The theme of this speech came to me in the middle of yet one more conference related to “Globalization” and I was reminded, once again, that the world many of us are accustomed to living in no longer exists. The world our students will live in is hard for us to imagine and it is my profound belief that our job is to educate students to live in that world.

Let me begin by defining “globalization,” which is often a quick way of saying the world is a single market. However, it is not just about markets but about the public good and the need to emphasize that over private greed. Indeed, world trade is greater and involves more products and services than ever before in human history. The most significant difference between the global marketplace of the present and the past, however, is the ability to instantly transfer capital from one side of the planet to another.  This can cause the loss of stability in some countries or provide needed assistance in others but the shift in capital resources is immediate and not always benign.

The rapid transfer of information is another feature of globalization; we can find out about almost anything we wish with the click of a mouse. The World Wide Web allows ideas, as well as viruses, to spread, for good or for ill. We are in constant contact with friends, family, colleagues, and business associates, no matter what time zone they are in. I have associates who are always available by email but almost never by phone.

Which brings me to another condition of globalization, the constant flow of people engaged in some form of global activity.  Airports are almost a metaphor for the world in which we live, a place where you are “in-between,” one location and another, where there is a mix of shopping mall and border crossing, where you are “suspect” until you clear security, where the multicultural flow of travelers can offer instant companionship or melt into a faceless crowd, where personal dramas are often on display. Frequent flyers rarely talk with each other, unless there is an emergency or delay. They are busy with laptops, or trying to catch up with their sleep. Some spend almost as much time in the departure lounges and hotels as they do in their homes. Included in this flow are many of our students.

There is, as well, a growing concern on the part of universities for community engagement. A recent report said the following:

“,,,,community engagement is widely accepted as one of the core functions of …. universities along with teaching and research. It nevertheless remains regarded by most higher education institutions as a moral rather than a strategic imperative, with few institutional returns, and so receives limited intellectual, managerial and financial resources.”

….  The term encompasses a range of activities such as community service, community development and service learning.

…. the tide is turning in favour of community engagement. Demands for greater accountability, the central role of universities in the 'knowledge economy' and trends in knowledge production, among other things, are obliging universities to rethink their public role and to develop more systematic approaches to community engagement.

These programs are occurring in widely disparate places such as countries in Northern Europe, across Africa, in North and South America, and certainly right where you are all sitting in this conference—in Asia.

In addition, the goal of being a global university, or having an international orientation, is stated in the mission of many institutions and there are on-going, sometimes successful, sometimes not, efforts to increase students’ competencies to be part of the global community. So, as an Associate Provost for International Programs at an American university told me recently, “we are trying to connect the local to the global and to focus on how to help students engage in sustainable practices wherever they end up professionally.”

One more thing about this new world….it’s highly competitive and very busy. Recently I read that “time is becoming the world’s most precious commodity” This sounds like an issue for corporations but I find this in all walks of life, including the academy.

Which brings me to my list of what the world needs and how we might respond. I have a list of five areas that are challenging:

Sustained compassion - right along with sustainability
Connected learning
Comprehension of complexity
Reciprocal responsibility
Culture care

1. Sustained compassion.
We must help students who will be part of the future world to realize their capacity for sustained compassion. Most people respond to suffering outside their immediate community with momentary regret, helpless dismay, or dismissal (I just can’t think about it).

As much as people suffer in catastrophic events in many parts of the world, the lengthy period of rebuilding and recovery may be even harder than being rescued when the event occurs. And the world stops watching because the media loses interest, and frankly so do we, after the initial impact and excitement of the event.

Mary Catherine Bateson writes, being compassionate “is as rare and valuable as the beings for which compassion is felt. Its sensitivities depend on picking out one pattern from the mass and recognizing a kinship to it. To conserve and focus compassion, we often depend on single images….” One idea, one image, often one story is what sticks with us.

International education and service learning can provide those images and, more important, expose students to those who are victims of inequality, loss, and tragic circumstances and help students recognize that these, too, are our “kin.”

I remember meeting Danny, a young blind man, who received $500 gift, a huge amount for someone eking out a living in a small store in one of the poorest barrios in Guayaquil, Ecuador.  A student had been awarded the $500 for writing about his study abroad experience and sent it to the President of Children International in Ecuador, Victor Mariduena, to use where it would do the most good. Victor decided that it could build a small home for this young man and his mother. The student was in a service-learning program at the Children International Center in this neighborhood sustained interest in that place long after he had departed.

Something remarkable happened just after the presentation of the gift took place. Several young, privileged Ecuadorian students who were there offered to build the house, getting help from their families and classmates. They got engaged because of this one young man who remembered and did something about it.

Sustained compassion doesn’t mean responding to every crisis and every tragedy. It means feeling a kinship with the conditions of others in the world, understanding how systems are often unable to sustain people like Danny, and doing what you can where you are.

Interestingly, recent research shows “helping others brings the same pleasure we get from the gratification of personal desires.” This is not, however, just a matter of our subjective sense of well-being but, according to one body of research, the instinct to care contributes to physical health. Being engaged, and the process of learning brings rewards that live on in many ways. This is a different kind of reciprocity.

2.  Connected Learning
The world needs people who have learned to connect experience with theory and how to apply that learning throughout their lives. This requires a way of “knowing” and a style of learning that moves beyond the highly compartmentalized and fragmented schooling that persists in much of higher education.

Victor Mariduena suggests that “To construct the world anew requires a lot of preparation and the removal of some of the debris existing at this moment. We have to remove barriers of prejudice, distrust, resentment, and selfishness” They are all barriers to connected learning.

Students who are exposed to the differences within cultures, in terms of privilege, ethnic origin, sexual orientation and contrasting ways of living, can begin to deal with their own prejudice, resentment and ethnocentrism. They can see that stereotypes are often wrong or seriously inaccurate. They can see that cultures have great variations within them. They can discover how institutions can perpetuate poverty, prejudice, and helplessness.

However, this cannot be accomplished by sending them into new communities for a visit. It requires sustained and meaningful contact.

And it also means reciprocal learning: students who engage in service learning want to make a difference. We don’t want them to just take from their hosts or use their service location to achieve their own goals. It is important that they establish relationships and give something back. They must provide a service that is needed, as identified in their service location, no matter how much they may think it is not exactly what they would want to do. Forming relationships is very important because it is a way of truly appreciating, building respect, and developing empathy for the people they are serving and from whom they are learning.

I visited a classroom in Jamaica that had few books or other learning tools and is stuffed with youngsters who attend in shifts. A student with the International Partnership for Service Learning, assisted the classroom teacher for half of each day. The other half of his day is spent at the university where his studies are consciously integrated with his experience. His field assignment includes exploring how the educational system is structured and financed in Jamaica, the cultural attitudes toward education and how politics impacts the manner in which education is provided. He also learns about how these children live, he got to know and their families and the kind of life they were living, and what aspirations they have. This is an example of providing a framework in which research skill, academic study, reflection and experience can come together.  And it leads me into my next point.

3. Comprehending complexity
We must help students understand the enormous complexity of this world, ways of thinking about it. and ways of collaborating with others to deal with complex issues.

One thing that classroom in Jamaica taught “Joel” was how much it was impacted by the failures of globalization, and policies and decisions that were made in palaces and meeting rooms far from this island. 

Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree reported a conversation with Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate and physicist, who said,

Here on earth, once it was formed, systems of increasing complexity have arisen as a consequence of the physical evolution of the planet, biological evolution and human cultural evolutions. The process has gone so far that we human beings are now confronted with immensely complex ecological, political, economic and social problems….you have to break it up into pieces and study each aspect, and then study the very strong interaction between them all.”

We need people who can “study each aspect” and the “strong interaction between them,” who can simultaneously hold conflicting views, and understand the cultures of vastly different peoples. None of us alone can find the answers to the issues that are emerging from all the problems that beset the world. Coming together, we may have a chance.

Students in unfamiliar cultures learn they cannot predict what will happen and must search for what lies beneath the surface.  They can learn to identify connections between seemingly unrelated events, and to explore complex situations and how to anticipate the unexpected consequences of decisions and actions. Throughout this, they discover that they have to rely upon others and perhaps we can even structure their learning so that they are required to use a skill long employed in Asia, working in groups.

4. Reciprocal Responsibility
We must impress students with the necessity for being responsible in their own society and to the world’s societies.

Why is this so important? Globalization is not enjoyed by everyone. In fact, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. “The ratio of the average income of the richest country in the world to that of the poorest has risen from about 9 to 1 at the end of the nineteenth century to at least 60 to 1 today.” 

In addition the world has gone through five major alterations and we are embarking on the sixth. The complexity of nature is unfathomable but we continue to tamper with it.

There are, as well, serious problems in places of relative affluence. Within the last few years, there has been an effort to build shelters for the homeless in Osaka that would remove them from tents in the park. Homelessness and hunger are a serious problem in throughout the world and poverty exists next to great prosperity in many parts of the world.

Just south of the border between Mexico and the United States, conditions for those who work for international corporations is deplorable. At one point, the Chief Executive of Alcoa was confronted with this reality when a Mexican employee, brought to the annual shareholders meeting by Benedictine nuns, rose to speak of conditions at the Alcoa Fujikura Ltd. plants in Acuña, Mexico. The CEO was forced to listen and acted on what he heard. I would not claim that all problems have been resolved, far from it, but wages have been raised to be among the highest in the area, environmental and safety practices have improved, the cafeteria has been modernized, and toilet paper is no longer rationed. Local living conditions, however, are still squalid and public services, including schools and health care, are seriously deficient.

The world needs leaders who understand that there is only short-term financial gain in business without attention to the community in which it exists; corporate responsibility does not end at the front gate of industrial parks.

Many of the products we use are assembled from parts produced in diverse locations. Consumers reap the benefit of this global efficiency and must also bear the costs—the costs of environmental degradation, of the lack of sustainability, of child labor, of such costs as the vast collection of plastic in the Pacific ocean between Hawaii and Japan that grows and threatens Pacific wild life. 

We must help students realize that the potential benefits of globalization cannot be fully realized until they are shared equitably. Globalization needs to be synonymous with responsibility if we are to serve the public good and maintain the viability of our planet and our species.

5. Culture care
Finally, we must teach students to value, respect and enjoy the cultural differences that exist among peoples and see then as a valuable resource.

One of the greatest fears about globalization is that we will all become a bland, uniform, global McDonalds culture. Ronald Inglehart and Wayne Baker who have researched the values of 65 societies for two decades states “Mcdonald’s restaurants have become a dominant symbol of the globalization of the economy and target of the wrath of globalization’s many opponents. But local values still wield great influence on culture, so don’t look for McWorld to emerge anytime soon.”

The world needs citizens that continue to value and to nurture the diversity that exists among peoples and who resist the temptation to fall back into isolationism and tribalism or live at the superficial level of a disconnected consumerism.

Strangely, “globalization not only pulls upwards, but also pushes downwards, creating new pressures for local autonomy…and has been the reason for the revival of local cultural identities in different parts of the world.” .  And many of the answers to the world’s problems lie within these reservoirs of cultural knowledge. But culture fights back, resisting extinction, because it is a strong force for holding groups together and bringing a sense of identity to its members,

So, while we encourage our students to be connected globally, we must also train them to care for their own cultures and respect and care for the cultures of others.

One of the places that students in the IPSL program service is on a reservation in the Lakota Nation at the SuAnne Big Crow Boys and Girls Club. Some of you were there several years ago when we had a conference in South Dakota. One of the major goals of this agency is to keep the culture alive, to teach children to learn its dances and other expressions of the culture, and its spirituality, as a way of keeping them connected to their heritage, their history and the strength of what the culture brings to their lives and to the community.

Research shows that students can become more open-minded, accepting of diversity, and, at the same time, learn a great deal about themselves. Study abroad programs tend to have an impact on students personal development. This provides a foundation on which to build the skills, knowledge and attitudes that could make a difference in today’s world. There are models for “teaching valuable academic, social, and personal lessons simultaneously.” International education, and especially service learning, provides a unique forum in which to encourage learning that builds the skills and knowledge that students will need and the world needs to thrive as we deal with the problems and opportunities that exist in the global community.

So can we provide what the world needs through educational intervention? Certainly! This has always been the case at one level or another but it is now critical that we consider the needs of the future, needs we do not really understand, as we plan our academic programs. Service-learning, carefully designed and well run, with the experiential and reflective process that it must include, is uniquely capable of helping students acquire those attributes that prepares them for an interconnected and interdependent world. As educators, we have an obligation to provide that preparation, to engage students in the world community, and to ensure that there is a critical mass of future global citizens.