On October 9, 2020, sixteen students and young professionals from twelve countries met with the Committee on Global Thought to discuss the purpose of higher education in a changing world. They would meet four more times, ultimately planning a Global Youth Summit in early December. Held in conjunction with the CGT Youth in a Changing World research project, the five working group meetings and December summit aimed to create positive change by engaging youth on critical questions related to the purpose and direction of higher education while simultaneously empowering them to voice their concerns and positions as they relate to higher education.
The group began by identifying the most pressing challenges facing the world, phrased as questions to better facilitate discussion. These were:
- How do we foster a cohesive and sustainable global community?
- How do we address global security challenges?
- How do we ensure equality on local, national, and global levels?
- How do we leverage the potential and manage the risk of technology trends?
Needless to say, this set of questions is not exhaustive, and each represents a general challenge that can be broken down into several sub-challenges. However, this list provided the group with an important foundation from which to structure the discussions. Once these questions were developed, members met to determine how a University of the future would prepare students to meet these challenges. Participants structured their discussions using the following questions:
- Why? What values should guide universities?
- What? What do students need to learn?
- How? What approaches and pedagogies should we use to achieve our objectives?
- Where? What should our campuses and classrooms look like?
These questions catalyzed the group to think outside the box by imagining an ideal learning environment. For instance, to address the fourth question above, members broke out into smaller groups of two to three to visually design a utopian learning environment. When they re-grouped, they realized that they all had imagined the ideal classroom space to be open and connected, flat in structure (it was a unanimous consensus that classrooms should not have students facing the teacher), and most importantly porous in nature (where the classroom is not confined to four walls and promotes conversation and immersion across communities and localities). This approach turned the working group sessions into a virtual makers lab, where creativity had no borders or restrictions.