Building a Curriculum to Foster Global Competence and Promote the Public Interest: Social Entrepreneurship and Digital Skills for American Community College Students

This paper proposes a new approach for combining top-down and bottom-up approaches intended to lead to a curriculum for action in the public interest that builds on social entrepreneurship and digital skills for students at community colleges. This integrated approach requires a collaborative, participatory approach and aims to provide relevant content for students with different cultures and backgrounds, personal values, and sense of identity. The objective is for all participants to engage in the learning process, become more confident, and develop contemporary skills that inspire and enable them to take initiatives to tackle global challenges and to thrive in a multicultural world. A relevant curriculum must enable students to understand the global and local situations in different geographies and, with the increasing demand for digital skills, to access and share information over networks, to develop possible solutions, and to make them happen. This paper proposes ideas for stimulating students to think about what they can do for the public good, starting with local issues, and to generate outcomes valued by the community. The ideas proposed for specific local communities in Maryland can be generalized for understanding and addressing problems for different communities in the United States as well.