Learning Locally, Thinking Globally

UM’s New Global Leadership Initiative Challenges Students to Tackle Big Questions

Story by Erika Fredrickson Photos by Todd Goodrich

Three years ago, University of Montana President Royce Engstrom, then provost, asked a group of faculty members to come together and brainstorm about how a UM education could change the world.

“I asked them where education should go in this Global Century,” he says. “I asked them what kind of experiences we should be giving our students and what kinds of topics and conversations we should try to enable for them.”

But the undergraduate years can be a challenging time as it is. Students often see general education requirements as something they just have to survive. Even when those courses are compelling, students still end up wading through—sometimes aimlessly—the sea of introductory courses, taking notes, and sweating exams, without quite knowing how any of it will apply to their futures.

Engstrom and the faculty talked about ways in which an undergraduate education could be designed by students in a more deliberate and interdisciplinary way. If, from Day One, students were engaged in coursework that interacted with global issues, they might better understand how their general education could make an impact. And wouldn’t that make them better citizens and leaders?

“So, out of that first discussion group,” says Engstrom, “came an experiment.”

That experiment, a donor-funded pilot program called the Global Leadership Initiative, launched this past fall. About 150 students were selected—not just honors students, but students who reflect UM in its variety of majors and backgrounds. Those select freshmen, or “Fellows,” began attending seminars, such as “Doing the Right Thing: A Global Strategy for Good Business,” which teaches ways companies can make a positive global impact through ethical corporate citizenship, and “Issues in Global Public Health,” which discusses policies that address current and future challenges to global health.

Each year, GLI Fellows will move on to another phase. The second-year component, Models of Leadership, includes off-campus retreats and engagement with national and international leaders in business, law, science, the arts, humanities, social sciences, and public service. Arlene Walker-Andrews, associate provost and GLI committee co-chair, says this component will help students see leaders as people, just like them, who took steps to go on to greater things.

“Students can meet people who are successful and who can talk about what they do and how they do it,” she says. “It helps them understand that we’re not all born with a silver spoon in our mouth and just got to our positions by luck. And I think it helps students see that you can be a banker making money and be doing volunteer work in Africa. You can be the head of an NGO and help people, but you can also be a pharmacist and help in the community.”

In the third year, Fellows get a passport paid for through GLI fundraising. They can use the passport to study abroad, but they also have other options: regional and local internships, service-learning coursework and research, or creative scholarship, all of which can be potentially donor-funded.

In their final GLI year, Fellows work in small groups of students from diverse majors to actually tackle a global problem with a specific project. Successful Fellows are awarded a certificate at graduation.

“This initiative focuses on all kinds of areas,” Walker-Andrews says. “There are classes on global public health. Gender issues in the world. Mortality. I always laugh when I say that one only because a faculty member in the humanities rightly says that we can’t forget the enduring questions, you know, what makes us human. So, mortality! These may not be the questions that students stick with the whole time, but we’re asking them to think big.”

GLI Fellows, from left, Riley Acker, Katie Stevens, Tyler Trucco, Elizabeth Schmidt, Rachel Reynolds, Danielle Howlett, Hunter Pauli, and Taylor Preston

Rising Tides

“Truthiness” means preferring facts one wishes to be true, rather than facts known to be true. Or as satirist Stephen Colbert, who coined the term, says, truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” Journalism Associate Professor Ray Fanning has taken this humorous, pop-culture idea and applied it to his GLI freshman seminar, “News Literacy: Truth v. Truthiness.”

“Stephen Colbert defined it on his show,” Fanning says, laughing. “And there is a lot of truthiness going on in the world. Particularly in journalism there’s this blurring between news and opinion, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which one you’re getting.”

In his class, students study the way news is gathered. They deconstruct articles to seek out when journalists are using direct or indirect evidence. They examine article sources and discuss whether that source is informed and authoritative, and in what ways that source also may be self-interested. Critical thinking, like being able to dissect the news, fits the purpose of the GLI program perfectly. It’s not just about being able to sort the truth from the truthiness, it’s knowing how to take that knowledge as a leader in the global economy and use it to solve problems.

“All majors need this skill of critical thinking,” Fanning says. “This class is universally important. We all have to be citizens, and hopefully we’re exercising our rights as citizens by being informed and then being able to act upon that.”

In another seminar, “Global Climate Change: Science, Society, and Ethics,” students also learn how to think critically and take action. Homework for freshmen Hailey Michelson, Emmitt Stangel, Rebecca Singleton, and Colin Soos, for instance, requires plugging power strips into outlets to compare green and conventional technologies, then calculating the watts to see which ones conserve the most energy. When they’ve gathered their evidence, the students will publish the results in a campuswide report.

“We want to see, first of all, if they are really effective,” says Michelson. “There are a lot of products that say they’re green, but they aren’t actually. And if they are, we’ll try to promote them to the University. We want to see if it would save money in the end and if it would be greener.”

The class, which counts as an introductory natural sciences requirement, is taught by biology scientist Art Woods. Like all the GLI seminars, the class is small—only nine students—providing an intimate environment. The students learn about ocean rise and acidification and the causes and effects of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. They discuss climate change models and the effect of climate change on certain populations, and they analyze current policy.

“The class is structured so we’re doing a mix of basic science,” says Woods. “What’s the science that contributes to the understanding of global climate change? What sorts of effects do we think are going to happen in the next fifty or one hundred years? And then how are they going to affect our world? As part of the class, I charge all students with developing their own project. And that project has to involve doing something about climate change and taking a public stand.”

With the idea of taking action in mind, the already small class works in even smaller groups on projects. They rarely take notes, but they read a lot and everyone participates in discussion. UM Regents Professor of Ecology and climate scientist Steve Running, climate ethics expert Dane Scott, and Clark Fork River Coalition scientist Chris Brick all have visited the classroom as guest speakers. Experiments like the power strip one give students a hands-on project that engages them in climate change solutions.

“It’s an informal atmosphere,” says Woods, “almost like you’re sitting around a kitchen table talking about these things. It’s amazing what the students know and think and can say, and often that gets buried when they’re in a class of fifty or one hundred, and they never get a chance to speak up. I’m impressed with them.”

Fellows take part in UM Professor Lee Banville’s GLI seminar titled “The Net Effect” in Don Anderson Hall.

The students are across the board: different majors, backgrounds, and abilities, which contributes to the GLI philosophy, says Woods, that rising tides can lift all boats. Stangel is a baseball player studying sociology. He heard about the program and saw it as an opportunity to be part of a new way of learning.

“I thought it was a really cool idea,” he says. “I liked everything about it. It’s cool to be the first class here to ever do it, and I’m interested to see how later down the road it can help me in life.”

Michelson, who’s thinking about majoring in journalism, is enrolled in two seminars. Besides the climate change course, she’s taking “The Net Effect,” a class about how the Internet is changing the world. Some students are studying how social media interacted with the Arab Spring. Because of her potential major, she’s also exploring how the Internet is changing journalism.

“That’s what drew me to the program,” she says. “I felt like I had an opportunity to take relevant classes about things that are going on now. You can experiment in different fields, and it’s not just glazed-over, huge classes and lecture. It’s recent stuff. It’s more hands-on. It’s relevant.”

She laughs.

“I’ve said that twenty million times,” Michelson says. “But everything does seem more relevant when you’re in these kinds of classes.”

Relevancy is exactly what Woods is going for.

“The whole idea of the GLI program is to raise the bar for undergraduate education. And to have small groups of incoming students grapple with really big questions,” he says. “Solving problems associated with climate change is going to need engineers, it’s going to need philosophers, it’s going to need biologists. It’s going to need all these different kinds of people working on different angles. I think it’s really going to help them to have some awareness of that interconnection.”

Measuring an Education

Walker-Andrews believes there are three reasons young people go to college: their parents tell them to, they want a job, and they want to change the world. And that big challenge—wanting to change the world—is the one she believes is foremost on the minds of incoming freshmen. And, she says, that’s the perfect time for it to happen.

“That’s when you have the energy and ideas,” she says. “And we probably should bank on that if we want the world to change.”

In late March, GLI students, faculty, and community participants assembled on campus to kick off the Models of Leadership component of the program. The first day began with a panel on human rights and ended with a talk from Priya Jaisinghani of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who spoke about mobile banking and its role in building economies in places like India.

The following day brought in a large spectrum of leaders speaking about international business and global citizenry, including Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. The range of speakers and issues illustrates something else that the GLI promotes: the idea that you can be a banker or pharmacist or writer, you can be politically conservative or liberal, and you can still think globally. In fact, it’s exactly that variety, says Walker-Andrews, that we need to solve the big issues.

“That’s why we say this is an education for the Global Century. It’s about using your general education and major to address these big problems. And it’s this need to collaborate—because I don’t think any one of us is likely to eradicate malaria in Africa by ourselves.”

The freshmen who were the first of the GLI experiment are almost ready to move onto this next phase, and the GLI committee is preparing to invite 200 incoming freshmen to come on board.

This is the kind of education Walker-Andrews hopes will define UM as the GLI continues and expands. Not too long ago, UM graduate surveys tried to measure the school’s success by asking alumni three questions: “Do you have a job?” “Is it in your area of study?” and “How much money do you make?”

“I think that’s a pretty crass set of questions,” Walker-Andrews says. “So we decided to change it.” The questionnaire now asks about the more nuanced terms of success, trying to find out if they learned the types of world-leader skills that GLI strives for.

“We decided to make it useful,” she says, “in the sense that this is an accredited institution where we claim that we teach students to think critically, to do quantitative analysis, to do X, Y, and Z, and so we need to be accountable to that.”

GET INVOLVED
UM is working toward a goal of securing three years of funding to support 600 Fellows. This goal totals $3 million. Philanthropic gifts for the GLI will assist with advising and mentoring for Fellows; stipends for faculty who lead seminars; scholarships and passports for experiences beyond the classroom; Models of Leadership retreats; and capstone projects. You are invited to support innovation at UM by making a gift to the GLI Fund. Call Ric Thomas, senior vice president for development at the UM Foundation, at 406-243-2598, to learn more about how to become involved.