Working Group on Ethical Community Engagement in Global Learning

Who we are:

The IUI Working Group on Ethical Community Engagement in Global Learning is a coalition committed to ensuring that global learning experiences are safe and mutually beneficial for all stakeholders. Our members include students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community organizations.

  • Global Learning is

    Our work draws on the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) definition of global learning:

    Global learning is a critical analysis of and enegagement with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies (such as natural, physical, social, cultural, economic, and political) and their implications for people's lives and the earth's sustainability.

    Through global learning, students should:
    1) become informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity across the spectrum of differences,
    2) seek to understand how their actions affect both local and global communities, and
    3) address the world's most pressing and enduring issues collaboratively and equitably.

  • What We Do

     The Working Group:

    • collects and shares resources
      • to build awareness of issues impacting host communities that host university students and
      • to increase capacity for ethical engagement in global community-based learning programs
    • sponsors opportunities for co-learning and inquiry related to ethical community engagement and culturally responsive teaching
    • works to institutionalize ethical considerations into university and campus policies and practices
      • advocates for policies that support planning and implementation of global community-based and community-engaged learning experiences aligned with our principles of ethical engagement
      • identifies and implements opportunities to incorporate ethical considerations into the business practices surrounding global learning experiences
    • works to enhance IUI's capacity to support global and civic learning outcomes amoung undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, including but not limited to alignment with the IUI+ Profiles of Learning and the Principles of Graduate and Professional Learning. 

  • The Role of Intentional Design in Ethical Community Engagement

    When intentionally designed, all global learning experiences create opportunities for meaningful interactions with host communities. However, not all programs engage host communities to the same degree or in the same manner. For example, some students will be embedded into the local community through home stays, service projects, or community based research having extended interactions with host community members. In contrast, other students may spend the majority of their time abroad with students and faculty from their home campuses.

    Global learning programs also vary in terms of the attention they give to their impact on host communities or the degree to which they engage students in examining their own motivations for global community engagement and their place within global asymmetries of power. Our group is interested in ensuring that opportunities for student learning to do not create unintended negative consequences for host communities.

Want to learn more or join the working group?

Contact Stephanie Leslie, Office of International Affairs,  or Dr. Mary Price, Center for Service and Learning, or sign up for the working group listserv below.