Internationalizing the Political Science Curriculum:
The Travel Course and Liberal Education.
By: Gordon A. Babst, Ph.D.
INTRODUCTION
A recent issue of the Association of American Colleges & University’s peer Review was
devoted to the intimate connections between higher education in the liberal arts and
citizenship.
Drawing from historical and contemporary sources, as well as from
practical experiences, this issue noted both one animating ideal of a liberal education –
civic engagement – and current failure to meet that ideal. Interestingly, the issue’s cover
design, which was repeated throughout the issue, consisted of a person in graduation garb
holding the planet Earth in his or her outstretched hands, suggesting that the topic
“Educating for Citizenship” would be more broadly, even globally conceived. This, it
turns out, was not the case, as not a single essay offered a perspective outside the
American setting or extended the topic beyond our nation’s shores, and the only one that
did merely referred to the global context of understanding diversity and the need to
comprehend it on our campuses and within our country.
In addition, the two-page listing
entitled “Selected Projects that Link Liberal Education and Civic Engagement” did not
mention a single project that was international in scope, nor did it offer a category to
complement the category “National Projects”.
All-in-all, this inattention to globalizing the curriculum was curious, given the
increasingly global dimensions of nearly every aspect of American life and society, and
the interpenetrations of American and other cultures in practically every corner of the
globe. The importance of study abroad in this context is hardly a new development, as
Carlson, et al., note in the preface to their comprehensive study of the study abroad
experience published in 1990:
In an interdependent world, study abroad is thought to be an important
vehicle for producing an internationally aware and concerned citizenry. It
2
Peer Review 5, no. 3(Spring 2003).
3
Robert A. Rhoads, “How Civic Engagement Is Reframing Liberal Education,” peer
Review 5, no. 3(Spring 2003): 25-28.
2
Convention