Expanding the concept of globalization: a syllabus and commentary

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2001 by Inez Martinez

Kingsborough Community College is one of the City University of New York's colleges whose existence has depended on the policy of Open Admissions, that is, providing access to CUNY to all high school graduates. It serves a racially and ethnically diverse population who typically are first-generation college students. Currently, about two-fifths of KCC students are immigrants attempting college-level programs of study using English, their second language. After five years, about thirty percent of a cohort of KCC students graduates, and of this number about three-quarters continue on to four-year colleges. In other words, for well over two-thirds of the students, their community college education at KCC will constitute their formal higher education. Consequently, liberal arts education is particularly crucial as the means for familiarizing students with current discourses and their historical backgrounds, and challenging students to acquire critical thinking skills.

THE OPPORTUNITY

English department faculty devised a demanding final semester of required English that attempts to meet the objectives of introducing students to current significant discourses, while asking them to develop their capacities at comparison and evaluation. This course focuses on analytic reading and writing. The teacher selects a theme, and thus the sections of the course offered each semester vary as to focus. The content of the course consists of texts from at least three disciplines. Hopefully students will grasp that each discipline asks distinctive questions of its subject matter and that its use of language is affected by those questions and the kinds of material it uses to seek answers. Finally, the course asks students to demonstrate their critical understanding of the issues studied by writing a research paper pursuing a question raised during the multi-disciplinary exploration of the course's theme.

In the fall of 1998 I had the opportunity to teach the honors section of our English department's final required course. At KCC, full-time students with a grade point average of 3.2 or better who have taken no more than thirty-five credits are invited to join the Honors Program. Many students so invited decline because honors courses are more difficult than regular sections of the same courses, thus making maintaining a high grade point average more difficult. Consequently, the students who take honors courses not only are usually remarkably intelligent, but also highly motivated to learn. If anything, the majority of the group I had that semester was even more able and eager to learn than the usual honors dass.

BACKGROUND

Before I organized the syllabus for this course, I had been immersed in reading about environmental and international women's issues. In fact, I had taught this course focusing on environmental questions and proposed solutions, and, during another semester, I had taught it focusing on questions concerning gender equity and proposed solutions.

I had most recently been particularly impressed with the international level of cooperation and common purpose achieved by the multitudes of women who had attended the international conference in Beijing in 1995. I had purchased Beyond Beijing, a video that attempts to give some flavor of that complex event, as well as a copy of Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, Spring/Summer, 1996, that contains, in addition to reports on Women's Studies Programs in Asia, Europe, and Africa, not only excerpts, documents, and commentary about the Beijing Conference, but also an exact copy of the Platform for Action. What is most amazing about the concrete list of proposals in The Platform for Action is that its content was influenced by women from all over the world represented at Beijing by 30,000 women in the non-governmental organization (NGO) gathering, and that it was approved by consensus by 189 nations in the official United Nations gathering. Here, I thought, was an example of the possibilities of globalization e nvisioned as international cooperation arising from local experiences and aims.

When I had taught the course focusing on the environment, I had been repeatedly struck by my students' total vagueness when asked to account for the earth's existence, or for the existence of life. Apart from some Biblical explanations, usually not very accurate or detailed, most students simply had never considered questions of cosmology or of their personal relations to the earth. I had purchased The Planet Earth from PBS, a series of six videos, some of which address issues concerning the beginnings of the universe and of life. I also had gathered many newspaper articles reporting the connections between events far away and their consequences at home: for example, the return of pesticides we have sold to Latin Americans in the fruits and vegetables we import from them. Globalization in this context meant grasping that human beings everywhere are not only connected in terms of our common dependence upon the "globe," earth, but as well by the consequences of how each treats it.