Pedro Noguera, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco & Carola Suárez-Orozco - Co-Directors of IGEMS

Mission

The Institute for Globalization & Education in Metropolitan Settings (IGEMS) is dedicated to advancing our understanding of diverse youth growing up in rapidly changing global cities and to promote their education and wellbeing.

Rationale

The forces of globalization – trade, technology, migration, and capital flows – are profoundly changing the contexts, experiences and life trajectories of young people in an interconnected world. The risks and opportunities experienced by youth today are intricately interwoven in a complex global interface. While there is a growing recognition that the global economy requires a new paradigm for education for the 21st century, much of the world’s education systems continue to be set in the 20th century mode of rudimentary mass education. This gap presents a challenge for the education and wellbeing of world’s largest-ever generation of adolescents who are approaching adulthood in a rapidly changing global era. The work of IGEMS is devoted to the scholarly understanding of these processes, the identification, and nurturance of promising practices, and the promotion of policy best suited to the dilemmas of youth development in a global era.

Priorities and New Perspectives

IGEMS address these issues by offering an interdisciplinary research, training, and dissemination program focused on the implications of globalization on the education and wellbeing of youth. New York City, the world’s leading Global City, offers an unparallel laboratory for developing work at the nexus of research, training, practice, intervention, and policy making.  Our priorities include:

• Understanding and fostering education that promotes the new 21st Century Skills
• Understanding educational disparities among underserved and underachieving student populations including minority students, immigrant origin student, and boys
• Fostering academic engagement among students
• Fostering basic research in New York City, domestically, and internationally
• Extensive dissemination of emerging findings 
• Translating research to practice
• Providing continuing community service
• Training of the next generation of scholars