Experiencing the World at GSE

GSE fosters opportunities for faculty, students, and visiting scholars to share their diverse experiences and heritages with GSE and with the wider Penn community. These opportunities come in many shapes and sizes, from small, informal lunches to multi-day colloquia.

Faculty and students collaborate with departments, schools, and area studies centers on many projects. Several faculty members are currently involved with the growing Mexican population in a suburb of Philadelphia, studying how these new residents are — and are not — integrating into the existing fabric of the community.

Recently, students and faculty reached out to a nearby community arts center to begin offering after-school classes in Mandarin to elementary school students.

And GSE frequently hosts international conferences, bringing colleagues from around the world to engage with each other and with Penn colleagues on a wide range of issues of educational theory, research, and practice — these gatherings range from the annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum to one-time conferences such as the 2008 Global Development Initiative Forum.

Several times each semester, GSE sponsors colloquia featuring GSE faculty, students, and visiting scholars presenting international work.

Focus on: Kathy Hall, Director, South Asia Center

GSE Assoc. Prof. Kathy Hall has directed Penn's South Asia Center since 2007. An anthropologist by training, Dr. Hall focuses on global education as well as issues of immigration, race, and citizenship in education.

The South Asia Center works to develop campus-wide, community, and K-12 programs and activities pertaining to South Asia.

In July, the South Asia Center hosted a STARTALK program at Penn, which included a Teacher Training Institute for Hindi and Urdu. The initiative seeks to expand and improve the teaching and learning of major world languages not widely taught in the US.

With Penn's other area studies centers (African Studies, East Asia Studies, and Middle East Studies), the South Asia Center also recently co-sponsored a Global Education Workshop, which provided teachers and administrators with information and materials to help them develop global education programs in their schools.

To learn more about this and other programs supported by the South Asia Center, click here.