Infusing the UN Sustainable Development Goals into a global learning initiative

Abstract

The Global Citizens Project (GCP) is a university-wide global learning initiative at the University of South Florida, aimed at enhancing undergraduate students’ global competencies through curricular and co-curricular experiences. The GCP uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for these experiences. Understanding the SDGs allows students to expand their ideas on issues that exist in the world and how we might respond to the challenges. The purpose of this article is to provide a case study showing how the GCP has introduced students from all disciplines and undergraduate degree programmes to the SDGs through interdisciplinary workshops, with the aim of helping them to better understand the SDGs and connect global issues to their academic goals, professional objectives and everyday experiences. To determine whether the aims of the workshops were met, qualitative content analysis is employed to analyse the constructed responses of students who attended them. The results of the study suggest that the SDGs provide a relevant and sufficiently robust framework for guiding undergraduate students in their thinking about global issues as well as their relationship with these issues.