Abstract
The question of how to engage undergraduate students in global learning is even more imperative given recent shifts in the global landscape and in higher education. Utilizing the value rubrics established by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, this analysis considers the importance of the humanities in realizing integrative, global learning in a domestic classroom. Intentionally underscoring global and integrative perspectives on race and ethnicity beyond the domestic sphere produces graduates with proficiencies in intercultural knowledge and competence who are capable of creating and applying solutions to complex global issues. Assessment data reveals growth in student worldviews, perspectives, empathy, and noteworthy internal changes in the learner. The humanistic focus on the human condition results in students meaningfully engaging on individual and community levels, and with heightened insight into the roles they play in the world. As such, they emerge transformed and prepared to thoughtfully engage with the global community.
Keywords
Integrative learning, the humanities and the World
Integrative learning in the American undergraduate experience plays a powerful role in producing graduates capable of crafting effective resolutions to real-world dilemmas. These skills are at the heart of what employers want in their employees, including the breadth and depth of liberal education learning, effective communication, active and applied learning, and skills, mindsets, and aptitudes that ensure achievement in the workplace (Flaherty, 2021). Since 2009, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has provided the principal tools for Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE), now widely referenced internationally. Over a decade after the establishment of these rubrics, this piece evaluates how integrative global learning in the humanities produces graduates who are positioned to thrive in multicultural settings and global communities. Utilizing the benchmark (introductory), milestone (intermediate) and capstone (culminating) level performance outcomes outlined in the VALUE Rubrics, this study utilizes self-assessment to measure integrative global learning results. Direct and indirect assessment reveal that integrative global learning in the humanities cultivates student empathy, global worldviews, and internal changes in the learner. These outcomes affirm the value of exploring the human condition—a central focal point of humanistic inquiry—from a global perspective as indispensable to achieving the indicators of integrative global learning and intercultural competence.
As a pedagogical approach, integrative learning encourages students to make lasting connections between and among intricate ideas and situations, while also transferring knowledge to create solutions to these dilemmas. The Integrative and Applied Learning VALUE Rubric defines integrative learning as “an understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and co-curriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus” (2009a: 2). The milestone and capstone level performance outcomes of integrative education stretch beyond basic connections (benchmark) or descriptions when prompted; they are aimed at progressively independent application and transference of skills and abilities to elucidate and deeply comprehend complex issues. Newell has argued that, “in themselves, connections do not empower students. The challenge of integrative learning is to make sense of the contrasting or conflicting insights by integrating them into a more comprehensive understanding of the situation in its full complexity” (2010: 8). The principles embedded in integrative learning intersect with the goals of the Global Learning VALUE Rubric, which accentuates knowledge application, personal and social responsibility, perspective taking, global self-awareness, cultural diversity, and global systems. It is in this intersection that the humanities play a particularly important role.
The humanities are critical to producing engaged citizens who are committed to working toward common goals in liberal education, including “the creation of a critical public culture, through an emphasis on analytical thinking, argumentation, and active participation in debate” (Nussbaum, 2004: 44). Moreover, “the humanities help us make sense of the complexity of the world we inherit—including our histories, values, and cultural traditions. They help us to explore competing visions of the past and future, and to probe what it means to be human” (Schneider, 2011: 2). By incorporating the principles of integrative and global learning, courses in the humanities can also reinforce the fundamental criteria of the Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric in milestone and capstone categories, consisting of: exposure to biases and culture, an understanding of intercultural differences and cultural rules, suspension of judgement and the expansion of worldviews, and the increase in empathy in considering experiences and perspectives. Deeply rooted in the tradition of liberal education, humanistic disciplines challenge students to critically examine their individual positions and choices in effecting civil responsibility, social justice, and equality. Courses in the humanities that integrate integrative and global lenses build students’ aptitude to contemplate their identities and the identities of others while “guard[ing] against misunderstandings, fear, essentialism, and hostility” (Butler, 2010)
This study illuminates how one course can intentionally guide students toward achieving sophisticated milestone and capstone performance levels promoted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Rubrics for integrative global learning. In this particular course, students are exposed to diverse materials and pedagogies, multifaceted historical narratives, and profound questions about social and community responsibilities. Through essential explorations of the human condition, students widely meet the milestone and capstone outcomes in both the short-term—through the integrated connections and transfer of knowledge to their learning—and also in the long-term, through active and applied learning. The integration of multiple areas of knowledge, modes of inquiry and perspectives amplifies how students “make sense of their learning” (Stubbs et al., 2013: 25), and lends support to the decisive conclusion by Lynn Pasquerella, President of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, that disciplinarity “isn’t as important as the skills, outcomes, and dispositions arising from integrative, applied learning—which can be practiced in the context of the workforce” (Flaherty, 2021). Moreover, integrative learning underscores the importance of “active and meaningful citizenship” and “becomes a teaching tool, a means of modeling for students how to engage thoughtfully and actively in their communities toward a common purpose” (Ferren et al., 2014/2015: 6). The core expectations in the rubrics enhance student “multi-dimensional understanding” and “theories of the human condition and the immediate dramas and demands of life they experience and represent in their classroom dialogue” (Braid et al., 2011: 13–14). Such achievement in a domestic setting is even more timely given the interruptions in global travel and study abroad due to Covid-19.
Questions of awareness are even more valuable as we continue to negotiate the impacts of the most devastating global pandemic in over a century. This crisis has accelerated conversations about the associations between the global and the local, the social and the scientific, and compassionate approaches to problem-solving. In the face of the enormous divides unveiled during this epidemic, integrative learning in the humanities engenders valuable skills that are imperative for college graduates, especially in a post-pandemic world. According to Pasquerella, Covid-19 has exposed “the ways in which the complex challenges we will be facing in the future, as individuals, as a nation and as members of a global community, will require the integration of skills and competencies across disciplines and the examination of issues from a diversity of perspectives” (Flaherty, 2021). This ongoing virus has revealed our collective need as citizens of the world to comprehend global crises and act upon them equitably and with empathy. This is very much in line with the expansion of worldviews, a key element in the Intercultural Knowledge and Competence Rubric, as an important “cognitive and affective lens through which people consider their experiences and make sense of the world around them” (2009b: 1). These diverse and intentional attitudes and cognitions provide a solid foundation upon which students in the humanities achieve intercultural competence on a global scale, as evidenced in the construction and delivery of the course outlined below.
Course design, rationale, and assessment: Race and ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean
For historians of Latin America and the Caribbean, race and ethnicity are critical lenses through which we contemplate the region, and doing so through multiple perspectives offers a rich opportunity to understand hierarchies, inequities, and the contemporary landscape. It is in this spirit that I offer an integrative and global learning course about race and ethnicity with the additional objective of attaining milestone or capstone performance levels of intercultural competence as outlined by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Intercultural competence is the ability to “meaningfully engage those others, place social justice in historical and political context, and put culture at the core of transformative learning” (American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2009b: 1). It encourages learners to “suspend judgement in valuing interactions with culturally different others” (2009b: 2) and privileges empathy, meaningful engagement, social justice, and cultural learning.
I first offered Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2009 as a course in the Department of History supporting the Humanities, Africana Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the diversity requirement at Muhlenberg College. Each semester, students engage in the analysis of primary and secondary historical sources, historical fiction, and testimonials that underscore the lived experiences of historically marginalized people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Beginning in the colonial period, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean offers an in-depth analysis of racial ideologies emerging in the modern Atlantic World, and traces how these shifted over time. Understanding resistance to dominant narratives and political ideologies is a central tenet of this course, which examines theory and practice through historical and literary sources aimed at challenging conventional characterizations of the past as scripted by the “winners.”
Literature produced from the non-dominant classes of society offers unique ideological perspectives and complements the historical narratives of colonizers and the colonized. Its incorporation, alongside primary and secondary historical sources, motivates students to consider political “representation” and “misrepresentation” in documentary history, inequities, and justice. Featured voices offer multiple perspectives that elevate or contest “official” national narratives, and students must grapple with these perspectives in their writing and assessment over the course of the semester. I incorporate works of historical fiction highlighting traditionally minoritized voices, including Carlos Fuentes’ The Crystal Frontier (Mexico 1995) and Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Torn from the Nest (Peru 1889). Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo Garofalo’s edited volume of primary documents in Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812 (2009), integrates important Afro-Latino narratives and views in original languages with translations in English.
In addition to these sources, testimonial literature is essential to understanding resistance to dominant narratives, histories, and cultures within Latin America and the Caribbean. Specific to this region, the testimonio is a rational choice to narrate and explain seemingly irrational circumstances. The approach “may be defined as an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g. war, oppression, revolution, etc.)” (Yúdice, 1991: 17). This literary tradition emerging from Latin America and the Caribbean is especially illuminating for the topics of race and ethnicity in a region where historical and written records have habitually circumscribed people of color and their traditions. Featuring the testimonial in a history class is strategic, aiming for an integrative, inclusive experience that meaningfully engages students with challenging topics and subjects in a historical context and allows them to carefully construct nuanced worldviews.
Testimonios illuminate expressions, memories, and histories via oral culture, a particularly salient factor in Latin America and the Caribbean. “Emphasizing popular, oral discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity” (Yúdice, 1991: 17). Drawing upon the culture of everyday people, the testimonio thereby represents subjects “excluded from authorized representation when it was a question of speaking and writing for themselves” (Beverley, 1989: 13). Testimonio authors provide “voices for the voiceless” (Gugelberger and Kearney, 1991: 3), and create a reordering of memory toward historically exploited communities and individuals. “They resist the attempts to disappear histories as bodies have been disappeared,” thereby offering a “truth value” in their oppositional perspectives (Bickford, 2008: 134, 136). Moreover, “truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history” (Yúdice, 1985: 17). The witness emerges as a voice from the margins committed to social justice and social consciousness. Students adjust to and process the first-hand insight into an individual’s life, and they connect to the triumphs, trials, and tribulations of the narrator. Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (Cuba, 2000) is central to understanding racism, sexism, and poverty in a former slave society.
A small, private, four-year liberal arts college in Eastern Pennsylvania, Muhlenberg is a predominantly white institution comprised of students largely from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. At Muhlenberg, courses that incorporate experiences based in two distinct approaches—disciplinary, methodological, ideological, or epistemological—sustained over the entirety of the semester, are designated as integrative learning experiences. The recent transition to integrative learning from cluster courses corresponded with a shift to two required courses in Human Diversity and Global Engagement. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean has always served as a “diversity” course, and has served as an integrative learning and a Women’s and Gender Studies course since 2018. I have taught four iterations of the course from 2018 through 2021, and have consistently collected direct and indirect assessment about both its global focus and the integrative learning approach.
This 300-level course is open to all students and carries no prerequisite; thus students enter the course with diverse levels of understanding—benchmark in some cases—about race, ethnicity, gender, and Latin American and Caribbean History. Their majors range widely: 20% had at least one major in the sciences, while 43% had at least one major in the social sciences. In contrast, in the four iterations analyzed here, just 14% of enrolled students were either History Majors or Minors, and 39% had one major within the humanities (theatre, language, history, dance, music). First year students accounted for just 4.5% of total enrollment, while sophomores included 16% of all students. Juniors comprised 37% of enrollment, of which approximately ⅔ were in the fall semester versus ⅓ in the spring semester. Of enrolled seniors, (42.5% of total), 77% took the course during the fall, and 23% in their final semester of college. Each course was capped at 20 students; two iterations held 17 students, one 18, and one with just 9 students.
A course as expansive and multifaceted as this one—and with such a broad audience—necessitates multiple points of inquiry, thereby accelerating students’ access to the topic and meeting students where they enter. My intention is to aid students in thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries and recognizing multiple ways of acknowledging and approaching complicated situations. One of the challenges of this pedagogy is moving beyond the connections themselves, a benchmark indicator, toward a fuller, more nuanced comprehensive awareness. As such, students integrate subjects, disciplines, and social issues “from outside as well as experiential insights from inside the complex situation” (Newell, 2010: 8). When employed in this way, integrative learning maximizes student growth through an emphasis on perspective-taking and knowledge application beyond the disciplinary lens, and in a progressive manner. This course, which focuses on a large geographic region beyond the United States and on themes that are remote for many students, demands a global orientation and a broad lens. Such breadth and depth impels students to become more culturally competent, particularly in a course that forefronts global learning with an emphasis on an understanding of global systems.
The American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Integrative and Applied Learning Rubric emphasizes that learning occurs across academic divisions and individual disciplines, and supersedes institutional boundaries. Framing language in the rubric reflects on the capacity for individual growth, including “the ability to adapt one’s intellectual skills, to contribute in a wide variety of situations, and to understand and develop individual purpose, values, and ethics. Developing students’ capacities for integrative learning is central to personal success, social responsibility, and civic engagement in today’s global society” (2009a: 1). Building from the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ classifications, Muhlenberg College generated Academic Learning Goals for Integrative Learning, in which graduates will be able to: 1. Understand relationships among various ways of knowing, and recognize the strengths and limitations of different approaches for comprehending phenomena 2. Use diverse perspectives and their vocabularies to intentionally recognize and solve problems, address existing questions, and ask new questions 3. Adapt and apply various perspectives developed in other contexts to new situations, while realizing the strengths and limitations of these different approaches 4. Communicate the value of an integrative perspective
Corresponding to the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ language, this approach “empowers students to recognize and solve problems, address existing questions, and ask new ones in more comprehensive ways” (Muhlenberg College, 2018: 3). In addition to this guiding language, I rely heavily upon the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Rubrics for Global Learning and Intercultural Knowledge and Competence, which are guideposts for the language of global learning at Muhlenberg College.
Although assessment can be problematic due to its inconsistencies, variabilities, and biases, I consistently utilize both formal and informal assessment to measure course outcomes, and my awareness of potential prejudices is heightened. Feedback from students is quantified and coded alongside the language embedded in the aforementioned rubrics. Over the course of the semester, I lead students through discussions of the value of multiple perspectives and disciplinary measures after an initial intake about their understandings of race, ethnicity, and gender in the Americas and beyond. Students engage in formal writing assignments that address specific prompts about their learning and the different perspectives and approaches to information, and they respond to informal prompts about their learning over the course of 16 weeks. These formal and informal assessments from four iterations of this course are compared to the language of integrative and global learning, and intercultural competence. Student views demonstrate strong correlations between and among global and integrative learning and intercultural competence through this exclusive study of race and ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean. An essential focus on humanistic approaches directly correlates to student intercultural competence, their understanding of racial justice on a global scale, and meaningful engagement and transformative learning. Entry into the course begins with an intentional discussion and introduction to integrative, humanistic sources aimed at elevating students’ proficiency in multiple geographical and thematic areas of global learning and intercultural knowledge.
Humanistic approaches to integrative global learning
Humanities courses that engage inquiry through multiple perspectives and underscore the human condition are essential to fostering student participation in a global world. Butler outlines that, “if identification with the human condition is a fundamental learning outcome for students of the arts and humanities, these disciplines can act as wellsprings of empathy and thus of sustenance for our participatory democracy,” a practice aimed at establishing a “common good” (2010). Although this course is not exclusively designed for democratic engagement, it does require students to engage in global content, and to place themselves in situations whereby they cultivate understandings of and compassion for people unlike themselves. In the words of Butler, “we identify with and embrace such connections not primarily because of shared language and common culture, but rather because human beings have a capacity for empathy that transcends boundaries of language, culture, skin color, religion, age, gender, and physical ability” (Butler, 2010). Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean illuminates how students can reach capstone levels of appreciation for “the other” through a purposeful focus on historical and global racial injustices.
The topics of racial, gender, and class injustices are central to the testimonial novel, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century. Seen through the eyes of a survivor of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Cuba, this text highlights the larger contexts of upheaval and change in a transnational, global framework, while also telling the story of political affairs from the inside. These events span multiple decades, locations, and ideological orientations, which allows students to link insights into global events to the specific lived experiences of individuals within Cuba. In so doing, they became acquainted with the performance descriptors of intercultural knowledge, including meaningful engagement, and connecting with cultures in historical and political contexts. Students assessed their experiences of reading Reyita within significant moments of social transformations and applied their learning to understanding intricate, interrelated phenomenon. For example: [Reyita] shed light on the reality of what growing up in Cuba meant from the perspective of an impoverished black women who was involved in the people, politics, and events that unfolded around her during this volatile period of radical change. This type of information is clearly communicated through testimonials of those who were not only around, but actively involved in this period. It is difficult to understand one’s motives/beliefs without connecting to the people themselves.
My approach to and incorporation of this personal testimony prompted students to craft associations between twentieth century Cuba to other parts of the Atlantic World, making politics and race “more relatable to the United States, and framed historical readings.” In Reyita, we witness the overlap among historical scholarship and a witnesses’ lens into tangible circumstances that afflicted Black Cubans over the course of the twentieth century. An understanding of this form of knowledge production, and the role of the protagonist (subject being studied), produced enlightening feedback from students, who pontificated on the value of the testimonial language as they surmised “truth value” in the literature: It is important to not simply read what the textbooks say is the truth. In doing so, one would miss myriad vital information. Testimonial literature allows the reader to understand history from the perspective of minorities […] rather than just a surface view. […] And although some would [question] the validity of the speaker and their memory, their words and opinions of what they have witnessed are needed to fill the gaps that the other sources leave.
Recognizing history and literature as a form of privilege, students viewed historical fiction, primary documents, and testimonies as a departure from this; they felt “if not the real then certainly a sensation of experiencing the real” (Beverley, 1989: 22). They strove to face the moral and practical dimensions of inquiry and understanding
Students also developed an appreciation for the interrelationships among the form of the sources (the testimonio; history; historical fiction; primary texts) and the content (race, ethnicity, gender), which illuminated their proficiency in understanding cultural boundaries. Afro-Latino voices, among them Reyita, an Afro-Cuban woman who disarms the reader with her candid and personal narrative of her life in Cuba through the twentieth century, revealed immense power, resistance, strength, and opposition in the face of structural inequalities and imbalances over time. Students commented that historical and personal testimony complicated their entry-level benchmark understandings of the social constructions of race and gender and their intertwined realities. For example, Reyita was at once a feminist and subservient to her husband; she was proud of her African heritage, and also clear about the deeply rooted cultural preference for light-skinned Cubans which influenced her decision to marry a light-skinned man. And for students, “the fact that Reyita managed to live a full and successful life made me better understand how agency is utilized.” The testimonial “helped show me how social concepts of race converge to form a different reality.” Her words underscored “real racism” and the “constant discrimination” she confronted, including the “negative comments and hate from her own mother for having darker skin. Reyita’s testimony is the real, raw truth of how prevalent racism was in Cuba during the twentieth century and how political instability played a part in it.” Similar reactions to these themes carried over into assessment of how the humanities elevates student understanding of multifaceted themes, such as racial justice, in a global context, from benchmark to milestone or capstone levels.
This intentional study encouraged students to connect multiple humanistic viewpoints to the global, structural, and racial injustices of colonialism. Students began to transcend statements that direct translations of underrepresented voices enhanced their understanding of race and ethnicity, to explain how and why the sources brought complexity to their perspectives. For example, timely and important translations of Afro-Latino petitions, wills, and other legal documents intricately traced the multitude of lived experiences of Afro-Iberian subjects. According to my students, this represented a fundamental counterpoint to the problematic ways in which traditional sources can “romanticize the conquering of the New World and exclude the perspectives of the indigenous people, women, Afro-Latinos, and others who are non-European.” The value of selected primary texts from this edited volume became clearer over the course of the semester, as students began to reflect on the ways in which contemporary scholars in the humanities were breaking the stereotype of history as a portrayal of dead white men (in their words), by “ensuring that all voices are heard and not just the voices of privilege that are more regularly documented in textbooks that I am accustomed to.”
Moreover, the integration of multiple types of sources provided context for understanding themes across time and place, and allowed students to enter at their own level of education, and acknowledge and transform the limitations of their previous learning. For some, this initial benchmark knowledge was limited to the history of slavery in the United States; personal narratives of slavery and colonization in Latin America and the Caribbean created accessible bridges to the “more relatable” United States History. The use of translated historical fiction, primary documents, and short stories “played a vital role in amplifying my understanding of the themes in Latin America from the first colonization through the twentieth century.” More specifically, the inclusion of short stories from Mexico to Brazil alongside translated primary documents illuminating Afro-Latino voices facilitated global learning, perspective making, and an understanding of global systems that allowed students to see that nations do not act in independent vacuums. Students noted that these sources played “vital roles in amplifying my understanding of racism and poverty in Latin America from the first colonization through the twentieth century.” The texts “helped frame our other historical readings by explaining experiences of race that we could apply to other texts.” These viewpoints are particularly valuable when studying Latin America and the Caribbean, the area that absorbed approximately 80% of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and where the indigenous and people of African descent represent roughly 50% of the entire population.
These interdisciplinary and integrative sources connected students to issues of racial and social injustice on a global scale, while unearthing their admiration for sources advancing important views often overlooked in dominant historical and literary records. This was an important milestone in student development and consciousness: that cultures ascribe different meanings to social interactions, and hierarchies. For example, one student at the end of the semester concluded, “I learned that racism exists everywhere even if it is not called racism. I learned that education is seen as a privilege in areas of the world,” even when that education avoids the realities of structural racism. Initially, many students struggled with the notion of state methodologies attempting to erase race through white political and intellectual figures within majority non-white countries. Upon conclusion of the course, students noted that multiple types of sources: were great for cementing concepts and exemplifying them through references to historical events. They helped me understand the idea of ‘white’ as something moldable, and as an intangible ‘thing’ comprised of multiple characteristics attributed to not only a person’s phenotypes, but their actions, their demeanor, and their social standing.
These sentiments, echoed in various ways, revealed that students grew in their mindfulness about the nuances of implicit forms of racism, while also perceiving the transitional qualities of “race.” One student concluded, in “reflecting on the course, I realized that the combination of various forms of literature has provided me with a better grasp on how race and ethnicity played an integral role in the development of Latin American identities and how those definitions fluctuated over time.” Multiple sources that complicated the roles of individuals who displayed both agency and subservience to this system further enhanced student achievement.
Additional milestone and capstone revelations became particularly apparent when students could integrate primary, secondary, historical, and literary sources into conversations about disciplines as actors shaping and creating knowledge, and producing perspectives on a global level. For example, in placing together forms of rule, colonial legacies, and modern inquisitions under the umbrella of race in Latin America, students interrogated the tendency of the academy to write in a “top-down” approach. Describing this gap as a “disconnect” at the beginning of the course, I noted that over the course of the semester, students began to understand that revisionist humanistic sources have elevated conversations about authorial voices, perspective, tone, and place us closer to the events as they unfolded. In so doing, as articulated by this student, “each source finds a way to share the lived experiences of people either through creating a story that depicts or mimics real life, detailing someone’s actual oral history, or providing a space to share the hows and whys of events that impacted people’s lives in this case, through race.” Student reflections began to communicate how race is and was omnipresent regardless of the form of the source itself. “Historical scholarship, historical fiction and testimonials, although different in their approach, find a great amount of overlap amongst them, beginning with the obvious similarity of sharing history through human experience.” This became particularly evident as students struggled with their assumptions that scholarship—or history more specifically—is perpetually written by the oppressors.
Meaningful engagement and transformative learning
Students enrolled in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean clearly demonstrated meaningful growth in their comprehension of race and ethnicity on local and global scales, and in accordance with the VALUE milestones and capstone levels. Moreover, this semester-long interrogation of global problems through multiple perspectives resulted in perceptible changes in students’ understandings of the world and the roles they play within it. During the second half of the semester in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean, students are asked to reflect on their learning through more directed questions about internal changes (Integrative Learning Rubric), attention to diversity, equity, and how their own actions affect the local and the global (Global Learning Rubric), and their understanding of culture, cultivation of empathy and worldview (Intercultural Competence Rubric). At the end of each semester, students were able to talk and write about each of these in milestone or capstone terms, while also engaging with the larger frameworks produced and endorsed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
This course, through the lenses of global and integrative learning, facilitated many of the characteristics of intercultural learning as outlined by the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Rubrics, including the notion of “internal changes in the learner” (2009a: 1), attention to diversity across difference (2014: 1), and the development of empathy and worldviews (2009b: 1). The educational experience of global learning through broad and multiple humanistic perspectives confirms that student identity growth can be realized, and measured. Van Tassel and Jorsch indicated similar experiences in their interdisciplinary history and writing class, where instructors experienced “students’ willingness to make it personal, leading to their individual “Aha!” moments” (2018: 60). In processing and analyzing complex narratives, my students had similar revelations about how the seemingly abstract became personal. Over time, this consciousness facilitated their connections to widespread problems and their abilities to imagine solutions. One student in this course wrote that “I have no educational foundation for most of the things we learned. I had no prior historical or academic lens with which to analyze my own experiences, so I ended up learning so much because, although I had a base, it was not strong or specified in the slightest.” Another concluded that “rather than reading about systematic oppression, the reader instead witnesses it.” In witnessing these injustices, students noted the obstructions to “undoing race thinking[…] because of its colonial origins[…] The readings humanized the conflicts beneath the surface […] and yet, it is important to consider agency.”
In addition to humanizing social transitions and personal transformations, students developed the ability to synthesize connections and broaden their own worldviews, key components of the capstone integrative learning rubric. They were also able to evaluate changes in their own learning independently, an advanced milestone performance level. For instance: The diversity of texts from different geographical areas helped me understand how the influences of race thinking in the creation of Latin America were conscious and deliberate decisions made by intellectuals and government leaders at the time. And, the unconscious effects of race thinking are still prevalent in the systems of these countries, and they are in the U.S. as well. I have to reconsider the whitewashed education within this country, and the ways that the U.S. has institutionalized racism to keep people of color down.”
This expression discloses students’ capacity to acquire intercultural knowledge and competence by “plac[ing] social justice in historical and political context” on a global scale. The outcome substantiates insight into cultural and national rules and biases and the interpretation of intercultural experience from multiple perspectives, two capstone performance level outcomes. Students became curious and inquisitive about cultural similarities and differences, as well as the ways that their own education and prior cultural knowledge had shaped their worldviews and exposure to cultural differences.
As such, this interdisciplinary, humanistic approach induced students to process the experiences of individuals who have been oppressed and resisted oppression, as well as the implications of those experiences. In short, students began to understand that they too have responsibility with regard to scholarship and the academic canon, and “that a socially just system both includes them and requires something of them” (Van Tassel and Jorsch, 2018: 60). As one student articulated, “people tend to see historical writing as a place that mainly consists of pairing dates to events but in reality it is about the emotions and reactions of people who are oppressed by certain institutions of power and their reactions to that oppression.” The ongoing dialogues between oppression and resistance, and the global nature of these themes, engendered critical transformations in the ways students viewed their positions within the world. Reflections confirmed that the organization of the course “brought a sense of humanity into the course’s study of history, because although most history is created by humans and their actions, I was able to develop a sense of sympathy for the people who were marginalized, suppressed, and hurt during these areas of deeply integrated racism.” Students struggled to articulate where to place this sympathy/empathy, and how to engage with the notion that structural changes—culturally, politically, economically, and socially—have not always produced positive benefits. One student reflected that “I can see the movement of culture (which encompasses race and self-identity),” but while tracing those shifts “is crucial to having macroscopic understanding of social structures,” the small changes were not seismic.
With a more nuanced understanding of the bridges among vast global societies, and a heightened comprehension of the experiences of everyday people, students expanded their worldviews and contended with past and contemporary racial inequalities. Their cognition of the politics of race and the ways that various sources served as “literatures of dissent” (Bickford, 2008: 141) led them to confront cultural and political hegemonic structures such as ethnocentrism. Students confronted colonial rationales for racial categorization and order and the contemporary violence that continues to haunt some parts of this region. More specifically, their understandings of aggression along the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, for instance, and the ways in which the United States perpetuated instability in that region, led to students’ questioning their own security within this nation. Reflecting on scholarly sources about violence and tensions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, one student noted that our analysis of academic readings inverted her previous conceptions of post-colonial independence and violence. Selected texts “not only reassess[ed] Hannah Arendt’s understanding of violence, but also place[d] it in the context of modern Dominican history.” This conclusion, echoed in the voices of other students as well, was that these events could not and did not occur in isolation, but rather they “are part of a larger and necessary discussion about what we value as a nation, and who we are as actors in this multinational script.”
These types of conclusions showed sophisticated understandings of the unevenness of global systems, the complicated nature of personal and social interrelationships, and the capstone attainment of challenges facing societies on local, national, and global levels. This growth was revealed in student consideration of how emancipated societies in Latin America and the Caribbean served as examples of resistance to deep structures of race and racism, and how modern social conditions with regard to race and ethnicity could redirect their previous understandings of hierarchies and subjugation. Outcomes from this course reiterated that case studies reflecting global, national, and local conditions resulted in life-altering micro and macro understandings of our own roles in reconsidering how we approach knowledge. For instance, “it is important to not simply read the written word as truth,” but rather seek out multiple sources and “become more comfortable with ambiguity.” Other students echoed this by concluding that it is important to consider the limitations of sources and the historical memory of authors. In addition, the ways that the identities of the subjects studied are situational and contradictory became a focal point for students at the capstone level. As one student concluded, “I didn’t realize the extent to which whiteness is read as violent, yet progressive, dangerous, yet necessary. It makes me more interested in their perspective on their history and the way they read race in the U.S. and how that literature can be mobilized to improve the way we talk about Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.”
Conclusions: The humanities as global, integrative, intercultural
In spite of continued assaults on the humanities in favor of pre-professional programs, the humanities continue to play an indispensable role in preparing college graduates for the world. Humanities programs and departments at my own institution generate the overwhelming majority of global learning courses, which cultivate the qualities embedded in the Global Learning VALUE Rubric, including our obligation to “foster individuals’ ability to advance equity and justice at home and abroad” (2014: 1). In ensuring graduates grow their “sense of identity, community, ethics, and perspective-taking,” global learning courses naturally lend themselves to the connections inherent in integrative learning, which has become “not just a benefit…but a necessity” that is “central to personal success, social responsibility, and civic engagement in today’s global society” (2009a: 1). Internal changes are a foundational learning outcome of the integrative and applied learning courses, as they lead to “the ability to adapt one’s intellectual skills, to contribute in a wide variety of situations, and to understand and develop individual purpose, values, and ethics,” especially as “students face a rapidly changing and increasingly connected world” (2009a: 1). Courses in the humanities are vital contributors to the core of these requirements, and subsequently, in focusing on integrative and applied learning through global lenses, they can also meet the criteria in the Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric.
Early in this course, many students displayed benchmark understandings about race and ethnicity in a global context; they noted that multiple ways of knowing through humanistic inquiry “complement” each other and “make up an important part of the current understanding of race and ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean.” These early intake reflections, while valuable, do not elucidate the particular ways in which the complementarity or understanding might be much more complicated or nuanced. For example, initially students remarked that “at its core, history talks about the actions of people. Reading historical fiction and testimonial literature brings to light the humanity in these events, places, and time periods in a way that looking macroscopically does not.” Student understandings of how multiple perspectives and disciplines balance and build upon each other increased over time. Toward the end of each course, students engaged with the principles of global and integrative learning, and intercultural competence, in milestone (and some capstone) performance levels.
These milestones became clearer as we made our way through challenging pieces that illuminate the complicated histories of people historically underrepresented in the scholarly record. These sources were “vital to understanding the degree of systematic hostility European colonizers engendered against the native population” and “consistent opposition and resistance to varying levels of oppression.” Testimonios and historical reflections on racism informed student understanding of the continuity of local systems and cultures in the face of national and international shifts. Student reflections about culture and perspectives show their movement “toward a deepened understanding” of worldviews. Focusing on specific problems or topics through varied perspectives and embedded inquiry enhances student learning and yields a higher degree of transformations of student identities, or “internal changes in the learner” as they negotiate intercultural competence (2009a: 1). This process shapes identity, and aids students in their comfort with the ambiguity and process of interpretation that are inherent in humanistic learning. These pedagogical approaches within integrative and global learning have a way of “pedagogically stir[ring] vulnerabilities and ultimately recognize[ing] vulnerability as a strength rather than a weakness” (Kahn, 2018: 13).
In spite of all of the successes of these types of courses, the evidence suggests there is room for improvement. Integrative learning is not institutionally widespread, nor is it commonly understood how integrative learning and interdisciplinary studies relate to each other (Newell, 2010). Students themselves were not always clear about why global and integrative learning (or even the humanities) are required, nor how they fit into the larger schematic of their undergraduate education. At the institutional level, expectations of learning outcomes must be clearly articulated and broadly understood in order to create adequate assessment channels and put those into place (Miller, 2005). However, and as the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Rubrics suggest, employers will increasingly require the skills learned through the liberal arts, including adaptability, problem solving, civic consciousness and perseverance. These include critical courses in the humanities that offer a global reach and the levels of intercultural competence and connectivity that are central to a young adult’s ability to navigate multifaceted problems in an ethical context. As noted by Doscher and Landorf, “for global learning to benefit inclusive excellence and education’s greater purposes, institutions must be just as committed to advancing the transfer and production of new knowledge as they are to diversifying student demographics and the established content to which students are exposed. This requires thinking about diversity in yet another way: in terms of students’ cognitive tool sets” (2018: 6).
Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean interrogates colonial mentalities and modern ideologies through the study of race, ethnicity, and gender; the focus on Latin America and the Caribbean facilitates a global lens. The material and structure of the course necessitate that students “meaningfully engage those others, place social justice in historical and political context, and put culture at the core of transformative learning” (2009b: 1). Students developed broad understandings of culture, cultural biases, suspending judgement, and expanding worldviews, “the cognitive and affective lens through which people construe their experiences and make sense of the world around them” (2009b: 1). By integrating multiple approaches, and with an intentional global focus on historically minoritized populations, this course familiarizes students with events, cultures, and circumstances that impact lived experiences. The course material deliberately leads students toward a more holistic, critical analysis of these histories, and the ways in which academic canons have omitted and recovered vital voices. In this way, graduates leave with expansive worldviews and toolboxes full of knowledge about how to synthesize information and generate creative solutions to complex situations. In effect, as one student concluded, the course offers “a new perspective, and a new way of asking why.”
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
