Guiding Solutions or Students?

by Scott Riggs and Image by Dr. Nilay Chakraborty

Who are we as an institution? What are we about? Many of us are wrestling with these questions as our campus is going through the strategic planning process. This is what we have been pondering in Global Education as we seek to develop a vision of global learning that is both meaningful and useful for our campus community.

Recently, we keep coming back to one question: are we trying to change the world and our local communities, or are we helping our students build awareness, skill sets, and a sense of purpose and trusting that they will bring about positive change with their own initiative?  Here are two examples of how this question plays out for global learning.  Are we to try collectively to move the needle on issues like climate change with a unified campus vision, or are we to develop a sense of urgency and empowerment in our students, and then trust them to become agents of change in their communities?  Are we to create model communities that can collaboratively reach solutions on divisive issues, or are we to teach students intellectual empathy and let them create these communities on their own?  
A simple answer would be to pursue both options. The modeling of solutions paired with teaching skills, attitudes, and a honed sense of purpose intuitively seem to pair well together in a spiral of forward progression. But do prescribed solutions limit creativity? Does prescribing attitudes break trust with a large portion of the population that is looking for more job training and less of a perceived moral agenda in higher education? By focusing on guiding both solutions and students, do we dilute or strengthen our potential impact? By tackling both, do we spread limited resources too thin to be effective? By not addressing both, do we shortchange our students?

From a macroscopic point of view, there is a complex inter-dependency between the University, student as an individual and society as a whole. Skills, awareness and purpose are one of the three most important components that a student receives through a university education. While skills gathered are directly related to the efficiency of a person in the future workplace, the awareness and sense of purpose both directly and indirectly provide the mechanisms to calibrating and augmenting determination and hope of the individual in the workplace. These individual channels are important drivers for overall societal growth. These ensure increased mutual understanding between different entities and systems in the society which ultimately lead to solution of difficult problems including social equality and overall societal betterment.

I don’t claim to have perfect answers here, but I am curious what other members of our community think about these questions.  If you would like to join this discussion, we’d love to see your thoughts in the “Comments” section of this blog post.