First Year Odyssey
Global Citizenship
Seminar Cluster
Introducing First-Year Students to Global Citizenship
The Office of Global Engagement and Terry College of Business invite faculty to join the First-Year Odyssey Global Citizenship Cluster. This cluster aims to bring together FYO seminars with an international focus designed to encourage students to reflect on cultural, social, economic, and political differences in a global context. It includes class presentations on study abroad and sustainability, as well as at least one academic and networking event especially geared toward first-year students enrolled in participating seminars.
How to Participate
Faculty interested in being considered for inclusion in the cluster, should send an email indicating their interest in participating along with the title and description of the seminar they proposed for Fall 2025 to Santanu Chatterjee and Martin Kagel. A maximum of 20 seminars will be included. The submission deadline is Friday, February 28, 2025.
Inclusion in the cluster does not equal formal acceptance of your FYO seminar. To be permitted to offer your FYO seminar and receive compensation, please follow the regular submission protocol outlined at fyo.uga.edu. Consideration of inclusion in the cluster is secondary to the acceptance of your proposal by the FYO program.
Eligible to teach First-Year Odyssey Seminars are tenure-track faculty members, including emeritus faculty and clinical faculty who hold the rank of assistant professor, associate professor, or professor.
Seminars are developed and designed as regular FYO seminars, i.e., their syllabi would reflect scholarly expertise and interests of faculty and would be scheduled at a time of their preference; however, to an extent, we would want seminars to have shared goals, which we will articulate along with plans for Fall Semester in joint meetings at the end of spring and just prior to the beginning of Fall Semester.
Each seminar would include two designated sessions, one on study abroad, the other on sustainability. The first session will be led by Office of Global Engagement staff and acquaint students with UGA faculty-led study abroad programs, scholarship support for experiences abroad, and other relevant information related to international study. The second session will be led by Office of Sustainability staff and be focused on how international experiences can be integrated into the sustainability certificate, grant funding for sustainability projects available to students on study abroad, and opportunities to present independent research centered around sustainability.
The seminar cluster would result in a cohort which we would bring together by coordinating one or two academic events, such as student-centered lectures and/or workshops exemplifying critical approaches to international experiences, and one networking gathering at the end of the semester. Participating students would also be asked to attend either the OGE Open House or UGA’s Fall Semester Study Abroad Fair. Events organized in connection with the FYO Global Citizenship Seminar Cluster would satisfy the FYO event attendance requirement for students.
While we recognize that many critical efforts related to global education are already ongoing in many classrooms on the UGA campus, an early introduction to a reflective approach to global education is still a desideratum. By encouraging students to reflect on cultural and political differences, socio-economic and educational disparities in a global context at the beginning of their studies at UGA, and by allowing them to gain a theoretical understanding as to where they are situated vis-à-vis others in the world, we would aim to better prepare students for future educational experiences abroad—get them interested and engaged—and deepen their international study, maximizing its outcome and thus the possibility of our students’ global citizenship. UGA offers a wealth of opportunities to internationalize the student experience on and off campus. Coordination of FYO seminars in a global citizenship cluster is a part of that effort.