Global Learning through Difference: Considerations for Teaching, Learning, and the Internationalization of Higher Education

Overview & Synopsis

By clarifying what global learning is and how it is essential to higher education, this article considers what global learning provides for teaching, learning, and internationalization in higher education. It demonstrates how the global nature of knowledge and learning in the 21st century requires a re-definition of classrooms and learning environments that recognizes how knowledge production today is a collective, global, and diverse process. The article suggests a number of foundational principles for global learning, including relational approaches, reflection, contextualized knowledge, perspective shifting, disorientation, responsibility, and an ability to navigate the general and the particular. It concludes by revealing how a global learning framework has benefits beyond teaching and learning and how it can contribute to the deliberate internationalization of higher education.