Archive for the ‘Intl. Education’ Category

I loved this article in Newsweek A Team of Expatriates about the large number of advisors to President Obama who have lived or studied abroad.   As someone who has worked overseas for most of my professional career, I agree with the assessment that living abroad can greatly shape your worldview.  Working on an international level forces you to be open to a wide variety of perspectives and think critically about each one in order to make a decision.

While I was happy to hear about all the international experience in the Obama administration, its still disheartening to know that only 22% of Americans have a passport. The need for global education is greater than ever.  As the article mentions, for this generation of students the greatest opportunities for work, investment and fun will be at the international level.

In the past few years some friends have asked me if I have become pessimistic about the state of the world, education, and the United States.  I usually keep a positive outlook on things and try take a long view of history – after all, I’ve watched the birth of the internet, a dot-com boom (and bust), the rise of globalization and emergence of biotechnology – all in my recent memory!

However, as we enter 2009, I’m especially optimistic about the coming year.  I’m optimistic because beneath all the pessimistic noise in the media there continue to be exciting trends in society.  Since this blog is about international education – a major reason to be optimistic is the fact that study abroad in the United States continues to increase.

The results of the annual Open Doors survey of study abroad was published in November, and the decade-long trend in the growing popularity of study abroad shows no sign of abating.

Even more exciting for me is that study abroad in “non-traditional” destinations (i.e. the places Global Leadership Adventures has programs) is also increasing.  In other words, more students today are traveling to places like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania than ever before.  This validates my thinking when I decided that GLA would focus its programming on these emerging economies.  Students understand that there is a new multi-polar world order emerging and its crucial to understand these various loci of power and influence in the world if one wants to work on the global stage.   And since almost all jobs today cross borders, it can be argued that every student should study abroad in order to be considered prepared to graduate.

In spite of the economic crisis (and the upcoming related geo-political crisis), I’m excited to keep watching the world become more global and be part of student’s education of this world.  I still can’t believe how much innovation has come to the world in the past 15 years – and I’m sitting at the edge of my chair to see what the next 15 years brings.

Educators often ask me, “What outcomes do you expect to achieve through your programs at Global Leadership Adventures?”

In today’s educational world, everyone has been trained to focus on outcomes and build curricula to ensure that student can achieve them.

However, with independent experiential learning programs such as GLA, we have the luxury of being able to focus on a wider set of outcomes, including intangible concepts such as self-discovery and personal growth.Since we don’t depend on government funding, we’re not tied to achievement tests and programs such as No Child Left Behind.

I usually reply with some factual information about how we want students to get a deeper understanding of social issues, human rights and personal leadership.But quickly I transition to a more unorthodox answer – “I don’t know”.

International educational programs are one of the best ways to literally lift a person out of one social context and drop them into a completely different one.This exposes the individual to massive amounts of potential learning opportunities and potential networking opportunities.In fact, the potential for a student to connect with a person, place or idea is so great, that almost every person I know who works on an international level can point to a specific moment in their personal history as an “activating event” that set them on a new life course towards a career in international affairs.

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