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Our report on the day

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Here is my first attempt to sum up the day. For those that attended please feel free to add comments about what the key themes and discussions were for you.

Background

On the 27th March 2014, Oxford Brookes University hosted the HEA funded event on Global Citizenship as Embodied and Connective Practice in the Arts & Humanities. The event was a collaboration between Neil Currant, educational developer in the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Juliet Henderson, Senior Lecturer in Communication, Culture and Language and Diane Regisford, Artist and Social Sculptor. We came together because of our interest in social justice.

The aim of the workshop was to critically engage with issues of graduate global citizenship through innovative pedagogies. The emphasis was on participatory approaches to explore aspects of intercultural identity and the related social issues that students and educators grapple with in higher education.

We hoped that by the end of the workshop participants would be able to:

1) Outline the challenges of realising global citizenship in the curriculum.

2) Explore with colleagues the notion of what it is to be an active, engaged, responsible and ethical global citizen in the world within and beyond the university environment.

3) Apply a range of embodied and connective approaches to developing global citizen identity, deepening understanding of key social issues and engendering interculturalism in practice.

Pre-workshop

In the three weeks leading up to the event, the three facilitators shared our thoughts on:

  1. What does global citizenship mean to me?
  2. What is the global context of your teaching practice or your own learning setting? How is this expressed in practice?
  3. How do we bring the question of values into our arts and humanities teaching and learning practices?
  4. What skills, attitudes and values are necessary for cross-cultural capability and how can we or do we help students develop cross-cultural capability?

Dianne contributed through poetry, Juliet through prose and Neil by video to reflect our different but complementary styles. You can see these thoughts and much more or our workshop blog / microsite http://openbrookes.net/global

World Café

On the day, we started with a world café to set the scene and focus our thoughts on global citizenship.

As a teaching practice, the world café invites us to step outside the binary divides between formal and informal, public and private, emotional and rational, and academic and non-academic. It does this in order to generate fresh, interconnected perspectives on the challenges facing the world today and how to address these.

The practices of the world café are premised on democratic principles of dialogue and discussion. They also derive from ancient principles of hospitality and sharing in which difference, or the unknown stranger, is welcomed as a guest. By inviting the unknown into our circumscribed fields of understanding bottom-up ways of addressing the challenges facing our world today can be generated.

Discussions and sharing food at the World Café

In the world café activity, we are all both guests and host. As such, participants were invited to bring a small contribution of food or drink to share with others on your table whilst they worked to identify challenges and solutions.

This notion of guest and host through food formed a key element of the day. We wanted to illustrate it as a way of breaking down traditional power distance in teaching pedagogy and acknowledging the contribution that students bring to our classrooms.

In our wide-ranging discussions, we considered the barriers and challenges in developing students’ global citizenship. We felt that it required a certainly way of looking at the world and other people; empathy was a common thread. It moves beyond teaching knowledge or skills into developing behaviours and attitudes.

There was also discussion about scale, perspective and agency. The term global tends to direct our thinking to the large scale which makes it hard to grasp how, we as individuals, can make any difference. However, we felt that in reality it is about starting at the local; the small scale. At this level we can have personal agency and make a difference. As OXFAM urges us: we must learn, think and act.

pedagogies of connection flip chart Finally we discussed how we might then use and develop pedagogies of connection to model the very ideas we seek to nurture. It is simply not sufficient to develop global citizenship through didactic teaching. Some approaches we might use include:

  • Action Learning
  • Participant observation
  • Active listening
  • Learner developed curriculum

By the end of the World café the energy and ideas was flowing. It was time to take a step back and reflect.

Embodied practices – Global Walk & ONE BOWL

For the second part of the day the group split into two based on personal preferences to explore different concepts of connectivity and embodiment in the context of global citizenship. ONE BOWL is a shared experience which draws from within and the Global Walk a shared experience drawing from our surroundings.

ONE BOWL

ONE BOWL, Ubuntu: clay ready for the eventCreated and enacted by Social Sculptor, Dianne Regisford, ONE BOWL is a connective practice, critically engaging issues of urban resilience and sustainability related to Food Sovereignty.

ONE BOWL is inspired by contemporary West African traditions of communal eating traditions. The installation posits the South African IsiZulu, cultural meme of UBUNTU (without you, I do not exist) as a liminal pathway towards recognition, exploration and appreciation of the ‘other’. Offered as an invitation to a ‘sitting’, ONE BOWL is a journey of temporality through public to inner space, experienced through communal sharing of a meal and visceral engagement through clay.

Food Sovereignty is a global, people driven, social change movement seeking to build resilient, locally controlled food systems based on ecological and ethical means of production. Food Sovereignty is a critical, sustainability issue and the movement is gathering traction in political, economic and civic spaces across the globe.ONE BOWL starts, Dianne & Amanda holding hands

Global Walk

This was a guided, observational walk through our new social, teaching and library spaces exploring how people and places connect to create a sense of community and culture. More details here and some short videos discussing some of the concepts

Global Citizenship, graduate attributes & learning outcomes – Lessons from Brookes 

In this session, Neil presented the global citizenship part of the evaluation of Oxford Brooke’s move to graduate attributes in programme learning outcomes. The key headlines from this evaluation were:

  • ‘Global’ was more prevalent that ‘Citizenship’ in Learning Outcomes.
  • A sizable minority (23 from 90 programmes) of outcomes labelled global citizenship were not related to the university definition of Global Citizenship.
  • Global Citizenship Learning Outcomes tended to focus on knowledge, comprehension and application rather than on the higher levels of Bloom’s cognitive domain.

The presentation concluded by arguing that programmes, modules, staff and students need to contextualise the meaning of Global Citizenship for themselves, rather than relying on institutionally definitions, to truly embrace global citizenship as a graduate attribute.

Final Discussions

In the final discussions, there were many themes and key words / phrases that emerged, some of these included:

  • Action
  • Making it real
  • Compassion
  • Empathy
  • Criticality

Inner activation – Global Citizenship can not be taught

The first key theme that emerged was “can we teach global citizenship?” Is it not, in fact, about embodiment and inner activation?[insert ‘inner activation.jpg’ image alt text= ‘Inner activation – Global Citizenship can not be taught’]

The second key theme revolved around the inherent values implicit in Global Citizenship. Is it our responsibility to teach certain values or should we teach criticality so that students can judge values for themselves without privileging certain values over others?

There was robust debate but we came to no conclusion as a group which highlights again the need to contextualise global citizenship for ourselves and in our disciplines

A Call to Action

participants support, understand and nurture the idea of a Global PicnicAs action was such a fundamental part of our Global Citizenship discussions, it would have been remiss not to end with a call to action. Led by Dianne, participants were invited to sketch out ideas for collective action. All the participants were then invited to SUN – support, understand and nurture – those ideas and help them come to fruition.

Watch this space to see what bears fruit. The Global Picnic idea is well on the way to being organised as is the student-led Global Citizenship website.

Adieu

For us as facilitators, it was a really inspirational and thought-provoking day. We come away wiser and more humble and I think this view was shared by the participants.

“Thank you for your most interesting and thought provoking workshop last Thursday. I too was aware of an amazing energy and shared purpose, which I hope gets put to good use. I look forward to the fruition of the ideas for doing something together.” Jean Wykes, Student in Fine Art

I want to thank you so much for the day today, though I was only able to enjoy a brief and beautiful part of it. The discussions round the tables at the start were extremely stimulating structured around such important questions: and as a wonderful other form of discussion was the power of silence created by Dianne’s One Bowl. The holding of clay, washing of hands, sharing of lentils and dates, carving of clay, chanting of ubuntu, and absolute attention of Dianne’s welcome as each individual joined her, were remarkable experiences.  This is a ceremony that should start and end every week! It takes learning to a new depth. Thanks to you all for arranging such an unusual and unforgettable day” Jane Spiro, Reader in Education

Many thanks to the Higher Education Academy for supporting this event.

The future

We plan to continue our productive relationships forged between staff and students interested in global citizenship. We are particularly thankful for all the social sculpture students from the Social Sculpture Research Unit who attended the event. We plan to develop this workshop further through additional workshops and presentations for example we are hoping to present again at RAISE 2014 which would follow up to our social sculpture style presentation at RAISE 2013 on Dianne’s story: Student Engagement through Institutional Research.

Our next planned event is a Global Picnic to raise awareness of global citizenship. We will occupy space outside the main teaching building & library at Oxford Brookes University main campus, where we will discuss the issues of global citizenship. Maybe you would like to organise your own Global Picnic and your university and we can share stories and create a network across the UK.

So in summary, What does global citizenship mean in your teaching and learning context and how can you make it ‘real’ for students? Please feel free to comment below.


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