Global Ideas Institute  

Archive 2011-12

About | Symposium | Participants | Organizing Comittee | Sponsors | Photos

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 suffer 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 have jointly planned a symposium for motivated, self-selected high school students to take place in April 2012. The symposium will be the culmination of over six months of organized group study, research, and continual dialogue. Toronto students from twelve schools, in grades eleven and twelve, are studying and discussing the challenges and opportunities of innovating and scaling up health technologies in the Global South. They have benefi ted from a series of lectures and interactive seminars with the world’s leading scholars of health and development.

For the 2012 Global Ideas Institute, students are focusing on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s challenge to “reinvent the toilet.” They are considering not only the technical dimensions of a toilet that is off the electricity and water grids and affordable for the world’s poor, but also the social, political, and economic factors for a sustainable sanitation program. Working in teams and led by mentors from the Asian Institute and Munk School’s graduate programs, the students work in a distributed learning model to share readings and online and face-to-face discussions. In April, their teams will identify and pitch their preferred approach to reinventing the toilet. The symposium will take place at the Munk School and will feature a panel of experts in the health and development field.
The work the students do is fully integrated across the many fields and disciplines involved in such a complex problem. They are reading and grappling with everything from academic research papers to news clippings, from sophisticated demographic materials to the personal stories of those directly working in the field. They are struggling with real-world problems through multidisciplinary lenses. They are learning about advocacy, empathy, and other-regarding global citizenship. They, along with their U of T mentors, receive no credit for their work, other than the gratification of studying a pressing problem that 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, best summed up the aims of the Global Ideas Institute when he conveyed the following to students and their mentors: “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, refl ecting on, and doing in your project here is going to help solve the problem. 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.”