None of these frameworks started as theory. Each one answers a question I kept meeting along the way, all about how the people and places around a university can become one ecosystem, and pay back at home.
A scalable, self-sustaining model to reframe global learning as a catalyst for globally integrated local economies.
I owe the inspiration for this model to Hilary Landorf of Florida International University (FIU), for our conversations on global learning, and to Making Global Learning Universal, the book she wrote with Stephanie Doscher and Jaffus Hardrick, which has been a polar star in my work over the years.
Transnational education usually starts with a program looking for students abroad. RB-TNE turns the order around: a shared problem comes first, and the partnership grows out of the work done on it.
In Rome, where I designed a UK degree with Middlesex University, validated in 2009, and later brought in the University of the West of Scotland. Italian musicians had no university path in contemporary music, so we brought the degree to them, at home.
Transnational education has become a main road to a degree, yet most of it still travels one way, with a program designed at home looking for students abroad.
RB-TNE learns from traditions that also start from real problems, such as action learning, co-op education, challenge-based learning and living labs. What it adds is the reversal: two places that share a problem, or one that needs help the other can give, build a partnership around it, and the education grows out of the work they do together.
Music is one of the fastest ways to understand another culture. This framework uses it to build global competence on campus, starting with a one-day pilot and growing with evidence.
I created this framework in December 2024 at the invitation of Birgitta Rausch-Montoto, then Director of FIU Global at Florida International University, who asked me to co-design its Global Learning Forum. The project was paused in January 2025. I remain grateful for her trust and vision, and I decided to keep working on it.
Both are universal frameworks, and both transform and include. That shared ground is why music is such a natural door into global learning.
Builds on research by Nathan Riki Thomson, “Global artistic citizenship”, Nordic Research in Music Education, 2024.
It starts small and local, then opens to the world. Students lead it from the first day, with a team from music, global studies and media.
A tradition lives when the people around it can live from it. The musicians, schools, communities, venues and cities that carry a tradition form an ecosystem, and an ecosystem can be mapped, supported and grown.
My newest framework, born at Voices of the Americas Heritage Institute, which I founded in June 2023. It is where the word “ecosystem” entered my work for good, thanks also to Shain Shapiro, founder of Sound Diplomacy and the Center for Music Ecosystems, and his book This Must Be the Place, and to Anthony Seeger, who has advanced ethnomusicology for decades. The model is ready for its first pilot. Shall we build it together?
The answer is music sustainability: not eco-sustainability, but the capacity of a musical culture to persist over time. It rests on three forces.
Music education institutions should take part, for a moral reason, keeping the world’s musical diversity alive, and for the educational, cultural and social benefits it brings.
Planning a partnership, applying one of the frameworks, or building something worth a Conversation? I'd be glad to hear from you.