Fernando M. Reimers et a1.

our framework for global citizenship. The collaborative citizen reaches out
across borders to work with peers—and, specifically, to purposely work
with peers who have differing perspectives—to solve global challenges.
The innovative global citizen synthesizes knowledge from across multiple
disciplines to develop new approaches, new ways of viewing problems,

and new solutions.

Further difficulty exists at the level of education, in that global education
must include complex competence that is both interdisciplinary and disci—
plinary. This idea represents a departure from the disciplinary focus of cur-
rent education systems and presents a real challenge in the field of global
education. Part of what makes education within disciplines comparatively
more salient is that the overarching ideas behind the disciplines are clear, and
creating curricular content is therefore straightforward'insofar as the cur—
riculum should reflect those ideas. Furthermore, the history of the discipline
is traceable, as is the future of the discipline, by specific goals. Take, for ex~
ample, the discipline of history. This discipline has a discrete set of knowl—
edge and skills, such as knowledge of the historical causes of conflicts and the
ability to review primary and secondary documents to build that knowledge,
respectively. It also has goals, such as avoiding future conflicts through help—
ing students understand and be able to articulate a history that a nation or
people share, and the existence of diverse historical narratives. Global edu—
cation must achieve the same clarity in overarching knowledge and goals,
which the World Course achieves through its attachment to the framework
of universal human rights, articulated knowledge and skills, and the goal of
solving pressing world problems.

CREATING THE WORLD COURSE

To create the World Course, we first spent some time defining the characteris—
tics of a globally competent graduate, as described earlier. To do that we drew
from a range of literature, including from frameworks such as the Human
Rights Declaration and studies and analyses of future global risks such as those
outlined in the World Economic Forum’s global risk assessment framework

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