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Global Learning Seminars

FYS-Global Learning seminars invite first-year students to explore cultural diversity and global challenges while developing awareness and critical thinking skills that will help them thrive in an interconnected world.

Interested in Teaching? Here's How!

STEP 1: Consult with FYS Associate Director Kate Andrup Stephensen at kstephensen@ucdavis.edu to plan your Global Learning Seminar

STEP 2: Submit a course proposal by the seminar proposal deadline

​​​​​STEP 3: FYS will promote your Global Learning Seminar to all incoming students at each summer orientation and throughout the academic year!

First-Year Seminars are an exciting program of small, innovative classes that reflect the instructor's intellectual interests. Limited to 19 students each, these unique courses promote intellectual exchange, critical thinking, and community. Global Learning Seminars, a collaboration between UC Davis Global Affairs and First-Year Seminars, provide an occasion for students to explore cultural diversity and/or learn about global challenges and how they are being addressed, while developing awareness and critical thinking skills that will help them thrive in an interconnected world.

Global Learning Seminars aim to enhance students’ sense of identity, community, and ethics, as well as their capacity for problem-solving and perspective-taking, in ways that are at once collaborative, equitable, and sustainable. These seminars are an important way that UC Davis is pursuing Global Education for All—a campus goal to provide 100% of UC Davis students with global learning experiences.

Global Learning Seminars provide important opportunities for students to:

  • Build Global Awareness
    • Students examine actions and relationships that influence global systems from multiple perspectives, analyzing how complex systems impact themselves and others.
  • Embrace Diversity
    • Students explore complex dimensions of diversity, equity and inclusion around the world, including language, culture and identity.
  • Act Globally
    • Students create strategies to apply knowledge, skills, and abilities to collaboratively address global challenges, locally and beyond.
The most important element of a Global Learning Seminar is that you are excited about introducing students to an important topic that will get them thinking about global systems, their implications for people’s lives and/or planetary sustainability, and/or how people are working to improve them.

Global Learning Seminar Resource Library

Resources

To support you in teaching a Global Learning Seminar, Global Affairs has developed a library of resources including Global Learning Outcomes, sample syllabi, scholarly articles, links to news articles and discussions on topics like academic engagement, cultural wealth, and global learning. If you are interested in discussing embedding Global Learning within a FYS, please contact Elizabeth Langridge-Noti (elangridge@ucdavis.edu).


Ready to Propose a Global Learning Seminar?

If you are interested in teaching a Global Learning Seminar, please contact FYS Associate Director Kate Andrup Stephensen at kstephensen@ucdavis.edu before submitting your proposal. We will reach out to help create or review your syllabus. 

Start Your Proposal


More Information Regarding Global Affairs