In the 21st century, higher education faces a number of substantial challenges: We need to prepare students for the complexities of a highly interconnected and interdependent world so that they can act as informed and responsible citizens within a global society – as so-called change agents. Transnational collaboration projects offer unique opportunities for the education of these change agents in our globalized societies. They prepare students to work towards social change across cultural and geographical boundaries and make it possible to move beyond the distinction between global and local. Merging global and local means bringing together local learning, engagement, and impact with global communication, collaboration, and knowledge production.
The mix of global and local – glocal – characterizes our approach to transnational collaboration and our teaching and learning model. We introduce a glocal curriculum that aims to foster such education in elds as diverse as higher education for sustainable development, e.g. global health, the humanities, philosophy, etc. The glocal curriculum is based on experiences and experiments from the “Global Classroom: Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century”, a teaching and research project in collaboration between Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany) and Arizona State University (USA). From 2012 to 2016, 72 students in two cohorts where involved for around three semesters each in this program and a team of researchers accompanied the respective processes.
In this Handbook we present resources and re ections including teaching and learning formats, activities, and digitally enhanced environments that we developed to support the education of change agents who are willing to critically and creatively contribute to sustainability transformations. The book covers three different stages, from (i) envisioning the glocal curriculum and its design to (ii) implementing and evaluating the glocal curriculum and program, to (iii) designing the glocal teaching-learning environment. Using a workshop approach, the Handbook provides valuable guidance for strategic university development, curriculum and program developers, quality managers, and teachers and instructors who are interested in innovative approaches that allow the development of critical and transformative mindsets, knowledge, and skills in order to address the sustainability problems of the 21st century.