Crossing Boundaries Course Proposal Form
Overview
In addition to participating in a Global Experience and Reflection, students must take two (2) courses that carry a Crossing Boundaries designation. Courses throughout the University carrying this designation develop the student’s ability to explore and understand the interconnectedness of cultures, peoples, and nations around the world in social, political, and economic arenas.
The Crossing Boundaries Intellectual Practice is coordinated by the Director of Global Connections.
Learning Goals
Crossing Boundaries IP courses enable students to achieve several of the following goals:
- Students will be able to interpret aspects of other cultures in relation to their own with greater sophistication and accuracy.
- Students will gain a deeper knowledge of historical, political, scientific, cultural and/or socioeconomic interconnections within the U.S. and between the U.S. and the world.
- Students will be able to pose critical questions about power relations as they investigate the dynamics of global and local transactions as applied to a social problem important to them.
- Students will be able to acquire a heightened sense of global interdependence and understand the need to address complex global issues across national and disciplinary boundaries.
- Students will identify obligations to people situated both inside and outside their own national borders.
Course Development Criteria
Crossing Boundaries designated courses must meet several of the following criteria:
- Address issues of interconnectedness, interdependence and inequity among peoples, cultures, and/or nation-states of the world.
- Provide a comparative, transnational perspective.
- Explore issues of social justice, social welfare, and economic rights within and across national boundaries.
- Approach the study of the United States as a part of the world.
- Focus on cultural norms and processes as well as entities like commodities and physical elements that flow across national boundaries.
Common Practices
Crossing Boundaries Courses often use the following pedagogical practices, among others:
- Crossing Boundaries Courses assist students in being able to actively observe and reflect on their own cultural biases and beliefs and engage with other ways of thinking and doing that may be unfamiliar.
- Crossing Boundaries courses emphasize the interconnected nature of the world. In particular they emphasize the connections between local and global phenomena and the ways that understanding how the world works requires investigations of issues and areas of study that cross national boundaries.
