Are you looking to add diverse perspectives into your course curriculum? Then don't miss the professional development webinar set for February 22 at 1:00 pm. This NISOD webinar, titled Are Your Students Global Citizens? How to Teach Diversity to the Leaders of Tomorrow, is a great first step. The webinar information notes that teaching diversity requires strong relationships that encourage dialogue and action so today’s students become tomorrow’s leaders. Confederation College has embedded Indigenous knowledge into classrooms since 2010 through specially developed Indigenous Learning Outcomes (ILO). The infusion of ILOs into program-specific courses throughout the college provides all students with opportunities to develop an understanding of Indigenous Knowledge through diverse world views and cultural frameworks in relation to their chosen career field. The concept of embedding diverse perspectives into the curriculum is a transferable skill. This webinar presents the ILOs as a case study while encouraging participants to adapt the model to fit their own curriculum. This webinar also demonstrates how embedding diverse perspectives into the classroom leads to a better understanding of cultural frameworks and how incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into the curriculum can improve critical-thinking skills.
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Have you ever thought about what we are all doing in higher education (or any level of education for that matter)? We are teaching students from the things we know now to help them be the leaders of the future. We are literally teaching then for things that will happen that we may or may not know anything about. It really drives the point home that we can't just worry about covering the material but must focus on helping them become self-guided learners. They need to be adults who can learn things on their own so that they will be able to handle the problems of the future. That was one of the reasons I was excited to attend the American Association of Community Colleges conference in Louisiana last weekend. As I participated in a session about innovative learning going on at several of the City University of New York schools, I marveled at how most of my colleagues are wrestling with the same issues that we are encountering. Today I encountered a special section in the The Chronicle of Higher Education that talks about a student leadership development program at CUNY. The program is aimed at creating leaders for the future. The City University of New York’s Futures Initiative, founded in 2014, is a program that advocates for both authentic innovation and equity. According to Cathy Davidson, the Initiative’s founding director and a distinguished professor of English at CUNY’s Graduate Center:  “Normally when we think of innovation in higher education, we think of extremely well-funded programs for typically wealthy students who plan on going into jobs at the very top of the technology world. Not necessarily innovation that serves the good for the most people. Our credo is that unless your innovation has equity built into it, it’s not really innovation.” It certainly raises a lot of questions as we come to the end of the spring semester.