About the Global Learning Initiative

Everything that the Global Learning Initiative does is based in the belief that faculty, staff, and students can collaborate to continually co-create empowering and rich curricula that are grounded in the disciplines that will allow our graduates to live lives of deep significance and flourish in an ever-changing and internationalized world.

The way that the Global Learning Initiative does this at Northern Arizona University is by facilitating, sponsoring, and organizing collaborative programming where faculty, staff, and students – through an international lens – can co-create deeply disciplinary learning experiences, pedagogies, and curricula at the college, program, and course levels.

Through the efforts of the Global Learning Initiative, Northern Arizona University will

• Develop new, internationally-focused undergraduate and graduate disciplinary curricula, learning experiences, and pedagogies at both the program (departmental) and course levels.
• Increase the dissemination of the scholarship of teaching – both on campus and nationally – for these internationally-focused program and course efforts.
• Assess the impact of the Initiative, based upon the stated GLI mission and outcomes.

Background

In Spring 2008, a Subcommittee of the Task Force on Global Education – consisting of more than forty faculty and co-curricular professionals representing all colleges and major divisions within the university – drafted the Global Learning Initiative (GLI) to begin to transform NAU into a global campus and to help prepare our graduates to successfully navigate the changes in a globally complex world.  GLI was adopted by the Faculty Senate in 2010 and established three University-level Thematic Student Learning Outcomes on Diversity, Sustainability, and Global Engagement – which were based on long-standing values at NAU as stated in our University missions and strategic plans – for all of NAU’s undergraduate programs and the Liberal Studies Program.  The Global Learning Initiative culminated in NAU’s global learning efforts earning the prestigious Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization in 2012.