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Global Citizenship in Canadian Universities: A New Framework …………………….….. pg 2 By Melanie Rathburn, Mount Royal University and Roberta Lexier, Mount Royal University Citizenship Education and Embodied ways of Knowing: What can be learned from the voices of Ghanaian youth in schooling and education? ……………………..…… pg 27 By George J. Sefa Dei, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and Marlon Simmons, University of Calgary A Habitat for Humanity and University Partnership: Enhancing Experiential Learning in El Salvador ...... pg 47 By Robert Feagan, Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford) and Mike Boylan, Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford) Cultivating Global Citizenship Abroad: The Case of Asian MBA Students in Dubai pg 81 By Shelbee R. NguyenVoges, Kennesaw State University Measuring Attitudes Toward the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: An Index of Global Citizenship ……………………………………………………………………………………………..…. pg 101 By Donald L. Rubin, University of Georgia (USA); Adam Landon, University of Georgia (USA); Michael Tarrant, University of Georgia (USA); Lee Stoner, Massey University (New Zealand) and Logan Mintz, University of Georgia (USA) Rethinking Global Citizenship Resources for New Teachers: Promoting Critical Thinking and Equity .....……………………………………………………………….…………….….…………. pg 117 By Lorna R. McLean, University of Ottawa and Sharon A. Cook, University of Ottawa
Dissertation Abstract pg 141 Aeta Indigenous Women Healers in the Philippines: Lessons and Implications ….. By Rose Ann Torres, University of Toronto
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Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education Volume 5 Number 1 - 2016 journals.sfu.ca/jgcee
Global Citizenship in Canadian Universities: A New Framework
Melanie Rathburn Associate Professor Department of General Education & Department of Biology Mount Royal University (Calgary, AB)
Roberta Lexier Associate Professor Department of General Education Mount Royal University (Calgary, AB)
Keywords: Global Citizenship; Universities; Framework
ABSTRACT: The value and importance of global learning is widely promoted and debated in the literature but, without a common language to frame this discussion, we cannot accurately assess its effectiveness or value. One term frequently used in these conversations, and extolled by universities, is the idea of global citizenship; however, there is no consistent definition of this concept. In this article, we describe the philosophical traditions surrounding the term global citizenship and explain the roots of the debate over its use. To further understand how this term is used among institutions of higher education, we investigated how select Canadian universities discuss global citizenship and identified some of the key terms used as proxies for it. By bringing together the existing academic literature, the available statistics, and a survey of mandates and practices across Canadian universities, we have developed a framework that defines a global citizen in a Canadian context. This shared framework, that universities can adapt and modify to meet their own institutional needs, is necessary to enhance their ability to develop the next generation of global citizens. A consistent language and vision will better shape the experiences students have, will ensure the evaluation of university programs is both possible and effective, and will create common goals that can be shared amongst industry, government, and universities.
Introduction
A shared understanding of how we discuss global citizenship is necessary to help better shape the experiences students have, to ensure the evaluation of university programs is possible and effective, and to create alliances among industry, government, and universities to enhance the development of students as global citizens. Global citizenship is frequently identified by industry, government, and universities in Canada as an important outcome of education; however, there is significant debate about the meaning of JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 3 this term. To understand this debate, we begin with a review of the roots of this debate. Next, we identify the key concepts used by universities as proxies for global citizenship and lay out the methods of analysis. We then provide an examination of global citizenship and its characterizations, as well as present existing definitions of the term as used by educational institutions. We conclude by providing a new framework of global citizenship and by offering some suggestions of mechanisms through which universities can more effectively fulfill their responsibility to create global citizens.
Identifying the Key Concepts of Global Citizenship
“The ideals of global citizenship,” according to Roopa Desai Trilokekar and Adrian Shubert (2009), “hold a special place for Canada and Canadians.” This, they argue, can be seen through foreign policy, in particular the Pearsonian tradition of peacekeeping, to which they refer as “a kind of global citizenship avant la lettre.” Canada, it is claimed, has “worked…to build up a sense of global accountability and conscience.” Moreover, they claim that, “Canada’s distinctive approach to multiculturalism and national self-definition” highlights the importance of global citizenship for Canadians: “Canadian society is too complex to be captured by categories of culture and ethnicity. People live their lives in an overlapping plurality of spaces and subjectivities within and across borders” (pg. 191-193).
Yet, over the past decade, we have seen an erosion of these policies and practices that give Canadians a “particular affinity” (Trilokekar & Shubert, 2009, pg. 191) for global citizenship. Canada no longer takes an active role in peacekeeping as part of its foreign policy; after leading the world in troop commitments for peacekeeping missions twenty years ago, Canada now ranks 65th out of the 193 United Nations member states and has only 34 personnel participating in operations around the world (Shephard, 2014). The nation’s international reputation as peacekeepers no longer reflects the reality of Canadian foreign policy. Moreover, while multiculturalism remains official policy in Canada, numerous tensions have emerged, especially over religious clothing and practices, which undermine the country’s supposed acceptance of the cultures and traditions of the people who now call Canada home. While “Canadians see multiculturalism as central to their national identity,” there has been increasing pressure on immigrants to integrate into “Canadian” culture and society (“Canadian multiculturalism,” 2014). The recent debate over Canada’s refugee policy further demonstrates the important shifts occurring in the nation’s international role. Historically, refugees fleeing war and chaos in their home countries were admitted in large numbers and Canadians prided themselves on the assistance provided to these individuals. Currently, however, Canada ranks fifteenth among industrialized countries receiving refugees (see, Bangarth, 2015) and has severely limited its acceptance of and support for refugees. Thus, in significant ways, the attributes—which apparently make Canadians global citizens—have significantly disintegrated over the previous decade. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 4
At the same time, scholars extensively debate the value of the term global citizenship and its meaning in a modern world. Political theorists, for instance, often argue that the concept is meaningless; they insist that citizenship is based in the nation-state and, since “the global conditions for citizenship do not exist…the term is at best metaphorical” (Carter, 2001, pg. 5). In other words, in viewing citizenship as a practical set of rights and obligations for members of a particular community, political theorists insist that, without global institutions that can grant citizenship, there can be no such thing as global citizenship. Other scholars, in contrast, argue that the concept extends beyond these limited boundaries and they instead take individuals, not states, as their primary focus (see, Cabrera, 2010). According to Hans Schattle (2008), global citizenship is more of an “attitude of mind” than formal membership or status in a particular community (pg. 115). It is based on the “belief that agents have global responsibilities to help make a better world and that they are part of large-scale networks of concern” (Dower, 2003, pg. vii). Many of these scholars ground their conception of global citizenship in the idea of cosmopolitanism, which views all individuals as citizens of the world who have a moral obligation to act towards effecting positive change based on the principles of justice and a common, universal humanity (see, Cameron, 2014; Dower & Williams, 2002; Schattle, 2008). Individuals do not only have the rights and obligations of citizenship granted by a particular nation-state, they also have universal human rights and a moral obligation to all other human beings (see, Cameron, 2014). Moreover, all individuals are part of a global community and must work with others to make the world a better place (Dower, 2003). The term global citizenship, then, is contentious and a number of tensions remain regarding the use of the concept.
In a recent article examining global citizenship education, Jorgenson and Shultz (2012) identified strategies that post-secondary institutions are employing to foster global citizenship. They discuss the wide range of programs that have been initiated in concert with the increasing priority of global citizenship among universities. Further, they discuss how universities in both North America and the United Kingdom have developed institutional mandates for global citizenship through their vision and mission statements, internationalization and education abroad initiatives, as well as through courses and certificates of global citizenship. Although this review provides good models for post- secondary institutions, we argue that because of the background and ethos of Canadians, our universities should have a different philosophy and value of global citizenship. Thus, this article reviews Canadian post-secondary institutions across the country to identify the practices and mandates for how Canadian universities approach global citizenship.
Methods of Analysis
This research began with a thorough review of the literature on global citizenship. There are numerous books that discuss this topic in a Canadian context (Rennick & Desjardins, 2013; Shultz, Abdi & Richardson, 2015; Tiessen & Huish, 2014) as well as more broadly (Lewin, 2009; Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011; Schattle, 2008). We used these JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 5 books to ground our analysis in a theoretical perspective and to help inform our understanding of the different perspectives and approaches that we might uncover. After reviewing these books, we performed searches in relevant academic databases (Education Resource Information Center [ERIC] and Education Research Complete) using keywords that captured information related to research on global learning experiences that foster global citizenship. These keywords included: internationalization, global understanding, global mindset, global learning, and global citizenship. Terms were categorized based on the root of the word and included all variations on the words. The full list of terminology and the frequency of their usage is available in the Mount Royal University institutional repository. While much of the literature comes from U.S. institutions, our focus was on the Canadian context, and the similarities and differences with the broader international context. This literature review helped synthesize existing information, highlighting patterns and consistencies, in order to determine how global citizenship is defined and what mechanisms might be used to encourage students to become global citizens.
We also consulted documents directly related to global citizenship within the Canadian educational system to determine how it is defined and how students are encouraged to become global citizens. We began by surveying the elementary and high school curricula in each province for mention of global citizenship (and related terms) and examined the ways that this concept was employed in each jurisdiction. In particular, we chronicled the grade and subject in which global citizenship is taught at the primary and secondary levels and the various ways that this term is defined in the documentation. We also reviewed the strategic, academic, or integrated plans at 30 different Canadian universities from across the country, with institutions that varied in size and academic focus (undergraduate, research, and comprehensive; see Figure 1 below). Within each plan, we searched for terms related to aspects of global citizenship using the terms: global, citizen, international, and cultur* (to allow for the capture of variations on this word such as culture, cultural, or intercultural). In addition, we reviewed each document to ensure that we discovered all discussions of global citizenship that might not have been captured by our word searches. We isolated sections of the documents from each university that pertained to global citizenship and used the software program NVivo to undertake a quantitative analysis of the terms used. We also conducted qualitative analyses using two types of coding procedures: using open coding, we determined categories and subcategories that emerged in the data and then used axial coding to assess the interrelatedness of categories. From these analyses, we were able to construct a new framework on global citizenship that better describes how the concept is used by Canadian universities.
We also collected recent quantitative research on global learning in Canada produced by the Canadian Bureau of International Education (CBIE), Universities Canada (formerly the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada), and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada (DFATD), that focus primarily on the numbers of students involved, the assumed effects on students and the broader community, and the JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 6 specific ways that these experiences contribute to global citizenship. We consulted directly with these organizations to collect additional data, not included in these published reports, to conduct broader statistical analysis to understand what currently characterizes global citizenship in Canada.
University of New Carleton University Queen’s University Brunswick
Concordia University Ryerson University University of Ottawa
University of Prince Dalhousie University Simon Fraser University Edward Island
Douglas College Trent University University of Regina
University of Langara College University of Alberta Saskatchewan
University of British MacEwan University University of Toronto Columbia
McGill University University of Calgary University of Victoria
Memorial University of University of Guelph University of Windsor Newfoundland
Mount Allison University University of Lethbridge Western University
Mount Royal University University of Manitoba York University
Figure 1 Thirty universities from across Canada were selected for this study. Universities were chosen as representative institutions from each province, size, and academic focus. Analysis of Global Citizenship and its Characterizations
Most universities have incorporated global citizenship into their strategic plans and have emphasized the need to produce students who understand diversity, have global awareness, and actively participate in the creation of a better society (Shultz et al., 2011). A survey across colleges and universities in the United States found that 1.5% of students participate in study abroad (Institute of International Education, 2014) while the 2014 Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) Internationalization Survey reports that 2.6% of full-time undergraduate students in Canada are taking university courses that involve travel abroad; this is up from 2.2% in 2006 (AUCC, 2014). This high participation rate relative to U.S. institutions, along with the federal government’s recent International Education Strategy (Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, 2014), reveal that Canada is poised to become the next leader in global education. Thus, it is imperative that we understand the components of global citizenship and how our education system fosters this development in our students. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 7
Canadian universities often use a variety of other words as proxies for the broader term, global citizenship. To understand how Canadian universities discuss global citizenship, we extracted all quotes from academic, strategic, or integrated plans that intimated towards the notion of a global citizen, and conducted a frequency count to isolate the terms being used to describe this concept. The most frequently mentioned words, not surprisingly, included: global, student, community, citizen, international, culture, and world (Figure 2). Other frequently used words described the mechanisms for how students would develop as global citizens (learning, research, knowledge, education, academic, skills, and understanding), or were descriptors of attributes of global citizens (engage, develop, contribute, commit, awareness, experience, create, and value). We were, however, taken aback with some of the words that were only rarely mentioned (only a few instances among all universities); these words were verbs that described how students would develop as global citizens such as: empower, enrich, nurture, cultivate, and interact.
Figure 2 This word cloud demonstrates the diversity and frequency of terms used by Canadian universities when discussing global citizenship. The size of the word is indicative of the frequency with larger font representing more commonly used terms. We were also interested in how frequently terms that describe the idea of global citizenship appeared in the academic literature as this provides a proxy to understand the level of academic research and analysis on this concept. We compiled a frequency count of the use of “global citizenship,” “global education,” “global learning,” “global understanding,” and “intercultural competence” for all articles indexed by the Education JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 8
Research Complete and ERIC databases. We had intended to also examine articles indexed within the Academic Search Complete database but upon review of the articles, our search strategy captured research that was tangential to the topic of global citizenship. As this database includes many different disciplines, we decided to exclude this analysis to ensure that our results were indicators of global citizenship in an educational framework
We analyzed the frequency of these terms for the entire history of the database as well as the last decade (2005-2015) of publications. On average, 68% of scholarly articles using these terms were published in the last decade (Figure 3). The term “global education” was the most frequently used; however, 51% of occurrences were in the last decade. The expression “global citizenship” was referenced only 954 times but most of this usage (83%) was in the last decade. This analysis illustrates that our perception of an increasing use of this terminology by universities is paralleled in the academic literature.
Figure 3 The use of global citizenship terminology used in the academic literature in the past 10 years compared to all records within the Educational Research Complete and Education Resource Information Center databases. Values within the bars indicate the number of articles published during the particular timeframe. In Canada, the majority of provincial governments have identified the development of global citizens as an important component of primary and/or secondary education. While the term is often not fully defined, most provinces equate the concept with active participation in the communities in which students are a part. In Manitoba, for example, the Grade 12 Global Issues curriculum (2011) promotes “an ethos of active democratic citizenship in the contemporary world” (pg. 1), while in Ontario, the Grade 10 Global and Active Citizenship curriculum insists that students be able to “describe fundamental beliefs and values associated with democratic citizenship” (pg. 1). In many provinces, the focus of the curriculum is on teaching students the “rights and responsibilities” of citizenship in a JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 9 global community and encouraging them to take action to create “positive change” (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2005; Alberta Education, 2011; and New Brunswick Department of Education, 2006). In some jurisdictions, however, the definition of global citizenship is articulated further. The Grade 3 Social Studies curriculum in Alberta, as one example, argues that students should be able to “recognize how their actions might affect people elsewhere in the world and how the actions of others might affect them” and should “respect the equality of all human beings” (Alberta Education, 2011, pg. 16)). The Grade 12 Geography curriculum in Prince Edward Island insists that a student “be able to set aside one’s own perspective and be able to understand others’ views on an issue” (Prince Edward Island Department of Education and Early Childhood Learning, 2011, pg. 32). Moreover, the Manitoba curriculum (2011) offers perhaps the most thorough definition of global citizenship, arguing that global citizenship (also referred to as “active democratic citizenship”) is based on:
…a fundamental acceptance of the inherent, equal, universal and inalienable rights of all human beings.… Active democratic citizenship involves developing a widening circle of empathy so as to come to a sense of collective responsibility for the continued economic and social well-being of humans while preserving the environmental integrity of the planet…. [Students] are empowered by a sense of personal efficacy to address issues facing today's world…. Active democratic citizenship is an ethos motivated by concern for humanity, society, the planet, and the future, and is activated by self-empowerment (pg. 2).
In the elementary and high school curricula, provinces acknowledge the philosophical definitions of global citizenship and attempt to encourage their students to become active members of the global community in an effort to effect positive and lasting change. However, as Figure 4 demonstrates (see Appendix), there is no consistency across the provinces in terms of the grade or subject in which global citizenship is addressed; students across Canada receive an uneven introduction to the concept.
Moreover, while the provinces are also responsible for higher education under the Canadian constitution, this rhetoric surrounding global citizenship is not always reflected in the policies adopted at the university level. Instead, many universities resist the notion that they should be training students to become politically active members of their communities (Cameron, 2014) and focus instead on providing the skills necessary to enter an increasingly global workforce. This conception of global citizenship, rather than using the rhetoric used by the provinces in their elementary and high school curricula, replicates that presented by industry and the federal government. For example, according to the vision of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD, 2014), Canada will “become a 21st century leader in international education in order to attract top talent and prepare our citizens for the global marketplace” (p. 6). Thus, while students are arriving at universities with a particular understanding of global citizenship through their experiences in elementary and high school, their post-secondary education often takes a JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 10 different approach and encourages a different understanding of their roles within a global community.
This type of thinking, grounded in economics and consistent with the corporatization of education, can be seen in our analysis of how universities discuss global citizenship. Many universities across Canada discuss citizenship with the ideology of promoting their institution’s global impact. For example, Ryerson University (2014) states that:
by combining the strength of its diversity with its strong history of external engagement, Ryerson can establish greater international reach and influence by partnering with like-minded organizations and establishing joint programs with international institutions. Increasing global connections will expand Ryerson’s international focus, create new opportunities for students and faculty, and allow Ryerson to bring new talent to its programs and the GTA (p. 12-13).
Similarly, the University of Calgary (2011) describes how it helps students develop as global citizens with an inward-looking approach where the focus is on:
creating a global intellectual hub where our students, staff, and faculty at the center of this hub will radiate new discoveries, ideas, and applications that have global impact. We will create a campus that also attracts scholars from around the world to this hub – one that promotes diversity of thought, culture, and respect for alternatives. We will leverage our expertise to share capacity with targeted institutions in the developing world (p. 27).
This type of language around global citizenship might raise the international profile of the institution but at the same time it fails its students and the global community by neglecting to consider how its academic strategy could contribute to a more just and equitable global society.
At some point within their strategic, integrated, or academic plans, every university that we examined referenced the development of students as global citizens (or some proxy term), but only about half (17 of the 30 universities) made an explicit claim within their vision or mission statements. For example, the University of Regina (2015) clearly articulated that the vision of the university is to “be a national leader in developing educated contributors, career-ready learners, and global citizens, and in generating meaningful, high-impact scholarship." However, the only alignment to this vision statement was a sentence embedded within the strategic plan’s Commitment to Communities section where the University of Regina states that it is “…committed to collaborative community service and engagement opportunities. This includes the communities within the institution as well as people and organizations external to the academy at the local, provincial, national and global levels.” Trent University’s (2012) JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 11 academic plan clearly indicates the institutional goal of fostering global citizenship among its students with the following vision statement: "We strive to make valued and socially responsible contributions to our local communities, to Canada, and to the world….We create opportunities for students, staff and faculty to flourish and develop as individuals and as global citizens" (p. 70). But again, there was no strategic direction within their academic plan; only one statement at the end of the document that asks individual academic departments to consider “What can your unit do to ensure a continued commitment to educating students as ‘global citizens’ who can contribute on an international level?” (p. 66; emphasis in the original). It is interesting that this one statement was intentionally set apart from the rest of the text using bold and underlined font: the only emphasis of this kind in the entire document. However, without clear alignment and descriptions of how institutions plan to enact these vision statements, it is hard to understand whether fostering global citizenship amongst its students is just rhetoric or a true priority of the university. These statements might be nothing more than claims to please governments who are responsible for allocating funding.
Other universities discussed global citizenship as embedded within their liberal education requirements, thus assuming that this broad liberal learning will somehow engage students in a program that supports their development as global citizens. For example, the University of Victoria’s (2012) strategic plan “affirms the fundamental benefits of a liberal education: the acquisition of knowledge, the development of good judgment, communication skills, critical thinking, quantitative analysis, civic engagement and global citizenship.” Rather than using global citizenship, the discourse at the University of Guelph (2012) refers to global literacy but they similarly discuss how this is an aspect of liberal education:
Global literacy is a means of building awareness of global impact and context into students’ approaches to problem solving and decision making. It extends the notion of ‘liberal education’ beyond analytic knowledge and canonical texts, to the vital competencies that individuals need in order to make responsible, globally-informed decisions (p. 17).
Although it is laudable to identify where this development will occur within a students’ academic career, without an explicit liberal education program there is no guarantee that each student will necessarily develop these competencies and attitudes. Universities need to be strategic and explicit with how they plan to achieve these goals.
One problematic approach that was common across some universities was to conflate internationalization with global citizenship; 7 of the 30 universities used internationalization when framing discussions of global citizenship. According to Canada’s Education Abroad Lexicon, internationalization is “the active pursuit of activities which support the incorporation of an international perspective into all aspects of teaching and learning” (Canadian Bureau of International Education, 2015). Internationalization might be one way to increase awareness and knowledge of global issues but we argue that JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 12 gaining a different perspective on these issues is only a small part of being a global citizen. Even though this definition describes an ‘active pursuit,’ the active component seems to be for the faculty or instructor, not active engagement by the student. In addition, the majority of universities claimed that internationalization would be accomplished by increasing the number of international students on campuses. Although this might change the university environment by encouraging varied international perspectives, it is not a guarantee of a change to the campus culture. Increasing the number of international students on campus is not enough; universities need to strategically integrate students within the classroom and the community if institutions truly want to provide diversity and multicultural discussions on their campuses. Furthermore, without providing the necessary supports and resources, international students are left alone to cope with life in a foreign country, which many times results in students feeling alienated and fostering interpersonal relationships solely with other international students (see, Choudhury, 2015 and Trilokekar & Rasmi, 2011).
There are a number of universities that have fully embraced the concept of fostering global citizenship and have been intentional in the strategies and mechanisms that encourage students to become global citizens. Many of these universities provide models for how institutions can align their ideals with their educational programs and practices. Carleton University (2013) has taken a ground-level approach and has called on each program to develop global learning outcomes: ways that faculty see global learning enacted in their own classrooms and activities. Similarly, the University of Guelph (2012) proposed that a “global dimension” should be incorporated into courses across the disciplines. The university took this idea a step further and proposed the creation of a School of Civil Society. This new school,
will work in partnership with NGOs, and public and private sector entities to strengthen the capacity of societies to face complex challenges and take advantage of extraordinary opportunities. This new unit will be the site of teaching and research excellence dedicated to the production and exchange of applied knowledge in such areas as women and girls in development, the environment, global food security, health, and community resilience… and most important, engagement with organizations at home and around the globe to bring about transformative improvements in solving the complex issues facing our world (p. 17).
However, converting ideas into action is not always a simple task. The university completed its consultation process and developed a proposal for the School for Civil Society and Engagement in March 2013. This new name, which includes engagement in the title, likely came out of their extensive consultation process, but we could not find any information about the current status of this proposal.
The University of British Columbia (n.d.), one of the only universities in our analysis to actually define global citizenship, adopted a different strategy. They created a Global JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 13
Citizen stream within their Coordinated Arts Program. This approach challenges students to: reimagine [them]selves both as individuals and as participants in a global community. This stream considers issues of globalization and associated forms of modernization, as well as the personal, social, and ethical opportunities and responsibilities that come with those processes… The way in which we perceive the world around us is often informed by a Western viewpoint, and the courses in this stream seek to illuminate and challenge this standpoint (UBC, Coordinated Arts Program, n.d.).
Embedding global citizenship within their coordinated arts program enables undergraduate students from across the university to interrogate the ideals of global citizenship in both an academic and practical way. By using a learning community approach, students are also exposed to global citizenship from multiple disciplinary lenses, thus challenging students to frame their thinking from varied perspectives. One drawback to this approach is that the themes of the program are constantly changing and thus, not all students have equal opportunity to be exposed to these ideas during their education.
The University of Alberta has been a leader among Canadian universities with respect to research, teaching, and practices that inform global citizenship on its campus and more broadly. Much of this work is conducted through their Centre for Global Citizenship Education & Research (CGCER) that describes global citizenship as “the development of global citizens who have a set of knowledges [sic], skills and attitudes that make it possible for them to be actively involved in local, national and global institutions and systems that directly or indirectly affect their lives” (University of Alberta, n.d., CGCER, para. 1). In recent years, this Centre has expanded their curriculum development strategies under the auspices of the Global Citizenship Curriculum Development Project (GCCD). The mandate of this project is to educate students to:
become responsible citizens, engaged in the democratic process and aware of their capacity to effect change in their communities, society and the world. GCCD is committed to addressing the challenge of global citizenship at the University of Alberta by involving the entire campus in the development and delivery of global citizenship curricula” (para. 2).
In addition to assisting faculty to incorporate global citizenship ideals in their own classrooms, the university also offers an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on global citizenship and is launching a global citizenship certificate program.
The University of Alberta example also provides us with a cautionary tale; the rhetoric found at the institutional level does not always align with the programs and actions of individual units. For example, the goal of the Centre for Global Education and Research is to “enhance the University of Alberta’s reputation as a major contributor and leader in the field of global citizenship education and international education” (University of Alberta, JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 14 n.d., About CGCER, para. 2). This may be a true enough statement but after an investigation of the many different programs, partnerships, and curricular and professional development opportunities, the main foci of this centre seems to be to encourage global citizenship among students across the university: a task that we would argue is far more important than increasing the reputation of the university.
Existing Definitions of Global Citizenship
Throughout our research, we came across a few organizations or scholars that attempted to define global citizenship, although neither the scholarly community nor universities have accepted a single definition. One of the most popular descriptions of global citizenship, which was repeated amongst numerous scholarly publications, was from Oxfam (2006):
We see a Global Citizen as someone who: is aware of the wider world and has a sense of their own role as a world citizen; respects and values diversity; has an understanding of how the world works economically, politically, socially, culturally, technologically and environmentally; is outraged by social injustice; participates in and contributes to the community at a range of levels from local to global; is willing to act to make the world a more sustainable place; takes responsibility for their actions (p. 3).
This definition has numerous strengths as it focuses on the individual’s responsibility as a global citizen, incorporating both an understanding of social justice and environmental issues, and calling for participation and action on the part of the individual. However, Cameron (2014) argues that a definition of global citizenship grounded in such notions may be less appealing to students, parents, and administrators because it is intended to encourage an attitude of, and skills related to political struggles for social and environmental justice.
In a similar but more succinct manner, Reysen and Katzarska-Miller (2013) define global citizenship as “global awareness, caring, embracing cultural diversity, promoting social justice and sustainability, and a sense of responsibility to act.” (p. 858). Some may argue against this definition because of the inclusion that global citizens must be ‘caring’. The word caring evokes an emotional response and individuals might care about an issue but not necessarily have a caring personality.
The University of British Columbia (n.d.) was one of the few universities that used an explicit definition of global citizenship. They described a global citizen as: JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 15
someone who feels a duty to respect and protect the Earth, the global community of fellow human beings and all other living creatures. We envision global citizens as individuals who have developed an understanding of the interconnected worlds and who deeply appreciate and value ecological sustainability and social justice. Global citizens are willing and enabled to take action to make the world a fairer place for ourselves and other living creatures (Road to Global Citizenship, p. 7, para. 1).
Yet, while this definition captures many of the attributes of a global citizen, it fails to see the development of global citizens within the university context as a continual process for which universities have a moral obligation.
A New Framework of Global Citizenship
According to Dower and Williams (2002), one of the strengths of the term ‘global citizenship’ is that “it is amenable to different readings and interpretations.” A common definition is required, though, if the goal of creating global citizens is to be achieved. Cameron (2014) claims that theories of global citizenship used by different institutions shape the kinds of experiences that individuals will have; there is a risk of reinforcing paternalistic and neo-colonial attitudes if a proper definition is not employed. Moreover, the types of programs universities create to promote global citizenship will be largely determined by the particular terms used to understand the concept. If global citizenship is understood as intercultural competence, for instance, then the focus of higher education will be on language programs and interactions among and between different cultures. Yet, if global citizenship is identified as active engagement aimed at creating a better world, then programs will also focus on educating students about the complexity of problems and their responsibility to participate in political struggles for social and environmental justice globally (Cameron, 2014). In addition, if programs aimed at encouraging global citizenship are to be evaluated, a rigorous definition is required. Without a clear and shared definition, it is impossible to assess whether or not particular efforts actually contribute to the creation of global citizens.
We propose the framework below (Figure 5), which will allow universities to develop a clear and explicitly articulated definition that is grounded in a shared process and vocabulary and is measurable, but which can be adapted to each local institutional reality and the needs of each university.
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 16
Figure 5 Our new framework to describe a global citizen. This framework depicts the necessary interdisciplinary knowledge and skills as well as the process that individuals progress through during their development. The boxes beneath the graphic provide more information for each overarching topic. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 17
This graphic places Global Citizenship at the center of four interconnected quadrants: Culture; Environmental Integrity; Human Rights; and Roles, Rights, and Responsibilities of Individuals (see descriptions of each of these concepts in the attached boxes). To be a global citizen, students must engage with all four of these areas. These quadrants are all informed by the broader social, cultural, political, historical, economic, and scientific context and are not intended to guide specific content; rather, they identify the essential areas of concern for a global citizen in Canada.
Moreover, global citizenship is a process, represented by the outer arrows on the graphic. Students must first gain awareness of a particular issue or concern related to the inner quadrants. As this awareness grows, they may move towards the next stage of the process: the development of the knowledge and skills required to address the issue or concern. As knowledge and skills are gained, students might then take action and may, ultimately, effect change in their local and/or global communities. As students effect change, further awareness is generated and the cycle continues. Each individual will enter the process at a different stage. For instance, students graduating from elementary and high school programs with a strong focus on global citizenship will already have a great deal of awareness about particular issues and concerns, may have some of the knowledge and skills required to take action, and may have effected change in some form or another. Other students may be learning about certain issues for the first time and will have to enter at the awareness stage of the process. While this cycle will continue for each student around each aspect of global citizenship, it is necessary to go through each stage of the process prior to moving to the next. Awareness is required to develop knowledge and skills; knowledge and skills are required to take action; and action is required to effect change.
This process must be grounded in the notion of mutual respect and responsibility. Global citizenship should not be driven solely by efforts from the Global North to “help” the Global South. Students must learn to recognize both the positive and negative moral obligations of being human; they have the duty to do good but also not to do harm or to benefit from the harm done to others (see, Cameron, 2014). The key to achieving global citizenship is not solely through doing good in developing countries but also in acknowledging the role that developed nations (including Canada) play in creating systems of inequality, injustice, and oppression.
Universities may adapt the above framework to their own specific context, purpose, and needs. Many universities may choose to focus on internationalization strategies as a site for the development of global citizens, but this should not be assumed. As one example of a different approach to global citizenship, Queen’s University (2011) has embraced the concept of “Local Globalism” in their academic plan:
To be able to participate internationally, students need to develop “local- mindedness” first. Innovative community and place-based learning, JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 18
increased emphasis on Field Studies, and community volunteer opportunities will enhance the pro-diversity approach to teaching and learning. Through engagements of these kinds, Queen’s students will learn much about cultural diversity while strengthening Queen’s relationship with its regional communities (p. 16).
Similarly, the University of Manitoba (2015) and the University of Saskatchewan (2012) have highlighted the importance of Aboriginal communities, and indigenization of the curriculum has become a key mechanism for the development of global citizens at many institutions. Ultimately, no matter the specific focus of each university, it is the moral obligation of universities to empower students to become global citizens and, to do so, it is essential that institutions develop a clear and articulated definition that is grounded in the above framework. This will ensure that all aspects of global citizenship are properly represented and that the development of global citizens is acknowledged as a process through which students will proceed throughout the various stages of their university careers.
Mechanisms to Achieve Global Citizenship
Although universities may adopt the above framework and articulate their own definitions of global citizenship, it is important to also consider the means by which institutions can encourage and support the development of global citizens. Based on a review of existing literature, we propose the following mechanisms through which institutions can evaluate their efforts to create global citizens:
Institutional Commitments
It is essential that university-wide documents, including mission and vision statements and strategic and academic plans, articulate an explicit description of global citizenship. Rather than employing various proxies for the term, as is currently common practice, universities should adopt a shared definition of the concept—informed by the framework proposed in this article—which can better facilitate the creation of various programs and services throughout the institution that will more effectively encourage the creation of global citizens.
Universities should also create a committee with membership from across the institution, which is tasked with advancing and implementing strategies to promote global citizenship on campus; this committee will ensure campus-wide engagement in these efforts.
In addition, institution-wide learning outcomes should be developed that encourage global citizenship. There is no single learning outcome that can encapsulate the complexity of this goal; universities should acknowledge the multiple ways that students may be JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 19 encouraged to become global citizens and create a number of measures for this aspect of learning.
Formal assessment strategies should also be implemented to ensure that universities are effectively fulfilling their stated goals around global citizenship. Currently, many universities focus on the number of international students as a key indicator of global citizenship on campus. However, more thorough assessments of course offerings, on- campus activities, off-campus opportunities, skills development, and the encouragement of diverse perspectives, will ensure that universities meet their goals in this area (see MRU Institutional Repository for examples of assessment models).
The Curriculum
Global citizenship should be encouraged across the curriculum so all students are exposed to the knowledge, perspectives, and skills necessary to their development as global citizens. While some universities have created dedicated courses on global issues and trends, these are often restricted to students in particular programs.. If students across the institution are to become global citizens, then these concepts must be integrated throughout the curriculum.
Moreover, areas that have faced significant cuts in recent years, including arts faculties generally, and language and culture programs specifically, must be supported in order that students acquire a better understanding of the issues facing the global community, the different perspectives that influence global relations, and some potential solutions to global problems.
Experiential learning should also be actively encouraged at Canadian universities. This would include, but is not limited to, community service learning, study abroad, field schools, co-op and work terms, and labs. These experiences should not only focus on the global; active involvement in the local community is just as important to the development of global citizens. In addition, while experiential learning is not inherently connected to global citizenship, if it is done intentionally it can allow students to put their knowledge and skills into action and effect change within the wider community. Universities must provide support for students from all programs and all socio-economic backgrounds to participate in these high-impact practices.
Universities might consider the creation of a certificate or citation, whereby students can receive a notation on their transcript indicating their broad-based exposure to courses that encourage them to become global citizens. This initiative should not be program- specific but should be available to students across the disciplines.
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 20
Co-Curricular and Extra-Curricular Activities
Universities should actively support events, speakers, workshops, et cetera that expose students to global issues. This will help build awareness and knowledge and give students the tools they require to effect change in their communities and around the world.
International students should also be better integrated into the university and the activities that take place on- and off-campus. International students should not only be seen as a revenue source or as a quantifiable measure of the global connections of the institution, but also should be viewed as equal members of the community who have knowledge and experience to share and an interest in learning from other students on campus. Universities might consider mixed residences with special programs that facilitate interactions between international and Canadian students.
Universities must also find better ways to support international students. This would include, but is not limited to, better access to English-language training, services to help ease the transition into the specific realities of the Canadian educational system, and opportunities to build community with other international students and with domestic students.
Students should also be encouraged to engage with their communities in a variety of ways. For instance, if students actively volunteer in their community and this can be documented, they could receive acknowledgement from the university that this is an important aspect of their education and their development as global citizens through a notation on their transcript, an ePortfolio, or other means.
Faculty Members and Global Citizenship
Universities should provide support for faculty members interested in global citizenship initiatives, which are often time consuming and frequently beyond the boundaries of a normal workload. Faculty members could be granted release time to develop their programs, and global citizenship initiatives could be a consideration in promotion and tenure decisions. Moreover, universities could provide workshops and seminars for faculty interested in global citizenship as a way to share experiences and to assist individuals interested in integrating these concepts into the curriculum.
Institutions could also better draw upon the expertise, knowledge, activities, and connections of international faculty members. These individuals can make an important contribution to the global citizenship activities on campus if there is adequate encouragement and support to do so.
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 21
Conclusions
Although changes over the past decade have diminished Canada’s role on the international stage and have threatened some of the characteristics that supposedly make Canadians global citizens, recent developments indicate that a period of change may be near. In the 2015 federal election, Canadians appear to have expressed their support for the policy of multiculturalism, a less confrontational approach to world events, and a more accepting policy on refugees. If it is these policies, as Trilokekar and Shubert (2009) claim, that make Canadians inherently global citizens, then perhaps there is a new opportunity for the nation to become a leader in global citizenship.
Universities must take an active role in encouraging a new generation of Canadians to become global citizens, and most have identified this as a goal for their institutions. However, if this goal is to be achieved, universities must be intentional in their efforts; rather than using proxies for the term and only vaguely identifying the methods by which it could be achieved, institutions must explicitly define what they mean by global citizenship and overtly distinguish the mechanisms they will use to assist students in becoming global citizens. It is not sufficient to simply claim that global citizenship is a priority for the university. Although there are many ways to understand global citizenship, and each university must adopt a conceptualization relevant to its own particular needs and context, we suggest that the framework provided in this article may guide universities as they develop their own mandates and practices. In particular, the framework encourages universities to consider the complex and interconnected areas of concern for a global citizen as well as the process through which students will become global citizens. Universities play an important part in developing engaged and empowered global citizens, and this framework can assist institutions as they develop these high-impact practices and assessments that are integral for fulfilling this responsibility.
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 22
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Appendix
Province Grade Subject Terms Used British 11 Civic Studies Informed Citizenship; Civic Action; Columbia Responsibilities as Global Citizens Alberta 3 Social Studies; "recognize how their actions might affect Language and people elsewhere in the world and how the Culture actions of others might affect them”; "respect the equality of all human beings”; "contribute to positive change”; "acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes to become effective global citizens" Saskatchewan N/A N/A N/A Manitoba 12 Global Issues "active democratic citizenship”; "based…on a fundamental acceptance of the inherent, equal, universal and inalienable rights of all human beings”; "developing a widening circle of empathy so as to come to a sense of collective responsibility for the continued economic and social well-being of humans while preserving the environmental integrity of the planet”; "empowered by a sense of personal efficacy to address issues facing today's world” Ontario 10 Global and Active Belief and values of democratic citizenship - Citizenship rule of law, human dignity, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, work for the common good, respect for the rights of others, sense of responsibility for others Nova Scotia N/A N/A N/A New 9 Social Studies "Take age-appropriate actions that Brunswick demonstrate the rights and responsibilities of citizenship (local, national and global)” Prince 12 Geography "be able to set aside one’s own perspective Edward and be able to understand others’ views on Island an issue” Newfoundland 6 World Cultures global distribution of wealth; human rights & Labrador issues and abuses; "take age-appropriate action to demonstrate their understanding of the responsibilities of global citizenship"
Figure 4 The subject and grade of global citizenship instruction in primary and secondary (K-12) schools across the Canadian provinces. Quebec is not included as the term “global citizenship” does not appear in French language documents.
Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education Volume 5 Number 1 - 2016 journals.sfu.ca/jgcee
Citizenship Education and Embodied ways of Knowing: What can be learned from the voices of Ghanaian youth in schooling and education?
George J. Sefa Dei Professor Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Marlon Simmons Assistant Professor Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary
Keywords: Citizenship, Decolonization, Embodiment, Ghanaian Youth, Moral and Character Education.
ABSTRACT: This article examines Ghanaian youth voices about issues of personal and moral character development through the teachings of local embodied ways of knowing. The purpose is with understanding how the role of discipline and the socialization of Ghanaian youth can help with informing what it means to be a responsible citizen. We briefly explore the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of researching moral character development, discipline and the relations to youth and citizenship responsibilities through youth voices. The paper is part of a longitudinal ethnographic project concerning Ghanaian youth, embodied ways of knowing and the implications for decolonization. We argue youth voices show complex understandings of embodied ways of knowing relating to questions of citizenship, discipline, character and belonging in the global context. The paper hence offers insights toward reforms needed in educational delivery (teaching, learning and instruction), as well as values of education to address the complexity of youth voice, decolonization, discipline, and embodied ways of knowing, so as to enhance the possibilities of coming to know citizenry, character, moral and community.
Citizenship Education and voices of Ghanaian youth
Citizenship education is a global concern for educators and many are working to ensure that schools are welcoming and safe spaces for all learners. Social harmony may be achieved by understanding the myriad issues and dimensions of what constitutes citizenship in diverse educational settings and how embodied learning in particular, when taken up critically, is relevant to enhancing the education of African youth. The bodies of JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 28
African youth are a place of contiguous histories. Colonially augured by way of enslavement, Diasporised movement, collective consciousness and cultural memory, the African body becomes epistemologically contoured through shared historical ways of knowing embedded within the body through space and time. While these shared historical ways of knowing embedded within the body of African youth are infrequently engaged in providing possibilities for decolonizing schooling and education, this can be an important tool in educational pedagogy for understanding contemporary questions of citizenship. This article is part of a longitudinal ethnographic project. The purpose is with knowing how Ghanaian youth voices – as articulated through embodied ways of knowing personal and moral character development – can help us understand current issues of discipline and what it means to be a responsible citizen in the contemporary global context. We briefly examine the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of researching moral character development, the question of discipline and the relation to youth and citizenship responsibilities through youth voices. We argue youth voices show complex understandings of embodied ways of knowing relating to questions of citizenry, discipline, character, moral, and respect.
We ask: How do we come to know and understand questions of discipline in the context of schooling, citizenship and pluralism? If we are talking about educational change, then schooling must include the voices from different communities. Parents, teachers and youth alike must find ways to engage with the local resources of youth. Questions of power and privilege, and the curriculum relevance of cultural knowledges as embodied, are important for community schooling. How youth come to understand their citizenry, material realities, concepts of character, questions of belonging, questions of values and self-worth, are all steeped within the domains of the body, language and culture.
Regarding decolonizing schooling and education and the link to citizenship and community, we discuss the production of a particular type of disciplined youth, the one well endowed with meeting the contemporary discursive/material needs of globalization. That is, youth as being a particular articulation of modernity through which colonial knowledging resides itself, colonial here meaning the imposition of particular values, beliefs and attitudes through the embodied domain of the text (Dei 2010; Simmons & Dei 2012). We recognize discipline as a non-hegemonic method of teaching all learners within the community of schooling. Smith (1999), reminds us that decolonization is “about centring our concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes.” (p. 39).
Hence, in coming to dialogue with local African knowledges as legitimate ways of knowing, we centre the work of decolonization. If colonization is understood as the imposition of one particular way of doing things, by creating spaces for local African ways of knowing and understanding, we begin to undo the colonial knowledge regimes. Regarding the term African, we call for a theoretical framework that speaks to the JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 29 multiplicity of differences, contradictions, ambivalences, and [un]freedoms, that constitute the diversity of Ghanaian youth in the global context, that being African involves proteanism and at the same time immutability, fluid and actively involved with flux.
Hence in the effort to decolonize, we ought to remember that the work is not with dismissing Western ways of knowing, but rather to disentangle the imperial grip colonial schooling and education have on what is considered legitimate discourses of knowledge. In other words, the work of decolonization is less interested with placing another form of knowledge at the top of a knowledge pyramid through hierarchical relations, but rather finding ways for different knowledge systems to dialogue without the axis of a hegemonic center (Memmi, 1991; Fanon, 1963; wa Thiong’o, 1986; Cesaire, 1972).
We query the historical location of discipline by positioning the historical discourse of discipline as hegemonic. At the same time we recognize discipline as a non-hegemonic method of teaching all learners within the community of schooling. Our interests seek to understand what it means to teach discipline rather than enforce discipline. The discussion works to broach the voices of Ghanaian youth as they account for youth citizenry within contemporary schooling experiences. Educators’ and learners’ voices about schooling experiences are interpreted to understand the context for addressing youth citizenry in schools, and to find methods in which embodied ways of learning through local voices of Ghanaian youth in schooling can be integrated with curriculum, teaching practices, and classroom learning to necessitate the decolonization of schools. The paper hence offers insights toward reforms needed in educational delivery (teaching, learning and instruction), as well as values of education to address the question of youth voice, decolonization, discipline, and embodied ways of knowing, so as to enhance the possibilities of coming to know citizenry, character, moral and community.
Rethinking discipline and the relevance of embodied ways of knowing
Historically, through a host of disciplinary discursive procedures, colonization produced a particular humanism, which avowed a certain form of moral citizenry (see also Giddens 1990; Foucault 2007; Appadurai 1996). Citizenship, as experienced through the West, promoted disciplinary forms of relations onto youth behaviour, in which the identities of youth were colonially deemed to be contiguous with historical scientific epistemes of rationality (see also Marcuse 2009; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Discussions of youth identity, about how identity comes to be shaped and formed through the conventional knowledge dissemination procedures of schooling and education, have been particularly employed through a linear, fixed, institutionalised way of knowing the self and the subject. The resulting effect is that we are historically provided with a universalized and disciplined way of coming to understand citizenry and citizenship rights through local embodied practices. These disciplinary forms of relations as residing within schooling and education come into being through the community of schooling, as imbued through our contemporary neo-liberal discourse (see also Rose 2007; Harvey 2007). JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 30
Youth, citizenry, and societal relations all come to be governed in and through a collective regime of accepted values and attitudes. Schooling and education are not devoid from these accepted standards. School curricula, pedagogies, and epistemologies of the conventional classroom all come to be historically embedded through Eurocentric paradigms (see also Scheurich & Young 1997). Displaced here are embodied ways of knowing through local histories. Instead, local epistemes come to be tangentially placed by the State, more so too, as abject to conventional curricula. Our social imagination is with thinking of education through all bodies alike, that knowledge resides within the experience of all peoples; we cannot continue to think of knowledge as being some commodified package (see also Giroux 2001; Apple 1995; McLaren & Farahmandpur 2005), purchased at the local supermarket, named as education, all in the pursuit of modernity and development.
Location of youth is central to understanding contemporary questions concerning embodied ways of learning, decolonization, spirituality and citizenship, in that embodied forms of knowledge about community, kinship and familyhood ought to be engaged by educators when talking about citizenship, youth and schooling. Often, citizenry and community, as being produced by way of schooling and education through various rituals of belonging, come to be engendered through ethnocentric curricula and pedagogies. Within the culture of schooling, the sense of community and the self come to be disciplined through these regulatory procedures of citizenship. The classroom then – in and of itself – comes to exert pedagogic forms of discipline onto students, thus addressing the needs concerning responsibility, the emotional, and the social, as framed within the context of the different local communities in a particular way that encumbers embodied ways of knowing (Smith 1999; Kincheloe and Steinberg 2008; Dei 2004).
If we are talking about educating youth through embodied ways of knowing, then questions of spirituality should be considered. Notably, spirituality is embedded in all geographies across Africa differently through intergenerational ways of knowing. Spirituality is about a particular relationship with the self through the embodiment of knowledge. With embodied ways of knowing we are thinking about innate, heuristic ways of coming to know the self, to know one’s local socio-cultural environment by way of ontological primacy. It is about knowing through bodies of difference. African spirituality is variably interwoven through Indigenous oral histories; it speaks to the mind, body and soul interplay that engenders values, beliefs, attitudes, expressions and dispositions that shape and form one’s embodied ways of knowing. It is constantly in flux and contoured through the myriad languages, cultures and difference immanent within African peoples. Epistemologically, African spirituality speaks to the uncertainty of innate, heuristic ways of knowing as imbued through the metaphysical immanent to African lifeworlds. Ghanaian systems of spirituality have historically diverged from Western systems of knowing. Spirituality, as spatio-temporally immanent to African geographies, speaks to the relationship to the land, oral histories and the community. Conventional schooling and JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 31 education have historically disavowed this relationship, which have privileged particular forms of institutionalized epistemologies.
To think of schooling and education as they come to be legitimized through curricula and pedagogues, involves thinking of the many ways discipline becomes discursively produced and accepted through the principles and techniques of schooling and education. It involves thinking of the ways in which schooling and education come to be governed through theories that seek the interest of development (see also Tucker 1999; Sadar 1999; Abdi, Puplampu & Dei 2006; Tikly 2004), to theories of progress and modernization; through particular investments of the body, through coercion and subordination; through idealized knowledges, through time and space relations, and signifying practices, and how these particular institutionalized interests become partitioned forms of discipline, all operationalized through pedagogic forms of epistemological enclosure (Foucault 1995). Knowledge is always already circumscribed through the governing “Eurobody,” that is, the archetype European subject of Enlightenment. What we have then is the conventional classroom as endowed through a certain disciplinary pedagogic space, one that quantifies knowledge in a way that commodifies and simultaneously ranks the different bodies and the different geographies of residing knowledges. Discipline produces itself through compliance and control materializing into this conforming body. In fact, Foucault should be noted when he speaks of the docile body (Foucault 1995). It prompts the thinking of how the docile body comes to be reified in and through the curricula and as re/producing of the archetype knowledge of Euromodernity. Discipline, as (Foucault 1995) tells us, is spatio-temporal and capillary-like, that discipline is producing of the subject. We must think of the myriad loci of the subjects, to think of schooling and education as subject. To think of the pedagogue and student alike as subjects forming capillary-like relations through what Freire (1970) calls a banking form of knowledge. Discipline then, as Foucault (1995) argues, concerns the particular relations produced in and through bodies of knowledge which subjects classify themselves in relation to each other, and at the same time form governing relations to that which is subject. Our task then is to historically trace these constituting variants which subject themselves within the governing-installed apparatus of conventional schooling and education, that is, to bring to the surface the colonizing procedures, methods, attitudes and beliefs that have come to be an accepted practice by means of the colonial importation of Enlightenment forms of knowledge.
Literature and context
The growing literature of the interrelated subjects of character/moral and citizenship education suggest these concepts consist of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that can ensure effective learning outcomes for youth in terms of the acquisition and relevance of knowledge for social change (see Dewey, 1909/1975). Character education can be a form of discipline onto bodies. In his work, Ryan (1996) argues that the “morals, values and ethics we want students to learn should be identified by adults and taught by matching the topic and level of intensity to the students’ developmental level” (cited in Marshall, 2001). JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 32
In pluralistic contexts, educators have to confront questions about whose and what values are to be taught in schools and the implications of this question for developing a caring community of learners. Gibbs (2007) and Althof and Berkowitz (2006) highlight issues of respect, responsibility, honesty, trustworthiness, compassion, empathy, justice, fairness, civic participation, kindness, integrity and work ethic as central to the understanding of both character and moral education. These are “qualities” that educators can assist youth to locate, develop and take up within themselves. Kohlberg’s (1981, 1984) and McClellan’s (1999) studies show that the question of moral education is not simply about teaching “right and wrong,” but teaching youth to engage in critical thinking to make independent and informed decisions about their lives and worlds.
The importance of embodied ways of knowing as an approach to multi-centric education that speak to the imbrications within pedagogy, instruction, and cultural ways of knowing from different contexts and sites to meet the concrete needs of diverse learners, is increasingly gaining ground. Within the African context, for example, we know of local educational approaches that sought to instill values and virtues in youth to ensure discipline and respect for self, peers and community. The question is, how is such education, as embodied, relevant in helping confront some of the challenges of youth citizenship and belonging? The literary works of Chinua Achebe (1996), Ayi Kwei Armah (1969), and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1965, 1986) point to how local African proverbs, parables, fables, myths, mythologies, and folklore contain instruction and knowledge about society, culture and nature. Bascom (1965), Kudadjie (1996), Yankah, (1989), Ogede (1993), Kalu (1991), Pachocinshi (1996), Abubakre and Reichmuth (1997) all show that proverbs and folktales (as embodied ways of knowing) have a long history dialoguing through cultures, traditions and histories, and offer understandings of the complex interactions of society, nature and culture (see also Abrahams, 1967, 1972, Dorson 1972, Taylor 1934, Wolfgang and Dundas, 1981, in other contexts).
A critical integrative prism for looking at how discipline, and respect for self and community are engaged within institutional settings, invites a scrutiny of the processes and structures through which education is delivered in school and off-school sites. This framework calls for understanding the contestations over knowledge, culture, values and understandings of social relationships, as well as an exploration of the interplay of school culture, social climate and environment that shape the construction of youth. We ask, what are the ways in which the contending issues of responsibility and accountability come to position youth and educators in asymmetrical power relations in the school system? This question is significant in the current push to make education more relevant to the needs, aspirations and experiences of youth, and to speak to questions about the embodiment of culture, history, politics, identity, local knowledge, citizenry and belonging in delivering the civic goals of schools.
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 33
Study method
This paper is part of a longitudinal study examining the understanding, teaching, education of discipline, and respect for community from the perspectives of youth, student- teachers, educators, parents and Elders in the African context. For this larger study, the major learning objective is about suggesting ways to enhance embodied ways of knowing for youth by working with educators to develop: 1) learning and instructional materials; 2) different strategies to implement character education in schools as informed by local Ghanaian voices, and 3) to document past, current and long-term institutional approaches for dealing with the experiences of African youth regarding discipline and respect for community in educational settings. The larger study is particularly interested in the internalization of colonization by Ghanaian youth as produced by schooling experiences in the local and broader context of Africa.
The larger study has reviewed the available literature on youth [in] discipline, respect for oneself, and socio-cultural environment. Consultations were held with local educational theorists and practitioners in Ghana on the subject of inquiry. In the actual field research in Ghana, we focussed on in-depth individual and group interviews with youth, (including those who have been disciplined through expulsions, suspensions or other disciplinary actions for their behaviour in the school setting) educators, student-teachers, parents, and Elders concerning their views on the search for alternative ways to engage education with youth.
So far, field interviews in Ghana have included a minimum of twenty (20) educational theorists and practitioners who have some knowledge of and experience in the issue of teaching discipline and respect by way of thinking through local Indigenous philosophies and concepts. Also, at least a dozen (12) focus group discussions have been organized. They included workshop sessions with teacher candidates, field practitioners, and educationists. Furthermore, there has been a total of over eighty-five (85) individual interviews conducted involving twenty-five (25) educators, twenty (20) Elders/parents and twenty-five (25) students/youth drawn from the local universities, secondary schools and community colleges, as well local communities in Ghana.
Limitations and the Implications for Validity
Language presented a limiting factor on the study. Field interviews and focus group discussions were done in English, the official language of Ghana. However, of the participants interviewed, some of the local languages spoken were Ga, Akan, Ewe and Dagomba. Participants expressed difficulty in translating their thought as shaped through local languages into the medium of English. Incommensurable constructs embodied within local languages, that could not readily be interpreted or translated into some measurable quantity by English, were brought to the fore by language. Embodied meaning-making processes are contextual and embedded within language and cultural variants lending to JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 34 specific character, moral and epistemological nuances. Another limiting factor was due to the temporal nature of the study, in that the study is augured through geo-specific trajectories of culture, which is context bound, fluid yet sometimes fixed, intergenerational and archived by way of oral narratives and memory. The embodied interpretations of discipline and variant character and moral practices by Ghanaian youth are then imbued through historical context-specific readings about their lived socio-cultural environments. Given this changing context of interpreting through an embodiment of knowledge, it is difficult then to produce some absolute fixed template with static meaning of what constitutes citizenship. As a philosophical paradigm, the study engaged a socio- constructivist interpretive approach. Hence, we are less interested in producing some absolute template of citizenship. Instead, it allows the reader to think through their experiences of citizenship to understand the discursive ways of what it means to be human through the nomenclature of citizenship. This brings us to questions of validity and reliability in the cultural context.
In terms of validity, in particular cultural validity (Cohen, Manion & Morrison 2011), we were cognizant of linguistic difference among the participants and how different understandings could arise when particular words were used without providing temporal context. The study took into consideration the variant modes of cultural reference within each linguistic group and how values and meaning become linguistically embedded differently. Interview transcriptions were made available to participants to ensure the rendering of appropriate socio-cultural interpretations.
Findings
The paper reports on a section of our field research findings. It is based on subject responses from youth to such questions as: What is discipline? How do local voices of Ghanaian youth understand discipline and respect for self and community? How do these understandings and practices help build qualities of the self among students and youth? We have chosen to focus on youth narratives that help us to understand the relationship with discipline in the contexts of schooling and education, and also the relevance of these voices of Ghanaian youth in schooling about the civic goals of schools.
Character, morals, respect, and discipline: youth voices
In one focus group discussion with Ghanaian youth of diverse backgrounds in a senior secondary school setting, the following responses were articulated when asked about what character means to the youth:
Int: when we talk of character what do we mean? Anyone can respond.
When you talk of character then you are talking of a person’s behaviour. How the person behaves. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 35
Character can equally mean an attitude, both good and bad attitude of the person. What I also understand is that your attitude sometimes determines your character. Your attitude. Character could be both positive and negative attitude. The person’s character is what is accepted within the society. It means that the person’s attitude or behaviour of the person is in conformity with what is accepted in society. The behaviour or maybe the person’s character is in conformity with the norms of the society. [File 29: Text Units 15–32] Youth associate character with a particular behaviour, in a sense being disciplined to act in an ‘acceptable manner.’ To have character is to be in tune with particular expectations as sanctioned by society. In effect, character is regulated by societal expectations and values; these values are taken as given and unquestionable.
When the youth were also asked about morals, they explained:
When we talk of morals, we can have good or bad morals. Morals are also associated with the behaviour of the individual. So your behaviour can either be good–which is a good moral– or bad, which is bad morals or immorality. That is what I understand about morals. We can equally talk of values. Someone can have good values. The inner condition of that person is … Morals are the general behaviour of an individual to the accepted norms of his society. [File 29: Text Units 40–65] From these youth voices there is an axiological understanding and conception of morals. In a sense, morals are the accepted expectations of society that regulate social behaviour. Knowing or understanding societal morals is to learn about becoming “disciplined.” Thus, through their understandings of societal moral values, the youth recognised that discipline, then, can be taught and learned.
In another focus group discussion with youth in a secondary school their take on values were:
Values are morals that are cherished in the society or where the person finds himself. Values are the laid-down rules within a society that society expects an individual to have. For example in Ghana, some of the values we cherish are … hard work and respect. [File 33: Text Units 113–142] In this context, youth understand social values as accepted expectations that come to be respected, in that society expects its members to have such social values because they JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 36 serve the interest of the community. These values have been transmitted through oral histories by way of African Elders and ancestors. Adhering to these values comes to show respect for society, culture and history.
On the question of respect, the youth also argued:
In Ghana here … respect will vary in many places. For instance in Canada what somebody will do — you might not see anything wrong with it. [But…] in Ghana, when you do the same thing it will be wrong. Let’s say you are in class and the teacher asks a question… you can’t raise the left hand. Here in Ghana you have to answer the question by raising your right hand because when you do that (raise the left hand) you don’t consider it as a sign of respect. There are certain good morals that are encouraged in the society. Just like she said there are certain behaviours that will make you either respectful or disrespectful. In Ghana, when an elderly person is talking to you, you will have to keep quiet and listen. When they want you to talk they will invite you to talk. You do not interrupt an elderly person when he or she is talking to you. That is another sign of respect. Respect can also be a teaching or standing objectives of a value that a teacher wants the children to acquire—within the society. [File 32: Text Units 180–199] Put simply, respect emerges from complying with the different variants of what constitutes preferred morals, as explained by the youth. The youth also come to understand that respect is taught. To be respectful is to accept and follow a societal code of moral conduct and personal action. Respect is cultivated as ethical modes that guide and nurture everyday social interaction.
On the specific question of discipline, the students in the earlier focus group discussion pointed to the relationship with discipline, respect and social moral conduct.
Discipline is partial of respect. When you are respectful, you are disciplined. You are found to be disciplined when you abide by the expectations of society in which you live. This is because you do not go contrary to expectations. You are disciplined. You can also say discipline is the principle guiding the values; the principles that whether or not you are disciplined depends on certain things that you decide to do in the community. For example you meet an elderly person carrying something, you try to help the person. I also think that when you go by rules of the society you are a disciplined person. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 37
I think that discipline in a generic sense includes what we mentioned earlier which are the good values: morality, respect and all that. When you do [exhibit these values] you are considered to be disciplined. [File 29: Text Units 70–101] If what the youth suggest—that discipline is in effect to ensure that one is respectful of, and adhering to the particular accepted practices of society—how then do we become cognizant about the way in which these said practices of society become hegemonic or colonial? Discipline is all-encompassing and embodies meaningful social values, morality and respect for culture and the different bodies of society.
Other discussions with youth about discipline brought a nuanced understanding about how society teaches its youth to accept particular social codes of conduct and morality:
Discipline is a form of inflicting physical or mental pain on a person. It could even be emotional. … There are different ways about discipline. Some also think discipline is the correction of bad behaviour. When a child is disciplined, they are correcting the child but then it also depends on the kind of discipline. Discipline can be a moral guide to [coerce] the teaching of minds and attitude. It is a guide that is put aside to strengthen the correct behaviour of people. It is meant to correct people but it depends on the kind of discipline that you give. If you do not take time and you give a discipline which does not tally with the kind of offence, then you must be doing the wrong thing. You may be thinking that….or let’s say the child comes and the child took some money and then you go and dip the child’s hand in fire… it doesn’t even tally well. … So for you to … sometimes the discipline should merit the offence. In our Ghanaian society sometimes discipline is used to deter the person from misbehaving, but if the child knows that if he misbehaves he will be disciplined or…else the child will go contrary to what is accepted in society. So they used to such correct behaviour in society. It is not always that a child should be disciplined. Sometimes you have to call the child and instead you can talk to the child…. [File 29: Text Units 125–157] As the youth suggest in the above discussion, discipline has various dimensions. It can be physical, emotional and psychological. Discipline serves as a moral compass instructing or working as a deterrent to problematic behaviour. Discipline ought to bring about JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 38 reformation and restoration. But how then, do we theorize youth identity and discipline, and how can such a theorization speak to questions of social difference, embodied belonging and citizenship? From the participants’ narratives, we imagine that understanding questions of youth identity and discipline involves disembedding ontological ways of knowing historically archived through cultural memory as spatiotemporally embodied within Ghanaian communities. This entails teaching discipline rather than enforcing discipline.
In thinking about youth identity and discipline we suggest understanding this contentious relationship through embodied ways of knowing; this hermeneutic task involves youth questioning everyday assumptions about knowledge, as well as allowing youth to engage local ways of knowing to come to understand their everyday lifeworld. Hermeneutically, embodied ways of knowing work with interpreting historical Ghanaian social values, such as diverse community traditions, to make sense of contemporary questions of social responsibility for youth. For example, in our focus group discussions, youth noted that character, attitude or behaviour of a person is always already immanent within society; that “a person’s attitude or behaviour of the person is in conformity with what is accepted in society.” Understanding what values, attitudes or behavioural patterns Ghanaian youth come to accept in society, necessitates disembedding historical constellations of what constitute the social, the communal and the political as embodied through cultural memory. In our focus group discussions youth described values as “morals cherished within society.” There exist certain values within particular societies— such as when an elderly person is speaking… how you respond, as well as how youth answer teachers in the context of the classroom by the raising of a particular hand. Adherence to these community values of character, morals and respect can be interpreted as a sign of discipline by Ghanaian youth. As articulated in the focus group discussions, “discipline is the principle guiding the values.” With the narratives from the focus group discussions with youth, what is significant for teaching practices and curricula initiatives is the positioning of Ghanaian youth as subjects of their lived experiences and histories, and understanding that the ensuing cultural politics of representation within conventional schooling and education in the context of Ghana serves to reaffirm the existence of Ghanaian youth as knowing bodies.
To ensure civic education for local Ghanaian youth, we ought to be cognizant of the everyday politics within educational systems. We could also work to tease out the way in which pedagogues and students come into particular relations with their complex socio- cultural identities. We caution that there are some pedagogical limitations, challenges and possibilities for integrating respect and character education through particular disciplinary mechanisms for the socialization of local Ghanaian youth. We posit the need to understand the ways local Ghanaian youth come to know the embodied-self through the context of discipline. There is a moment of recognizing conventional ways of understanding “discipline” as “colonial and colonizing practices”, in that such practices regulate social behaviour and are imposed as foreign onto the acceptable meanings of an embodied- JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 39
Ghanaian-self. Questions of citizenship are all embedded within local histories of what it means to belong; about how local Ghanaian youth come to understand their identities; and how citizenship rights and responsibilities of the learner/self/subject come to be desired and performed through the schooling experience of the local Ghanaian subject.
In pointing to ways in which local Ghanaian youth’s embodied understandings can be integrated with the curriculum, teaching practices and classroom learning to necessitate the civic goals of schools, we ground our ethical ideas concerning respect, character and morals in the sensibilities of Ghanaian youth. We suggest that such values are ontologically accepted in society through ancestral, cultural and social forms of memory, memories that have been moulded through time and revealed as the nature of Ghanaian reality. We engage in an educational praxis through pedagogies that speak to the inter- and intra-relations of cultural difference of local Ghanaian youth. In doing so, identity is dialectically placed within the political context so as to dialogue with the embodied self, the ‘Other’ and community through questions of schooling experiences, citizenry, character, the production of knowledge, and the disciplining of learners. Take for example the issue of language. The official language of instruction integrated within the Ghanaian curriculum is English. But in a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic society such as Ghana, civic discord can surface among the official institutionalised language and the local provincial language. Yet language as embodied by Ghanaian youth is quite diverse, constituted through a range of culture, historical and socio-political variants. wa Thiong’o (1986) notes that language is a means of communication as well as a carrier of culture, being a product of each other in ways whereby culture embodies moral, ethical and aesthetic values of local peoples. Given then that Ghana is a multi-linguistic geography, how can different languages, such as Asante, Ga, Akuapem, Dagarte, Ewe, Fante, Boron, Dagomba and Akyem, be included within the classroom? What does it mean for local Ghanaian youth to have their embodied ways of knowing as embedded within language, renounced within the conventional classroom of learning and simultaneously English installed as the authentic language of instruction? From the narratives of the participants, we are left thinking of epistemes ontological to Ghanaian communities, that is, extricating cultural and social memory that have been crystallized through space and time and have come to be accepted within the society.
Possibilities for Critical Citizenship
We have written a particular dialogue from a social science theory that works from, with, and through the lived experiences of Ghanaian youth. At the same time, we are writing against the colonial encryption embedded within historical discursive practices of what it means to be a citizen in the context of the Western nation-state. We suggest then, citizenship ought to be imbued through critical consciousness. We posit citizenship should be about pedagogical praxis, about pedagogical personhood. If we are speaking about citizenship in the context of Ghanaian youth, given the historical colonial forays, then citizenship embodies resistance. Citizenship then, is political. In a sense then, what we are JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 40 calling for is an articulation for a critical citizenship, in which all learners can come to think about how their lived social worlds come to be historically shaped, formed and organized through particular ways of understanding the embodied-self. Critical citizenship then, becomes a particular historical space through time in which all bodies alike can come to individually and collectively avow their sense of identity about how they come to belong within particular geo-political terrains. Critical citizenship considers possibilities for a transformative self in ways that ground local Ghanaian youth in their own cultural ways of knowing, as well as their social environments and particular communities. Our locating of critical citizenship allows for a pedagogical reading of culture that speaks to the complex historic specificities of identity concerning what it means to belong within the contemporary epoch of modernity. The notion of critical citizenship comes out of entangled histories, lived experiences, cultural knowledge and the politics of identification. As pedagogical praxis, critical citizenship allows the ‘Othered’ body to be integrated within the multiple communities of the schooling experience. One of the civic goals of schools ought to be about including the histories of different bodies, i.e., history as broadly conceptualised to speak to the lived experiences of myriad peoples and their communities, rather than fixed, static events that come to be marked through particular celebratory events and performances of institutionalized state procedures. Critical citizenship calls for centering the student in ways in which curricula becomes principally organized through the student’s cultural histories. Critical citizenship is about a particular identification with the social and the political. Critical citizenship can be protean and at the same time immutable, fluid actively involved with flux.
Discussion
Foregrounding the voices of Ghanaian youth is key for tracing the effectiveness of teaching respect, self worth and disciplinary methods. The discussion suggests ways to enhance learning for citizenship and belonging from the embodied voices of Ghanaian youth by dialoguing with epistemologies historically accepted in society about values, character, discipline and respect. We queried the location of discipline by positioning the discourse of discipline as hegemonic and at the same time, as self-asserting from within, as seeking the interest of youth, to understand what it means to teach discipline and not enforce discipline. We ought to be cognizant about how we come to know and understand citizenship and belonging through questions concerning discipline. What we are attempting to do is to find different methods to come to dialogue with the embodiment of citizenship and belonging to ascertain particular character, moral and civic responsibility, which aids in the harmonization and integration of youth within society. The discursive formation of citizenship is subject to a given/fixed interpretive framework, so we need a different reading to these historically enclosed ways of knowing, one that includes the voices of the youth as embodied through the myriad cultural understandings of our social world. Such ways of knowing speak about civic responsibility, and it moves the discussion concerning citizenship and belonging beyond the good-bad binary, to one that promotes accountability and respect for citizenry. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 41
Historically, Ghanaian embodied ways of knowing have been classified as less than knowledge. We have Ghanaian youth then coming to know, or coming to experience, the Ghanaian-self through a disciplined organization of schooling where youth come to govern or regulate their experiences of citizenship, their sense of belonging within the broader community, through a particular surveillance as informed by these colonially-imbued methods and practices of schooling, constituting in a sense, a form of alienation from within (see also Foucault 1995; Fanon 1967, 1964). These immanent regulatory procedures of schooling come to instil a particular normalised form of discipline as presented through the everyday practices of schooling and learning. The question of how we come to make meaning of discipline or how one comes to understand the experience of discipline as it resides within the everyday experience of Ghanaian youth is important. Youth come into the process of learning through different forms of behavioural patterns wherein knowledge resides in a particular way and can only be reached through certain procedures. So like the truth of physics or like the truth of chemistry, knowledge is distributed into the governing social terrain in ways that work to stratify the classroom. But the classroom is not some unknown entity devoid of bodies waiting to be spatially theorised, the classroom represents the social; the classroom is community, the classroom is about belonging through embodiment. We invite a conceptualization of citizenship and schooling as constitutive variants, working together, engaging in mutual dialogue.
How then do we understand questions of discipline in the context of schooling and citizenship in the pluralistic context? Spivak (1988) speaks about epistemic violence, while Scheurich and Young (1997) also talk about colouring epistemologies. If we recognize the ethnocentric interests of the epistemologies embedded within the conventional curricula of schooling and education, and we claim social justice and equity for all, then citizenship ought to be embodied through liberating practices. In thinking through discipline in the context of schooling as experienced by Ghanaian youth, our starting points speak about the governing domain of the entrenched epistemological relations, in particular the way in which power and privilege come to be operationalised within particular bodies. Our intention has been with understanding how, within the classroom, youth come to regulate the self, i.e., how youth come to embody as one’s own the conditions of belonging through a particular form of disciplined citizenship. If, and as Foucault encourages, we are thinking through the insurrection of subjugated knowledges (Foucault 1980: 81), then in the African context, dialoguing about the embodiment of knowledge or Indigeneity could offer transformative possibilities.
We know that Indigenous African ways of knowing have been with us even before the colonization of knowledge (Dei 2000a, 2008). So to ‘insurrect’ such knowledge, is, to say, transporting, or importing this embodied knowledge to the classroom text. It is about inclusivity. It is about accepting values, beliefs, customs and the culture of difference. It is about dialoguing with oral forms of knowledge (i.e., the ones colonially installed to the margins) to retrieve and bring to the classrooms for all bodies, different ways to come to learn what being socially responsible means, to nurture the sense of understanding of these JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 42 historic moral categories and character classifications in the context of citizenship education. So in coming to make sense of how discipline comes to be discursively operationalized in the context of schooling and citizenship, our sites of query concern youth and the particular relationships formed through these everyday embodied experiences of citizenship. We would like to bring attention to the way citizenship and the act of belonging are located, interpreted, commodified and consumed by all youth every day.
Yet, discipline for Ghanaian youth in the context of citizenship, schooling and education is about epistemological representation. Epistemological representation though, involves a different embodiment of knowledge; it involves equity, rather than some apolitical or ahistorical embodiment. Epistemological representation concerns itself with heterogeneous ways of knowing; citizenship should be inclusive and representative of the different embodied practices. Hence, citizenship ought to disentangle the historical conditions of knowledge, the colonial project and the enabling of standardized forms of knowledge to inform schooling and community. To think of discipline within the context of schooling and citizenship involves thinking dialectically through histories of colonization. It involves questioning the organization of knowledge, the material production of citizenry and the axiological codification of character within conventional schooling. It involves engaging the pedagogic relevance of teaching discipline rather than enforcing discipline in schooling communities.
Conclusion
In concluding, we ask: How do we come to know and understand citizenship and belonging through embodied values of moral and character education as deeply embedded within local cultural ways of knowing? Given the conditions of our contemporary globalized society, we suggest engaging questions of citizenship and belonging through the context of embodied difference and pluralism; we must be cognizant about the particular citizenship in which we promote and participate. The future belongs to the youth of today. School curriculum needs to reflect a civic responsibility for all youth and citizenry alike. Curriculum should dialogue with the voices of all bodies of youth, to value the embodied experiences of those historically marginalized bodies. Behavioural patterns cannot simply be dismissed through historic forms of pathologizing; these patterns are the starting points to extricate deeply embodied ways of knowing. We have turned to youth as a vantage point to help with disentangling these deeply buttressed roots of standardized colonial ways of knowing and understanding what it means to belong, what it means to be a particular citizen within a particular community. We hope by dialoguing with embodied voices of local Ghanaian youth, that all learners can come to articulate different subversive pedagogies to engage the governing colonial imbued spaces of citizenship.
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 43
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Author Biographies
George J. Sefa Dei is a Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). His teaching and research interests are in the areas of Anti-Racism, Minority Schooling, International Development and Anti-Colonial Thought. His most recent publications include: New Perspectives on African-Centred Education in Canada, (2013 — with Arlo Kempf); Indigenous Philosophies and Critical Education: A Reader, (2011-editor); Teaching Africa: Towards a Transgressive Pedagogy (2010). Among his other publications are: Fanon & Education: Thinking Through Pedagogical Possibilities (2010-- co-edited with Marlon Simmons); and Fanon and the Counterinsurgency of Education (2010).
Marlon Simmons is an Assistant Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. His research interests include culture and leadership, embodied ways of knowing, intergenerational knowledge, and governance of the self. Marlon’s research is grounded within the Diaspora and communicative network practices of youth.
Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education Volume 5 Number 1 - 2016 journals.sfu.ca/jgcee
A Habitat for Humanity and University Partnership: Enhancing International Experiential Learning in El Salvador
Robert B. Feagan1 Associate Professor Wilfrid Laurier University @ Brantford
Mike Boylan Coordinator, Global Engagement Programming Wilfrid Laurier University
Keywords: international experiential learning; ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ global citizenship; participant preparation
ABSTRACT: The increase in international experiential learning (IEL hereafter) opportunities being developed by universities in the global north requires more attention both generally and with regards to specific IEL programming objectives. This paper provides observations and assessment of a case study of university- student participation in home-builds in El Salvador over the course of three years—a partnership between Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program, and a Canadian university. The information collected is assessed relative to the key critiques and to the recommendations encouraged in the IEL literature, with the intention of incorporating these critiques and recommendations in future IEL planning for this partnership, and to inform IEL work more generally. The key observations and recommendations include the need for enhanced student preparation pre and post-trip–meaning ‘critical reflection’ processes and materials on privilege and personal goals themes; on specific global south context; and enhancing intercultural learning and awareness activities and processes e.g., more closely integrated host-community and participant relationship-building opportunities. These recommendations are seen as important for enhancing on this specific IEL program and its short-duration timeframe, while suggesting useful guideposts for IEL more generally, as its occurrence increases within the university setting.
1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Robert Feagan, Wilfrid Laurier University, 73 George Street, Brantford, Ontario, Canada N3T 2Y3, [email protected]
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 48
Introduction
Increasing international engagement interest and options for students–as part of the broader internationalization shift at universities in the ‘global north’ (Altbach and Knight, 2007; Heron, 2011)—is occurring for a variety of reasons. On the one hand we see the ‘state’ accommodating globalization and neoliberal political and economic shifts by off- loading public and community services to local-level institutions like churches, municipalities, private foundations and educational institutions, while simultaneously directing and compelling increased global integration of educational and economic activities under the internationalization umbrella (see Conran, 2011, and various chapters in Tiessen and Huish 2013 for more discussion).
On the other hand, among many factors associated with international learning and engagement at universities are those with more global social justice-oriented ambitions. These are concerned with raising the levels of understanding and action among young adults in an increasingly polarized world, so as to work towards addressing the inequities and divisions between the so-called global north and global south—constructed out of a lengthy history of colonial and imperialist activities (Pluim and Jorgensen, 2012). We draw on Cameron’s (2013) ideas of global citizenship for this research, where we examine our participants’ experiences following this author’s thin to thick global citizenship continuum. For us, this means that enhancing or ‘thickening’ IEL will potentially include stronger understanding of the concerns of the prevailing neo-colonial discourse of north- south relations, and for the participants to be more cognizant of their relatively privileged positions in comparison to those with whom we work in the host country of El Salvador. Albeit a complex concept (see others like Smith & Laurie, 2011; Tiessen & Epprecht, 2012; Larsen, 2014), it suggests thinking about ways to deepen cultural competencies and understandings, work towards common cause, and think about north-south relations through this thin-thick lens. We will discuss this further in the literature and methodology sections.
This side of the internationalization agenda, and the one around which this paper on international experiential learning (IEL) is framed, is founded on a belief that our learning institutions must enhance their roles for equipping students with opportunities which contribute to understanding and resolution of contemporary global scale challenges of human health, global security, environment, human rights, inter-religious tensions, economic issues and uncertainties, and population growth and movement (Smith and Laurie, 2011). The paper takes as a point of departure previous concern and desire for better Canadian pedagogical models for such international learning (Benham Rennick and Desjardins, 2013; Heron, 2011).
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 49
Purpose
The paper explores a case study of three similar short-term IEL iterations that are part of an ongoing partnership between a Canadian university and the international Global Villages program operated by the international non-profit organization Habitat for Humanity. Our primary objective is to understand and assess the results of this case study with respect to the recommendations for enhanced IEL located in the same realm of literature that critiques extant international learning efforts. This assessment then leads to recommendations for pedagogical processes that would more appropriately shape these specific kinds of IEL program endeavors, and arguably, IEL efforts more broadly. In other words, given what is observed in this specific case study, we use the identified IEL themes to provide critical insights for both understanding the shortcomings of our international experiences to date, and means by which to enhance IEL outcomes for student-participants in the future.
Context of the Case Study
This paper presents the results from three sequential and largely identical IEL experiences regarding a university-non-profit partnership: Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program (HFH-GV hereafter) in El Salvador in collaboration with a university in southern Ontario Canada—Wilfrid Laurier University, over the period 2013-15i. A description of the case study experiences is provided, along with an analysis of the information collected during these three iterations relative to the objectives noted above. In doing so, the research hopes to develop enhancements on our current IEL opportunities, with a focus on global north- and global south- oriented IEL, so as to enhance student understanding and their ability to act in the world—the development of ‘agency’, among other long-term objectives. Observing for student motivations, insights, knowledge, and understanding through these case study iterations should provide a basis for working toward more appropriate pedagogy and organization of these experiences for the future.
The IEL experience being examined in this study has been bound by several limitations up to this point. The in-country experience is relatively short (~8-9 days), participants do not necessarily possess language or foundational skills to facilitate intercultural learning, and the partnership with the charitable organization Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program may reinforce the concept that this is an experience with northern development aid aims. On the other hand, the short duration and lack of prerequisite skills for participants has created conditions that enable diverse students from various years of study and disciplines to participate. The partnership with a high-profile charitable organization, Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program (HFH-GV), may also have stimulated a higher participation rate. Furthermore, the authors speculate that this type of introduction to IEL, done well, may have the effect of modifying student’s self-perceptions such that they become more likely to consider participating in future, longer, ‘thicker’ IEL programs. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 50
International Experiential Learning
Critique
IEL is one of a number of various terms used to describe international movements of volunteers that integrate some form of education and ‘contribution’—often implying movement from the global north to the global south. For example, terms like: voluntourismii, international service-learning (ISL), study abroad, international volunteering service (IVS), work-study, international internships, and global citizenship learning are some of the labels used across this quite diverse literature (see Tiessen and Huish, 2013; and Benham Rennick and Desjardins, 2013 for notes on this terminology). As well, there is pedagogical and recruitment language evident in some of this literature and in North American university parlance with a focus on the educational aspects of such engagement: ‘global-learning,’ ‘experiential education,’ ‘active partnership,’ ‘global education,’ and ‘educational volunteering’ for example.This paper uses international experiential learning (IEL), and the literature focused on global north and global south engagement is used to inform this choice.
The most broad-based and historically-situated critiques of international volunteer engagement is that it naively and/or intentionally reproduces colonial and neo-colonial outcomes and perpetuates the global inequities which ironically these IEL opportunities are often created to address (Clost, 2013; McGehee, 2012; Thomas and Chandresekera, 2013; Pluim and Jorgensen, 2012). These authors claim that the lineage of cultural, political, and economic differentials in power between the volunteer participants and the host communities is evident in the perpetuation of dependency common to north-south relations; in the historically religious values-impositions at such north-south interfaces; in the ‘othering’ of the host-community (MacDonald, 2013); in the inequitable dynamic which sees northern participants able to choose to volunteer in the global south (a common geography of these relationships) with little or no reverse flow—the south as a kind of classroom and space for ‘professionalization’ or acquisition of social and career capital for northern volunteers (Fizzle and Epprecht, 2013; Drolet, 2013; Smith and Laurie, 2011)iii; and in the international development or ‘development aid’ efforts and language that accompanies developed vs developing world constructions (Roddick, 2013). The critique associated with this last theme centres on the legacy of the ‘development’ period following decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s. Palacios (2010) says that the,
… basic conclusion of many authors that have contributed to this critical theory of development is that the Western intention of helping underlying the development aid goal is humanitarian as much as it is colonialist. However, it tends to reproduce the same global patterns of inequality and poverty, leaving intact—if not reinforcing—the dominant position of the North… (864)iv JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 51
And with respect to the aims of post-secondary educational institutions and their IEL programming which is the focus of this research, is a core tension between the administrative and institutional directives for increased student enrolment through IEL, which some see as a kind of ‘brand’ and positioning mechanism (Cameron, 2013; Fizzell and Epprecht, 2013), and the movement for an IEL with aims rooted in global social justice. Benham Rennick and Desjardins (2013, 37) state it like this:
Those of us who work in international programs in higher education are caught between the quasi-religious aims of “doing good,” “help,” and “making a difference,” and the corporate-style institutional goal of the internationalization of education, the national aim of promoting Canada in the world, and the personal objectives of students.…unless we establish and embed particular and explicit values in our programming, we are likely to perpetuate a neocolonial agenda that carries a subtext of “saving,” “helping,” and even “civilizing” partners in what is now sometimes called the Global South.
Such uncritical intentions by institutions and by extension the students who volunteer, are associated with concerns about images of the ‘exotic’ and fascination projected onto other cultures—forms of ‘othering,’ and in this context, participant voices claiming a desire to ‘give back’ through such IEL experiences (MacDonald, 2013). It is suggested that these kinds of attitudes can come from a place of, “… cultural imperialism and voyeurism; [and] homogenize the citizens of a country, thus erasing the cultural diversity and heterogeneity of a nation; and reinforce “the helpless victim” narrative of people in the Global South” (Thomas and Chandresekera, 2013, 94). The advent and growth of many forms of IEL are often criticized as mere adjustments to the neoliberal agenda which increases polarity between the global south and north, under the auspices of a ‘market embedded morality’ (Vodopivec and Jaffe, 2011), and associated neoliberal processes which compel “the rolling back of the state” (Smith and Laurie, 2011, 547).
The history of such north-south engagement is lengthy and though this paper cannot go into much depth here, suffice it to say that, “… it is difficult to evade the colonial undertones of the historical movement of people (and benefits) from the centre to the elusive peripheries and back to the centre” (Pluim and Jorgensen, 2012, 28), and this context must be taken into account in current international educational engagement forays (Benham Rennick, 2012). Colonial history and the contemporary globalization dynamic sometimes housed under the neoliberalism labelv, provides a critical context within which current education, collaborative assistance, and international charitable and social justice relations are developed. It is appropriate to point out that navigating these complex discourses, with hopes of achieving a configuration of recommendations and hence appropriate learning outcomes in an IEL context, are both difficult and necessary. Also, though there is strong experiential U.S. and other northern country IEL writing, the paper draws notably from a contemporary literature that appropriately informs our own post- JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 52 secondary Canadian research context. The next section shifts to a focus on what this literature recommends for appropriate IEL ‘engagement’ in close association with our case studies, and which is considered most pertinent for attending to concerns of the foregoing critique.
Directions and Recommendations
Without thoughtful preparation, orientation, program development and the encouragement of study, and critical analysis and reflection, the programs can easily become small theatres that recreate historic cultural misunderstandings and simplistic stereotypes and replay, on a more intimate scale, the huge disparities in income and opportunity that characterize North-South relations today. (Grusky, 2000, 858)
This paper advocates for an IEL pedagogy that recognizes the importance of movement towards global social justice. As post-secondary institutions become more globally- integrated, both intentionally and by dint of various external state and market pressures, there is a corresponding need to incorporate IEL concepts and objectives that are aligned with this normative stance (Drolet, 2013). Our paper recognizes the often complicated, contentious, and messy character of such work (MacDonald, 2013) while pulling together some of the key categories of pedagogical objectives into a recommendations framework for understanding what the case study in El Salvador reveals and what this can suggest for enhancing such IEL programming.
The intent with the recommendations objective is to advance this specific, ongoing program toward a ‘thicker’ conception of IEL programming. Framed in this way, current IEL programming can be positioned in terms of Cameron’s (2013) spectrum of thin to thick global citizenship, with the idea that enhancing or ‘thickening’ IEL will provide learning opportunities which: are critical of the dominant neo-colonial discourse of north- south relations; can provide spaces for intercultural learning and for students to question their positionality relative to those they encounter in El Salvador; and the possibility to continue learning and acting in ways that contribute to global social justice.
IEL Recommendation Categories
Participant Preparation: The means employed to assist students in appropriate inquiry and thinking around their volunteering efforts in these international situations, commonly termed ‘critical reflection processes’ (Lough, 2011; Travers, 2013), are seen as central in IEL. As Tiessen and Huish (2013, 9) submit, “International experiential learning that is carried out without critical reflection and ongoing self-analysis has the potential to entrench stereotypes of “others” rather than promoting enhanced cross-cultural understanding…”, a position held as well by Benham Rennick and Desjardins (2013). Participant preparation is emphasized through all phases of the IEL, and this can mean readings and discussion on the cultural history and economics of the destination country, JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 53 journaling processes, and reflection practices pre, during, and post-trip on such themes as privilege, intercultural skills, awareness and adaptation, etc. All three of these phases benefit from specific forms of participant engagement associated with each, like close cultural contact in-country, while experienced facilitation throughout the phases can help challenge the status quo as opposed to normalizing it (Thomas and Chandreserka, 2013; Travers, 2013).
Volunteer participants in enhanced IEL must reflect critically on some key aspects of themselves, and of the contexts associated with both the specific geography of their volunteering destination, and of the broader structural narratives that circumscribe their IEL event. The espoused themes of such reflection commonly include: personal goals, concepts of privilege, and associated understanding of the north-south power relations tied to the current and historical context of the host-country, etc. Given this kind of learning framework, it is believed that “A university is in many senses a better candidate to run volunteer programs than a single travel agency; it is more likely to provide accountability, reflection and learning outcomes” (Palacios, 2010, 862). At the same time, it is useful to ask: “Is this critical reflection merely a form of critical thinking designed to generate better citizens, better neighbours, and better volunteers, or is it designed to generate a deep sense of reflexivity that is connected to action that is constantly engaged in challenging power relations and the status quo?” (Langdon & Agyeyomah, 2013, 57) The following examines the sphere of participant preparation relative to the themes noted above.
‘Goal Setting’ – good preparation can contribute to participant goals of personal growth, cultural awareness, language-learning, identity formation, and previous studies list goals like confidence, self-worth, leadership, skills enhancement, and creativity as common and worthy motivations and objectives (Pluim and Jorgensen, 2012; Bailey and Russell, 2012; Ong et al., 2011; Sin, 2009). Critical reflection processes can help students set and articulate personal goals, and assess the importance of these in their lives. At the same time, personal goals cannot be the sole objective of IEL, as using the global south as a form of ‘classroom’ for obtaining individual objectives merely replicates and exacerbates old patterns of domination and the reinforcement of inequitable relations and perspectives (Fizzell and Epprecht, 2013).
‘Privilege’ – participant preparation is also important for examination of the concept of privilege, which is generally associated with attributes of race, gender, class, etc., and to help situate a person relative to various levels or systems of access and mobility that are legacies of historical-social construction and unequal power, and commonly unexamined. Though not easy to ‘unpack,’ the concept and reality of privilege is increasingly recognized as a core aspect of participant abilities and understandings of self with regards to IEL work. When appropriately engaged, processes assisting with reflection on privilege can assist an IEL participant to rework and understand the ‘helping narrative’ (MacDonald, 2013) or ‘helping imperative’ (Heron, 2007) common to IEL participant framing of their perceived roles and contributions. This kind of preparation can help shift participants to JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 54 move towards what Thomas and Chandreseker (2013, 103) label the authentic ally—a figure that “… understands, acknowledges, and engages in self-reflection regarding the power and privilege that they wield in the world.”
Desired processes are those that facilitate personal goals at the same time as developing consciousness of self as interdependent and implicated in various ways with the larger global system. Preparation can focus on diminishing the risk that participants will perpetuate uncritical assessment of their experiences, and thereby reinforce the separation of groups into those privileged and living in the global north from those supposedly benefitting from such ‘help’—the “underdeveloped rest of the world” (Vodopivec and Jaffe, 2011, 123). This is the binary that Conran (2011) notes must be consciously addressed given the kind of ‘benevolent imperialism’ it reinforces (Fizzell and Epprecht, 2013, 120).
Related concerns located between goal setting and privilege are raised around volunteer voices that claim to ‘learn from them,’ and the ‘orientalist’ discourse that this suggests. This ‘discourse of reversal’ (McGehee, 2012) seems to arise as an unconscious means of reconciling observed inequities, and a ‘They’re poor but happy….’ refrain can suggest an uncritical rationalization that normalizes the status quo. This is evident as well when IEL participants voice sentiments around host-communities as dominated by ‘close community ties and kinship,’ and a kind of innocence and happiness perceived to be missing in the participant’s hectic lifestyles in the global north. The ‘friendliness’ and ‘intimacy’ narrativevi described in the literature is seen by some observers as masking a kind of moral superiority, and a form of ‘othering’ (Vodopivec and Jaffe, 2011).
The concept of ‘global citizenship’ may be a means for seeing these two aspects of participant preparation relative to one another. The literature parses this concept along a continuum from ‘thin’ to ‘thick’. The thin end focuses on themes of employability, CV- building, the university ‘trophy course’ goal, and career opportunities in a globally integrated world (Cameron, 2013)—mirroring the personal goal(s) subtheme. This version sees the global south as a kind of classroom for northern aspirations “… driven by superficial global citizenship ideals…” (Tiessen, 2013, 88). The thick end of global citizenship focuses on developing a consciousness where IEL participants shift their focus to work towards a more equitable and just world where notions of solidarity and engagement are central values, beyond ‘doing good’ and personal growth hopesvii, to ‘doing justice,’ which is how this is interpreted in the literature. When the objectives of personal goal setting include work on privilege, movement towards thick global citizenship is said to occur.
In terms of recommendations for critical reflection processes that address these themes, writers like Travers (2013) espouse practices of preparation that can help to raise awareness of such positions and sentiments, and this would mean in a broad way, “… acknowledging how we experience the world, [and] … understanding our role in the global JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 55 social justice project, …” (Thomas and Chandreseker, 2013, 97). The goal here being that participants are more capable of seeing how their positions in the global north implicates them in this global dynamic.viii This kind of recognition can help participants move toward enacting “the fulfillment of moral duties” (Cameron, 2013, 28). This has resonance with the next sub-sphere—intercultural skills and awareness.
‘Intercultural Skills and Awareness’ – participant preparation themes also include processes which help IEL volunteers learn intercultural skills and awareness. Pluim and Jorgensen (2012, 27) define it like this:
Cross-cultural or intercultural education exposes students to different ways of thinking and being in the world and fosters their abilities to better understand international issues, to think through multiple perspectives and to build relationships with people from different backgrounds.
IEL attributes that figure in intercultural awareness outcomes include: service duration, reflection processes and intercultural contact or encounters. Participant supervision, in- country support, pre-departure preparation and post-trip reintegration processes, and sending organization roles can all help shape and integrate intercultural awareness for IEL participants. Themes that might be included in such learning could be: basic economic and socio-political systems of the host-country, cross-cultural perspectives on themes of traditions, values, and family systems (Drolet, 2013), and mutually beneficial intercultural activities (Lough, 2011). These can help disrupt existing beliefs that reinforce old perspectives (Bailey and Russell, 2012), and at the very least ensure that IEL ‘does no harm’ (Cameron, 2013).ix
It is useful to note as Dean (2001, 624) contends, “… that the concept of multicultural competence is flawed,” instead arguing that we are better off “… maintaining an awareness of one’s lack of competence” (italics added, 624), from an attitude that recognizes culture as “continually changing” (625), and seeing cultural values “… in relation to the larger system in which they are embedded” (626). Dean’s perspective suggests that IEL learning not fixate on a static end-point, but rather position cultural awareness as a process based on humility and openness. Intercultural skills and awareness can be developed through forms of interaction, including ‘close cultural contact’ based on respectful and reciprocal interaction between the volunteers and the hosts (Palacios, 2010). This might be thought of as looking for appropriate ‘volunteer encounters’ (Vodopivec and Jaffe, 2011).
Duration of the IEL experience is closely associated with this theme as: “… students’ intercultural growth and competence have been significantly correlated with duration of the experience” (Lough, 2011, 453). This suggests that because increased exposure and connection with other cultures enhances learning, respect, and acceptance between participants and host communities, that duration of the IEL experience be understood as an JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 56 important aspect of this theme. Given the short duration of the case study iterations of this research, we look to participant preparation which can help to ameliorate duration issues that might reinforce pre-existing beliefs and stereotypes, and focus on only goal-setting for example (Roddick, 2013). Lough’s (2011, 454) views that “… guided reflection may moderate the relationships between the duration of the service and ICC [intercultural competence]” informs the thinking here.
In this vein, examination of the roles of the sending organization partner relative to IEL enhancement is also important. Given that there are a variety of sending organizations involved with international engagement activities—“private companies, non-governmental organizations, charities, universities, conservation agencies, religious organizations and governments” (Guttentag taken from Ong et al., 2011, 298)—then observing them for their roles (or lack of) needs to be part of this IEL enhancement effort, even if somewhat tangential. It is held that the sending organization must play at least a partial role in providing conditions for some of the outcomes for enhanced IEL, and that this is best done in a collaborative partnership with the educational institution involved. The roles suggested for a sending organization can include: provision of some of the intercultural learning and awareness contexts for the participants, forms of orientation regarding cultural, political-economic, and environmental histories, and on-the-ground means by which the volunteers and host-country members might find mutually respectful ways to interact and learn from one another.
Though this research is not focused closely on the sending organization aspect of the IEL experience—in this case HFH-GV—it is useful to note that the sending organization is an obviously significant entity in the IEL mix. This usually means, as noted above, playing a role in the provision of positive host-community inclusive strategies and relations, logistical movement of resources (materials, transportation, lodging, food), participant orientations in-country, and perhaps assistance in pre- and post- IEL briefing and debriefing for the participants (see Ong, et al., 2011; and Stoddart and Rogerson, 2004, for their thoughts on appropriate sending organization roles).x
‘Reciprocity & Contribution’ – Examining IEL case studies tells us that the kinds of experiences to which volunteers devote their efforts can be significant for a range of reasons, often under the umbrella of the efficacy of their efforts and attention to the desire for reciprocity of interactions. Aside from the broader concern about replicating colonial patterns of inequity and north-south polarity, is the need to ensure that the participant activities of such volunteering on the ground are not ineffectual—as in doing work that has little purpose, may actually be detrimental, and/or can be more effectively done by the people in the host-country—hence, not reciprocal. Part of the work of IEL effort and development of appropriate pedagogies and partnerships which best serve the various stakeholders involved—the students, host-communities, and the international sending organization—is also about the actual content or character of the work performed by the volunteers (Palacios, 2010). This in turn has bearing on the objectives of such north-south JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 57 intersections given that the skills debate and concerns in the literature are commonly about the inappropriate assigning of global north volunteer activities when they bear little resemblance to their actual abilities or skills.
The kind of concerns raised in IEL studies and the recommendations made in association, create the framework of interrelated variables grouped below: Figure 1: Recommendations Framework – Towards Enhanced IEL. The information collected from the case study iterations are qualitatively examined for their fit or alignment with these spheres of recommendations.
Figure 1 Recommendations Framework – Towards Enhanced IEL This framework captures some of the key pedagogical tenets that Benham Rennick and Desjardins (2013) believe universities need to incorporate in their IEL development, and which are reflected in many writings (McGehee, 2012; Grusky, 2009; Palacios, 2010). Examining means and directions for enhancing existing IEL efforts, builds on Benham Rennick’s (2013, 8) beliefs that, “When done well, these experiences bring extraordinary perspective and understanding of ourselves and the Other.” That is, by incorporating such ideas in a carefully considered volunteer experience —‘adequate preparation’ (Clost, 2013), it can catalyze shifts in the ways by which global north participants see themselves and the world in which they live, and in some, perhaps incremental ways, contribute to structural shifts over the long-term at the north-south interface (Conran, 2011).
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Methodology
The three iterations of the HFH-GV and Laurier International partnership in El Salvador—the case study of this research, were approached from the beginning with a set of information- collection mechanisms in mind. These included participant surveys both prior to and following the experience, facilitated discussions both in-country and following the experience, and notes from the researcher’s participant-observer role throughout. Ethics approval for the research was received for all three iterations (the years 2013-14- 15), and participants chose for themselves the nature, if any, of their participation in the study. Reflexivity in the sense of being ready for potential shifts in the focus and objectives of the study were built-in, though the parameters of the study changed only slightly from its initial direction. Response themes tracked through the three phases of the research were not all hypothesized in advance, though given the short duration of each iteration, the character of the kinds of outcomes seen in other studies, and the longevity and experience of the non-profit international partner, there was a basic sense of the range of potential participant perspectives and commentary.
Following similar information-collection intentions as those of Vodopivec and Jaffe (2011), the basic purpose of the survey and facilitated discussions was to examine for: motivations, expectations, impacts, and consequences, with both open and close-ended questions, allowing for the students to expound in their chosen directions on these themes. In more detail, the information-collection process consisted of three interconnected phases: a pre-trip survey, facilitated discussions on-site, and a post-trip phase that included both a survey and a group discussion, though the latter was only possible in the last two iterations of this research (the 2014 and 2015 experiences). The first phase consisted of a pre-trip survey asking questions about reasons for participating, associated hopes regarding the nature of their contribution(s) in volunteering; expected learning outcomes; speculation on the benefits and drawbacks of this kind of experience—for selves, for the home-recipient Salvadoran families, and/or communities there; and anything else that they viewed as important. This pre-trip package phase also included a package of accessible notes on global engagement with a quote on international service learning – ISL:
A structured academic experience in another country in which students (a) participate in an organized service activity that addresses identified community needs; (b) learn from direct interaction and cross-cultural dialogue with others; and (c) reflect on the experience in such a way as to gain … a deeper understanding of global and intercultural issues, a broader appreciation of the host country and the discipline, and an enhanced sense of their own responsibilities as citizens, locally and globally. (Crabtree, 2011, 19) JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 59
It also included an excerpt from Benham Rennick (2012), which focused on the Canadian historical antecedents for this kind of international experience, and a paper on this kind of global engagement by Grusky (2000).
The second phase focused on the facilitated group discussions carried out in El Salvador. These discussions were conducted in ways to safeguard student concerns about sharing in an open format with the other participants, with confidentiality and information- use assurances that were facilitated to be as safe and clear as possible given the conditions of group sharing. The on-site discussion questions were similar to the pre-trip survey questions regarding hopes for learning and contribution expectations, with allowance for opportunities to speak to any shifts in understanding or insights given the in-country experience up to that point. This phase of the information-collection also included the participant-observer’s journaling notes that compiled insights, feelings, and observations with respect to the in-country phase of the IEL.
The third phase of information-collection occurred after leaving El Salvador. This included a written survey, inclusion of each student’s transcribed conversations following the in-country team discussions (an opportunity for each student to take a look at what they said in-country and to edit if desired), and in the second and third iteration of the case study, a facilitated discussion hosted by the researcher and personnel with the university’s Internationalization Office. This post-trip survey aligned with the first and second information collection phases, by asking the participants how their experience looked in hindsight, with opportunities to reflect on shifts in their perceptions regarding aspirations, expectations, contributions, and impacts. This allowed for post-trip insights about self, learning moments, and where or how this experience might affect future decisions and directions. Though small refinements in the information- collection process emerged from the first iteration of this 3-year case study, this generally amounted to less redundancy and hence fewer questions posed in the pre-, in-country-, and post- trip data collection phases for the last two iterations. Essentially, the same procedures and methods were followed. The next section provides the results of the case study, with an eye to how what transpired fits or not, with the recommendations framework developed for qualitative assessment of this IEL venture.
Results
Three 8-10 day IEL trips were carried out in El Salvador in the San Miguel ‘Department’ of El Salvador (see Figure 2: El Salvador and Build-site Villages near San Miguel) during the university’s February winter-break periods in 2013, 2014 and 2015. The three experiences were generally identical in their organizational format and planning, and in their objectives. A total of 44 students participated over these three trips, with the faculty researcher conducting information collection and participating in all three iterations: nine students in 2013, 20 students in 2014, and 15 students in 2015. In addition, there were two other non-student participants over the course of these trips, a JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 60 facilitator/mentor from the Internationalization Office of the university on the first trip, and a member of the local affiliate of the sending organization—Habitat for Humanity—on the third. As is common in IEL, there was a gender mix that was overwhelmingly female: 41 women participants and three male participants over the course of the three iterations.
Researcher-participation involved work on all of the builds while providing some level of mentorship for the students. The actual building time allotted for each iteration was roughly five days, with a half day set aside both before and after for formal introduction to the home-recipient families, for celebration activities held by the HFH-GV affiliate office (food, certificates-awarding, speeches by and for the recipient families, workers, and participants, children’s activities and dancing), and a day and a half for what is referred to as R&R—downtime at a local beach resort at the end of the volunteering period prior to return to Canada, a cost paid for separately by the participants.
Figure 2 El Salvador and Build-site Villages near San Miguel
There was little opposition to participation in the information-collection processes. The generally non-intrusive character of the study aspirations and the pre/during/post phases of discussions, and simple survey questions, both open and closed, seemed initially to garner overall acceptance and participation. The in-country participation in the facilitated discussions would suggest this (with 39/44 taking part; the five declining for reasons of disinterest and/or inhibition). The Table 1: Participation Rates Across Information-Collection Components (see Appendix) indicates participant involvement levels in various aspects of the information-collection process.
As can be seen, student recruitment for feedback was generally less positive both pre- and post-trip, with the speculation that in-country discussion saw high commitment given excitement levels and lack of common normal life distractions. A number of the students, JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 61 though having expressed interest in participating in the pre-trip survey, found it difficult to do so given time-constraints associated with ongoing university obligations. When asked about expectations for the trip, one of the students responded:
Like a few of us who are really busy and coming out to this trip—and everyone asks me “Like are you excited?” and I am just focusing on my work right now, and before we knew it we were on the plane and at Pearson [airport in Canada] leaving for here. And I haven’t ever done a Habitat build before, or ever been to Latin America, so I didn’t really know what my expectations were, or what really to expect, other than just hearing some stories about last year.
Similarly, upon returning to Canada for the last half of their winter program, interest in and/or time to attend the facilitated discussions post-trip along with completing the post- trip survey, was sporadic for the participants. This second phase saw almost full participant ‘buy-in’ across all iterations, and it is surmised that the small size and pilot-character of the first iteration of this IEL (2013), affected positively the pre- and post-survey rates of participation. While full commitment by all students to all three phases only occurred with 12 students, the majority commonly completed three out of four of the information- collection components, indicating that there was more than sufficient information collected from the three phases to examine for the ‘fit’ of this case study relative to the assessment framework.
About 100 pages of single-space transcripts were generated from the in-country and post-trip facilitated discussions. These discussions and written surveys form the basis of the qualitative assessment of their fit with the IEL Recommendations Framework while the participant-observer journals were used for context and anecdotal assistance. The Results section moves through the various components of the Recommendations Framework, with its focus on Participant Preparation themes discussed earlier.
Goal setting: IEL studies commonly report on participants emphasizing goals related to learning, self-awareness, confidence building, etc. In this study it is evident that ‘personal goals’ is a prevailing theme with common aspirations in the pre-trip surveys including: learning about ‘self’ and ‘personal strengths,’ about ‘new cultures’ and the ‘third world,’ about ‘challenging myself,’ and about ‘helping,’ ‘giving back,’ and ‘making a difference.” The participants wrote also about gaining: ‘independence,’ ‘connections,’ ‘global experience,’ ‘team-building skills,’ crossing items off of a ‘bucket-list,’ ‘leadership skills,’ and a ‘life-changing trip.” Information collected pre-trip, in-country, and post-IEL saw these key phrases repeated and confirmed. Lengthier comments like ‘pushing myself beyond my comfort zone,’ ‘learning about a different place in the world,’ ‘providing experiences to share with my future classes,’ experiencing ‘something bigger than myself and getting my priorities back in order,’ and ‘contributing to my full capabilities,’ add JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 62 some nuance to the above goals. One participant responded to the question about reasons for going on the trip like this:
I just really want to improve myself. I know that I am really good at making relationships with others, and just being personal with others—so I just basically wanted to improve myself and my ability to connect with others.
As expected, the ‘helping narrative’ came up quite commonly as a response to reasons for going, with 30 of the 44 participants suggesting something along the lines of: ‘I just really want to help,’ ‘I just want to give back,’ ‘do something meaningful for the people,’ ‘the satisfaction I get when I help others,’ ‘to give of myself,’ and ‘to be able to provide help to others who are in conditions and circumstances who may not be able to do so themselves.’ What is useful to observe from all three iterations, is that this ‘helping narrative’ theme, diminished in terms of its prominence both in-country and post-trip—suggesting that the experience itself shifted somewhat from what many of the participants imagined to be a core goal for themselves prior to going, with one of the participants saying it like this:
I think that they best way to learn about a culture is by actually living with them, working with them, and seeing how they do things. I think you really go into this trip thinking I’m helping out a family with less than me, but that’s really not the case at all. They have so much to give to you.
The second phase of the information-collection process in-country allowed for participants to share new insights, learning, and observations about what they were experiencing that was either expected and/or unanticipated. This phase was dominated by what Conran (2011) calls the ‘intimacy’ experience, which included observations and feelings about: new connections, special encounters, and sentiments regarding the El Salvadoran people both generally and specifically. Research in Antigua described how the participant- volunteers in that case study, “… developed an emotional connection to their project, mediated through the relations they developed with the beneficiaries and organization staff” (Vodopivec and Jaffe, 2011, 117). This very closely mirrors the sentiments shared by the participants of this case study. That is, observations around the ‘friendliness’ of the home-recipient families, the development of ‘close connections’ and intimate encounters with neighbours and workers on the build-site, and with the sending organization staff, dominated the discussions both during and following the IEL event.
The across-the-participant spectrum intimacy narrative is seen in comments like: “And to come here to the site every single morning and see their faces, and have them greet us with big smiles on their faces—and genuinely happy to see us. It’s a great feeling…”, how ‘kind and giving’ they are to us, ‘but the non-verbal communications with them—the smiles, and gestures overcame the connections problems,’ coupled with a multitude of stories about the close personal bonds felt to have been made with various members of the JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 63
Salvadoran cohort involved in-country. It appears as noted by Conran (2011, 1460), that the participants were open and perhaps looking for, ‘something shared’-an aesthetic of attachment experience that meant to them some form of positive relationship and connection. Upon their return to Canada, often the most compelling memories were of those kinds of ‘intimacy’ encounters. As one participant shared on looking back at the experience:
I would like to think that it has changed my appreciation for what I have, but at the same time it kind of opened my eyes to how much the people in El Salvador truly do have. For example, the feeling of community and family that I felt while building the house was something that I rarely see in Canada. These feelings, to me, seem to be much more important than all of the material things that we tend to focus our attention on in industrialized societies.
And,
Anyway, I was putting my bag away, and [woman at build-site] put her hand on my shoulder, and it made me feel that I was like family. And I really appreciated it, and I felt so close, almost like she was my grandmother. And it was amazing… just like that simple touch, it really affected me.
Privilege: Prevailing emphasis on themes of ‘intimacy’ in their experiences, with the associated continual references to the many Salvadoran people with whom we had close contact, ‘as poor but happy,’ tells us something of the level of the analysis held by the participants. However, this does not mean that a larger political understanding was non- existent. The following comments indicate that at least some level of recognition of both the participants’ status as members of the global north, and the implications of this for IEL endeavours was voiced—though irregularly. Comments like: “I want to be a better advocate for change,” were accompanied by concerns raised when the question about potential negative outcomes from such endeavours was posed across all phases of the inquiry. Though many participants wrote not applicable on the survey—as in they could not foresee negatives associated with this work nor did they see any in hind-sight, occasional notes were made on: potential ‘neighbor jealousy’ and ‘white elitism,’, host- members possibly holding “a feeling of helplessness that foreign people need to come help,” “possibly disrupting their culture,” and that volunteers might be seen as “trying to force our western ideals on them.” There were also observations that suggest an understanding that the north-south narrative has its own shape in Canada. Three of the participants raised the concern that issues around poverty and homelessness are present in Canada as well:
I think the only negative thing that I can think of, is that there are so many people in our own community that need help, and we’re spending JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 64
so much money to go out to El Salvador or wherever, to help other people …
There was also the notion that this kind of international work suggests potential future direction for a few of the participants, one of them noting how the history talk shared in- country about Habitat in El Salvador was eye-opening: “I really liked learning that part of it, and I think for me Habitat is going to be kind of like something that I want to be doing for the rest of my life.” The next few quotes capture some of the participants’ hopes and questions about the experience as it relates to their long-term aspirations:
I really want to continue in not-for-profit work. I truly enjoy it, I found four days way too short. I made a promise to myself that I would do a yearlong travel-abroad term, doing builds, and spending three months at a time at four different locations. And so this has shown me that I can meet really amazing people, and I can do more of this. That’s what I want to continue.
And,
My kind of career goal is to like, do curriculum development for an NGO or non-governmental organization… and through this [experience], it just sort of reaffirms that this is where I want to be… and working with individuals who just by sake of random luck, happen to be born into that sort of situation of having much more difficult lives than what we have…
And,
I think my biggest challenge is, how am I going to learn from this, and how am I going to apply this to my everyday life back at home? I think that is the biggest question. How am I going to make this change me, and how am I going to use this to motivate and inspire me to do more of this kind of work to help out other families as well as other developing countries?
Finally, there was a broader perspective shared by just two of the participants that captured some sense of the concerns of privilege and how these can manifest themselves unconsciously in our attitudes related to this kind of IEL work. This one was the most articulate:
There is always an air of the “white savior” complex where we, as privileged individuals, feel that we have “done good” by helping some poor people building a home, when in reality, they may not have needed as much help as we like to think. There is also the exotic factor, seeing them as the “other” and the judgment that one can’t help but bestow on people whose actions and methods of doing certain things are foreign to JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 65
us. I believe many students who do trips like these will give themselves a pat on the back, and return to Canada without ever thinking of it.
Intercultural Skills and Awareness: aspirations regarding ‘cultural learning’ was shared in minor ways by almost all of the participants, at some point voicing or writing about hopes to: learn ‘about a different culture,’ ‘understand and appreciate diversity,’ ‘perhaps learn some Spanish,’ ‘see a different place in the world—culture, language, life style,’ ‘be immersed in their culture,’ and stating things like, “culture and diversity are celebrated within my schooling [education], both of which the team will be embracing,” and “languages are the doorway to the world… what better way can I learn than to be fully immersed in a different culture?” Of note, particularly because it was not common, were comments by two students who shared that this theme of intercultural awareness was fairly central to their overall IEL goals prior to the trip:
I really want to observe and experience what the food tastes like, what clothes people wear, see the differences between the North and the South… (it’s) an opportunity to expand my critical thinking by exposing myself to a new foreign culture…
And,
As a language student, culture is something very meaningful to me. The sense of community and relationships with people—communicated through their languages—is of utmost importance in today’s global society. It’s crucial to spread understanding, rather than ignorance.
And after being in-country, at least a few of the participants gained a different sensibility about how important proximity and some level of immersion are to learning and cultural awareness:
… yes, you are able to go to China Town and Little Italy [in Toronto in Canada]—but it’s not the same thing. Being able to make those connections with people who are actually practising their religion or their culture is really even more beneficial because then first-hand you can really see it.
And,
I think what I’ve gained is being more open-minded and not judging things I guess. Because even today we were talking to [a Salvadoran translator], and she was talking about things that we do that they just don’t do here. Like women don’t usually drink, or like she said she doesn’t dance because it’s against her religion. But she made sure she said that she understands that we do that in our culture and that it is totally fine… so I kind of think that it’s like we should do the same thing JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 66
towards their culture, like other cultures, and not judge them right away, and accept the different things they do.
The opportunities for the participants to interact with the host-community took many forms as noted earlier: daily connections with the drivers, the masons and workers on-site everyday with the participants, the families—usually including children, mothers, grandmothers, etc. with whom the team ate lunches and had breaks, and the HFH-GV affiliate staff who had more formal engagements with the team, providing historical and geographic background on two evenings of each week of the trip, and translation roles throughout. There were also outings to culturally significant features like the first theatre and the central Catholic Church of San Miguel.
Importantly, as perhaps one third of the participants noted at the end of the trip, the short duration of the volunteer experience (8-9 days) made it difficult for them to feel like they could fully engage and learn. Though this next comment was shared by a participant in relation to the poverty he witnessed and how it relates to his life in Canada, the key point was about the potential of an IEL that was longer in duration:
… [I can see] how little our problems are compared to someone living down there. And I feel like I got a glimpse of that, though it’s only a week; but I feel I want to get more of that, being more inclusive in that kind of environment, so you get the bigger effect. So being there for a longer period of time and actually living in that house or living in those kinds of conditions [would be what I want] so you can see how it really is.
And with a focus on IEL duration, this was said,
I find that the biggest thing is that there is not enough time to truly experience the culture, to really get to know the family, to do anything in that aspect. I feel like I am only getting a taste, and it’s not satisfying in that sense.
And though not commonly voiced, this comment about the importance of honest cultural relations and of seeing our presence in a different kind of light than as the dominant ‘helping narrative’ provides at least some counter-perspective that could be built on:
…but what I think is really important for us, is the example that we set here as the privileged group. Because as you have all probably noticed, they don’t speak a lot of English, they get not as many TV channels as we would, and especially out in places like Chinimeca where we are… these rural areas. And so they have a very skewed image of North Americans, just like we probably have a skewed image of Central Americans. And I think it’s important that they gain a good perspective JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 67
of us so that we are not always like the privileged stereotypes to them— because I think it’s important that they know that the imbalance between cultures and ethnicities does not always have to be that way. And that we are here to lend a helping hand and to be equals. We are not coming here to ‘save them.’
Reciprocity and Contribution: The work performed by the student participants basically met the simple-skills description of HFH-GV work: carrying cinder blocks, mixing concrete, tying rebar (with simple training from masons on site), digging, moving soil, sand, and gravel, etc. This meant that though there was a diverse mix of student participants, the roles were basically quickly learned and interchangeable. The short-term character of the volunteer part of the build, the simple labour orientation of the work, and the monetary contributions by the volunteers are central to the building of the homes. Local contractors, masons and their assistants are employed because of these resources, and would not be there otherwise.
In terms of the roles of the partners in this IEL experience, HFH-GV closely aligned with its claims (see HFH-GV, 2015)xi. Observation over the three iterations of the study, with special attention to the affiliate office in San Miguel, El Salvador where the builds occurred, verified this. The affiliate office ensured that the following kinds of conditions were met: initial meeting and integration of volunteers with the recipient families prior to the home-build period; ensured participant lodging; transportation within country to lodging, work-sites, and to cultural and historical sites (brief forays during the evening); adequate food; orientation and learning discussions regarding historical and cultural attributes of the country; and a final post-build celebration inclusive of all host-country HFH-GV affiliate staff, families, workers, and the participants. Though sending organization attributes are not central to the research, their roles in providing the above logistics and processes are important aspects of IEL. All of the participants were generally content with the role of the sending organization, with one participant offering this:
So, especially since going on this trip, and with [rep from a Canadian Habitat affiliate] on the trip, and learning from her about what Habitat is doing in Brantford back home, it has helped me see that what I really like about this organization is that they are not just one of those organizations that “works in other countries”—like in 3rd world countries—in the sense that they are doing things for other people. I like that they are also based here (at home). So it’s not just something like where they are going, “well we’re going to help all of those poor people in other countries”—and a lot of organizations do that… run trips for groups and for students, that are specifically for ‘helping’ other people—what I like about this is that there is the acknowledgement [by Habitat] that there are lots of people here [her own city in Canada] that need homes and help as well. JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 68
To iterate, HFH-GV has affiliate offices in the region of the IEL builds that are staffed by local residents, creates volunteer work that is labour-intensive with no pretense concerning global north expertise, and carries out similar work in the global north as well. This last fact was revealing for a few of the participants as noted earlier, with this volunteer saying:
Organizations like Habitat have really inspired me. I don’t know, I think it’s that I find it so amazing that people just help other people. Why this relates to this is because I think I want to do that for the rest of my life. I think I always knew that I wanted to, but now this helps me to know that I can do it through an organization like this.
The HFH-GV Handbook (2015) provided some base preparatory themes for the participants, and this asked for at least some level of self-reflection by the participants on the nature of their involvement, along with guidelines regarding cultural sensitivity practices when in El Salvador such as clothing choices on-site related to both work and climate, and with respect to after-hours activities and behavior around drinking, and gender issues that need to be considered out of respect and understanding of cultural difference.
The next section examines these results in an effort to understand how they align with the IEL concerns outlined in the literature, how this case study might suggest directions for enhancing this specific university IEL program, and what it might suggest for IEL more generally. The various spheres of the Recommendations Framework are explored in turn, as they were in the results.
Discussion and Recommendations
The critical analysis that takes place in the pre-departure phase shapes the nature of the placement abroad and also the messages that are transmitted upon our return to the Global North. (Tiessen and Huish, 2013, 17).
Goal-setting and Privilege
The personal goal(s) emphases shared by the participants around self-awareness, on wanting to ‘help,’ and especially with respect to the ‘intimacy’ sentiments that arose with the case study, provide important feedback for imagining future IEL preparation and organization. Firstly, it is appropriate to support the contention that such IEL opportunities allow for and support personal goals around fostering confidence, development of independence, of leadership, and of sense of individual accomplishment—all with respect to how these self-awareness attributes can help a student confirm and clarify future personal and career development directions for instance.xii And, such IEL needs to do more than this, especially in the realms of understanding the concept of privilege and its bearing on their participation.
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This case study revealed results similar to those that Palacios (2010) observed with respect to volunteering voices emphasizing helping and gratitude sentiments. And in close association, the results also revealed the prominence given by the participants of those stories mirroring Conran’s (2011) intimacy narrative. Both the helping and the intimacy narratives it would appear, held by most of the participants, in important ways mask or neglect a broader analysis (Heron, 2011), of which only a few volunteers were able to raise some concern and apprehension regarding our presence in the global south. For Conran (2011, 1455) “… the focus on intimacy overshadows the structural inequality on which the encounter is based and reframes the question of structural inequality as a question of individual morality.” He goes on to say this means that without participants being aware of or recognizing it, “… supports the continued expansion of neoliberal cultural ideologies and economic policies.” Certainly the political repression and structural inequality that mark El Salvador’s colonial history and the ongoing impact of neo-colonialism have bearing on this type of program, and the potential for this problematic relationship to be reinforced through north-south programming.
In terms of privilege, the volunteers are seen to hold some fledgling consciousness about notions of class division at the global level, and perhaps some understanding of the power differential that shapes their world relative to the one in El Salvador, though these appear superficial. That is, occasional comments were made on the visibility of material differences and poverty relative to that in Canada, and on how ‘western’ or ‘white’ elitism might be at play, but for the most part, there was little in terms of our own complicity in the global north and south context and the negative outcomes (asked in the surveys) that might be part of this IEL. And, though there were occasional references to housing needs for those in similar circumstances in Canada, and of the sometimes taken-for-granted material prosperity the participants enjoy in the north, these were not prominent themes. This incomplete or partial picture held by the participants, means generally that they do not see “… the ongoing role people living in the Global North have in perpetuating poverty in the Global South” (Roddick, 2013, 273), and that as Clost (2013, 235) suggests, an important recommendation for better IEL should include helping participants “… understand the historical, social, and political-economic influences that shape our ways of seeing.”
Intercultural Skills and Awareness
The lack of incentive to step more consciously into the IEL preparation processes hampers longer-term outcomes around intercultural awareness and understanding. Though this IEL aligns with Cameron’s (2013) position that such forays should “do no harm,” it is the case that the brief duration of the trips in the manner that they are organized at the moment, impedes an appropriate level of connection and interaction, from which deeper intercultural awareness might emerge. The results are not negative, as they suggest some level of both interest and ability on the part of the volunteers to step more genuinely into this kind of learning. However, stronger volunteer engagement in both pre- and post-trip JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 70 efforts could help to deepen the meanings and possibilities of the interactions that occur, while developing the skills for such learning to happen effectively.
In-country interactions might include accommodations within the communities and with the families where the build-sites happen, as a more direct means to create social and cultural interaction with greater depth and possibility for mutual learning. In our case, the formal and informal interaction with the masons, the family members (children and parents), with the translators and other sending organization members, though “… more than simple isolated accounts of amiability…” (Palacios, 2010, 872), were generally somewhat superficial. Therefore, some strategic restructuring of the elements of this program to include a higher degree of close cultural contact, perhaps through host family stays, longer duration and closer proximity to the build site, complemented by critical pre- during-post reflection would help to increase desired learning outcomes. Of course, the brief duration of the IEL is a central issue in this case.
However, this kind of IEL program enhancement may be developed in incremental ways, while acknowledging the limitations. It was observed in this case study what Conran (2011) saw in her work in Thailand regarding an ‘emerging social consciousness’ potential. That is, a remark made by one of the team-leaders on the second iteration, about the duration of her team’s IEL experience: “Yes it was short, but the taste we get from this experience will push us to bigger things” may be a point of departure for the potential inherent in these short-duration IEL events. Such thinking takes us at least partly out of the quite ‘debilitating position’ that IEL cannot contribute to structural change, even in incremental ways.
Reciprocity and Contribution
This program positions the students as volunteers aiding with the construction of housing for a local family, yet as a condition of their participation students are also required to contribute a significant monetary donation to the Salvadoran Habitat affiliate. It is likely that this financial donation is a considerably more significant contribution to the local cause of alleviating poverty housing than the short-term provision of unskilled labour. Despite this, the volunteer participation serves an important function in satisfying the student demand to help in a concrete way, providing a context that enables the students to depart from the established tourist experience, and perhaps most significantly, providing the context for close cultural contact between the students, the family members and the masons to occur.
First, the accessibility of simple tasks on the build site enables students from diverse backgrounds to feel involved and effective immediately with little orientation or training. Second, it can be argued that the short-term character of the build means that local workers have not been displaced by this kind of volunteer effort. In this vein, some hold that the monetary contributions made by the volunteers are a central reason that homes are built in JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 71 the first place, and that local contractors, masons and their assistants are employed because of these resources, when they would not otherwise be. Third, the dynamic established on the build site is one in which the local masons are firmly positioned as authorities and as teachers while the northern visitors are positioned as learners and unskilled labourers (the masons are provided with training and skills to support the supervision of this unusual group of novice foreign builders). This construct diminishes the potential for a perception by local community members that the foreign volunteers have arrived with superior western knowledge (Palacios 2010; Conran, 2011).
Given all of this, there is still some concern about whether HFH-GV can do more with respect to enhancing on the IEL outcomes for the participants, and indirectly then, for the host-country itself. This might include some effort to deepen the cultural encounters and awareness potential during this short time frame, and perhaps to ensure that the recipients of the volunteer contributions are fully aware that the volunteers do not come with any specific skills or expertise, thus helping to diminish any of the attribution of expertise which might be occurring given the presence of those privileged enough to volunteer from the global north; this can also have effects on the attitudes of those who are part of the IEL event in the global south.
The above discussion leads to the conclusion that there are a number of shortcomings associated with this IEL experience and how it has been organized thus far. It would appear, and participant outcomes and voices (or lack of in a number of instances), indicate that the non-credit character, of this IEL—with the first and second iteration lacking even co-curricular potentialxiii—affected participant involvement in pre- and post-trip information-collection processes, and importantly, in the lack of ability/interest in reading of the pre-departure literature provided by both the researcher (the package referred to in the methodology section and the international service learning reading by Grusky (2000)), and by the sending organization (HFH-GV, 2015). As Langdon and Agyeyomah (2013) noted in their own work, students are less likely to take part if this kind of ‘embedding’ of the IEL in university coursework does not happen. One of our own participants alludes to this in her remark,
I don’t think I’m going to completely forget it or anything, but once we actually get back into our normal routines of being in school, exams and assignments, and being with all of our friends again, and having all of our comforts, I think that just maybe, it might not be something we think about as often.
It follows from the above that a key recommendation for future IEL and this partnership, is that an increased level of preparation and a corresponding set of incentives is required in order to ensure deeper levels of student awareness of their presence and their ‘privilege’ while taking part in this kind of international experiencexiv. In this light, a question posed by Fizzell and Epprecht (2013, 129) might then have much more resonance for the JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 72 participants: “Why are volunteers in the Global North in the position to volunteer or ‘serve’ those in the Global South to begin with?”
Conclusions
This work assessed qualitatively, relative to IEL critique and recommendations, the outcomes of a case study of IEL based on three short-duration iterations of a university- HFH-GV partnership in El Salvador. It would appear, as Cameron (2013) might proffer, that this kind of IEL volunteer work best fits into the ‘thin’ end of the global citizenship continuum. That is, the participants may have reached some level of personal goals regarding attributes like confidence, self-awareness, and leadership, likely some utilitarian outcomes contributing to CV and career development, and a taste—perhaps some momentum—for further exploration of this kind of IEL experience. However, it was less likely to contribute to the ‘thick’ global citizenship attributes that recognize north-south inequality for instance, and lead to forms of observation and political action in the global north or south, which further social justice and equity objectives; exposure does not necessarily lead to activism in these realms nor to ‘unseating’ stereotypes (Heron, 2011). There were some participant voices reflective of such ‘thick’ understanding, but they were the exception.
The core question that arises with this case study is about how to enhance on the IEL experience both for this specific university–HFH-GV partnership, and for IEL learning more generally. Can such experiences for example, foster incremental movement towards deeper learning, especially in light of the short duration of this specific case study, and likely an increase in similar IEL forays by post-secondary institutions generally? At some level, it is believed that these kinds of experiences begin international understanding, perhaps only a ‘taste’ as noted by one of the participants, but at least some level of appreciation and connection on a personal level with people in very different cultural, political, and economic contexts.
The hope of this research, given the potential observed with the participants in the case study, is that appropriate IEL and long-term outcomes regarding global social justice can occur, but this can only happen by strengthening the participant preparation at all phases of this kind of experience. This is not profound of course, and it was imagined at the outset that such results were likely. However, and we are not sanguine here, the findings suggest of some potential in the realms of longer-term volunteering arising out of such ‘tastes’ (Palacios, 2010); where enhanced participation and consciousness-raising are seen as possible, if the experience is carefully crafted (McGehee, 2012); and that “thin or “soft” forms of global citizenship may also provide opportunities to promote something thicker…” (Cameron, 2013, 36).
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Future Directions
There are many potential directions for research in this realm especially given the escalation in internationalization and related issues that have been identified. Without simplifying this quest for future research directions, some general areas are flagged here in no particular priority. This might include examining the dearth of males involved in IEL and what this suggests in terms of gender and masculinity questions with respect to global service and learning experiences. Further work could also examine more closely, means for raising the level of inclusion of host-country stakeholders and participants—drawing out frank discussions and voices from the host-communities about what they see as the benefits and costs of these IEL experiences. It might also be useful to examine the role of the disciplinary variable in IEL, from what disciplinary perspectives participants are coming, and do we see more ability and potential for IEL enhancement outcomes?xv
Other possible future directions of research: reciprocity in the context of this volunteer program; the influences and motivations that are driving the demand for this type of experience; the specific characteristics of the partner organization that support ‘enhanced IEL’; longitudinal impact on the volunteers—exploring longer-term volunteer aspirations, etc. And finally perhaps, the global social-justice aspirations of IEL literature might benefit from research that works towards north-south engagements that ensure some form or quality of sustainability, continuity or momentum over the longterm. That is, the ability to evolve and continue in the absence of northern participants might include advocacy “… to involve locals as extensively as possible, creating employment and the conditions for long-term viability by ensuring that projects have the expertise and the infrastructure in place to enable them to continue, even without the contribution of volunteers” (Tomazos and Butler, 2009, 208).
Endnote
i The university partner in this case study has developed various forms of educationally-oriented international opportunities over time: Business School internships in Europe; Global Studies ‘learning abroad’ opportunities and ‘field trips’; Human Rights and Human Diversity internships in Ghana; History battlefield-tours; and affiliations like WUSC – World University Services Canada; CUSO – Canadian University Students Overseas; and Students Without Borders. However, educational experiential partnerships with international non-profit organizations doing work in the global south are only just emerging. At this juncture, short-term trips are seen as a form of stepping-stone experience in international learning for students.
ii While some researchers position a good proportion of these kinds of north-south volunteer experiences under the voluntourism label, others claim a clear demarcation between a volunteer tourist experience, and those in which humanitarian, educational, and/or development aid efforts transpire—especially those where there is an affiliation with a learning institution. This has some bearing on the utility and context for the literature that informs the study here (see Zavitz and Butz, 2012 for example for their avid critique of the tourism adoption/appropriation of volunteering experiences). The ‘commercial’ orientation of such international engagement has a multitude of labels: volunteer tourism, social/moral/educational/responsible
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tourism, service-based and/or mission vacations, goodwill tourism, pro-poor tourism, justice tourism, etc. (Tomazos and Butler, 2012; Stoddart and Rogerson, 2004), with diverse rationales espoused, and equally diverse outcomes—exploitative, benign, appropriate, etc. This paper draws on this literature when the ideas and critiques help inform the examination of this specific IEL work.
iii Zavitz and Butz (2012, 416) iterate the specific concern regarding north-south flows of volunteers, which then allows for: “… essentialised and dualistic distinctions based on an imagined geography that populates the global South with a variety of development needs, and the global North with young people who are willing, able, and entitled to meet these needs through volunteer work.” This is the neoliberal interpretation and experience of development practice of which Vodopivec and Jaffe (2011) ask us to be aware. iv See Benham Rennick and Desjardins, 2013; and Tiessen and Huish, 2013, for recent edited critical volumes tying IEL to these various themes associated with ‘development’ writ large.
v Some authors suggest “… that neoliberalism is in danger of becoming an over-used, almost redundant shorthand in much scholarly work…” (Smith and Laurie, 2011, 547), though as a means of describing the broader trajectory of political-economic forces and beliefs at the global level, it has its merit.
vi “Intimacy is understood here as an embodied experience that arouses a sense of closeness and a story about a shared experience” (taken from Berlant in Conran, 2011, 1459).
vii This identity-seeking, self-awareness project of personal growth, is described by some writers as a “neoliberal project of self-realization” (Fizzell and Epprecht, 2013, 121)
viii This kind of power difference, usually hidden within the prevailing discourses of such global engagement, can be made more visible using concepts like chains of causal responsibility where examples like climate change and realities around how: “… individuals in the Global North do indirectly benefit from unfair global trade rules through access to cheap food and material goods at the expense of individuals and communities in the Global South” (Conran, 2011, 31) can be used to develop understanding of global social and political patterns.
ix The concept of “do no harm” (Cameron, 2013; Drolet, 2013) can be thought of as a minimal bar set to prevent more long-term dependency and exacerbation of inequities.
x The voluntourism concepts and critique from which some of the literature review was drawn, needs to be understood relative to the specific partnership between the international non-profit Habitat for Humanity and its Global Village program – HFH-GV and the university, and the actual work carried out by the volunteers. Some would suggest that it fits the voluntourism category because of its international character, and the rest period of 1-2 days following the build period at a seaside resort in El Salvador (see Stoddart and Rogerson, 2004 where HFH is the research focus and positioned as a sending organization within the realm of volunteer tourism). The personnel in the international offices of HFH-GV would say that they are not a voluntourism organization, but rather an international humanitarian one. As Ong et al. (2011) note, a sending organization is not automatically a commercial tourism entity, and both the university and HFH-GV do not identify themselves in this way.
xi In regard to stated objectives of HFH-GV, it sees itself as an organization working for social justice through the provision of shelter as a means to alleviate poverty, doing so in ways which meet the needs of those in the communities that they serve, and provide a means for those in the global north, to both learn and to contribute in ways which influence long-term sustainability of the families and their communities. These specific objectives cannot really be assessed here given the focus of the study, and yet, the basic minimum
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conditions and criteria for structural shifts, perhaps minor, are being met by providing housing to those who would not otherwise have it, and in ways which allows for the circulation of the low-interest payments—the so-called ‘revolving funds’—Fund for Humanity (Stoddart and Rogerson, 2004), into further housing efforts over time in those communities. In this vein, questions about the IEL and its outcomes are useful, while believing that at a minimum the building of shelter for the recipients has long-term outcomes that are well- documented. It is useful to point out however, that such non-governmental interventions are argued to be ‘apolitical’, and hence undermine those who believe this detracts from the roles that state governance systems should perform—housing for instance, and that having non-profit international organizations organizing this service, does not address the underlying structural conditions of poverty found at both the state and the global level. xii As students acknowledged with some candor, the CV reference, a certain kind of caché with friends and relatives (and perhaps a ‘profile update’ on Facebook—said with some humour—though it is a well- known critique) are sometimes the proffered outcomes of IEL.
xiii Co-curricular record is a student experience that has official sanction in a post-secondary institution, i.e., membership and involvement in such matters as university student clubs, and/or a community contribution of some sort, which is accorded weight by the institution legitimating its addition to a student CV ‘record.’
xiv It is interesting to note that for those participants that did share concerns about the possibilities of negative outcomes from such interventions like this program, their home disciplines at this specific university were in global studies, education and contemporary studies, law and society, and women’s studies. These suggest something about the larger picture provided by such programs, and what it might suggest for better preparation for IEL.
xv This research anecdotally noted that there were differences in the perspectives of the students, likely related to the university programs to which they were attached, with students over the three iterations coming from Education, Kinesiology, Contemporary Studies, Global Studies, Languages, Women’s Studies, Business, Criminology, Human Rights and Human Diversity, etc.
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Author Biographies
Robert Feagan’s teaching and research over the last 20 years fit generally within the sustainable community-development sphere, with a focus more specifically on social and environmental justice—creating community engagement and learning opportunities for both himself and his students. Such university-community engagement efforts focus on those who are marginalized and/or underserved due to issues of class, disability, race, educational achievement, age, gender, etc. This undertaking consciously works to ensure that such engagement is both learner and community-partner centred. More recent efforts are on creating international learning and humanitarian opportunities for students, working towards understanding privilege and north-south social justice issues, while engaging in intercultural learning.
Mike Boylan is a Coordinator of Global Engagement programming with the Brantford campus of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. This means that his work is devoted to creating opportunities for students to become more involved with and critically reflective on international learning, international partnerships with universities and non- governmental organizations, and on processes that develop mutually supportive connections among different student groups on campus, and with students from countries outside of Canada. Prior to this position, he worked for many years in international development and with organizations like Outward Bound.
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Appendix
Table 1 Participation Rates Across Information-Collection Components
Information - El Salv El Salv - El Salv - Totals Collection Components - 2013 2014 2015
Pre-Trip Survey 8/9 10/20 13/15 = 31/44
In-Country Facilitated 9/9 15/20 15/15 = 39/44 Discussion
Post-trip Facilitated 7/9 9/20 13/15 = 22/35 Discussion
Post-trip Survey 7/9 1/20 9/15 = 17/44
Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education Volume 5 Number 1 - 2016 journals.sfu.ca/jgcee
Cultivating Global Citizenship Abroad: The Case of Asian MBA Students in Dubai
Shelbee R. NguyenVoges Assistant Professor of Education Kennesaw State University
Keywords: Study Abroad; Narrative Analysis; Intercultural learning; Critical Reflection, global citizenship
ABSTRACT: Dewey’s (1933) process of critical reflection states that experience, reflection and transformation are integral to one another and cannot be separated. For participants in this study, this becomes the method by which learners can explore and make sense of ‘learning by doing’ experiences that occur in a condensed and intense international educational experience. 24 graduate students’ critical reflections reveal perspective transformations about 1) local and global identity, 2) personal/professional balance in career path and 3) the need for collaboration and shared experience abroad. Because the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is fairly uncharted territory when it comes to understanding the nuances of 21st century experiential learning and development, evaluating how meaningful and transformative experiences can be fostered through ‘learning by doing’ initiatives serves as an important piece of dialogue in scholarship, in the region, and around the world. Exploring critical reflections from learners enrolled in a graduate business program offers insight about how their educational experiences are shaped by the context of Dubai, and what in particular encouraged meaningful learning from their individual perspectives.
Introduction
The ability to engage in inclusive and respectful dialogue within multicultural interactions is a necessary competency for all adult and higher education (AHE) learners across the ever-changing and interconnected globe. As such, assessing outcomes, participation rates, impact and experiences of study abroad programs (SAPs) stands as one of the most dynamic phenomena in adult, continuing, lifelong, workplace and higher education (BailyShea, 2009; Sharma, Phillion, & Malewski, 2011; Sison & Brennan, 2012). BailyShea (2009) broadly defines study abroad as learning that occurs outside of the geographical confines of the home country, underscoring a highly individualized and multifaceted educational experience that can take many forms. Dewey’s (1933) model, in particular, is helpful in providing a structure for exploring these individual experiences by outlining a five-step critical reflection process that allows systematic and intentional exploration of each AHE learners’ cultural perspectives when participating in a short-term
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SAP. Dewey’s (1933) five-step process for critical reflection offers AHE learners in this study, a highly individualized resource to encourage perspective transformation in the “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (p. 9).
The objective of the present research is to explore the perspective transformations revealed within the critical reflections of graduate business students coming from China, Pakistan, India and Russia, studying and interning in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The following study begins with a brief overview of trends to provide context about what factors shape international education in a global and regional frame within the UAE and Dubai, specifically. Next, complexities associated with adjustment and socialization abroad are shared with special consideration to Dubai’s educational landscape bridging connections between context and literature. The concluding portion of the review of literature provides information about Dewey’s (1933) five-step process of critical reflection—in the foreign classroom—as a method to encourage authentic transformative learning-by-doing experiences. A short profile on the graduate participants and program is provided as background information framing the methodological approach. Findings are shared next, and indicate that 21st century graduate business students’ experiences, from China, Pakistan, India and Russia, are multifaceted. AHE learners in this study confront regional and global identity/equity, ownership of professional path, and a need for shared experience and collaboration. Implications and directions for future research are offered as concluding remarks.
Review of Literature
Global & Regional Trends
In the last ten years, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has spent considerable effort to track the tremendous rise in student mobility, with more than twice as many students leaving their home country to study, intern and build academic competencies abroad (Maslen, 2014). United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) provides categorical data on regions of the world and their corresponding trends in international education. Their data reveals students from the Asia and Pacific Region (including those from China, Pakistan, India & Russia) comprise 53% of all AHE learners studying abroad, with the majority of these students coming from China, India, and South Korea respectively (UNESCO, 2013). While what UNESCO designates as the western world (US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia respectively) receives the majority of these AHE learners, the OECD’s most recent data reports indicate a growing trend in intra-regional mobility, or students who leave their home country but stay within their home region (OECD, 2013).
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The drivers which fuel student mobility come from both individual student and institutional perspectives. Bodycott (2009) suggests that Chinese and Indian students in particular, look to studying abroad as a strategy to differentiate their skill sets, complement their degree and network globally in order to set them apart from peers and increase their own marketability as job seekers. Further, both students and institutions of higher education recognize that study abroad serves as powerful experiential learning that can offer a student personal development in the way of increased intercultural awareness, intercultural sensitivity, global citizenship, self-awareness, and tolerance for uncertainty, in addition to competitive advantages in employment (Ie, 2009; Sison & Brennan, 2012; Ward & Searle, 1991). For all of these reasons, participating in SAPs is perceived as a “definite positive on a graduate resume” (Lawrence, 2006, p. 30). Rizvi (2000) notes that this is especially true for employers in the Asia and Pacific region where elevated status is designated to overseas educative experiences.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), becomes a prime destination for students in China, India, Russia and Pakistan who are looking to study abroad within close proximity to their home country. UNESCO’s (2013) report outlines that mobility in what they categorize as the Asia and the Pacific regions indicates that many of these countries look to the UAE strategically, as a destination that offers “American-style” internships, academic experiences, and branding with increased affordability, shorter distance from their home country, and less fear of culture shock (p. 58). Becker (2010) suggests that because Dubai and the UAE in general are looking to build a knowledge-based economy and limit dependence on oil exports, a high demand exists for students.
Educational institutions like the University of Wollongong (an Australian University in Dubai) and the American University of Sharjah promote the UAE as an intercultural and exciting hub of international trade and information technology (IT). While there are many different formats or types of internationally educative experiences offered by these institutions, spanning from a short three-week internship experience to a full, long-term, four-year exchange (BailyShea, 2009), the UAE markets English-only instruction and personally-tailored learning that is industry specific (Badam, 2010). Additionally, OECD (2013) indicates that shorter, vocation-specific international programs in business have increased in popularity because of affordability and practicality. Programs across the UAE, and in Dubai specifically, capitalize on this trend by promoting educational opportunities which offer practical knowledge and application to global business and intercultural development with direct partnerships between AHE learners and local enterprises (Badam, 2010). The focus of the present research examines one particular year-long MBA program boasting cohort design, accelerated learning, and practical engagement within the international business and information technology hub of Dubai. While the aim of this study focuses on perspective transformations within a critical reflection assignment for a 30-day internship experience at the conclusion of the year-long program, international AHE learners often remark on the full-year experience as a whole. Of particular interest to the research is how learners synthesize practical and experiential learning from the local
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 84 marketplace of Dubai to their own understandings about global citizenship via critical reflection. Dewey’s (1933) five-step process for critical reflection is employed to examine how these international AHE learners make meaning about their intercultural competencies (i.e.: identity, global citizenship) and collaboration through their experiences studying abroad.
Complexities of Learning Abroad
The context of the UAE, and Dubai specifically, offers AHE learners an incredibly diverse and stimulating environment to polish and practice their professional/academic skills. However, recent scholarship underscores that benefits of experiential learning like study abroad are not guaranteed. Dewey (1933) touches on some of these same misconceptions when he explains that the experience, in and of itself, does not automatically mean that learning or any changes have occurred. In fact, truly authentic and meaningful engagement in learning abroad can be challenged by any number of complex issues. Researchers concerned with transformative, personally relevant learning-by-doing experiences abroad take notice of obstacles like adjustment (Redmond & Bunyi, 1993), development of local student and professional networks (Ie, 2009), and work-life balance (Bodycott, 2012), as well as culture shock (Bitsika, Sharpley, & Holmes, 2010) and other aspects of the socialization process. While AHE learners recognize the paramount importance of networking and building relationships, it becomes an “easier said than done” situation once abroad (Bodycott, 2012, p. 359).
Indeed, it becomes difficult to develop and harness the intercultural competencies of a global citizen if learners withdraw from the local context. Cohort models and other co- national SAP designs have been used as a remedy to culture shock and homesickness, as well as to encourage AHE learners to interact with locals abroad in short term and long term SAPs and internship experiences. Co-national program design, in the past, has offered AHE learners a way to share the experience with peers who have similar cultural identities, but of course, however it is not without limitations. Although researchers suggest co- national programs are meant to build in added social support and promote socialization with locals (Bitsika et al., 2010), critiques suggest these programs can run counterintuitive to perspective transformation, increase cultural rigidity, and discourage the AHE learner from embracing local culture and professional networks (Ward & Searle, 1991). In this study, the researcher is tasked to address the polar nature of socialization/adjustment abroad in order to encourage a healthy blend of bonding amongst peers, but also to develop global citizenship across the larger local multicultural context of Dubai. No doubt, this is another phenomenon that is easier said than done.
Critical Reflexivity
To balance concerns for adjustment/socialization and allow for individualized explorations of internship experiences for each learner, the researcher in this study utilizes scholarship at the intersection of experiential learning and critical reflection. Bennett
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(1998) explains that developing global citizenship must begin with an understanding of the self, or deep reflection. Recent scholarship places emphasis on critical reflection as a way to develop intercultural competencies and counter the challenges that are inherent in experiences of socialization abroad (Fleishman, 2012). Sharma, Phillion, and Malewski (2011) remark:
“Critical reflection brings about awareness of the self by calling into question one’s prior knowledge or taken for granted frames of reference which include beliefs, assumptions, values, and cultural norms of thinking and acting.” (p. 11).
Critical reflection places particular importance on making meaning from experience. While experience does not guarantee that learning has occurred, Dewey (1933) suggests that deriving meaning from experience can lead to transformative learning. In this context, the instructor serves as a facilitator of critical reflection by previewing the five-step process, offering definitions and examples for each step, and then creating spaces for students to engage in the process on their own. Kolb (1984) further points out the usefulness of this practice in internships when he states that experience and reflection are natural partners in a cyclical process whereby experience must be reviewed and evaluated continuously and retrospectively for the learner.
Johnson and Golombek (2011) support the value of using this educational activity by noting that storytelling and narrative are commonly used as tools in the classroom to bring reflexivity, previous life experiences, thinking and acting into intentional consciousness. International AHE learners in this study come from similar cultural lenses, and have a sense of shared experience (Baumgartner, 2001) as they engage in questioning of ideology and systems of belief. Collectively, researchers agree that systematic and strategic planning to encourage collaborative and individual reflection remain important for meaningful, authentic learning to occur (Baumgartner, 2001; Bodycott, 2012; Sharma et al., 2011).
Conceptual and Theoretical Framework
Sharma et al., (2011) echo Dewey’s remarks and note “experiencing, reflecting, and acting upon experience to transform how we perceive ourselves and others” is the main aim of critical reflection (p. 12). In Dewey’s definition of critical reflection, he outlines a five-step process whereby an intentional and systematic breakdown of assumptions and knowledge can occur by evaluating:
1. An experience. This first step involves identifying one particular incident or surprising event, feeling, interaction, etc. 2. Doubts, reservations and persistent confusion. Second step involves questioning and exploring areas of ambiguity surround the event.
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3. A variety of tentative explanations or hypotheses. Third step includes a number of suggestions that could be used to explain the event using observations and facts. 4. Rebuilt experience to create a new hypothesis. Fourth step includes incorporating new ideas and perspectives to reason a potential new conclusion or understanding. 5. Tested hypothesis or new action. The final step involves trying out the new inferred understanding or conclusion to test its veracity. Dewey’s five-step process for critical reflection informs this research and is employed to encourage more robust learning-by-doing experiences for AHE learners in this study. The collective dynamic of intra-regional trends in mobility, magnitude of diversity and opportunity in Dubai, and complexities of facilitating meaningful learning-by-doing abroad generate warrant to understand what the experiences of international AHE learners are in the Middle East. More importantly, what key insights do international AHE learners identify within their own private critical reflections after spending one year abroad in Dubai? The following section offers background on the program, instructional design and participants who shared critical reflections about their experiences and learning outside of their home country. This context serves as the frame from which this research was undertaken.
Methodology
Background, Context & Participants
AHE learners in this study had chosen one of four specializations in information technology (IT), finance/wealth management, global logistics/supply chain or management in Dubai within a year-long (long-term SAP format), accelerated, English-only program outside of their home country in pursuit of their MBA. The design of this program creates space for International AHE learners to share classroom experiences as a co-national cohort and also gain practical exposure via an experiential internship in their specialized fields of interest. Upon successful completion of MBA coursework, a 30-day internship experience and thesis requirements, students can choose to return to their home country and job, or participate in local job placement services on a competitive basis.
Each participant who anonymously submitted a private critical reflection voluntarily provided demographic data to identify cultural background, age, gender, and specialization. The 24 international AHE learners who participated in this study self- identified as: Chinese (25%), Indian (63%), and Pakistani (10%), with one Russian student. There were 20 males (n=20) and four female (n=4) students, which is not atypical considering the sharp contrast in the male to female ratio present in Dubai. The mean age of the participants was 23.
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Research Design & Data Sources
The study received an exemption via the Institutional Review Board (of the MBA- granting institution in Dubai) as data was collected as a part of an education assessment in their course work for the class. Data sources included “Key Insights” detailing private critical reflections from 24 participants, four focus group interviews (with each specialization), observations, and field notes. While not all participants privately reflected on all 30 days, each participant engaged in critical reflection about some particular experience(s) over the 30-day period.
The 30-day internship experience takes place in the last month of the year abroad and is taken concurrently with a one-credit INT 5100 course. This course meets once a week for three hours and is divided into four modules. In the introductory module, the instructor serves as a facilitator of critical reflection in that the definitions, terms and examples of incidents and experiences which model the process are shared with students and then students practice producing their own examples to check understanding. The “Key Insights” Space for Critical Reflection (Appendix) was meant to offer flexibility to individual experiences guided by the five-step process, so that AHE learners could apply this resource to their own individual encounters and experiences. Students could write as much as they wished, or as little, for each day of the 30-day experience, and remain anonymous about key insights discovered. Each cohort member was required to submit their 30-day reflection log, but could opt out of inclusion to this research. No incentive was offered to participate in the study.
Focus-group discussions were audio-visually recorded and transcribed to offer more depth and explanation to private critical reflections. Again, the researcher looked for key words to distinguish 1) experiences, 2) doubts, 3) explanations, 4) new thinking and 5) new actions within both private and group dialogue, to offer structure and organization to the findings. Collaborative group dialogue with cohort members of the same specialization occurred in the final two weeks of the course in the third, fourth and fifth modules. This allowed the learners to revisit their “Key Insights” Space for Critical Reflection and explain or develop their ideas in more detail within small group discussions. Each of the four focus groups were conducted using open-ended inquiry, where learners were invited to share a particular meaningful insight from their private reflections. No fewer than four and no more than six students participated at one time. Further, this allowed the researcher to moderate smaller, more manageable discussions specific to the professional area of interest in order to get at some of the deeper social and overarching themes of importance.
Analysis
Anonymous critical reflections were evaluated using thematic analysis in order to recreate the meaningful experiences and insights shared by each international AHE learner. Focus group discussions prompted learners to think about a particular meaningful ‘Key
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Insight,’ giving each learner the opportunity to share and hear from other peers in their specialization. Reissman (2005) notes that narrative analysis can be useful when analyzing “individuals in stories of experience” (p. 1). While many kinds of narrative analysis exist, all overlapping in some way, “thematic analysis” highlights the actual messages and “what is said, rather than ‘how’ it is said” (Reissman, 2005, p. 2). A grounded approach, like thematic analysis, showcases individual testimonies, which can offer illustrative value to a particular phenomenon or occurrence (Reissman, 2005). Other recurring themes within and across private reflection responses, observations, and field notes informed subsequent open-ended questions and discussion within the focus-group conversations.
Critical reflection is a highly personalized and intimate process unique to each learner and their experiences. While it was important for the researcher to offer flexibility and space to share private and anonymous reflections about personal development without the threat of social desirability, penalization and obligation, it is recognized that this is not without limitations. Several learners used Dewey’s (1933) guide with specific attention to each of the five steps, denoting each phase with numbers (1 -5) or letters (a-e), being careful to delineate between experiences, doubts, explanations, new thinking and new actions. However, the majority of responses were relatively loose narratives that did not explicitly align to the model. On one hand, loose adherence to the five-step process offers some rich, authentic data from lived experiences, but on the other hand, underscores that systematic critical reflection may prove difficult to outline with attention to the framework for these learners. In analyzing private and focus group responses, the researcher looked for key words to distinguish 1) experiences, 2) doubts, 3) explanations, 4) new thinking and 5) new actions.
Findings and Discussion
International AHE learners, who offer “Key Insight” responses over their 30-day internship experience, reveal the nuanced experiential learning that occurs in a cohort- based MBA program. In reflecting on Dewey’s (1933) five-step process (D5SP), responses reveal that International AHE learners: 1) negotiate their national identity in a global context, 2) realign from extrinsic to intrinsic motivations about their professional career path and 3) stress the importance of collaborative, or shared, experience. Examples are provided to illustrate how these themes uniquely manifested across each participant during their 30-day internship experiences and one-year abroad in Dubai. A threaded discussion and analysis is also provided to stimulate thinking about how internationally educative experiences could be enhanced and enriched from the insights and perspectives shared by these learners.
National (home) Identity in a Global Context
Navigating changes in perspective can be difficult to map in a global context. Ramirez (2013) outlines that global citizenship is difficult to intentionally cultivate, but ultimately should encourage learners to know about others who are different and to gain new
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 89 understandings related to global interconnectivity. Dewey’s (1933) D5SP of critical reflection was utilized to promote “dialectical interaction between the self and the world. Without this interaction there is no understanding of the self, the world, or experience, nor is there change in one’s awareness or learning” (Sharma, Phillion, & Malewski, 2011, p. 12). In the first module of the INT5100 course, international AHE learners spend significant time reconciling theoretical concepts about critical reflection to their own experiences, learning and perceptions. Because students spend substantial time navigating how they make sense of their own identity, it makes sense that new ideas about who they are and what shapes their experience emerged.
In looking for key words related to Dewey’s first step of ‘the experience,’ 85% of the “key insights” critical reflections indicated that AHE learners negotiated challenges and encountered perspective transformations about how they make sense of their own national identity. In many private reflections, participants discussed what it means to identify as “Chinese” or “Indian” in step one of D5SP. Students shared a variety of ways that their identities are shaped by family members, and parents especially. Many of them echoed lessons learned about the importance of “education,” “learning,” and “knowledge.” Many of their summaries of experience in this phase could be tied back to strong family bonds and motivations to make the family “proud.”
One Indian male learner elaborated on his perspective transformation made possible by the experience by noting, “Growing up in India, I thought I knew what it meant to be Indian, you care for the family and you go to Uni and you try and not take trouble out there.” He extends that the “crowds and masses in the cities shape Indian culture and interactions” as a tentative explanation (or step three of D5SP). There were a multitude of responses that offered other explanations connecting to step three of D5SP, including ideas related to “crowded spaces,” regional stereotypes like “north Indians are smarter, more modern, than Indians of the south,” and lack of “trust” for south Indians toward north Indians.
International AHE learners recognized that studying abroad could potentially “change” their “perspectives,” and “world views,” and offer a “different landscape” for engaging in international business and connecting with Indians regardless of regional identification. One Chinese learner shared his incidental transformation by reflecting, “You think you know your own culture and people, but this place (Dubai) will surprise you.” In forming new hypotheses, with reference to step four of D5SP, participants were challenged to think critically and make sense of why their national identity, or home culture was different in the context of Dubai. One participant shared:
“I was happy to see lots of (South) Indians around. But, there was a difference. They were much more warm and hospitable than you would find back home.”
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Other learners’ insights revealed feeling “shunned” or “put off” by their “fellow countrymen” because of perceived “class” or socioeconomic differences. One Chinese female shared “the social order is different in Dubai and UAE… and it’s hard to see me as a low class immigrant” explaining hesitations in step two of D5SP “key insight” response. International AHE learners, in this case, recognized differences between their national identities at home and in Dubai. While this was not an intentional learning outcome for the course, students were able to demonstrate complex cognitive processing about socially constructed ideas of class and ethnicity. Because Chinese females typically occupy positions in the hospitality and service industry in Dubai, they are not always perceived as equals in the IT field.
Participants revealed high-ordered thinking about how their conceptions of national identity are shaped, specifically within the Emirati social and professional strata. For some students, like the female from China, this presented doubt or discomfort to see herself as an outsider “worker” or laborer (who occupy a very low social standing in the UAE) rather than seeing herself as an “average Chinese girl.” About half of the participants in this case study, mostly Indian males, commented about Emirati attitudes towards Indians. One respondent pointed out in step four of D5SP that, “we [Indians] are most of the people in Dubai, but we are not equal to the locals.” This respondent revealed critical insights into how dominant culture and hegemony give power and privilege to the local Emiratis (who are the minority in number in the UAE), but do not offer immigrants (the majority of number) the same rights and luxuries. Responses do not divulge full details about this concept, but instead give a small sense of how national identity is challenged within the context of the UAE where social strata is clearly demarcated by physical appearance and occupation (Ali, 2010). Through an investigation of responses that clearly outline each step of D5SP, learners begin to understand the broader social, political and economic processes associated with identity development, and encounter transformations about how they previously understood their own identity.
Participants’ insights and considerations about their own culture created opportunities for students to take a step back from the experience as a whole. Students’ experiences and ‘key insights’ illustrate how they are developing their global citizenship through their own cultural awareness and sensitivity to local contexts. In looking at differences in national or home culture, general principles of diversity in the global context were illuminated. One participant deduced that “even in my own culture, I have realized that no single person is the same.” Ultimately, many participants illustrated how global citizenship was cultivated by sharing their newfound “global perspectives.” In sharing their new actions (step five of D5SP), many echoed this Indian male’s feeling that “cityscapes around the world” are all impacted uniquely by the individuals who compose them. One Indian female shared “the people around are no more foreign; I’m not a foreigner. We all are citizens of this Earth.”
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Changing Lanes not Directions
Because the family plays an active role in deciding what educational course of action might be right for the student, this can sometimes create resistance, reluctance and resentment for the learner (Bodycott, 2009). Many advocates of SAP, including parents, are quick to argue that international exposure produces globally competent citizens of the world who are more sensitive to cultural nuances, and thus, are more attractive as potential employees once exiting the AHE institution (Ie, 2009). While this may be true given the above discussion on identity, international AHE learners from China, India and Pakistan come from inherently collectivist cultural value systems, meaning these students can experience challenges from the family which create obstacles to developing these competencies authentically (Bodycott, 2012). No doubt, this impacts the quality and possibilities inherent in an internationally educative experience. As learners critically reflect on the cultural values of Dubai in contrast or comparison to their own personal belief systems, discussions about personal passion, the family, and career path emerge.
Many international AHE learners from China, India and Pakistan are making a familial investment and there can sometimes be intense, even negative, experiences with pressures from the family (Bodycott, 2012). However, 75% of the participants in the case study reported re-ordered thinking (step four of D5SP) about their professional life and future after having completed their internship experiences and year abroad in Dubai. In many instances, participants revealed new ways of taking ownership of their learning-by- doing in the internship as illustrations of their personal development even if they had pressures from their family.
In one particular critical reflection, one male Indian student summarized (in step one of D5SP)“…my parents wanted this [SAP] for me, and I knew this to be a good opportunity, but I have friends and relationships back home.” In this case study, International AHE learners place a lot of stake in what the family would be “proud” of, and do not put their own passions and interests ahead of what their mother, father, or elders would want for them. Ultimately, obligation can take precedent, overshadowing some of the inherent benefits of self-directing one’s own study-abroad experience and building tolerance for uncertainty which each contribute to personal development. However, through their experiences abroad, students encountered opportunities to “explore the world,” “open my mind,” and “connect to passions” in ways that connect to their personal and professional interests. A Pakistani male echoed new actions (step five of D5SP) in that:
“My internship let me discover IT (information technology) from a consulting perspective, and I loved it… I know that is what I want to pursue for my future, so in a way, I am shifting lanes, but not my direction…so I feel they (my parents) will be pleased.”
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In other examples of step five of D5SP, in their responses about “Key Insights” about the internship experience, participants commented on being more “self-sufficient,” “accountable,” “independent,” and “reliant on oneself,” because the internship gave them opportunities to “figure out” their areas of strength, weakness and allowed them to “grow as a person.” An energetic Indian female reported, “I have learned to complain less and accept more,” when commenting on perspective transformations in step five of D5SP. This applied not only to personal scenarios like chores and food preparation over the course of the year abroad, but also to professional scenarios within the internship like “taking copies,” or “running an industry report.” Another male participant from China shared his new perspective about navigating uncertainty in the internship on his own terms: “I would normally consult my father in our family business, but I do not have that option here, so that is one kind of cool thing, to do it my way instead.” Participants suggested that being able to navigate a new professional context in a global setting like the internship experience, without the help of the family, gave them space to discover their own personal interests and helped them to develop professionally into a career specialty of their own choosing. While this may have not manifested in a specific new action in the fifth step of D5SP for all learners, realigning motivations from extrinsic to intrinsic is a powerful action. This is an important finding in that many collectivist learners do not place value on their own individual desires. Seeing value in an intrinsic desire is one “takeaway” that many students noted helped them to understand nuances across individualist and collectivist cultures. Realignment to intrinsic motivations was present in at least one “Key Insight” entry for 60% of the participants.
In one illustration of motivational realignment, a male Pakistani learner shared, “choice has corresponded to money and what is rewarding for the whole family, but I find that management speaks to me and my own strengths” rather than supply chain and logistics which was his intended specialization. This Pakistani student, like other respondents, shared that he may have never really thought about what he might like to do or what would be suitable for him as an individual. However, through getting out on one’s own in the internship experience, he and others were able to identify what in the professional world resonated with their individual talents and abilities. Participants’ responses reveal that the “Key Insight” private space for reflection can be beneficial to outlining how personal development, with respect to goal setting and motivation, is shaped over the course of the 30-day internship and how students begin to experience changes in their own perspectives within and across cultures.
Collaboration is Still Key
International AHE learners reported that peer and social support were “key insights” when reflecting on their year abroad. Literature concerned with meaningful, authentically transformative education abroad continuously wrestles with how to balance adjustment and socialization within a foreign context. The question remains about how to encourage robust learning within contexts of high uncertainty and limited cultural capital. While this could
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 93 perhaps be the most lightweight finding, it is important to address the group dynamics of learning abroad, as this receives much attention in SAP design and impact (Clark et al., 2009). In this case study, participants shared appreciation for having a cohort-based program and developing a learning community. The lone Russian student shared “this cohort is like family, everyone is different, but the same thing is important for all.” Although this student did not share a national identity with anyone in his cohort, he identified as part of that learning community. Another student shared that “learning and growth increases when people come together and cooperate.” One male Indian student went so far as to say, “had it not been for my friends, I would have given up the program and gone back to India.”
Interestingly, Indian students recognize the omnipresence of fellow countrymen and women across Dubai and the UAE, however, these individuals do not necessarily represent potential peer networks or relationships. Again, sharp divides across occupation and perceived class standing can sometimes isolate and alienate members of the same cultural group (Ali, 2010). International AHE learners, in this case, seem to touch on Baumgartner’s (2001) idea of shared experience where importance is placed on the communal activity of learning and discovering. Participants stress the importance of “share(d) stories,” or “discuss(ing) events of the day” with someone who can relate to their personal situation in their “Key Insights” log about the internship experience.
Additionally, participants suggest placing much more stock in the idea of building relationships and networks cross-culturally. Learners share that family is a crucial social network, but making new friends and peer networks outside the family is also important. One Pakistani female shared:
“Your family is always going to be there, but I learned that relationships are investments, and although it’s easy to find people to have a coffee with, great friends who you can trust with your joys and moments of weakness are rare and take considerable investment.”
Nearly 90% of the participants in this case study indicated that a cohort program design was helpful to both learning and personal development in their “Key Insight” reflections. Additionally, some elaborated that having space to dialogue with other members of the specialization helped to facilitate meaning made about experiences. Based on the data collected in private critical reflections, cohort design was perhaps more impactful than sharing a national identity because students could identify industry-specific phenomena and, through interactive communication, could make meaning from multiple perspectives. Participants’ responses resonated more directly with the idea of shared experience than with feelings of alienation, culture shock or other general anxiety as a foreigner.
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Conclusions and Future Directions
Private critical reflection encouraged AHE learners to individually explore their personal development in the way of increased intercultural sensitivity, global citizenship and self-awareness, and encouraged them to re-order their thinking about themselves and their world (Ie, 2009; Sison & Brennan, 2012; Ward & Searle, 1991). While the aim was to reflect on the internship experience itself, many students ended up reflecting on the experience of learning and living abroad over the full year that they have been outside of their home country. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Dubai specifically, is fairly uncharted territory when it comes to understanding the nuances of 21st century learning and development for International AHE learners from the Asia and Pacific region, especially India, China and Pakistan. Exploring “Key Insight” critical reflections from learners enrolled in a graduate MBA program offers insight about how their educational experiences are shaped by the context of Dubai, and what in particular shaped new perspective transformation from their individual experiences. Findings from this study both extend and challenge existing scholarship concerned with study abroad. Practical implications explain the need for pre-departure explorations and creative ways to balance adjustment and socialization once abroad.
Mapping Me: National and Global Identity
International AHE learners who shared key insights from their year abroad report new perspectives in how they see their own national identity and are able to identify multiple lenses of interpretation at the conclusion of their experience abroad. What characterizes being Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, or Russian is subjective for these students. Sharma et al. (2011) posit that it is a good idea for students to engage in deep questioning about equity and social constructions when thinking about the cornerstones of their own cultural values, attitudes and beliefs prior to studying abroad. By doing so, students are able to identify “taken for granted frames of reference” in order to discover the underlying historical, cultural and socio-political significance of identity and identity construction (Sharma et al., 2011, p. 15). Pre-departure activities that encourage AHE learners to map (conceptually, graphically, or artistically) their core cultural values and general understandings about equality and immigrant inequity, bring consciousness to the foundations of their ideology. This is especially important for Chinese, Pakistani and Indian learners who may need to reconcile the family’s wants and desires and their own experiences as immigrants. Students can then begin to make connections between the destination they will inhabit and the socially constructed values, attitudes, beliefs and professional opportunities in that country prior to arrival. Addressing the fundamental tenets of equity and intercultural competence such as these, is important to tackle before the student has left their home country, because these can be overlooked and undervalued once the learner is abroad. Intentional engagement on core issues of multicultural interaction and identity prepare the learner to engage in an ongoing process – or re-ordering, questioning and critical reflection to encourage perspective transformations.
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Balancing Cohort and Local Community Engagement
Previous research suggests that encouraging students to develop professional networks in a foreign locale can be difficult, especially within co-national programs (Bitsika et al., 2010; Bodycott, 2012; Ie, 2009; Redmond & Bunyi, 1993). Offering AHE learners both collaborative and private space to critically reflect on new concepts and ideas can be beneficial for personal, professional, and transformative growth abroad (Sharma et al., 2011). Sharma et al. (2011) suggest that the key is in intentional educational planning. While there is not much research on internship opportunities with an accelerated SAP from the Chinese, Indian and Pakistani learners’ perspective, this research suggests that the instructional dynamic is powerful and could produce new insights to encouraging global citizenship and equity education.
Kolb (1984) underscores that learners come from uniquely carved paths, seeking out experiences that complement their personal, professional, and academic interests. Thus, evaluation of any given experiential learning opportunity must include the individual disposition of the learner and their interests. This case study suggests that cohort design offers international AHE learners from China, India, and Pakistan, a sense of social and peer support when they are away from home, but does not discourage interaction with locals. Additionally, participants in this study report feeling enlightened with new worldviews and increased global citizenship. Because Eastern society is rooted in collectivist ideals, cohort design may prove to be advantageous to encourage adjustment and ease culture shock for intra-regional study abroad in the Middle East.
Developing and designing individual experiential assignments, or course material like internships—where interaction with local professionals is built into requirements—reduces the likelihood of alienation, or tightening of cultural rigidity. This provides students with their own unique encounter as the “other,” within the experiential assignment, but is shared in the sense that all learners will be uniquely challenged by their learning-by-doing activity. In navigating their own national identity as the “other” in a global context, learners can generate more self-awareness and tolerance for uncertainty, and build knowledge to facilitate cross-cultural connections, which collectively contribute to increased personal development and employability. Again, it becomes important for AHE learners to be able to connect their professional interests to their personal interests. Individual experiential activities give the student freedom to discover where these intersections occur.
The unique demographic makeup, strategic geographic location, prevalence of English instruction, and short distance from China, India and Pakistan, no doubt provide ample justification for SAPs in Dubai, UAE. The duality of extremes, to which Ali (2010) refers, offers a dynamic context within which discourses of equity, power, and privilege can be discussed in a most complicated frame like Dubai. As International AHE learners navigate personal and professional identities in a global cityscape, there are critical dimensions that
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 96 can be lived and experienced in daily working life, like the internship. This poises students to critically think about complex dimensions of the social hierarchy, how equity exists within that structure, and foundations of the global economy that contribute to the most recent snapshot of Dubai. Additionally, cosmopolitan Dubai is highly multicultural, offering one of the most diverse cityscapes in the world. Students all over the globe can be a part of learning in a “tomorrow’s world, today” dynamic that is technologically innovative, globally relevant, and always adapting.
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Appendix
Key Insights A Space for Critical Reflection
Self-Identified Nationality/Cultural Background: ______
Age: _____
Sex/gender: M F I choose not to respond
Specialization: ______
Evaluate the following with respect to your experience: 1. The experience; and inferences from the experience 2. Doubts, reservations and persistent confusion 3. A variety of tentative explanations or hypotheses 4. Rebuilt experience to create new hypothesis 5. Tested hypothesis or new action Day____/30 ______
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Author Biography
Shelbee R. NguyenVoges is an Assistant Professor of Education at Kennesaw State University. She spent two years in Dubai exploring intercultural and international experiential education with particular interest in academic and social adjustment in multicultural contexts. Her research focuses on sociocultural influences on the learning environment, study abroad participation, and the practice of adult learning theory.
Correspondence should be directed to Shelbee R. NguyenVoges, Assistant Professor of Education, Department of First-Year and Transition Studies, Kennesaw State University, Email: [email protected], Phone: 470.578.4282
Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education Volume 5 Number 1 - 2016 journals.sfu.ca/jgcee
Measuring Attitudes Toward the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: An Index of Global Citizenship
Donald L. Rubin Center for Health and Risk Communication Center for Global Health University of Georgia, USA
Adam Landon2 Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources University of Georgia, USA
Michael Tarrant Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources University of Georgia, USA
Lee Stoner School of Sport and Exercise Massey University, New Zealand
Logan Mintz School of Public and International Affairs University of Georgia, USA
Keywords: global citizenship, Indigenous rights
ABSTRACT: Global citizenship has emerged as a key objective of liberal education. Because the status of Indigenous Peoples worldwide is inextricably linked to globalization and imperialism, mainstream culture students’ attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples can be taken as an index of global citizenship. The items comprising the Measure of Attitudes Toward the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (MATRIP) draw directly from the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Twenty-three statements about Indigenous Peoples’ rights—as explicated in the UN Declaration—were transformed into Likert-type items measuring five dimensions: Preservation of
2 Correspondence concerning this article should be directed to Adam Landon, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia, 180 E Green St., Athens, GA 30602, [email protected], 706-542- 9713
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Culture, Lands & Resources, Self-Governance, Restitution, and Services and Representation. Surveys were administered to 226 undergraduates. MATRIP measurement properties were tested using confirmatory factor analysis. Results indicate that a final scale consisting of 20 items adequately measures the hypothesized dimensions.
Introduction
This paper reports the development of a Measure of Attitudes Toward the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (MATRIP). MATRIP is intended to function as an instrument for assessing attitudes of mainstream (i.e., majority, dominant) culture individuals toward economic and social justice for Indigenous Persons. Because the class of “Indigenous Persons” is inherently inter-national in scope (United Nations, 2008), and because the oppressed status of Indigenous Persons is inextricably bound with aspects of social justice and equity, imperialism, and globalization (Stewart-Harawira, 2008), the MATRIP is proposed, in addition, as an apt index of global citizenship. In recent years, global citizenship has emerged as a key objective of liberal education at colleges and universities in the United States and elsewhere (AAC&U, 2013; Stearns, 2009). Because global citizenship is interwoven with attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples, as we describe below, institutions embracing that objective may find MATRIP to be a useful tool for assessing student outcomes of international education and global learning initiatives (see American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2013).
Definitions of global citizenship vary widely. Some accounts equate global citizenship with opportunities to participate in world commerce as producer and/or consumer: “[a] global citizen, from this perspective, is one who can live and work effectively anywhere in the world…” (Noddings, 2005, p. 2-3). The converse position views global citizenship as the impulse to protect against the ills of exploitative commercialization (Kingwell, 2000). For some authorities, global citizenship is the highest level of cultural identity formation, transcending unidimensional national or ethnic identities (Banks, 2001). For others, global citizenship implies participating in some more- or-less institutionalized cross-national civil or political activity (Falk, 1993). Stripped to its essence, “[i]f someone says, ‘I am a global/world citizen,’ then at the very least she is saying something like: I accept that all human beings matter and that among other duties I have as an individual, I have responsibilities that are cross national.” (Dower, 2008, p. 40).
Social responsibility likewise shows up as one of three core components of global citizenship articulated by Morais and Ogden (2011); the other components are competence and civic engagement. The elements of this aspect of global citizenship, in turn, are an “understand[ing of] the interconnectedness between local behaviors and their global consequences” as these bear on (a) global justice and disparities, (b) global interconnectedness and personal responsibility, and (c) altruism and empathy (p. 448). Contested rights of Indigenous Peoples, such as claims of sovereignty over resource-rich traditional territories, are often at odds with economic privileges of mainstream (i.e.,
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 103 dominant) culture citizens (Davis & Wali, 1994). For mainstream culture persons to endorse rights of Indigenous Peoples, therefore, is to meet Morais and Ogden’s (2011) three criteria of global social responsibility: (a) a commitment to reducing disparities in global justice, (b) personal responsibility for mitigating the consequences of globalization, and (c) altruism. Attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous peoples are potentially tied to social altruistic motives often cited as important determinants of prosocial behaviors and attitudes like those reflected in the prototypical “global citizen” (DeGroot & Steg, 2007; Schultz, 2001; Reysen & Katzarka-Miller, 2013). Therefore, an instrument that queries about attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous People is a directly social approach toward measuring global citizenship.
In our conceptualization, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about sustainability are intimately linked to global citizenship and social justice (Tarrant, 2010; Tarrant, Rubin & Stoner, 2013), and ultimately to rights of Indigenous Persons. That is because Indigenous modes of economic development and resource utilization almost always promote sustainability (Howitt, 2002). Sustainability is also intimately bound up with issues of social justice. Social, economic, and public health problems stemming from environmental degradation disproportionately burden peoples of lower socio-economic status (Bullard & Johnson, 2000; Mutz et al., 2001; Langhelle, 2000). For example, neighborhoods where people of lower socio-economic status reside are disproportionately the repository of polluted air and water, and sites for the industrial facilities that produce them (Brooks & Sethi, 1997; Mutz et al., 2001; Cutter, 2006). These issues are especially problematic given that people of lower socio-economic status are less likely to engage in state-driven natural resource management decisions (Lawrence et al., 1997), or possess the political or financial capital needed to effectively protect their rights (Arquette et al., 2002). This scenario of disempowerment and adverse impact is the case in many Indigenous communities and territories where Indigenous Peoples are deprived of access to and jurisdiction over traditional lands and resources (Davis & Wali, 1994), and harmed by the degradation of habitats with which they identify (Berkes, 2012). Moreover, the very definition of Indigenous Person is often linked to a worldview that unites humans with nature (Cunningham & Stanley, 2007; Watene & Yap, 2015; Milfont & Schultz, 2015).
Rights of Indigenous Peoples are codified in the United Nations’ (2008) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – from here forward “Declaration” – adopted by the UN General Assembly in September, 2007 following 20 years of discussion and development (see Barsh, 1996). The Declaration affirms that Indigenous Peoples have suffered historic disenfranchisement and exploitation as a result of conquest and colonialism. It asserts that Indigenous Peoples have inherent rights of domain over traditional lands and to engage in traditional practices such as cultural transmission and worship. Several of the Declaration’s 46 articles pertain to administrative details of UN oversight. Others, however, deal with substantive issues such as demilitarization of traditional Indigenous lands, representation of Indigenous Peoples in legislatures,
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 104 reparation payments, autonomous education systems, and control of natural resource allocation.
Because of the expertise and care taken in its development, the comprehensiveness of its provisions, and its nearly universal acceptance (interestingly, the four nations dissenting from the UN vote adopting the Declaration were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States), the substantive articles of this document are taken as the content domain for a program to develop an instrument to measure attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples (i.e., the MATRIP). Specifically, we hypothesize that dominant culture citizen attitudes towards the rights of Indigenous Peoples can be measured along five related dimensions corresponding to the major themes of the Declaration: Preservation of Culture, Lands & Resources, Self-Governance, Restitution, and Services & Representation. These dimensions are described in detail in the sections to follow.
Preservation of Culture
Cultural transmission is a critical component of group identity maintenance through time and space (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1982). Therefore, acceptance of the rights of Indigenous Peoples to engage in the traditional practices that facilitate the transmission of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that perpetuate a culture that exists independent of the mainstream is an important component of the MATRIP. In fact, Article 11 of the Declaration states that Indigenous Peoples have the right to “practise and revitalize their cultural traditions…to maintain, protect, and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures…” Article 13 further elucidates these rights stating that Indigenous Peoples have the right to “…transmit to future generations their histories, languages, philosophies, writing systems and literatures.” Collectively, these ideas reflect a right to the preservation of one’s culture through the transmission of traditional forms of knowledge, languages, religious practices, and cultural traditions from one generation to the next. Preservation of Indigenous cultures can be a politically contested concept among stakeholders with competing claims to nationalistic and religious hegemony, and therefore tied to issues of equity and social justice (Jung, 2003).
Lands & Resources
Although there is no one accepted definition of indigeneity, many cite a peoples’ interaction with a given territory over time as a moral foundation for the collective rights they are afforded under the Declaration (Kenrick & Lewis, 2004; Sarivaara et al., 2013). Land tenure, and the right to conserve, develop, or otherwise control resources placed under Indigenous jurisdiction is an important component of the Declaration and inextricably bound to the Indigenous identity. For instance, Article 26 of the Declaration states that Indigenous Peoples have the right to “…lands, territories, and resources which they have owned, occupied or otherwise acquired,” and “to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership.”
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This article, and others, reflects a right to self-determination through the use, management, and development of resources under the jurisdiction of Indigenous Peoples. Endorsing policies to redress past injustices that expropriated Indigenous Persons’ territory and resources reflects global citizenship.
Self-Governance
The right to self-governance is a basic right of Indigenous Peoples. Articles 3, 4, and 5 of the Declaration affirm Indigenous People’s rights to self-determination through political process, financial transactions, and the development of autonomous governing institutions. Self-governance, therefore, is a manifestation of the collective right to sovereignty afforded by the Declaration. Of course, dominant national governments vary considerably in the degree and manner in which they recognize and support—or continue to suppress— the sovereignty of Indigenous People (Wiessner, 1999).
Restitution
According to Morais & Ogden (2011), individuals who have embraced the ideals of global citizenship actively seek to end social injustice. In the context of the rights of Indigenous Peoples, meaningful action may include restitution for the harms Indigenous Persons have endured as a result of colonialism and conquest (Stewart-Harawira, 2008). In fact, the Declaration affirms the rights of Indigenous Peoples to be given fair compensation for the loss of traditional lands, subsistence, or well-being that they have experienced as a function of dominant culture social, economic, and development polices. Article 11, for instance, affirms that states must “…provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution…property taken without their free, prior and informed consent…” Acceptance of these rights, therefore, reflects a belief that global injustices should be righted through active changes in policy, a tenet of global citizenship (Morais & Ogden, 2011).
Services & Representation
Although the Declaration makes clear the rights of Indigenous Peoples to self- governance, it also states that all Indigenous Peoples are to be granted the same rights as the citizens of the countries in which they are embedded. This includes citizenship, the right to political representation in national democratic governance, and access to social services. However, Indigenous Peoples often do not possess the same world-view as dominant culture citizens, or have access to social services as a function of geographic isolation, among other constraints. Consequently, the Declaration affirms that Indigenous Peoples have the right to obtain these services in a manner that is consistent with their world-view. This includes state-funded yet autonomous educational, political, and economic institutions, and the financial support needed to realize their rights. Therefore, positive attitudes towards the rights of Indigenous Peoples to obtain services and have
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 106 adequate democratic representation in state government represent a commitment to equality, social justice, altruism, and global citizenship.
Although a number of instruments are available to measure mainstream persons’ prejudice against specific Indigenous Peoples including Australian Aboriginals (Pedersen et. al., 2004), members of Canadian First Nations (Donakowski & Esses, 1996), and Mayans in Guatemala (Ashdown et al., 2011), no extant instrument directly measures attitudes toward rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is one’s stance toward Indigenous rights per se—rather than one’s degree of prejudice against one or another ethnic group—that we argue is most directly aligned with the ideals of global citizenship reflected in the constructs elucidated above.
Accordingly, efforts reported here to construct the MATRIP constitute a first attempt to measure attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples. A graphical depiction of the hypothesized MATRIP scale is presented in Figure 1. As depicted, the scale measures attitudes on five dimensions corresponding to the rights codified in the Declaration; Preservation of Culture, Lands & Resources, Self-Governance, Restitution, Services & Representation. In this paper we present a preliminary test of the measurement properties of the hypothesized MATRIP scale.
Figure 1 Hypothesized model of MATRIP scale and parameters estimated
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Method
Recruitment of Study Participants and Data Collection
To test the dimensionality of the MATRIP scale a questionnaire was administered to a group of undergraduate students at a major public university in the Southeastern United States. After obtaining clearance from the proper Institutional Review Board, participants were recruited from the research pool of introductory courses in communication studies. The courses were required by a number of majors, and so generally enroll students from diverse majors and levels of undergraduate study. Of the 226 participants from whom valid data were collected, 69.4% identified themselves as female. First-year students constituted 32% of the sample, 40% were sophomores, 17% were juniors, and 7% were seniors. The average self-reported grade point average was 3.48 (sd=0.45) on a scale from 0-4. The questionnaire was administered online using Qualtrics software. After providing informed consent, participants were provided with a definition of Indigenous Peoples drawn from Al Faruque and Begum (2004) in order to frame the study:
When Western nations like England, France, Spain, and Holland colonized much of the non-Western world, native peoples already lived in those lands. Today, the term Indigenous Peoples refers to the descendants of those pre-colonial inhabitants. Indigenous Peoples maintain cultural ties to their ancestors through traditional language or stories or lifestyles or beliefs. They actively identify themselves as members of those historical groups. Examples of Indigenous Peoples include Aboriginal people of Australia, Maori of New Zealand, Quechua of the Andes Mountains in South America, the Inuit of Alaska and Northwestern Canada, and the Cherokee of the Southeastern United States.
Next, using a five-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, participants were asked the degree to which they endorsed 23 statements about rights of Indigenous Peoples. The statements were drawn from the substantive articles of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, 2008). Survey items measuring each of the five dimensions are presented in Table 1 (see Table 1 in Appendices). Attitudes toward Indigenous People’s rights to Preservation of Culture were assessed with six items including “Indigenous People should have the right to maintain their own customs and traditions.” The dimension Lands & Resources was measured with four items including “Indigenous Peoples should have the right to use, develop, and control the lands and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or use.” Attitudes towards the rights of Indigenous People to Self-Governance were assessed with four items including “Indigenous Peoples should have the right to self-govern and to develop their own laws.” Restitution was operationalized with four items including “Indigenous Peoples should receive just and fair compensation when deprived of their traditional means of
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 108 subsistence.” Last, the dimension Services & Representation was operationalized using five items including “Indigenous Peoples should have a guaranteed minimum number of seats in the political system.” Item means and standard deviations are presented in Table 2 (see Table 2 in Appendices).
Analysis and Results
We used confirmatory factor analysis to test the hypothesized structure of the MATRIP scale. All analysis was done in STATA version 12 (StataCorp, 2011) using the full information maximum likelihood estimator (Enders & Bandalos, 2001). Results for the test of the measurement model provide marginal support for the initial hypothesis – χ2 = 365.8, p = 0.000, df = 220; RMSEA= .054; CFI=.897; NNFI = .881 based on well- accepted criteria (Hu and Bentler, 1999). Modeling results, including fully standardized factor loadings (λ) and standard errors (SE), are presented in Table 2. Given that this analysis represents the first effort to develop a scale to measure attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples, we proceeded to refine the model beyond this confirmation of our initial hypothesis.
Two items (X3 and X6) measuring Preservation of Culture displayed standardized factor loadings below the commonly accepted threshold of .4 (Beauducel & Wittmann, 2005). These two items were dropped from the analysis and the model re-estimated, yielding a marginal improvement in model fit – χ2 = 294.6, df = 179, p = 0.000; RMSEA = .054; CFI = .913; NNFI = .898. After examining the modification indices, two additional post-hoc model modifications were undertaken. First, the item X15, originally hypothesized as a measure of Restitution, showed high levels of cross loading (e.g., significantly loading on more than one dimension) and was removed from the model. Second, the items X13 and X14 measuring Lands & Resources were highly correlated, and upon inspection very similarly worded. Consequently, we allowed the error terms for these items to co-vary. Following these modifications, we re-estimated the model, finding the data to be an adequate fit – χ2 = 205.8, p = 0.000, df = 145; RMSEA = .045; CFI = .942; NNFI = .931. Results for the final model are presented in Table 2. The internal consistencies of the dimensions in this final model were for the most part adequate by conventional standards (Nunally and Bernstein, 1994) and presented in Table 2.
Discussion
Attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples involve one’s sense of responsibility for others who may be geographically remote, as well as remote in terms of cultural identity, relative to mainstream persons. These attitudes thus constitute a meaningful index of global citizenship (Morais & Ogden, 2011). The MATRIP was developed to measure those attitudes using content from the United Nations’ (2008) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the hypothesized five- dimension scale was an adequate fit for the data after minor modifications, supporting our
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 109 hypothesis that the MATRIP is a sound instrument with which to measure attitudes towards the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and thus an effective proxy for global citizenship.
Certainly the present enterprise of developing the MATRIP is subject to limitations. Tests of the scale’s measurement properties are based on a single sample of North American college students. It remains for future research to determine if these findings can be replicated in other national and cultural settings. For example, Indigenous Maori in New Zealand arguably enjoy greater political power and cultural influence than do Native American Indians in the U.S. (Maaka & Fleras, 2000). How do the status differences among Indigenous Peoples affect MATRIP structure and scores for mainstream peoples living in those nations? For instance, item means across all dimensions of the MATRIP were relatively low in this study. Mean scores might be significantly higher among respondents from countries like Canada or New Zealand, countries that arguably engage in more intense public education about sustaining Indigenous cultures. By the same token, it remains for the MATRIP to be administered and validated with participants of varying ages and educational backgrounds. In any event, instrument validation is best regarded as an ongoing process, rather than a static label applied to a set of items (Sussman & Robertson, 1986).
Future research on attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples might examine how they correlate with other measures of global citizenship and social value orientation (e.g., Merrill, Brascamp & Brascamp, 2012; Morais & Ogden, 2011; DeGrot & Steg, 2007; Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013). Demographic factors may also be related to MATRIP dimensions, and therefore, warrant future consideration. Political orientation, knowledge of Indigenous cultures, and social prejudice, for instance, may account for variation in MATRIP dimensions. The dimensions of the MATRIP tap diverse attitudes towards the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Therefore, antecedent attitudes and beliefs may vary between dimensions. For instance, some dominant culture individuals may endorse Indigenous rights to self-governance while opposing restitution payments. Variation in the relevant antecedent variables that predict MATRIP dimensions may shed light on areas for instructional reform.
More importantly, educational institutions can examine whether MATRIP scores are modifiable by means of the kinds of experiences that have been shown to enhance other measures of global citizenship. Study abroad can be one such experience, but not all study abroad is equally efficacious (Tarrant, Rubin & Stoner, 2013). It will be of particular interest to determine whether study abroad that includes constructive contact with Indigenous Peoples (Rubin and Lannutti, 2001) will prove to have a salubrious effect on mainstream students (while of course conforming to ethical principles for reciprocal benefits to Indigenous communities that must be honored in such exchanges; see Wells et al., 2011). Consistent with much research on education abroad, it is most likely that students who experience contact with Indigenous Peoples, and who also engage in
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 110 structured reflection about that contact (Whitney & Clayton, 2011), will manifest the greatest growth on the MATRIP. Pending further validation of the psychometric properties of the MATRIP scale, therefore, we recommend that educational institutions adopt MATRIP as a way of assaying student growth in global citizenship attitudes following constructive contact with cultural others.
Conclusion
Finding solutions to the social and environmental challenges of the 21st Century requires a populace that is informed of the role that they play in a larger society. This society is global in scope, encompassing the natural world and the diversity of humans therein. Recognizing the rights of all people to be free of discrimination and injustice is one step toward realizing this ideal. Given that Indigenous Peoples have been subjected to oppression and discrimination through globalization, and that the Indigenous identity is tied with a world-view inclusive of nature, dominant culture citizen attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples are an important social metric of global citizenship and sustainability. Therefore, the MATRIP may be useful for educational programs hoping to engender the ideals of global citizenship and social justice in their students.
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Tarrant, M., Rubin, D., & Stoner, (2013). The added value of study abroad: Fostering a global citizenry. Journal of Studies in International Education, 18(2), 141-161.
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Appendices
Table 1 MATRIP dimensions and Items Preservation of Culture X1: Indigenous People should have the right to maintain their own distinctive customs and traditions within mainstream society X2: Indigenous People should be able to decide who is and who is not a member of their tribe X3: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to control all intellectual property rights concerning their culture and traditions X4: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to use their traditional medicines and to maintain their health practices X5: Indigenous People should have the right to maintain their own customs and traditions X6: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to prohibit others from visiting their sacred sites Lands & Resources X7: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to prevent any military activity taking place on their lands X8: Indigenous Peoples should be able to protect or develop the natural resources on their lands as they wish X9: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to use, develop, and control the lands and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or use X10: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to maintain a distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned, or otherwise occupied and used, lands Self-Governance X11: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to develop their own health, housing, and other economic and social programs and to administer them through their own institutions X12: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to establish their own legislatures to make rules affecting them X13: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to self-govern and to develop their own laws X14: Indigenous Peoples should have the right to decide their own laws Restitution X15: Indigenous Peoples should be fully recognized under past treaties X16: Indigenous Peoples should be provided fair compensation for lands and resources that their ancestors traditionally owned or used and which have been taken away without their prior consent X17: Indigenous Peoples should receive just and fair compensation when derived of their traditional means of subsistence X18: Indigenous Peoples should receive payment from the state for property that was taken away from their ancestors without full consent Services & Representation X19: Indigenous Peoples should be provided financial assistance to help them obtain their rights X20: Indigenous Peoples should receive special legislation to improve their economic and social conditions X21: Indigenous Peoples should have public/tax-sponsored media outlets (such as television and radio) in their native language X22: Indigenous Peoples should have public/tax-funded educational programs to combat prejudice against them X23: Indigenous Peoples should have a guaranteed minimum number of seats in the political system
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Table 2 Results of measurement model testing, standardized factor loadings reported.
Full Model Final Model M (SD) λ SE λ SE Preservation of Culture
(α=.67, c.r.=.74) X1 1.61 (.85) .61*** .06 .65*** .06 X2 1.97 (.90) .55*** .06 .54*** .06 X3 2.33 (1.06) .39*** .07 - - X4 1.87 (.91) .57*** .06 .63*** .06 X5 1.56 (.71) .53*** .06 .54*** .06 X6 2.60 (1.20) .39*** .07 - - Lands & Resources
(α=.69, c.r.=.78) X7 2.87 (1.19) .57*** .06 .56*** .06 X8 2.06 (.91) .67*** .05 .67*** .05 X9 2.23 (.87) .69*** .05 .69*** .05 X10 1.90 (.82) .56*** .06 .56*** .06 Self-Governance
(α=.83, c.r.=.84) X11 2.33 (1.08) .50*** .05 .62*** .05 X12 3.06 (1.20) .64*** .04 .74*** .05 X13 3.17 (1.16) .92*** .02 .74*** .05 X14 3.27 (1.13) .92*** .02 .74*** .05 Restitution
(α=.58, c.r.=.57) X15 2.20 (1.08) .47*** .06 - - X16 2.12 (1.06) .54*** .06 .54*** .06 X17 2.31 (1.00) .51*** .06 .51*** .06 X18 3.15 (1.12) .59*** .06 .62*** .06 Services & Representation (α=.70, c.r.=.79) X19 2.86 (1.07) .64*** .05 .62*** .05 X20 3.13 (1.01) .56*** .06 .56*** .06 X21 3.12 (1.11) .46*** .07 .48*** .06 X22 2.76 (1.07) .64*** .05 .65*** .06 X23 3.40 (1.13) .52*** .06 .52*** .06 p≤.10*, p≤.05**, p≤.001***; α = cronbach’s alpha; c.r = composite reliability
Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education Volume 5 Number 1 - 2016 journals.sfu.ca/jgcee
Rethinking Global Citizenship Resources for New Teachers: Promoting Critical Thinking and Equity
Lorna R. McLean Associate Professor Faculty of Education University of Ottawa
Sharon A. Cook Distinguished University Professor Faculty of Education University of Ottawa
Keywords: global citizenship education; equity; teacher education
ABSTRACT: Global citizenship education, or education aiming to develop teacher candidates’ knowledge and empathy with transnational challenges, has become increasingly recognized as an important field internationally, requiring a particular set of pedagogical understandings and tools to facilitate learning. Traditionally, global citizenship education resources have been developed by non-governmental organizations to aid teachers in classroom presentations and to profile issues of concern to their constituencies. Understandably, some of these resources require revisions to correspond with teacher candidates’ grade levels, learning styles, subject-based disciplines and broad issues of equity. Accordingly, we developed a guide for teacher education candidates and novice teachers based on a collaborative inquiry model that we called a “Primer” in order to assess the compatibility, equity and adaptability of classroom-ready global citizenship education materials. Our aims were to understand how pre-service candidates made use of the Primer as a means to integrate global citizenship topics in the regular curriculum. Based on our research—which was informed by a mixed-method methodology consisting of focus groups, journal reporting, and survey data—we documented teacher education candidates’ experiences with the Primer. Our research of how teacher candidates made use of the Primer, offers evidence that their desires and abilities to teach global citizenship themes through classroom-ready resources has been facilitated by utilizing the Primer.
Introduction and Research Questions
In 2005, UNESCO identified teacher education as the primary opportunity for achieving education for sustainable development (Liddy, 2012). Likewise, global citizenship and development education is increasingly recognized as an important field internationally, requiring a particular set of pedagogical understandings (Mundy &
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Manion, 2008; Merryfield, 2010; Goodwin, 2010; Evans et al, 2009; Abdi & Shultz, 2008;) principles, (Hicks and Holden, 2007; Peters, Britton & Blee eds., 2008), theoretical perspectives, (Eidoo et al, 2011) and knowledge, (Jorgenson & Shultz, 2012; Rapoport, 2010). When we began our global citizenship project with teacher candidates at the turn of the twenty-first century, global citizenship educators had few resources to use. Today, teacher candidates are overwhelmed with an abundance of choices of variable quality.
Traditionally, many curriculum resources for teaching global citizenship have been developed by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to profile issues of concern for their constituency and to aid teachers in classroom presentations. Often, educational materials are developed by NGOs to satisfy financial requirements by their funding agencies. This goal can inhibit the teaching materials’ pedagogical and content range and limit some global citizenship teaching resources for classroom use. In Canada, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funded our Faculty of Education’s ten-year global citizenship project with NGOs under the Global Classroom Initiative. Likewise, in various countries such as the United Kingdom, the government provided seed funding to coalitions of International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) (Blee, Britton, David and Young, 2006). In the United States, TeachGlobalEd.net (http://indiana.edu/~global/teachglobaled/) is also a product of collaboration among international agencies and universities with the goal of providing a broad range of teaching resources.
While some NGOs have volunteer teachers or people with pedagogical training to prepare resource materials, many others are either staffed by development experts with limited pedagogical skills or use outdated educational models. Even when experienced educators create classroom materials, there is often pressure for NGOs to “brand” and circumscribe materials to increase their visibility and capitalize on fund-raising opportunities. The result is that while some educational materials are outstanding, others need to be adapted to particular classroom circumstances (McLean, Cook & Crowe, 2006). Still others need to be rejected by educators as inappropriate for the task at hand. Understandably, many contemporary global citizenship education materials require critical and collaborative revisions to correspond with teacher candidates’ grade levels, learning styles, community norms and broader issues of equity (Cook, Crowe & McLean, 2011, p.1).
Teaching from a global citizenship perspective is supported by recent province-wide initiatives such as those mandated in the Ontario Ministry of Education (OME) and other provincial curriculum guidelines in Canada that identify themes closely related to peace, global education and environmental sustainability (OME, 2007; 2013). Our goal has been to help novice educators critique and discriminate among the resources available to teach global citizenship, to adapt these materials for their students’ educational needs and to suggest improvements to the NGOs’ and INGOs’ resources so the sponsoring organizations can improve these products. Our program aims to have pre-service teachers
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 119 integrate global citizenship topics into the regular curriculum and to encourage them to develop new perspectives for teaching. To accomplish these dual tasks, we developed a Primer as an assessment tool to promote and support global citizenship pedagogy and curriculum under the assumption that without good resources, teachers can make only limited use of the progressive pedagogical strategies encouraged by global citizenship education (Merryfield, 2010).
Elsewhere, we focused on the pedagogy of teaching from a global citizenship perspective among teacher candidates (McLean, Cook & Crowe, 2008). In that research, we found that teacher candidates of core subjects related to global citizenship, such as Social Studies, Civics, History and Geography, need to be introduced in their pre-service programs to current and relevant information about the challenges of the developing and developed world and they require an appropriate pedagogy to deliver this information if they are to be successful in teaching global education. We found that teacher candidates require specific interactive pedagogical skills to teach these topics and “…they need classroom-ready curricula on which to draw to integrate global citizenship topics into provincially-approved curricula” (McLean, Cook & Crowe, 2011, p.1; Gaudelli, 1999). Hence, there is an obvious need to help pre-service teachers choose resource materials wisely. The Primer was designed to assist with the challenge of discriminating between resources that are useful and those that are not.
This study, in particular, targets the need for teacher candidates to access high-quality classroom-ready resources on global citizenship education for their students and within the standard curriculum while developing a “culture of critique” of these materials (Horsely, Newell & Stubbs, 2005; Cole, Barwell, Cotton & Brown, 2013; Gallavan, 2008). A number of studies that have examined global citizenship education have conflated the needs of teaching candidates with an analysis of curriculum materials (Blee, Britton, David & Young, 2006; Hicks & Board, 2001). Drawing upon teacher inquiry processes as a progressive practice for professional development, our aim in this study is to focus primarily on the critical consumption and development of curriculum materials, either electronic or print-based, to help teacher candidates access global education resources for use in the classroom. We believe that this Primer would be useful for experienced teachers as well, although they are not the focus of this research.
Among the multitude of demands and expectations that teachers confront, constantly reviewing documents or websites is time-consuming and requires professional pedagogical and academic knowledge to determine the suitability, adaptability and reliability of a resource. Therefore, we developed a guide for teacher candidates that we called a “Primer” (See Appendix). The Primer utilizes cognitive-developmental notions of child development and readiness, commonly presented to candidates in Canadian Faculties of Education.
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For our research into how the Primer was being utilized by our candidates, we drew on Ermeling’s four features of collaborative teacher inquiry: identify and define important and recursive instructional problems; connect theory to action; utilize evidence to drive reflection; and work toward detectable improvements (Ermeling, 2010). We view our research in understanding teacher candidates’ use of the Primer as an opportunity for them to develop critical thinking skills through a professional learning experience (McNaughton, 2012; Duncan & Barnett, 2010). Our intention was for the candidates to go beyond the limited scope of the Primer to generate their own bank of skills and to recognize that becoming a teacher is a lengthy process spanning a career (Sears, 2014). As well, we anticipated that candidates might see their role in the future, if not now, in the production of NGO and INGO materials for the larger global community. In this article, we explore the ways in which the Primer was used by four groups of teacher education candidates. Our study addresses the following questions:
1. What are the characteristics of the teaching population wishing to use such resources and pedagogy? 2. What are the expectations and challenges of global education, its resources and pedagogy? 3. How did teacher candidates use the Primer and what are the implications for their professional practice? To respond to these questions, we begin with a discussion of the definitions, expectations and challenges of evaluating global citizenship resources for use in the classroom by exploring some of the studies that influenced our development of the Primer and research. In particular, we detail how the development of global citizenship education as a field—with its own components of analytical, evaluative and participatory skills— has evolved alongside issues of equity within education. This literature review includes an overview of the pedagogical practices that have developed within global citizenship education that are often seen as challenging on many levels, even for experienced practitioners. This discussion lays the groundwork for the authors’ analysis of the questions listed above.
Definitions, Expectations and Challenges of Global Citizenship Education, Resources and Pedagogy
For our purposes, global citizenship education follows closely the definition set out by Graham Pike that identifies four components: the interdependence of all people within a global system; the connectedness and diversity of universal human attributes that link to areas of knowledge, curriculum subjects, aspects of schooling, and the environment; a global perspective to enable students to look beyond the confines of local and national boundaries; and, multiple perspectives that privilege the educative value of considering different views before reaching a judgment (Pike, 2000, p. 65).We also draw on other themes emerging from the literature. For example, the role of NGOs in global economic and educational systems has been identified as a way to contest the continued record of
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 121 social injustice (Blackburn, 1998; Bigelow & Peterson, 2002). Moreover, the importance of Indigenous Peoples’ views (Lamy, 1987) and the emphasis of wholism over particularism (Kolker, Ustinova, McEneaney, 1998) have been featured as themes within global citizenship education since the late 1980s. Merryfield emphasized the components of analytical, evaluative and participatory skills in private and public life as relevant to global citizenship education (1997; see also Kirkwood, 2001; Lapayese, 2003; Willinsky, 2005). Anti-racism (Merryfield & Subedi, 2001), feminism (Cook, 2008a, 2008b; Mofatt, 2000; Reardon, 1993) and multiculturalism (Toh, 1993; Zachariah, 1993) have also been identified as germane features of global citizenship education through their values and ideas of both the interdependency of the world and humans as citizens of a global community (Toh, 1993). Lastly, among many characteristics, global citizenship education calls for respect of differences and an appreciation of the rights of others; for example, Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux (1991) stress power differentials, the disabling authority of hegemonic structures as well as the possibilities of empowering discourse (see also Preece, 2002; Wells, 1996).
The range of themes and topics encompassed by global citizenship education is immense. Teacher candidates and novice teachers may feel overwhelmed and intimidated by demands for their expertise in one or more of these fields within an already demanding curriculum. Understandably, teachers rely on classroom-ready resources to help them translate these complex topics into useful lessons and student-friendly classroom experiences.
Pedagogically, what has come to be called global citizenship education bears testimony to its social activist and progressive roots. It arose at the same time as Experiential Learning, the Values Clarification model, Open Schools and Child-Centred education (Cook, 2008a; Hendrix, 1998). Part of this progressive tradition of global citizenship education has been the claim that content and process should be fused or at least interdependent (Le Roux, 2001). As the field has advanced, strategies have been developed to encourage activity-based learning (Selby & Pike, 2000; O’Sullivan & Vetter, 2007) and perspectivistic analysis (Parker, Ninomiva & Cogan, 1999; Pike & Selby, 1988; Teach Magazine, 2005; Reardon, 1996; 2001), critical analysis, conflict management and resolution skills (Harris & Morrison, 2003), cooperative learning (Holden, 2000), story- telling (Calder, 2000; Moore, 2003; Robins, 2008), digital technologies (Zong, 2009; Harshman & Augustine, 2013; Gaudelli, 2006), student projects and community surveys (Tye & Tye, 1993). Hicks and Bord also note that global education tackles contemporary and future problems (2001; see also Perkins, 2002; Reardon, 1993; Calder, 2000). Pedagogical practices in global citizenship education are thus wholistic, reflective, and can be woven through other disciplines such as history and mathematics. Teaching strategies for global citizenship education stress empathetic strategies like roleplay (Holden, 2000) and simulations, (Gautier & Rebich, 2005), transformative inquiry skills, and authentic community partnerships and associations (Willinsky, 2005). As well, new approaches to assessment encompassing cognitive, affective and participatory domains have also been
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 122 suggested (Evans, Ingram, Macdonald & Weber, 2009; Diaz, Massialas, Xanthopoulos, 1999; O’Sullivan & Pashby, 2008).
While such pedagogies are not foreign to teacher candidates and are typically woven throughout pre-service teacher education, interactive strategies are challenging on many levels for novice and even experienced practitioners. First, they require more time to implement than transmission-based pedagogical models such as lecturing or reading from a text. Since interactive pedagogies require active student engagement to be successful, complex strategies must often be modified for particular age groups or differentiated learning styles. Furthermore, teacher candidates must be willing to experience some frustration and confusion when negotiating these interactive pedagogies. A simulation game or perspectivistic analysis requires not only time to complete successfully and debrief with students, but also careful attention to the details of particular case studies related to complex issues. In turn, this approach demands a detailed knowledge of situations and outside readings beyond the range of experience of either the teacher or student. Hence, complex pedagogical demands, compounded with unfamiliar content, may cause teacher candidates to feel inadequate in the face of these exceptional demands of teaching global citizenship education (Appleyard & McLean, 2011). Teachers are drawn to classroom-ready resources that can assist them in successfully incorporating global citizenship education in their curriculum (McLean, Cook & Crowe, 2006).
Characteristics of the Teaching Population Needing Global Education Resources
Our discussions with teacher candidates indicated that while they find the subject matter of global citizenship to be important, many were also intimidated by the knowledge and pedagogical skills required to teach a rapidly changing information base, and by the challenge of a pedagogy with such heightened expectations for student engagement (McLean, Cook & Crowe 2008; Rapoport, 2010). Frequently, teacher candidates felt poorly equipped by their undergraduate education courses to act as authoritative information-providers for global citizenship education (Reimer & McLean, 2009; Gallavan, 2006; Holden & Hicks, 2007). Our research has allowed us to identify and define important and recursive instructional problems for teacher candidates (Ermeling, 2010). We conclude that assessing classroom-ready materials on the basis of the pedagogical content, as well as the information provided or assumed, is necessary.
Asking candidates to assess the value of outside agents’ resources, such as NGOs who provide curricula, seems to run counter to the usual model of teacher education that tends to legitimize prepared resource materials. By encouraging teacher candidates to use the Primer to analyze and assess NGO-produced materials, we sought to instill a “culture of critique” in which all resources are assessed by prospective teachers. For this to be a reasonable goal, candidates required an exemplary guideline, thereby raising their confidence that they could recognize and then adapt appropriate pedagogies and
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 123 information with these resources. The Primer invites teacher candidates to connect an exemplar (the Primer) to an instructional problem—how to assess what is acceptable in resources and what is not—while utilizing specific key prompts to utilize evidence in each case. On this basis, teacher candidates were given the means to drive their own reflection about these resources (Ermeling, 2010). Through this culture of critique, teacher candidates sharpened their critical faculties in recognizing, adapting, revising and then emulating the development of outstanding instructional resources, working towards “detectable improvements in their practice” (Ermeling, 2010) to sustain these teacher candidates throughout their teaching careers.
By introducing candidates to the Primer, we hoped to support a culture of critique through three objectives. First, we aimed to activate the prior knowledge of candidates who have studied issues related to equity in their undergraduate courses. All of the teacher education candidates in our study entered an eight-month B.Ed. Program with a Bachelor’s Degree, with some having completed graduate studies. Given these prior learning experiences and the expertise of many candidates in their teachable subjects, we knew that a sizable number of them had background knowledge in equity-related issues such as gender, racializations (e.g. the way in which people are constructed in relation to their physical appearance, national origins and power differentials), sexual identity, or (dis)abilities. Based on our research and that of others, we also knew that candidates may not have seen their experience or knowledge as transferable to the learning demands and instructional challenges of global citizenship education (Dei, 2008; Ermeling, 2010).
Teacher education represents a formative stage in the candidates’ learning (Maclellan, 2012). To address the disconnection between candidates’ prior knowledge and their current ability to teach global citizenship education, and to drive candidates’ critical consideration of classroom materials, we developed a Primer with a question-based format. These questions were designed explicitly to address the level, age and learning style, pedagogic approaches and, in particular, equity-related issues to activate candidates’ prior knowledge by connecting theory to action. We also intended to probe candidates’ understanding of hidden assumptions, omissions and bias alongside the more favourable attributes of equity, multiple perspectives and representations of global interdependence within these teaching resources. For candidates who were unfamiliar with these concepts, we intended for the Primer to be a springboard for further independent inquiry (O’Sullivan & Pashby, 2008) and to improve their understanding of criteria for critiquing resources in advance of using them in the classroom (Ermeling, 2010).
Second, through the Primer we demonstrated ways for candidates to connect theory to practice in their work as teachers. The apparent reluctance of teacher candidates to embrace theory is well documented (Smith & Hodson, 2012; Pring, 2012; Knight, 2012; Ermeling, 2010), as teachers often view theory as separate and independent from practice and as irrelevant to successful practice. Hence, candidates often miss the theoretical underpinnings of resources and therefore, the opportunity to judge that particular
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 124 component of materials. Based on our commitment to infusing theory with action (praxis) in developing the Primer, we attempted to demonstrate how theoretical underpinnings (e.g. racializations and gender) could inform the practice of teachers (Ermeling, 2010; Korthagen, 2010).
In so doing, we take up the challenge as expressed by Hagger and McIntyre in their critique of “university-based teacher educators [who] have not shown themselves to be at all expert at [...] thinking concerned with questioning the practicality of apparently good theoretical ideas” (Hagger & McIntyre, 2006, p. 66). In designing our Primer, we framed the relationship between practice and theory as a model that supported teachers’ professional learning (Maclellan, 2012). We argue that this relationship is a bottom-up process that is grounded in the individual teacher candidate’s own learning style. Hence, we aimed to demystify discussions of theory generally by responding to Hagger and McIntyre’s initiative to make theories practically useful (2006).
Finally, we aimed to encourage subject-based educators to integrate a global citizenship perspective into their teaching styles and methods. Multiple studies have documented the difficulty that subject-based educators face when incorporating global citizenship education into their disciplinary curriculum (Campbell & Crowe, 2011; Horsely, Newell & Stubbs, 2005). Although some teacher candidates may see a role for theory, in general, disciplinary training shapes certain perceptions of how one integrates new materials and perspectives into such areas and levels (Smith, 2001). Not surprisingly, because of a lack of experience and materials to teach global citizenship, confidence is a factor for candidates to integrate global citizenship topics into the broader curriculum. In their study on teaching citizenship in science, for instance, Hayward and Jerome note how candidates were not familiar with using their own lives as a “starting and ending point and so did not feel at ease with changing the implicit rules governing discourse on the subject” (2010, p. 216). Thus, some teacher candidates are faced with the challenge of developing the confidence and skills to integrate global citizenship knowledge and pedagogy into a subject-based curriculum about which they are aware they know too little. The benefits of acquiring these skills, however, can prove worthy for instruction (Cole, Barwell, Cotton, Brown, 2013). Teacher candidates face a steep learning curve as they attempt to identify and define important and recursive instructional problems in teaching the curriculum. However, if we can aid them in incorporating global citizenship knowledge and perspective into their subject-based curricula by offering support to discriminate between appropriate and less appropriate resources during a formative stage of their professional career, we are providing opportunities to support learning as candidates construct teaching expertise while also promoting global citizenship education (Goodwin, 2010).
The Primer: Characteristics and Possibilities
The Primer originated as a checklist to assess the value of resources for any content or interest area. As such, the original version stressed the first two categories of age- and
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 125 learning-style appropriateness in the pedagogy employed in the resource. These two categories address the age range and learning styles of the curricular resources including the ratio of written to visual text, layout of student and teacher materials, balance of interactive and information strategies, and opportunities for communicating knowledge, values and research expectations. Issues relating to pedagogy were also addressed alongside alignment with the provincial Ministry Curriculum Guidelines, use of media and technology, integration of content and process and the use of interactive pedagogies recommended for particular stages of development. The reference points for the first iteration were Barbe, Swassing & Milone (1979), and Gardiner & Hatch (1989). With the clear need for pre-service candidates to critically assess global education resources, the Primer’s content underwent multiple levels of assessment towards its improvement. A major section on equity was added, drawing on the relevant literature in that emerging area (Cook & Riley, 1994; Stanley, 2011) as well as professional knowledge. Questions in this section directed candidates to find evidence of multi-perspectivity, gender biases, racializations, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, class and cultural representations such as religion, etc. We created the “equity” category to parallel the more conventional fields of level, age- and learning-style appropriateness, and to emphasize the central importance of equity concerns in any curricular resource used to teach global and citizenship topics.
All of the criteria suggested for pre-service candidates are expressed as questions. We chose this structure to invite novice teachers to approach all educational resources from a critical perspective. We aimed for the Primer to be used in two distinct ways: first, to suggest questions that pre-service candidates should address with resources they intended to adopt, and secondly, to critique the Primer itself. We wanted to hear from pre-service candidates about any areas of confusion or omission. How could the Primer become a more useful guideline for them?
We also designed the criteria to assess the value of the curriculum resources as applicable to other topics and resources, not just those used to teach global citizenship. However, we do contend that global citizenship education resources in particular, require an assessment tool to assess their effectiveness and appropriateness for candidates to choose among the welter of available resources, and to suitably reinforce their own limited knowledge. Once having struck the original list and revised it several times over, we solicited teacher candidates’ views on how they were utilizing the Primer as a means to obtain more information about how it could become even more useful (Primer: Appendix). The following section describes the methodology and addresses the process of analyzing the teacher candidates’ responses to utilizing the Primer.
Methodology
To use and critique the Primer with teacher education candidates and to determine how the Primer might be refined, we developed a three-pronged approach based on a mixed-method research paradigm (Cresswell, 2007; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2006). To
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 126 better understand the candidates’ reactions to utilizing the Primer and to collect their suggestions for improvement, we held a series of four 1-1/2-hour workshops with the teacher candidates: two workshops were coordinated with teacher candidates from the four divisions of Teacher Education: Primary (Kindergarten to Grade 3), Junior (Grades 4 to 6), Intermediate (Grades 7 to 10) and Senior (Grades 11 and 12); the third workshop was conducted with the Primary/Junior candidates; a final workshop involved only Junior /Intermediate candidates (Table 1). All of the workshops took place prior to the teacher candidates’ first practicum. The first two workshops with a total of 50 pre-service teachers were organized early in the teacher candidates’ program as part of the annual Fall Institute at the beginning of October. The Fall Institute involves about 300 teacher candidates who attend a series of workshops related to teaching from a global perspective over two days. Our session involved two researchers and was advertised as an opportunity to explore the pedagogy and resources related to teaching from a global citizenship perspective. As an expression of the interest in our topic, we had full registration for the workshop.
We offered three components for each of the workshops. In the first part we introduced the Primer to the teacher candidates, discussed the origin of the idea and explained the rationale for our choice of categories. During the second part we introduced three separate resources for the teacher candidates to evaluate using the Primer: a multi- media video presentation, a print module for an interactive activity and a mapping exercise with a particular focus on gender issues. The selection of activities ranged across the four grade divisions: primary, junior, intermediate and senior. The third stage of the workshop included a focus-group discussion and debriefing by the teacher candidates about their experience of using the Primer, to encourage them to critique the resources and the Primer. One of the researchers led the session and the second researcher transcribed the discussion. Following each workshop, the researchers met to discuss their findings and record their evaluation of the session.
Table 1 Participation at Workshops
Workshop Level of Participants Total Number of Attendees 1 Primary, Junior, Intermediate and Senior 50 2 Primary, Junior, Intermediate and Senior 50 3 Primary and Junior 40 4 Junior and Intermediate 40
By combining candidates from the four teaching divisions, we wanted to explore the pedagogical expectations and resource-based challenges of teaching global citizenship education and to determine how the candidates utilized the Primer to critique the resources. We aimed to alter the Primer in response to concerns or new ideas presented. Our research design aimed to chart the recursive instructional problems experienced by teacher candidates, have them connect these problems to theory, and encourage them to reflect on
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 127 how the resource (and the Primer) could be improved (Ermeling, 2010). Notably, all 100 of the candidates self-selected to attend the first two workshops, suggesting a high degree of motivation. By contrast, the third and fourth workshops were held during class time within the regular Curriculum Design course. The third and fourth workshops required 80 teacher candidates to participate in the discussion as a component of their course; thus, they may have had a more limited commitment to understanding global citizenship education and the Primer that we sought to introduce than those who self-selected to attend the first two workshops. Given that the third and fourth workshops took place in a Curriculum Design course, much of the discussion centered on the curricular advantages and challenges of using the Primer.
A second source of quantitative data emerged from the annual Fall Institute (Fall Institute Survey). Approximately 120 questionnaires were generated at this event (See Table 2). Based on their experience of attending workshops, listening to keynote speakers and watching films, candidates completed an online survey with questions related to integrating global citizenship education into the curriculum. To analyze the data, we tabulated the responses and drew upon Auerbach and Siverstein’s (2003) method of reviewing the relevant text and grouping it into categories of repeated ideas to create themes.
Table 2 Fall Institute – Return rate on questionnaires
Teacher Education Candidates Responses to survey Return rate (%) 300 120 40%
A third source of data was derived from the informal day-to-day conversations that the researchers had with teacher candidates following their first practicum experience. To understand the recursive instructional problems candidates faced and the varied uses to which the Primer was being applied (Ermeling, 2010), as well as changes that might be made to the Primer, the authors took note of the candidates’ comments regarding their use of the Primer in differing circumstances.
Discussion and Findings:
Candidates’ Expectations and challenges of global education, its resources and pedagogy
In addition to those challenges surveyed earlier in this paper, teacher candidates identified a range of expectations and challenges for teaching global citizenship education in relation to resources and pedagogy. When candidates were asked to identify and define important recursive instructional problems or barriers that might prevent them from teaching global citizenship-related topics, they responded that problematic subjects (e.g. religion or poverty) and issues regarding such topics as sexual orientation or parental
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 128 reactions to controversial topics were seen as the greatest barrier (37%), followed by problems with materials or resources, as in the case of NGOs and fundraising initiatives or credibility of information from organizations (22%). Of particular interest, knowledge- based issues outranked the teacher candidates’ concerns over difficult teaching strategies, the latter of which were identified by only 16% of the candidates (Fall Institute Survey, 2011). These results confirm our findings from previous research over the course of this project’s life of almost a decade.
We gained further insight into pedagogical challenges when we raised this topic as a point of discussion at the workshops. Concerns regarding the integration of global citizenship into the mainstream curriculum were addressed specifically by the candidates in all age divisions. Among candidates of younger children, a major problem was seen to be addressing the complexity of global issues while still respecting the needs of a young student population. Teacher candidates also raised the integration of theoretical frameworks such as racializations and feminist theories into an elementary-level curriculum that largely focuses on local, regional and national issues. Among those who taught older students in senior grades, the tight scheduling of curriculum in classes was considered to be a major impediment as candidates worried about insufficient time to teach mandated content. As well, candidates were concerned about how they would access related material to take up these issues within their subject area considering the limited time for each class, how long it would take to prepare lessons to develop such themes, which supplies would be needed and how accessible they were, and whether this approach could be adapted easily to the curriculum. Further, teacher candidates wanted to know how materials might allow for accommodation, modifications and extension activities for their students (see also Hayward & Jerome, 2010; Hicks & Holden, 2007). The role of global citizenship education within the prescribed curriculum was another concern, including how heavily weighted global issues are in the curriculum. Generally, teacher candidates wanted to know how a global citizenship perspective could be adapted to mainline subject disciplines (Goodwin, 2010).
As an expression of these concerns, teacher candidates overwhelmingly requested more online and print resources specific to grade level and subject disciplines. (Fall Institute, 2011; see also Horsely, Newell, Stubbs, 2005). There was also a general agreement among the candidates about the need to confirm the legitimacy of the resources through comments such as “is the resource just a message about money?” and “what is the validity of the sources that are produced by the NGOs?” These and other worries about the quantity, balance and appropriateness of curriculum resources to teach global citizenship effectively in the classroom acted as further prompts for the Primer and its criteria to discriminate among resources.
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Use of the Primer by teacher candidates and implications for professional practice
We discovered that teaching candidates mainly found the Primer to be useful in addressing their concerns although some candidates were clear that they were not prepared to use the Primer. Even these candidates, however, understood a culture of critique to be necessary in choosing appropriate resources or pedagogies for their pupils. Many candidates identified the value of using the Primer to assess the suitability of the many resources available to them and demonstrated their ability to use the Primer effectively. Moreover, candidates suggested additional opportunities for using the Primer to connect theory to action that were beyond our expectations. For example, one candidate recounted how she had used the Primer in a theory-based course to analyze articles for a paper she wrote. Another candidate reported using the Primer as a basis for his critique of general teaching resources during his practicum.
Some candidates took the approach of the Primer literally and followed the guidelines to the letter to work towards improving their teaching. Their reflections on using the Primer were practical, inferring that “here is a tool, and I will apply the categories to my evaluation of a resource.” Among these candidates, additional suggestions for revising the Primer tended to focus on other practical needs such as the cost of resources and how current the website is. Other candidates identified the broader implications of the Primer to further challenge assumptions, omissions and bias. For these candidates, questions emerged based on critical inquiry and a culture of critique. Among these candidates, questions were raised concerning “who produced the material,” “how are differing points of view represented,” and “how does a teacher reconcile the contradictory nature of some of the ideas in the resource, such as religion and views on sexual orientation” (See also Merryfield, 2010; Preece, 2002; Swee-Hin & Floresca-Cawagas, 2000; Abdi & Shultz, 2008). Still other candidates preferred to develop their own criteria to assess resources and pedagogies.
One of our intentions was for candidates to personalize the Primer by emphasizing certain components over others. With these responses it appears that candidates saw the possibly of developing resources and instructional problems in new directions as their instructional needs changed. When candidates recommended changes to improve the quality of a classroom resource produced originally by a NGO, we forwarded those recommendations to the sponsoring agency (See also Blee, Britton, David & Young, 2006). In this way, we sought to impress upon our candidates that generating good resources to support global citizenship education is a community endeavour, one to which they can contribute for the benefit of the students receiving these resources, and for the broader community that derives advantages from improved public education resources.
These examples and others indicated to us the utility of such a document for many of the pre-service candidates with whom we worked. We could see the impact of the Primer in promoting a culture of critique in teacher education and in suggesting a wide
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 130 applicability of guides of this kind in raising candidates’ confidence and skills to teach global citizenship through collaborative teacher inquiry (McNaughton, 2012; Maclellan, 2012). In so doing, these “important and recursive instructional problems” of finding appropriate resources for the teaching of global citizenship education, and for other academic tasks to which a culture of critique can be applied, have been addressed (Ermeling, 2010).
Conclusion
With this Primer we attempted to enhance teacher candidates’ learning by focusing on collaborative teacher inquiry to develop the confidence and skills to integrate a global citizenship perspective within interdisciplinary and subject-based curricula. By inviting candidates to engage in the dual purpose of critiquing resources and improving the overall design of the Primer guideline, they have engaged in both conceptual and practical learning. To the extent that we succeeded in engaging teacher candidates in the critical process of assessing classroom materials, we provided an opportunity for them to participate in knowledge and to construct curriculum in “liberatory and transformative ways....” (Banks, 2008, p. 323).
First, with regard to the culture of critique, the candidates clearly understood the necessity of critiquing resources; however, their approach to this level of critique varied by degree and depth of individual intentions. Some pre-service candidates chose not to use the Primer at all, but instead developed their own criteria. Second, on the utility of theory to inform practice, overall, candidates accepted the theoretical frameworks and recognized the practicality of theory for teaching complex topics. The third goal, however, of enlarging the candidates’ ability to integrate global citizenship education into their subject- based teaching garnered the least success in our study. Evidence of the range of concerns as expressed by the candidates in the workshops varied from how they would manage to include more information and resources into an already crowded schedule to wondering about the emphasis on global citizenship within the curriculum. Although we succeeded in achieving our first two aims, we were less successful in convincing candidates to focus on a global perspective within their subject-based discipline, primarily among secondary school candidates.
In sum, the Primer is an educational initiative designed to facilitate the teaching of global citizenship as an interdependent and multi-perspective enterprise. To remain current, the Primer is continually under revision and updated by the authors and the teacher candidates to reflect current trends in thinking about equity issues. With regard to assessing gender, for example, in the revised 2015 Primer, we explore gender and gender identity beyond a male/female, man/woman binary. Through our use of the Primer with teacher candidates, we have endeavoured to push the general field forward by operationalizing interdependence and multi-perspectivity using a variable set of resources, most of which have been assessed according to a Primer. Candidates evaluated the materials from a
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 131 number of perspectives to decide if a resource was appropriate for one group, but not another, if a component needed to be altered, or if the resource did not meet their curricular needs and therefore should be discarded. In so doing, we have evidence that teacher candidates have come to understand the construction of knowledge in new and exciting ways, and that their increasing desire to teach global citizenship themes through classroom-ready resources has been facilitated.
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Appendix
Assessing Classroom-Ready Curriculum Resources in Peace and Global Citizenship Education: A Primer
(Sharon A. Cook, Tracy Crowe & Lorna R. McLean, 2011)
Most curriculum resources for teaching peace and global educational topics have been developed by non-governmental organizations to profile issues of concern to that constituency and to aid teachers in their classroom presentations. Many are outstanding and can be used with almost no adaptation. Understandably, some others require changes to make them appropriate to level, learning style, community norms or pedagogical equity. The following questions are intended to help in assessing these learning materials.
1. Level, Age & Learning Style Appropriateness
* Does the resource clearly indicate the educational level (academic, applied, workplace- oriented, open, gifted, transitional) for which it is intended? What evidence demonstrates the appropriateness of the resource for this particular level? Consider the following: reading level conceptual development types and placement of supporting questions or other comprehension aids visual features, including explanatory illustrations. * Is the age range of the target audience identified? What evidence demonstrates the appropriateness of the resource for a given age? (See all features identified above.) Is there evidence in the resource, of features for students of differing ages (including older), working at various levels of learning, to attract interest and serious consideration? What is the approximate length of sample in-class activities? Do these match the recommended length for the level and age group?
* Is the presentation of the information developmental, so that new understandings are introduced at various stages of the curriculum?
* What is the relationship of written to visual text?
* What additional information do you need to provide for students to understand this resource?
* Are the stated outcomes, expectations, and formative and culminating tasks in line with the Ministry of Education Curriculum Guidelines in your region?
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* How are differing points of view reconciled in the resource?
2. Pedagogic Questions
* What additional research do you need to complete to be able to use this resource?
* Is any media or technology integrated into the resource? Is it appropriate for the age and level in terms of interest, cognition and developmental stages? Are there supportive questions to accompany the technological/media resources?
* Are assessment and evaluation items suggested for the resource? How do these suggestions fit with Curriculum documents in your region, stages of development, and outcome statements?
* Are the content and process components appropriately connected?
* Are any of the following strategies used, and if so, are they used appropriately (given the level, age and content)? role plays simulations cooperative learning community service document analysis decision-making. * Is there a reasonable balance of interactive strategies and information providing? (Assess the difficulty of the concept, for which information provision is usually required.)
* Is there an opportunity for students to communicate their knowledge or opinions on a topic in a variety of ways, utilizing for example, recognition of Gardners’ “Multiple Intelligences”?
* Are students invited to seek additional information from a variety of sources?
3. Equity Concerns: Gender, Racializations, Culture, Sexual Orientation, Dis/Ableness, Class, etc.
* In what ways do equity concerns intersect within the resource?
* How often are women’s/men’s or girls’/boys’ specific needs or interests noted in the resource? Choose a sample lesson and one representative desired outcome. Substitute the opposite gender and assess whether the item still makes logical sense. Should it make sense? To what degree does the discussion of gender within the resource encourage
JGCEE, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2016 • 140 sensitive classroom discussions about other instances where gender matters, such as politics, economy and health (HIV/AIDS)?
* How many of the suggested activities would interest girls as well as boys?
* Are boys and girls, men and women all represented visually and textually throughout the resources?
* Is the racialization of the group being examined identified? Is the racialization of the observer different from that of the observed?
* To what degree does the discussion of racializations within the resource encourage sensitive classroom discussions about other instances where racializations matter? Are issues of racializations integrated with discussions on gender, economy or politics?
* How are issues of culture covered in the material? Is there an attempt to explain culture without resorting to exoticism, stereotypes or invoking the bizarre?
* If religion is at the root of a culture’s identity, is there sufficient space devoted to defining religious principles and their relationship to culture?
* Does the material cover the economic, colonial or political basis of this culture?
* Are diverse family/living arrangements such as same sex partners, single parents or grandparents represented in the resource?
* Does the resource feature people with dis/abilities? Could you integrate questions of ableness with this resource?
* Within the resource, is there evidence of differing class-based families/communities?
Journal of Global Citizenship & Equity Education Volume 5 Number 1 - 2016 journals.sfu.ca/jgcee
Dissertation Abstract
Aeta Indigenous Women Healers in the Philippines: Lessons and Implications
Rose Ann Torres Degree: Ph.D. Institution: University of Toronto Year: 2012
Keywords: Aeta women healers, Aeta people, Indigenous knowledge production, talking circle, Indigenous healing, public health, anti-colonial theory, post-colonial theory, colonization, Indigenous feminism, decolonizing methodologies, participatory action research.
ABSTRACT: This study is aimed at providing historical evidence of the healing power of Aeta women healers in the Philippines and how they use their healing practices as a form of resistance against imperialism. The talking circle has been used as a methodological tool in this study. A talking circle is a qualitative narrative research methodology. Twelve Aeta women healers took part in this study. The study investigates two central research problems: What are the healing practices of Aeta women? What are the implications of the healing practices of Aeta women in the academic discourse? This inquiry is important for the following reasons: (a) it focuses a reconsidered gaze and empirical lens on the healing practices of Aeta women healers as well as the lessons, insights and perspectives which may have been previously missed; (b) the research attempts not to be 'neutral' but instead to be an exercise in participatory action research and as such, hopefully brings a new space of decolonization by documenting Aeta women healers’ contributions in the political and academic arena; and (c) it is an original contribution to postcolonial (Spivak 1996, Bhabha 1994, Young 2001), anti-colonial (Dei 2006, Fanon 1963, Memmi 1965, wa Thiongo 1986) and Indigenous feminist theories (Smith 1999, Green 2007), particularly through its demonstration of the utility of these theories in understanding the health of Indigenous peoples and global health.
This study is significant in grounding both the anti-colonial, post-colonial, and Indigenous feminist theories and the qualitative research methodology (Chilisa 2012, Chase 2003, Creswell 2013) while comparatively evaluating
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Western discourses calibrated against the benchmark of the actual narratives of Aeta women healers. The results of this study subsequently categorized my findings into three themes: namely, identity (Bhabha 1994, Dei 2007), agency (Smith 1999, Spivak 1996) and representation (Spivak 1996). This work is also important in illustrating the Indigenous communities’ commonalities on resistance, accommodation, evolution and devolution of social institutions and leadership (Dei 2006) through empirical example. The work also sheds light on how the members of our Circle and their communities’ experiences with outsider intrusion and imposed changes – intentionally structured to dominate them as Indigenous people – altered our participants and their communities. Though the reactions of the Aeta were and are unique in this adaptive process, they join a growing comparative scholarly discussion on how contexts for colonization were the same or different. This dissertation therefore joins a growing comparative educational literature on the contextual variations among global experiences with colonization. This is important since Indigenous Peoples' experiences are almost always portrayed as unique or “exotic.” I can now understand through comparison, that many of the processes – from military to pedagogical impositions – bore striking similarities across various colonial, geographical and cultural locations.
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Author Biography
Dr. Rose Ann Torres has a PhD in Sociology of Education and Women and Gender Studies at OISE/University of Toronto. She has been teaching in the Sociology Department at Ryerson University and Trent University, and in the department of Women and Gender Studies at Brock University. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of Community engaged research theory and methodology, Indigenous studies, inequities, critical anti-racism, gender variance, politics of resistance, inclusive education, post- colonial theory, anti-colonial theory, feminist theory, transnational studies, and sociology of knowledge. She is currently conducting community-engaged research on “The Diasporic Resiliency, Agency and Resistance of Filipino Women: Roles, Influences, and Experiences.”