The Office of International Affairs prepares students (and other stakeholders) to engage the world, address global challenges and live lives of meaning by fostering an understanding of one's individual and interconnected positions in the world; cultivating an open-minded approach to the world that encourages respect, curiosity, and engagement with diverse perspectives; and promoting a sense of responsibility to the world and a commitment to the greater good.
Our pedagogical model is called Self-Other-World Learning (SOWL, pronounced “soul”). It combines understandings of how we encounter difference and how transformation occurs as a way to catalyze profound global learning.
This approach is concerned with transforming and sustaining
- ourselves (we are the instruments of our work, meaning anything we plan or do can only be as good as we show up to it);
- our relationships (we do everything with others who are always different than us);
- and our world (including institutional/organizational + socio-historical systems, as well as natural and built environments).
We believe that transformation occurs through an integrated combination of inner and outer work that balances reflection and action in a world characterized by constant interaction with difference and change.
To this end, we employ wide-ranging methods across our different programs, projects and offerings to engender deeply transformative, permanently integrated learning.
Through this approach, we prepare students intellectually, experientially and personally to engage the world, address global challenges and live lives of meaning (our mission).
We espouse a philosophy rooted in global citizenship and a commitment to learning that
- recognizes our mutuality and interconnectedness at all levels
- includes reflection and critical thinking about our place, responsibility, action and impact in the world
- promotes engaging with difference without striving to assimilate or eliminate it
- embraces belonging to the same world we are working to change
- is committedly experiential, dialogic, liberatory and otherwise
- promotes creative and intellectual work in (and in between) multiple genres and disciplines
- advocates for the use of non-English and non-colonial languages
- deepens leadership capacities while widening arenas of care and concern, and
- includes the deep inner processes that allow us to offer and sustain our best work,
all of which prepare students and others to become global future-makers and global leaders.
Three Core Definitions
- Global citizenship is an orientation of care and concern for the world that includes other humans (with whom we may or may not have anything in common) as well as other beings and the planet. It implies a commitment to action, as well as to peace, social justice and sustainability.
- Global learning refers to learning that increases our capacity to appreciate the complex, overlapping global/local relationships in which we are positioned; to see difference and interconnectedness at once; and to think interdisciplinarily as we address the world’s challenges and strive to make it a more equitable, sustainable place.
- Global leadership is a mindset, skillset and way of being that is informed by an understanding of how social systems work and interconnect; that is committed to working within complex contexts of difference; and that is dedicated to learning within changing circumstances as we aim to create a more just and sustainable world.
While SOWL permeates all of our endeavors, several initiatives include:
- For Lehigh faculty: Global Teaching and Learning Fellows
- For Lehigh students: Global Citizenship Practitioner-Learders in Residence
- For global educators: Coaching and Critical Intercultural Learning: Towards a New Approach for Global Education - AIEA Thematic Forum
- More links: see Coaching + Global Education for work in this area and Coaching for SOWL for the announcement about our coaching initiative.