Global Ideas Institute  

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We live in one of the world’s most diverse cities, and we are experiencing a time of dramatic change. We see a more deeply interconnected world, fuelled by technology, with momentum enough to change corporations, media and governments in every country. At the same time we see deep divisions politically and economically, and an ailing planet. The imperatives for a renewed sense of global citizenship and global engagement are clear and unequivocal.

We know that our best students in their final years of high school are not being offered enough opportunities in the conventional curriculum to develop those hard and soft skills that they will need to meet the challenges already present in their world. They are disadvantaged from this lack of stimulation and, as a country, we miss the opportunity to benefit from their freshness, their technological expertise, their passion and their global mindedness. Students are our future leaders and we would do well by ensuring that they engage their world in intellectually imaginative ways.

The University of Toronto Schools and the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs jointly planned a symposium for motivated, self-selected high school students, to take place on April 1, 2011. The symposium was the culmination of four months of organized group study, research and continual dialogue. Fifty Toronto students from eight schools, in grades 11 and 12, studied and discussed the challenges and opportunities of scaling up local health innovations in the Global South. They benefited from a series of lectures and interactive seminars with the world’s leading scholars of health and development. Students focused on India’s Aravind Eye Hospital and its efforts to expand its model into other parts of the Global South and even industrial societies. They analyzed what lessons could be learned from social, economic, political and technological perspectives, and how these lessons could be shared with other resource-constrained societies. Led by mentors from the Asian Institute and University of Toronto’s graduate and undergraduate programs, teams of six to eight students worked in a distributed learning model to share readings and online and face-to-face discussions. For April's symposium, their teams identified and “pitched” their preferred approach to addressing the problem of scalability as seen through this case study. The symposium took place at the Munk School and featured a panel of experts in the health and development field.

The work of the project was fully integrated across the many fields and disciplines involved in such a complex problem. The students read and grappled with everything from academic research papers to news clippings, from sophisticated demographic materials to the personal stories of those directly connected to the Aravind Hospital and its work. They struggled with real-world problems through multi-disciplinary lenses. They learned about advocacy, empathy and other-regarding global citizenship. They, along with their U of T mentors, received no credit for their work, other than the gratification of studying a pressing problem which has not yet been resolved, together generating solutions that can potentially better the lives of hundreds of millions in the world’s “bottom billion.”

U of T’s Peter Singer, the CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, summed it up best when he concluded his January talk with the following observation: “So I just want to end by saying how humbled I am to be with you, because you’re going to solve this problem. And what you’re learning, reflecting on and doing in your project here is going to help solve the program. You’re focused on something extraordinarily important. Not just to provide better care in the developed world and innovate there, but also to solve some of the problems your neighbours are facing … Good on you and good luck; what you’re doing is extraordinarily important and is itself innovative.”