Cosmopolitan Learning For A Global Era

Ensuring that higher education students are fully prepared for lives as global citizens is a pressing concern in the contemporary world. This book draws on insights from cosmopolitan thought to identify how people from different backgrounds can find common ground. By applying cosmopolitan insights to higher education practice, Sarah Richardson charts how students can be given the opportunity to experience a truly international education, which emphasises deep cultural exchange rather than mere transactional contact. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the author uses empirical evidence to show that simply studying alongside those different to themselves or studying overseas are inadequate in preparing students to lead the diverse societies of tomorrow. Instead, the book calls for a coherent approach to higher education that properly prepares students to lead global lives. Chapters highlight a number of key aspects of higher education practice, from curriculum to pedagogy, to educator skills to assessment, and demonstrate how these can be reconsidered to give students the opportunity to gain cosmopolitan attributes during their higher education. Cosmopolitan Learning for a Global Era will be of great interest to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students, with a particular focus on cosmopolitan thought, international education and higher education more broadly, as well as university educators and leaders across a wide range of disciplinary areas.

Ensuring that higher education students are fully prepared for lives as global citizens is a pressing concern in the contemporary world. This book draws on insights from cosmopolitan thought to identify how people from different backgrounds can find common ground. By applying cosmopolitan insights to higher education practice, Sarah Richardson charts how students can be given the opportunity to experience a truly international education, which emphasises deep cultural exchange rather than mere transactional contact. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the author uses empirical evidence to show that simply studying alongside those different to themselves or studying overseas are inadequate in preparing students to lead the diverse societies of tomorrow. Instead, the book calls for a coherent approach to higher education that properly prepares students to lead global lives. Chapters highlight a number of key aspects of higher education practice, from curriculum to pedagogy, to educator skills to assessment, and demonstrate how these can be reconsidered to give students the opportunity to gain cosmopolitan attributes during their higher education. Cosmopolitan Learning for a Global Era will be of great interest to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students, with a particular focus on cosmopolitan thought, international education and higher education more broadly, as well as university educators and leaders across a wide range of disciplinary areas.

This book explores what academic leadership in higher education might mean in the cosmopolitan and increasingly globalised 21st century through individual academics' narrative accounts drawn from a range of international contexts. The book shows that academic leadership is key to an individual's development and that it could mean different things in different settings as academics operate across the levels of professional practice, institutional organisation, sector-wide systems and international networks. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitan perspectives on academic leadership which are developed from the particularities of local and everyday situated experience. Part I of the book explores key theoretical perspectives; Part II provides first-hand accounts from the contributors of their own development as academic leaders; and Part III discusses some of the implications for those with responsibility for academic development and for all those concerned with developing the qualities necessary for leadership practices.

"In Learning in the Global Era, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco has integrated a rich harvest of practical wisdom with cutting-edge research in cognitive theory to produce an indispensable handbook for all who are grappling with the challenges of education in our rapidly changing world. With their interdisciplinary approach and their attention to cultural diversity, the essays are a treasure trove of insights and constructive approaches to which educators and policy-makers will return again and again."—Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard University; President, Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences "Neither developed nor developing nations have begun to prepare young people for the demands of the global economy; nor does schooling anywhere adequately respond to the massive migration of families whose home languages, cultures, and social structures differ from those in the new host nation. Besides providing vivid and rigorous accounts of the shifting population patterns, employment markets, and cultural and political change, this fascinating book presents promising educational innovations that put student engagement and the global context for learning at the center. No other book so effectively joins emerging research on cognition and learning with the political and economic challenges of globalization."—Martha Minow, Harvard Law School, and co-editor of Engaging Cultural Differences "Learning in the Global Era is a masterful book. Each of the essays, exquisitely arranged and coordinated by the editor, is a memorable example of rigorous interdisciplinary analysis and insight into emerging global issues. The range of concerns—from nurturing a global consciousness and appreciating the simultaneous cultural patterns that children develop in global cities, often through their own migration, to the effects of gender-specific dilemmas in global classrooms-makes this book a compendium for more than understanding a world which challenges many traditional assumptions. But reading it does more; it makes us mindful of the difficulty and also of the necessary creativity involved in learning and teaching today. I am grateful for its lessons and the readers will be, too."—Doris Sommer, Harvard University "Globalization is transforming entire economies and cultures, but schools and schooling have not kept pace. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco has assembled a set of thoughtful and incisive essays by international experts that show how globalization makes it imperative to rethink and reform the education of children in every part of the planet. Educating citizens in the advanced countries to understand global society and cultural differences, increasing access to education in the developing world while teaching new skills, finding ways to help immigrants adapt and succeed in their new surroundings—all these essential tasks are addressed in this important book."—John H. Coatsworth, Columbia University "How should this generation of youth, the largest ever in human history, be educated? How do we make sure all youth have access to quality education? What cognitive skills, interpersonal sensibilities, and ethical norms should be nourished in youth to live and thrive in our global world? Learning in the Global Era addresses these and other questions with both scholarly rigor and humane concern. It brings together leading international scholars— including anthropologists, cognitive scientists, economists, education scholars, linguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists with extensive research experience in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, to examine the education of youth for the 21st Century. It is a work that breaks new ground by locating learning and youth engagement in the ever more complex economic, social, and cultural realities that define the world's global cities."—Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, and High Commissioner for Human Rights

Based on a qualitative meta-analysis of data from five studies conducted with secondary and college students, this book explores the multiple ways in which sources of cosmopolitan agency exist in their lives. Grounded in a framework of critical cosmopolitanism, this book examines how students’ identities develop in new contexts and how their perceptions of themselves change. With a focus on native-born, international, immigrant, and refugee students, Oikonomidoy discusses the ways in which students express their cosmopolitan orientations and interact in cross-cultural settings, and offers insights for scholars and teacher educators.

This book approaches notions of Being, Interculturality and New Knowledge Systems, through a team of expert contributors who share their evidence-based knowledge. It attempts to address the missing connections between what is recognised as 'global knowledge' and the underrepresented knowledges that are constructed across higher education.

This edited research volume explores the development of what can be described as the ‘critical turn’ in intercultural communication pedagogy, with a particular focus on modern/foreign language education. The main aim is to trace the realisations of this critical turn against a background of unequal power relations, and to illuminate the role that radical culture educators can play in the making of a more democratic and egalitarian social order. The volume takes as a starting point the idea that criticality draws on a number of intellectual traditions, which do not always focus on social and political critique, and argues that because ideological hegemony impacts on the meanings that people create and share, intercultural communication pedagogy ought to locate itself within wider socio-political contexts. With reference points drawn from critical and transnational social theory, critical pedagogy and intercultural theory, contributors to this volume provide readers with powerful ways that show how this can be achieved, and together assess the impact that their understanding of criticality can make on modern/foreign language education. The volume is divided into three major parts, namely: ‘theorising critically’, ‘researching critically’ and ‘teaching critically’.

This edited volume argues for positioning students at the centre of higher education, drawing from the concepts of student agency and self-formation. The volume highlights that higher education has broader and more important purposes than what a neoliberal human capital approach would suggest, and explores how students exercise their agency and realise self-formation as inherently connected concepts throughout university education. With disciplinary, cultural, and contextual diversity, this volume will provide international perspectives to readers interested in higher education theories, policies, and practices.