Global Learning for All: Educating for a Sustainable Future

Global Learning for All: Educating for a Sustainable Future (GLFA) brings students, faculty and staff, as well as local and world communities, into a new learning paradigm. GLFA fully integrates Global Learning and its core concepts of Sustainability, Diversity and Internationalization into the fabric of every SUNY experience. It serves SUNY students through a firm base of well-established SUNY programs, while sparking and channeling innovation to increase magnitude and relevance.

The GLFA initiative defines Global Learning as:

Global learning cultivates understanding of oneself and one’s society and cultural influences, grounding comprehension of the world beyond one’s borders and a sense of responsibility for the challenges humanity faces. Global learning imparts skills needed to work across differences to forge mutual understanding and devise solutions to those challenges.

For generations, international education provided transformative experiences to a small number of students participating in mobility programs. SUNY's commitment to equity has led to recognition that universal global learning is integral to a high-quality public education, and therefore to SUNY's mission. And SUNY institutions are ready for this.

PRE-EMINENT GOAL:

All SUNY students engage in meaningful Global Learning

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Key Goals:

Global Learning can and does happen right here at home. It is supported through lived, intercultural experiences that transform a student's perceptions of self and others and through methodologies such as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). Delivery of these experiences is NOT place dependent. SUNY students will benefit from opportunities to participate in Global Learning early and often.

Building equity for a sustainable future requires all of us to invest in our own society. Global Learning can be radical. It can present opportunities to re-learn history through global awareness, to build compassion, and to develop our own capacity to participate in a societal process of re-humanization, reckoning with our racial past and beginning to lay a foundation for healing.
Cultural humility is a critical element of intercultural competence.
Building our global knowledge means learning to understand other ways of living in the world.
Global Learning aligns with SUNY's comprehensive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Action Plan.

The Sustainable Development Goals lay out pressing, interconnected challenges faced by humanity. They provide opportunities to channel efforts and collaborate with partners all over the world so that students and faculty can roll up their sleeves to bring about meaningful change, building equity here at home and across the world.

Engaging in these challenges through Global Learning initiatives instills in students the values and skills needed to develop their unique approach to building a better, more sustainable future, now and over the course of their lifetimes.

Institutions committed to impactful and pervasive Global Learning build inclusive communities characterized by vibrant and compassionate learning environments. These inclusive communities, in turn, attract and integrate students from many countries and cultural backgrounds, providing an environment that supports such Global Learning.

SUNY established the world’s first and foremost university-based center focused on global learning through virtual exchange. The SUNY COIL Center has been leading the way for SUNY campuses and 125+ institutions throughout the world on high-quality global learning integrated into the curriculum.