A few years ago, I became fascinated with the idea of teaching about relationships from a wider paradigm than what we experience here in the United States. I began experimenting with a global/transnational/comparative approach in my Marriage and Family class (a 200-level Sociology elective). This kind of approach felt vital to me in a world that is increasingly interconnected, a world that we are sending students out to navigate. At first, I added readings to the course that summarized family and partnership trends from around the world. As time went on, I decided to expose my students to the diversity of global practices by organizing the course around a number of concepts that we would explore with readings, guest speakers, and group projects.

In my most recent version of the Marriage and Family course, I began with a handout on the first day of class that spelled out to students my attempt to summarize the most socially approved model of partnership in the United States today: a lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual, love-based, legally recognized, personally fulfilling, committed marriage between two mutually consenting adults similar in age and characteristics. This was followed by a list of concepts that reflected diverse partnership practices from around the world. These included monogamy, polygamy (polygyny and polyandry), polyamory, serial monogamy, homogamy and heterogamy, hypergamy and hypogamy, marriage migration, child marriage, same sex marriage, love-based marriage, arranged marriage, dowry, bride price, and walking marriage.

I assigned readings designed to deepen the students' awareness of these practices. For instance, I found Judith Stacey's new book, Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China to be a riveting account of various contemporary partnership and family practices. Stacey drew upon her research of gay men raising children in Los Angeles, polygamy and same sex marriage in the U.S. and South Africa, and an ethnic subgroup in China (the Mosuo) who historically did not practice marriage. (The term "walking marriage" roughly captures their alternative way of practicing partnership.) Other readings helped to capture other practices that the students found quite "foreign," such as arranged marriage, marriage migration, and child marriage.

We also looked at concepts related to having and raising children. Some of the more global concepts included transnational adoption, transnational surrogacy, transnational parenting, children in street situations, unaccompanied migrant children, and "parachute children" (children sent to live in another country while their parents remain in the original country).

In addition to readings, lectures, and discussions, I have been pleased at how guest speakers could bring some of these global course concepts alive. Colleagues who were raised in cultures that practice polygamy or arranged marriage shared how common and accepted these practices are in other places. An additional colleague shared her experiences of transnational adoption, describing the process of adopting three siblings from Russia.

To add to our sense of discovery, I asked students to select from a list of nine unfamiliar or transnational or controversial concepts and to work in groups to present more information to the class. (Last time I taught the class, the nine concepts I selected were polygamy, arranged marriage, child marriage, marriage migrants, polyamory, heterogamy, same sex marriage, transnational adoption, reproductive technology (including transnational surrogacy), and transnational parenting.) This "Concept Project" assignment had a solo component and a group component. In the solo part, students were asked to search for interesting and appropriate sources that helped them to understand their chosen concepts better. Each of the students narrowed their sources down to one sociological journal article, one news source, and one web page source. They then prepared an annotated bibliography of these sources, to share with me and with the other students they would be presenting with. Collectively, each group then came together with multiple potential sources that could form the basis of a professional, valuable, and creative presentation to the class. Presentations were 10 minutes long, and I allowed the students to use up to three minutes of this time sharing video clips from the internet, TV, or movies that helped to illustrate their points. Presentations were posted for students to review again later, and became additional material that they could draw from in completing additional assignments, such as a paper assignment I called Marriage/Partnership in Global Perspective.

It has been exciting for me to develop this approach to the class, and at the end of the semester, the students expressed how much they had learned about a topic they thought they knew all about: marriage and family.