Elisheva Cohen, senior associate director of experiential learning and professional development at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies is a co-editor of Teaching Global Development: Practical Approaches for Inclusive, Critical, and Decolonized Pedagogy, a landmark open-access volume published by Bloomsbury Academic. Edited alongside John-Michael Davis, Ruth Murumba, Mary Jane Parmentier, Marylynn Steckley, and Rita Udor, the book is the first collection of its kind to bring together current approaches to teaching development studies with ethics, equity, and decolonization at the forefront — and is freely available to readers anywhere in the world.
Drawing on contributors from a range of disciplines and from across the world, the volume invites educators to reconsider what global development means in different contexts — and how that understanding should shape course design and pedagogy. Contributors offer strategies for building more ethically grounded syllabi, innovative approaches to exploring diversity and equity through readings and activities, and detailed case studies of global development studies programs. Throughout, the collection showcases practical tools for service learning, lesson plans, and activities that model what critical, DEI-sensitive teaching actually looks like in the classroom.
The ebook is available free of charge under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on Bloomsbury Collections, made possible through open-access funding from Indiana University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. At IU, support came from the Tobias Center and the Center for the Study of Global Change — reflecting both centers' shared commitment to advancing rigorous, equity-conscious scholarship and pedagogy in international development.
The volume arrives at a moment when questions about who defines "development" — and whose voices shape how it is taught — are increasingly urgent in classrooms around the world. By centering ethics, lived experience, and decolonized frameworks alongside theory, Cohen and her co-editors have produced an essential resource for scholars, instructors, and students grappling not only with the substance of global development, but with the responsibilities that come with teaching it.