Spring 2024 NCHC Portz Grant Recipient

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

"Global Outreach and Learning Diversity (GOLD): US-Malaysia SDG Dialogues"

The global educational landscape faces an evolving mandate to integrate the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in teaching to cultivate students’ intercultural citizenship and interdisciplinary knowledge. Despite progress, there remains a gap in leveraging the concept of a global classroom to foster holistic, globally conscious education. While studying abroad opportunities may not be always available, impactful learning and a global mindset could occur within the classroom through virtual exchange.

This 14-week collaboration connects 23 students in an honors course (HNRS 187. The world and me: United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, Cultures and Languages) at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with 7 international students and scholars from Malaysia through virtual exchanges to discuss these goals and explore their roles as global citizens.

This project involves two parts:

1. Weekly discussions through online annotations. Every week, students from both countries exchange thoughts on a specific SDG through an online annotation tool called Hypothesis. The instructors adopt the multiliteracies pedagogy to provide a variety of learning materials to facilitate discussions, such as cartoons on Hunger (SDG2), influential blogs in the world on SDGs, documentary films, and digital stories. Students not only post their initial thoughts and personal experiences but also raise questions to their partners, through which they learn to examine these SDGs through cultural lenses.
2. Collaborative projects. There are two collaborative projects in this program. The first one is creating a digital story with a focus on SDGs. While students complete this project individually, they need to draw on their weekly discussions with their global partners and cite their illuminating quotes to produce the digital story. After all stories are posted online, partners view each other’s stories and continue their discussion through comments and questions. The second project is a collaborative project where global partners work as a team to create an infographic and a social innovation plan to make a change in the world. Students are encouraged to connect the SDGs with their disciplinary knowledge to consider the intersectionality of these goals. The purpose is to enact their agency as a global citizen to contribute actionable plans to make an impact, either within their community or within a larger society.

This project is innovative as it extends students’ global learning beyond the classroom walls, and creates a space where students discover interdisciplinary knowledge and adopt an intersectional lens to examine these goals. It aligns with NCHC’s shared practice “Inclusive Pedagogies” to embrace students’ “varied experiences, identities, backgrounds”. More importantly, this project empowers students to enact their civic duties to make actionable and impactful plans, which echoes NCHC’s shared practice of “Co-curricular opportunities” to prepare “honors students for leadership roles and professional challenges through which they will exert a positive impact on local, national, and global issues."

This project benefits both students in the honors program on the UW-Eau Claire campus and the students in the partner university in Malaysia. Firstly, because this project emphasizes student-centered, culturally relevant, and globally minded learning, students from both sides have a chance to hear authentic voices from people from different cultural backgrounds, which helps them become more empathetic in addressing SDGs. They learn to be more inclusive and understand how different countries may approach SDGs differently due to their cultures. Secondly, to communicate effectively with their partners, students learn to adopt various strategies to convey their ideas and negotiate meanings. This is an important opportunity for students to develop their intercultural competence. Finally, students appreciate the opportunity to build relationships with their global partners, and they learn to appreciate and embrace diversity.