The Fries Center team was busy at the end of the last academic year creating and refining tools that the campus can use going forward.

Decentering Europe. As a complement to our listing of units with a regional or area-studies approach, we have added a list of academic units that have taken steps to decenter the European experience in their curriculum and pedagogy, along with specific examples of what each unit has done. Decentering is not the same as devaluing. Decentering means to teach European-derived content alongside content from the rest of the world, without marking the European material as somehow privileged. Decentering encourages us to make room for and consider with intention all voices including those that have been less dominant in global discourse.

There are many ways to decenter. To give just one example, the Philosophy Department can both consider Plato to be a great philosopher and change the name of a course from “Ancient Philosophy” to “Ancient Western Philosophy”; or it could expand the syllabus of “Ancient Philosophy” to include ancient philosophies beyond those of Greece and Rome. As you will see from clicking on the drop-down menus on the website, units across campus are currently doing a variety of things to decenter Europe, some more intentionally and explicitly than others. Units not listed are provisionally omitted as not currently highlighting features relevant to decentering Europe. The information here has been gathered primarily from each unit’s website and is a perpetual work-in-progress; please contact fcgs@wesleyan.edu with any questions or updates.

Advising for a Global Education. Another new page on the Fries Center site is titled “Faculty Resources.” Here we collect links to a range of resources from the Fries Center site itself and beyond. One newly revised page linked here is called “Advising for a Global Education,” which seeks to summarize some of the key things that any adviser should consider when working with new advisees, no matter their intended major.

International Events. The Global Wesleyan Collaborative has embarked on an effort to track and publicize internationally themed events and activities (“events” are one-off things like lectures; “activities” are broader in scope, like a series or new curricular initiative). Going forward, we will share information on upcoming events on the Fries Center homepage (which we have just started) as well as on the large screens in Fisk Hall and on our social media. In addition, this will allow us to gather data concerning the events as a whole, including those held in languages other than English.

Fries Center team will do our best to gather information from email announcements, but we’d like to encourage you to use this simple form (also linked on our home page) to submit event information. Information on broader activities can be submitted here. For more information, including a glossary of key terms, see the Internationalization Dashboard.