Core Values

Sydney Petite enjoyed almost all of her classes at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, but none more than two experimental, team-taught, interdisciplinary courses on topics close to home: the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the thorny issue of global migration.

“I had never taken a class with more than one professor before. This was a different professor almost every other class,” said the international relations and political science major. “I loved Spring Hill and had an amazing educational experience, but this was the first time we’d ever gone so in depth from so many different angles on one topic.”

“We were getting the economic perspective, the science, the politics of oil, the government’s role, and the role the media played in the crisis,” said the Mobile native, who is taking the Foreign Service exam and applying to graduate school.

At Arcadia University outside Philadelphia, students clamor to get into the seminar that Jeff Shultz, anthropologist and education professor, teaches on and anthropologist, teaches on “Baseball and Béisbol: The Evolution of Race and Ethnicity in the Major Leagues.” It focuses on black and Latino players and explores how baseball became a lifeline for the Dominican Republic’s economy.
 
The Spring Hill and Arcadia classes both grew out of efforts to reinvigorate and globalize general education led by the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). The two schools were in a cohort of 32 colleges and universities in a project called General Education for a Global Century that is now