Higher learning in a diverse context

Last week at a conference on diversity in higher education, the president of the DePaul University at Chicago, IL, pointed to research which showed that students who study at a university that facilitates a culturally diverse environment develop higher cognitive learning than students who study in a non-diverse environment.

In other words, students not only learn from the books they also learn from their new and diverse environment. In a diverse environment nothing can be taken for granted. More importantly however, in a diverse environment nothing should be taken for granted if one is to survive (socially that is).

Intercultural encounters are indeed the best learning school one can have and I can tell from my own experience that an intercultural environment is perhaps the most rewarding a school can offer to its students.

I applaud the project moving targets because it precisely does that: It offers students from different countries an opportunity to work together and learn from each other for the duration of a week. During this week the students will come to understand that their environment is not the only reality based on which they can perceive the world. At the same time the students will be able to show others how they look at things that are being played out in their direct environments.

The result of all this will be a new environment: a grey area in which the students themselves have set the borders and rules. Hopefully, by the end of the week you will have learned not simply how to set up a course and teach pupils at a primary school. I hope that in addition you will have learned that there is much more than what any textbook tells you.