The Global Imperative for Higher Education: Cultivating Students’ Ontological Relationships to Multiscalar Spaces through Glonacal Agency

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the cause and treatment of global emergencies are bounded within a space (e.g., local communities, a country, or a region). This establishes a new purpose for higher education, namely to move from the notion that institutions must physically house students to that of cultivating students’ glonacal agency through the online learning environment. Such a model intrinsically motivates students to navigate the multiscalar spaces (i.e., global, national, and local spheres) as part of their higher education learning and to lead actions that do not subjugate the interests and rights of communities in diverse spaces. In serving the new purpose of higher education, online graduate education, particularly asynchronous comparative and international education courses, can play an imperative role. This essay, thus, establishes an ontological and pedagogical conceptualization of how comparative and international education can prepare students to develop glonacal agency by interrogating the concept of space and attending to students’ ontological sense of being in the context of education and agency development.