James Madison University
IN-24: Innovation A

The Cultivating the Globally Sustainable Self Summit Series is a multi-year, multi- institution initiative to promote transformative teaching and learning in research and practice. The Summit Series is centered on five broad and urgent global themes including 1) conflict resolution, 2) human rights, 3) sustainability, 4) global education, and 5) religious and cultural understanding. Hosted by James Madison University (JMU), this effort has brought together approximately 80 leading and interdisciplinary scholars, educators, and practitioners from around the world to confront these issues head-on and apply themselves to unlocking human learning, growth, understanding, and engagement in a way that will address these crucial problems facing modern society. This knowledge-building and knowledge sharing approach is built upon a “four-legged stool,” including a leg for 1) building the community of scholars, educators, and practitioners, 2) developing and publishing a book that includes theory-to-practice chapters by targeted teams of summit participants, 3) producing a Summit Media Package that presents insights of the summit book as accessible, compelling short films targeting a wide, young audience (16-to-22-year-olds), and 4) creating web-based academic curricula and materials that further explain and explore concepts introduced by video content. The Summit Series community was established in 2015 and meets annually to discuss strategy and direction and to work on focused projects under the umbrella of Summit themes. In the fall of 2015, Summit leadership presented these projects as part of a book proposal entitled Cultivating the Globally Sustainable Self: How the Human Species Might Fulfill its Potential to Oxford University Press. Following internal and external review in the spring of 2016, Oxford University Press approved the book project, with an anticipated completion date in 2018.With the aim of reaching and teaching a young audience of high school and college students in the U.S. and internationally, the next step is a video project that features youth-driven and youth-captured film content from at least six different countries across six different continents (Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America). By design, the Summit Series includes carefully selected participants from each of these continents who will facilitate the film development process in their respective countries. The film project is directed by Arnd Wächter, Founder and Managing Director of Crossing Borders Education in partnership with the Summit Series Steering Committee and the three conveners of the Summit Series, which include the College of Education and Office of International Programs at JMU and the non-profit International Beliefs and Values Institute. The Summit Media Package will consist of a variety of short films that are designed to create public awareness of and interest in the five Summit themes. While the Summit book will be written primarily for scholars, educators, practitioners, and students, the Media Package will include perspectives and activities that are designed to facilitate and demonstrate learning, growth, development, and engagement across the Summit themes while also inspiring young viewers to dig for more information in the book and other Summit resources. Alongside the Summit Media Package, the “fourth leg of the stool” consists of online resources that complement and further explain film concepts, including educator manuals, awareness exercises, curricular strategies, models of learning, growth, and change, assessment methods, and other educational resources and links. The Media Package and collection of curricular resources, distributed online to educators in college as well as K-12 settings, will provide the means to reach beyond academia to expose the outcomes and insights of the Summit Series to a wide, young audience composed of catalysts for change and the betterment of society.

Responsible party: Dr. Craig Shealy, Professor, Graduate Psychology Entered into the tool by Melissa Altman