De-Centering the U.S. in the Global Politics Classroom Resource Collection: Co-Facilitators Summary and Participants

When teaching about global politics, we are often confronted with a dilemma: how can we teach our students that global issues can be seen from multiple perspectives? Or put differently, that the US view, let’s say on addressing climate change, is only one of many valid and varying approaches and perspectives? This task is particularly important and daunting if you teach at an institution where many students have never left the United States or where study abroad is not widespread. This context was the impetus for our teaching symposium:  De-Centering the US in Global Politics.

Accordingly, our teaching symposium was about more than teaching students about places, politics, cultures, and economies beyond the United States. Our symposium participants all grappled with a much more difficult question to answer: how can we shift the focus away from a solely US-centric perspective on global politics and issues and instead incorporate a more diverse range of viewpoints, experiences, and cultures into the learning experience of our students?  The result is a teaching resource collection that pulls together the expertise and lessons learned from eleven faculty representing a wide variety of institutions and subfields.

Our teaching resource is designed to help other faculty to de-center the US in their own classrooms, not just for those teaching global or international politics. But also for those who teach across any other subfield. Our cohort also was conscious that not all faculty have time to completely redesign their full syllabus. Thus, our teaching resources offer ideas for assignments that can easily be integrated into existing course designs and lesson plans that faculty can use to replace existing ones or to fill in empty weeks in their schedule. If faculty are starting from scratch, some of our resources can be used as starting points for a new class.