach what was taught in 1955 – it’s not going to work.
(Advice?) having a formal education is vital to opening so many doors in life, but it is the curiosity and creativity that we each possess that can lead all us to new solutions. Remember to put yourself in the centre of what you are learning.
This Sustainable Lens is from a series of conversations at University California Irvine in June 2015. Sam’s visit was supported by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, and coincided with Limits 2015.