Attendance at AAC&U’s national conference pushed me to specify the processes we have in place at Haverford College to support ethical global engagement and how those processes are distributed not only within Center for Peace and Global Citizenship staffing, but also across engaged faculty scholarship. I spent the previous fifteen years working to coordinate and support ethical engagement from and in collaboration with large R1 campuses. So I recognize how some of the opportunities I’ve been sharing can seem particular to a small liberal arts setting. I’m thinking now about the highly individualized counseling process and faculty-mentored, community-driven, engaged scholarship. But large institutions are leading in vital ways. The University of Minnesota Pre-Health Student Resource Center has a Preparing for Ethical Choices Abroad overview as well as links to a Toolkit for Pre-Health Advisors and a free, online, open-access module for (any) students preparing for an international health-related experience. The module was developed to incorporate best practice guidelines while supporting…

By Jennifer Magee and Katie L. Price* The Eugene M. Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College exists, in part, to facilitate Swarthmore College’s commitment to intellectual rigor, ethical engagement, and social responsibility. Watch to learn more about who we are and what we do. Our summer grant programs—made possible through the generosity of the Swarthmore Foundation and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation—are a key way in which we help students synthesize these three areas by connecting the campus, curriculum, and communities. While we believe deeply in the power of learning by doing, we also recognize that we would not be fulfilling our mission if we did not work to ensure that students were prepared to engage ethically. In the past two years, we have redesigned how we prepare students for ethical engagement and are happy to share some of what we’ve learned with the GlobalSL community. As an overview, our process for summer grantees consists of:…

In yesterday’s post I shared how our selection, partnership, and preparation processes aim to support ethical global engagement at the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. Today, I focus on the ways in which the community-driven commitments of Fair Trade Learning are intersecting with our programming, existing partnerships, and faculty scholarship. Later this week I’ll share more about how these kinds of commitments are developing at large institutions. Now that I’ve been at Haverford for two and a half years, I sometimes get the “this only works at small liberal arts colleges” feedback. But FTL practices and principles work across institutional types and sizes. The University of Minnesota, University of Dayton, and IUPUI have all made clear progress on many of these key questions. At Haverford, change happens through consensus. The collaborations I describe here are reflective of scores of interpersonal conversations and committee decisions. One essential point is that three of the four examples shared below do not…