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Women’s Emancipation and Development Agency (WOMEDA) Executive Director Juma Massisi (seated, center) facilitates conversation among women and Amizade students in Kayanga, Tanzania, as part of research that supported a successful United States Agency for International Development grant award for WOMEDA.

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DukeEngage students Jeline Rabideau and Jenny Denton worked with middle school girls, such as ​Katie, in Western North Carolina to enhance literacy skills through digital storytelling projects focused on their families.

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DukeEngage independent project student Alex Saffrit collaborated with a community member, Moses, in Nkokonjeru, Uganda, on a solar cooker project.

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Ernesto Alaniz, community maintenance leader, Villanova civil engineering student Allie Braun, and Water for Waslala program manager Iain Hunt cooperate to inspect a new water tank near Santa Maria Kubali, Nicaragua.

Course Planning and Program Development

Course planning is an often-under appreciated process, whether in conventional courses or GSL. While specific activities may help with particular goals such as development of  global or intercultural competency, deeper understanding of positionality, or more nuanced comprehension of academic content, it is important to consider precisely what the course goals are – along with how they will be measured – early in the course planning process. Course planning processes move beyond the accumulation of many interesting activities and experiences to develop targeted efforts to develop specific learning and competencies. The following resources are particularly helpful for this process:

  1. The Education Abroad Faculty Toolkit, housed at the University of Kentucky, has been designed with respect to two primary focus areas, global citizenship and academic development. Specific course objectives have been written for each focus area and are supported by an array of instructional tools that can either be integrated into course syllabi or facilitated as one-time activities.
  2. Effective Use of Performance Objectives for Learning and Assessment  from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine’s Teacher and Educational Development program summarizes careful integration of learning objectives to develop specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
  3. The course outcomes exercise* draws on Wiggins & McTighe’s celebrated Understanding by Design approach to teaching and learning.
  4. The Fair Trade Learning standards and rubric embody a global, cross-community, multi-organizational, multi-institutional effort to ensure standards of fairness in learning and service partnerships. The standards emerged through a community-driven approach to partnership, and are important throughout all moments in program planning. They have now been published in academic articles as well as books, and developed in ways intended to facilitate stakeholder conversation around issues of equity in partnership.

 

*This resource may be downloaded as a Word document from the GSL File Cabinet.