Global Education and Outreach

Global education is an essential component of NYU Abu Dhabi’s educational mission and curriculum. It is realized through a careful sequence of interrelated academic and intercultural experiences that foster greater intercultural understanding toward social responsibility— globally and locally. They are designed to advance our students’ ability to:

respect, engage, and negotiate difference toward greater common ground and common good;
and act with ethical intelligence as responsible, local citizens and leaders in communities they engage in the UAE, abroad, and at home.

Just as the development of critical thinking skills is not produced in one course but through a process of intellectual and social maturation over multiple years, a global education is not the product of a single experience abroad or more generally traveling. It is cultivated through well guided, iterative interactions with otherness. It is produced through bringing critical reflection and disciplined analysis to those experiences. It manifests in the ability to ask and respond to questions of global human significance with an ever more unprejudiced mind.

Through the network of academic centers and portal campuses that constitute global NYU, students have benefit of resources, intellectual circles, research centers, and place-based learning that is not available in Abu Dhabi (or any other single site) but is essential to training globally minded, action-oriented leaders and humanitarians. The carefully constructed learning environments abroad are laboratories as important within the liberal arts and sciences context as a state of the art chemistry laboratory, an art studio, or a biological field station. These are study abroad laboratories for producing higher levels of reflective judgment, intercultural sensitivity, and skills of cross cultural communication, conflict resolution, and peacemaking.

In collaboration with divisions and offices at NYUAD, an even broader stage is set for global education at NYUAD through an admissions process that brings together students from a broad range of national and cultural backgrounds, a core curriculum that provides theoretical framing for understanding significant questions through a broadly global lens, student life programming that fosters intercultural communication, and local community engagement through volunteer, internship, and undergraduate research opportunities. From this important academic grounding in Abu Dhabi, NYUAD moves students into the broader global context through study away semesters, J-Terms abroad, and regional academic programs and helps them bring back to NYUAD the benefit of that learning abroad.

Carol Brandt

Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor, Global Education and Outreach

cb149@nyu.edu

As Associate Vice Chancellor, Global Education and Outreach and Vice Provost, Carol Brandt leads the strategic and academic administration for NYUAD’s programs of global education, including Semester Study Abroad, the January Term Program, Summer Programs, Regional Academic Seminars, the Engineers for Social Impact program, Community-based Learning in the UAE, and Student Global Mobility Services. She has additional responsibility for the Office of Social Responsibility, which provides adult education to the 800 contracted staff at NYUAD as well as the Office of Community Life, which supports faculty, staff, and their families with their acculturation to living in the UAE.

Before coming to NYUAD in 2009, Brandt spent 25 years in teaching and academic administration at The Claremont Colleges, a consortium of selective, liberal arts colleges and graduate schools, where she served as Vice President for International and Special Programs and a member of the faculty of Modern Languages, Literature, and Culture at Pitzer College.

With teaching and research specializations in linguistics and second language acquisition, Brandt developed innovative programs of intercultural and language learning, including a Community-based Spanish program in Ontario, California; the Program in American College English; curricula for the teaching of Shona, Turkish, and Setswana in Pitzer’s study abroad programs; the International Fellows Program for the Peter F. Drucker School of Graduate Management, and the first Summer Language and Culture Institute at the Claremont Colleges. She was the principal investigator for grants supporting intercultural and community-based learning totaling over $4.5 million from foundations including Mellon, FIPSE, Hewlett Packard, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Housing and Urban Development Department, and the Miyazaki Educational Foundation.

She developed language intensive, field research-oriented study abroad programs in Botswana, China, Ecuador, Wales, Nepal, Japan, Turkey, Italy, and Zimbabwe as well as a biological field station for the study of restoration ecology in Costa Rica. She has presented extensively at conferences of international education on critical pedagogy, the assessment of intercultural learning, and models of community-based education.

Global Education

Social Responsibility