Global Studies Initiatives in Arts and Sciences 2025

A workshop to internationalize the curriculum was held at Parkland College in the summer of 2025 as part of a long-term collaboration between Parkland College and the area studies centers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The sponsors for this workshop where the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for Global Studies, which funded this workshop to promote curriculum redesign with Title IV funds from the United States Department of Education. Ten adjunct faculty from the department of Arts, Media, and Social Sciences representing nine different fields participated in this ongoing initiative to update and globalize their courses. As in past years, participating faculty redesigned course materials and created new assignments and activities to further Parkland's General Learning Outcome of Global Awareness and Cultural Reasoning. This year's work focused on case studies from the Middle East, although other regions of the globe were also workshopped. The development of this curricular redesign is described in the attached individual reports which contributed to anthropology, communication, criminal justice, economics, music, political science, psychology, sociology and theater courses. We thank the faculty who worked on this project, as well as Dr. Sarah Grison, Professor of Psychology at Parkland, who led the workshop, Dr. Isabel Scarborough, Department Chair for Arts, Media, and Social Sciences who organized these efforts, and Krishna Thomas, Director of the Parkland's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning who hosted the session. In line with Parkland's mission to engage the community in learning, we hope this work will have a positive impact on our students as well as contribute to ongoing discussions on internationalizing education.