Are you intrigued by the opportunity to share curriculum and assignment ideas with colleagues from other disciplines who are also interested in internationalized teaching? Would you like to explore the meanings of and challenges to “internationalizing” and “decolonizing” our university? Then join the Fall 2022 Internationalizing and Decolonizing the Curriculum Faculty Seminar, hosted by the Fries Center for Global Studies (FCGS).
Leask (2015) argues that an internationalized curriculum will: “Purposefully develop students’ international and intercultural perspectives” and “Move beyond traditional boundaries and dominant paradigms and prepare students to deal with uncertainty.” At the same time, internationalization can result in unintended outcomes, such as the hegemony of the English language or the perpetuation of harm and inequities. For this reason, the FCGS takes a decolonizing approach to internationalizing the curriculum. We invite faculty members whose courses and teaching are already internationalized in traditional ways to explore their course content, methods, and theoretical frameworks through the lens of this decolonizing approach, and we invite faculty members who have not yet explored internationalizing or decolonizing to join the conversation.
In the Internationalizing and Decolonizing the Curriculum Seminar, faculty will come together to discuss their efforts, past, current, and future, to incorporate global perspectives and intercultural learning into their teaching. There will be six 90-minute seminar meetings in fall 2022, facilitated by Emily Gorlewski, Ed.D., of the Fries Center for Global Studies, which will allow faculty members time to discuss and reflect on internationalization and how it can be promoted in sustainable, antiracist, decolonizing ways. Guest speakers may include members of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network: https://criticalinternationalization.net/. The outcome should be a new course, a new unit of a course, an existing course re-worked, or other project in which each faculty member demonstrably internationalizes and/or decolonizes their teaching or their department’s curriculum. Faculty will present these projects to the FCGS and other faculty in spring 2023; the implementation of the projects should take place during the 2023 calendar year, either fall or spring. Examples of past projects can be found at https://internationalizing.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/internationalizing-the-curriculum-seminar/
Seminar members receive a $500 stipend to support their participation.
Applications to participate in the Fall 2022 seminar are due on May 31, 2022.
