International Education Week (IEW), November 15-19, 2021, is to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchange worldwide.
IISE embraces the notion of “glocal,” or local innovations shared internationally. This perspective also means a responsibility to learn multiple ways of understanding the same problem. For example, internationalization today, and especially in higher education, is driven by both global competition, and global collaboration.
IISE’s new working groups have content that is inherently both local and international (glocal), such as global and local language and culture, global gender policy, as well as indigenous education.
Dr. Maureen Porter, IISE Associate Director, elaborates the glocal value that IISE embrace to further Pitt’s mission in international education. "IISE is the unduplicated hub for global, inter-cultural, comparative, multi-lingual, and international scholarship and praxis. We are achieving the Global Plan for Pitt by “Connecting the Local and the Global” through strategic, meaningful endeavors that strengthen our community of practice. This year pushed us to make our priorities more streamlined and to sustain commitments to remaining a center of excellence for global diversity, equity, and inclusion."
(Picture: Maureen Porter and the team with the embroiderers and henequén weavers in the city of Tixhualactun)
IISE is committed to continued student, family, and community success here and abroad, by serving as a broker to provide peer reviewers for scholarly journals, creating opportunities for SOE faculty to be speakers at jointly sponsored online conferences, planning for joint degree programs/courses, and operationalizing long-sought collaborative exchanges that could be done virtually, if necessary.
During the pandemic year 2020-2021, we targeted our investments into strategic professional development offerings. These include nurturing our relationships with dear colleagues at hard-hit partner universities, NGOs, and institutions doing critical work globally (in Pakistan, Uganda, Germany, Indonesia, China and several in Latin America). For example, as part of Dr. Maureen Porter’s Fulbright-Hays GPA in Uganda and Kenya, Pitt’s Center for African Studies and IISE co-hosted the second, well-attended Teach Africa, which is a Professional Development Workshop for urban K-20 teachers. This was an exceptional opportunity to visibly, as the SOE mission emphasizes, recommit to educational equity, and to tangibly disrupt and transform inequitable education by teaching African and African American content that has been strategically left out or disparaged in schools!
Read more details here for IISE’s glocal perspective in international education.
By: AS
Date: Nov 12, 2021
Source: 2020-2021 IISE Annual Report