Minnesota Studies in International Development (MSID): Mission and Educational Philosophy
MSID Mission
Minnesota Studies in International Development (MSID) is devoted to the preparation of culturally sensitive individuals who are committed to the concepts of justice and sustainable development for all societies in our interdependent world. MSID seeks to engage students, faculty, staff, and the general community in dialogue and reciprocal learning with people from Africa, Asia, and Latin America concerning local and global problems, with a particular emphasis on development issues. Through grassroots internships and research experiences in development projects working within economically poor communities, you will gain firsthand experience with the conditions, needs, and strengths of the countries involved with MSID programs.
MSID Educational Philosophy: Fostering Lifelong Habits of Thought and Engagement
MSID seeks to foster 9 lifelong habits of mind, heart, and action. The program has been deliberately designed to help you acquire these habits.
Habit 1: Think, Feel, and Act Holistically
MSID helps you value many kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. MSID asks you to cultivate not only the cognitive domain, but also the affective and behavioral. Learn to appreciate not only western linear approaches, but also more holistic non-western approaches.
Habit 2: Extract Meaning from Experience
After leaving the university, most people receive information not through neatly organized lectures or textbooks, but through real-world events. MSID’s experiential pedagogy provides opportunities to hone important observational and analytical skills. Field experiences and writing assignments push you to move continually back and forth between experience and ideas. MSID challenges you to apply theories, concepts, and modes of analysis to help understand your experiences and to also critique these same theories, concepts, and tools in light of those experiences. MSID strives to help you be actively attentive to your surroundings, to learn to spot the significant in the midst of the mundane, and to seek to produce ongoing dialogue between theory and practice.
Habit 3: Understand the Intimate Relationship between Knowledge and Power
With MSID, you will seek to understand how poverty, discrimination, and powerlessness are produced and manipulated. As you dissect “knowledge” about development, you come to see more clearly that knowledge is socially constructed. MSID teaches you to reflexively ask who has produced particular knowledge, on what perceptions of reality that knowledge is built, whose interests it serves, and how knowledge based on other realities and interests might differ. You will be aware that the public arena reflects some realities better than others. MSID is intentionally cross-class as well as cross-cultural. You will also constantly reflect on what voices are absent or distorted in public discourse and in media portrayals. You should wonder how civic dialogue would change if valuing a diversity of voices and opinions were the norm rather than the exception. Finally, you should seek to hear those multiple voices yourself, and to help those voices reach the ears of others.
Habit 4: Savor Diversity
Working in boundary zones generates creativity. Through classroom study, homestays, internships, excursions, and field assignments, MSID will bring you into interfaces across boundaries of culture, social class, religion, and ideological perspective. With MSID, you should be eager to move beyond your comfort zone and resist the temptation to surround yourself only with people like yourself. Knowing that reality is too complex to yield to the tools and insights of a single academic tradition, you should be addicted to interdisciplinary thinking and should seek always to understand a variety of perspectives before formulating your own positions.
Habit 5: Invoke the Global Context
The MSID experience pushes you to examine local and national issues in your host countries in the context of great forces—economic, political, social, environmental, cultural—that are reshaping the globe. You may conclude that the dominant approaches are not working and that the world’s problems require a rethinking of development and intercultural relations at all levels. With MSID, you should consider the global context as you seek to understand and address issues in your own communities. In the quest for alternatives, you should be capable of questioning the assumptions that underlie current ways of doing things, and of thinking creatively about alternatives. Moreover, having come to a new appreciation for the perspectives and strengths of at least one society within the global south, you should have an ongoing impulse to help others share that appreciation. In ways big or small, you should find yourself striving to build north-south bridges.
Habit 6: Take a Long-Term Perspective
Political systems and the marketplace give disproportional weight to the short term (e.g., the latest poll results or quarterly financial reports). MSID asks you to question models of “development” that are unsustainable and to challenge “progress” that is based on borrowing from those yet to come. MSID will teach you to ask how decisions—individually and as a society—affect posterity. You should imagine what the voices of future generations would say if they could be heard, and how to live keeping these with voices in mind.
Habit 7: Cultivate Empathy
MSID helps you develop the capacity to experience aspects of reality from the frame of reference of others, to value their skills and insights, and to walk—at least mentally—in their shoes. An ability to identify with others casts suspicion on the asymmetry inherent in many efforts to promote development and social justice. With MSID, you will develop not only a bend toward empathy but an aversion to condescension. When reflection and analysis lead you to couple empathy with action, you should instinctively eschew a vocabulary of “helping” in favor of “working with,” “joining the struggle of,” or “learning with.”
Habit 8: Foster Community
MSID teaches you to immerse yourself in societies less individualistic than your own. Your internships and homestays often prove a powerful venue for experiencing the magic of community. At the same time, you are part of a second kind of community—a community of learners. As an MSID student, you have a responsibility not only to maximize your own learning but to assist in the learning of your classmates. In the MSID model, all teachers are learners and all learners are teachers. The MSID experience should leave you with a respect for the power of community and a commitment to contributing effectively to the communities in which you participate.
Habit 9: Translate Insights and Values into Action
By immersing yourself in alternative realities, MSID helps you gain new insights into your own. By learning about the other, you rethink who you are. By directly participating in work within the host country, you act on your learning. Through writing assignments and group discussions, you continually reflect on your own relationship to issues of injustice and social change. As you gain new self-understanding, you will reexamine what is important to you and what kind of life you wish to live—as professionals, as consumers, as investors, as parents, as citizens. This reexamination should be not a one-time event, but a lifelong process. You should lead a life of effective action coupled with critical reflection, and you should have a lifelong passion for justice and a lifelong habit of thoughtful civic engagement.