Overview of Course

The field of Global Studies explores transnational patterns of human experience across time and space, drawing on multiple disciplines and ways of knowing. Its aim is to better understand important global forces that structure our lives, shape the future, and demand our attention as we seek a better world.

Our Global Studies course is the connective academic experience for the shipboard community. It is the place where we draw meaning from our time on the water, our varied cultural encounters, our explorations in port, and our inevitable conversations about obligations and opportunities as global citizens. The course provides a narrative for the voyage, and skills and knowledge useful after our travels.

The course weaves together themes of Port Country Discovery and Global Citizenship, drawing on aspects of science, history, socio-economics, current issues, and intercultural competency. Our unifying narrative will explore sustainable development: the tension between global inequities or opportunity and the urgent need to respond to global environmental change. What does Global Citizenship mean in a world where billions of people aspire to greater sustenance and security at the same time that global environmental change requires a fundamental reworking of the ways we produce and use energy? From our home base in the rapidly changing global ocean, we’ll visit cultures across a spectrum of prosperity. We’ll learn about their unique challenges and solutions, and how we work together to shape the future.

Specific learning outcomes include:

Connective Narrative – Students will be able to:

Recognize the opportunities to act as a global citizen with the capacity to improve the health and welfare of others, and the sustainability of the Earth’s systems.
Analyze the challenges to socioeconomic development in a world whose environmental sustainability is threatened by global climate change
Port Country Discovery – Students will be able to:

Demonstrate observational and analytical skills needed to draw cross-cultural comparisons and to assess the similarities and differences in a variety of human experiences.
Identify key conditions and defining systems (e.g. cultural, economic, environmental, historical, political, and/or technological) of port countries in preparation for intercultural encounters.
Intercultural Competence – Students will be able to:

Identify their own cultural assumptions, beliefs, and biases in order to increase self-awareness.
Demonstrate an understanding of cultural differences and intercultural communication skills as a basis for navigating cultural encounters.
Blue World – Students will be able to:

Demonstrate knowledge of ocean dynamics and their role in global climate systems and environmental sustainability.
Describe key aspects of the human uses and abuses of the marine environment and how they inform global citizenship and the development of ocean stewardship.