Global Perspectives for Students Transcript

Something that I've been involved in in the past you know three to four years in Arizona has been kind of this drive to internationalize the community college curriculum and it's something that I've been doing for a long time and now there's a little bit more of a focus on that and I think that coming from a rural community coming from a place where many of our students are place bound they don't have the opportunity to leave and kind of see the world or see even other parts of the country bringing a global perspective to any curriculum I think is really important because so often we are in a bubble right we're just we don't look outside you know our local community and we often don't think that we're part of the global community the world community and so when you can take something like controversies that are going on right now over the removal of confederate monuments for example and then look at what's going on in other parts of the world that are very similar for example with you know the removal of a Cecil Rhodes statue in South Africa or the removal of a Christopher Columbus statue in Argentina you know things like that can show students that as humans on this world wherever we are we're often grappling with some of the same issues and so I think that trying to pull even just a little just a little bit of what's going on outside your local community or the united states really helps to broaden students minds and I think that you know as we're starting to develop more and more curriculum that is looking at the world from a much broader perspective kind of moving away from a strictly Eurocentric perspective in teaching world history to really embracing the diversity of the world but also the interconnectedness of the world it really is something that gets students engaged in and really stimulates their critical thinking because too often you know people think that there's just one way to look at things and when you bring in a few different sources and you teach students how to look at things from different perspectives it you know it really helps them to blossom as human beings and I think it benefits them in so many other facets of their lives.