National Collegiate Honors Council
Date of this Version
2021
Document Type
Book Chapter
Citation
In: Place, Self, Community: City as Text™ in the Twenty-First Century, Edited by Bernice Braid and Sara E. Quay. National Collegiate Honors Council, 2021.
Abstract
Over forty years have passed since I attended the National Collegiate Honors Council’s 1978 United Nations Semester (UNS) in New York. I have since served as a resident director of the 1980 UNS, practiced law, and taught as an adjunct law professor. Since 2008, I have spent half of my professional time consulting on international rule of law development projects. I have worked with teams of legal professionals to support the constitutional transition in Tunisia; trained law students and lawyers in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East and North Africa region; and evaluated the impact of a host of judicial, legal profession, and legal education reforms throughout the world. After I had embarked on my international work, a friend asked whether I could ever have imagined my legal career taking such a dramatic turn. My answer: Easily. Rather than a departure, the international work has felt instead like a return, a circling back to something begun decades ago during the UNS when I had my first introduction to the global network and work of international NGOs (non-government organizations).
In the Introduction to this monograph, Bernice Braid describes an aspect of the City as Text™ semesters that I see as foundational for my international work and that I will explore here: an integrative learning approach has an “inherent . . . capacity to generate a sense of interconnectedness, of self-in-context, which finds expression in professional practices that endure long after the original experiential learning adventure is over” (xii). Braid’s statement accurately encapsulates the legacy of my participation in the UNS.
Included in
Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Higher Education Commons, Higher Education Administration Commons, Liberal Studies Commons, Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons
Comments
© 2021 NCHC.