This course is designed as a collaborative project between New York University Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin offering students a unique opportunity for academic and cultural exchange in a classroom that serves as a test lab for global education. The discussion will focus on the current realities and future possibilities of global higher education at the backdrop of its historical and con-ceptual coordinates. A glance at the contemporary higher education landscape reveals ambivalent trends and directions: Excellence and internationalization figure as paradigms that drive universities to secure their stakes in global higher education market. National politics of education further enhance this competition among institutional front-runners by launching excellence intiatives or entering in supranational Bologna-type arrangements to facilitate cross-border academic exchange and knowledge production. As a consequence a range of distinct regional approaches to global education have emerged from national models and practices of education. This course will serve as a site of academic dialog between NYUB and HU students in one classroom by pursuing the following three steps. First, it seeks to familiarize participants with the visions and promises of global education while also paying attention to potential perils involved in global-izing national models of education. Among others, we will address questions such as: How are modes of producing and disseminating knowledge affected when education crosses borders? What does global education demand from student learners and how are globally educated citizens envisioned? How can experiences of knowledge production and education specific to one context be made operable in another? In a second step, the course introduces and compares regional ap-proaches to global education. Different national histories of higher education yield different answers to the questions formulated in the first step. Yet, debates center around (one) global education, not educations. This tension requires scru-tiny and, in a third step, it will ask students to develop an informed and critical position on the stakes of global education.
In order to make use of the unique classroom setting the course will employ inde-pendent (out-of-class) and in-class, individual and collective, analytical and inter-pretive formats. Students will be particularly encouraged to fully embrace the learning impulses resulting from the intercultural encounter between NYUB and Humboldt students. The language we are going to acquire in this course is called global education. By starting to learn its rules and formulas, students are likely to see possible future trajectories of educational development and might even envision their future role in it. The class discussion will culminate in a colloquium (December 13, 2017) at which both NYUB and HU students will present their final projects.
Due to the particular format of the course the number of HU participants is limi-ted to 10 students. The course meets once a week for 3 hours from October 25 to December 13, 2017.
Registration for the course takes place via personal application (including a brief motivational statement of 10 lines) until October 1, 2017.
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