The Glocal Curriculum

In the 21st century, higher education faces a number of challenges: We need to prepare students for the complexities of a highly interconnected world so that they can act as responsible citizens within a global society as change agents. Transnational collaboration projects offer unique opportunities for their education. They prepare students to work towards social change across cultural and geographical boundaries and to move beyond the distinction between global and local. Merging global and local means merging local learning, engagement, and impact with global communication, collaboration, and knowledge production. The mix of global and local– glocal– characterizes our approach to transnational collaboration and our teaching and learning model. We introduce a glocal curriculum that aims to foster education in fields as diverse as higher education for sustainable development, e.g. global health, the humanities, philosophy. The glocal curriculum is based on experiences from the “Global Classroom: Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century”, a teaching and research project of Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany) and Arizona State University (USA). In this Handbook we present resources and reflections that we developed to support the education of change agents who are willing to critically and creatively contribute to sustainability transformations. The book covers three different stages, from (i) envisioning the glocal curriculum and its design to (ii) implementing and evaluating the glocal curriculum and program, to (iii) designing the glocal teaching-learning environment. Using a workshop approach, the Handbook provides valuable guidance for strategic university development, curriculum and program developers, quality managers, teachers and instructors who are interested in innovative approaches that allow the development of critical and transformative mindsets, knowledge, and skills in order to address the sustainability problems of the 21st century.