In response to a growing awareness surrounding issues of power dynamics in cross-cultural exchanges, many universities in the Global North (GN) have integrated some level of culturally responsive training into their curriculum aimed at helping their students recognize their place of privilege and developing tools to help them reshape and transform existing power dynamics with their peers in the Global South (GS).
However, this approach still falls short. The long-standing effects of power imbalances between nations don’t necessarily disappear when only those coming from the historical position of power (i.e., GN) practice cultural humility and stepping back. Educators must also invest an equal amount of time considering how to prepare and position those from the historical place of oppression (i.e., GS) to engage effectively and contribute to transforming these relationships.
To do this, global citizenship education (GCE) frameworks cannot be designed as a standardized set of paradigms applied to all contexts (Bosio, 2023). Unfortunately, at this time much of the literature and research surrounding GCE comes from the Anglo-Saxon/Western domain with some arguing that many of the current GCE frameworks are somewhat conflicting and not applicable or even desirable in the GS contexts (Schultz, 2007; Jooste & Heleta, 2017; Bosio, 2023).
How each country and culture experience and respond to the forces of globalization has a direct impact on how they will ultimately define GCE and the goals that are relevant to them (Akkari & Maleq, 2020). While many GN GCE programs often have frameworks that focus on cultural humility, personal reflection, economic gain, professional development, and/or compassion (De Andreotti, 2014, Deveruex & Glenn 2022, Jooste & Heleta, 2017), perspectives from educators in the GS indicate that for them and their students the key objective of GCE is instead focused on empowerment and fostering “emancipated global citizens” through a critical pedagogy rooted in social justice (Bosio, 2023).
The remainder of this article seeks to provide practical tools that educators in the Global South can utilize in their GCE efforts towards empowerment (Bosio & Waghid, 2022). These recommendations draw on the author’s seven years of experience as an American educator at a West African university that routinely organized virtual and in-person exchanges with US-based institutions (Devereux & Glenn, 2022). The practical recommendations are framed within three key objectives of GCE that were identified by educators in the GS from a recent study that analyzed GS educators’ perspective of the unique role and goals of GCE in the GS (Bosio, 2023).
1) Promote Reflective Dialogue
- Socratic Seminars - teach students how to dialogue and allow students to articulate and consider various points of view and systematically question key issues related to a particular topic.
- Participatory Evaluation Surveys- allow students to provide real-time feedback on the course and whether it was helping to meet their educational, personal, and professional goals.
- Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale- can be used as a tool to help students identify and repair in real-time any detrimental power imbalances between themselves and create new group identities and systems for collaborative work (Clayton et al., 2010).
2) Empower Students to be Agents of Social Change
- Flipped Classroom Model - can be used to demonstrate empowerment and democracy within the classroom setting as power was purposefully shifted away from the teachers and to the students.
- Project-Based Learning - allows discussions to go beyond the classroom and into the community allowing students to develop original solutions and apply what they were discussing to causes that they cared deeply about.
- Case Studies - can help demonstrate how young people across the world have served as agents of change within their own communities.
3) Foster Critical Awareness
- Inquiry-Based Learning - allows students to investigate case studies or situations within their own community to analyze the “why” behind those conditions and situations.
- Critical Self-Analysis - encourages students to examine elements within their own social, economic, political, historical, and cultural context that may influence their beliefs and values and therefore interactions.
- Decolonization Pedagogy - this framework encourages students to challenge Western-centric ideologies and knowledge that influence the world around them (Bosio & Waghid, 2022; Devereux & Glenn, 2022).
As educators in the GS initiate and engage their students in cross-cultural exchanges with institutions from the GN, they must continue to create and share activities and techniques that are appropriate and applicable to the unique and diverse cultural contexts in which they teach in order to encourage the development of empowered global citizens from the GS that will have the confidence, capacity, and desire to take action to address and transform instances of inequality and injustice for themselves and others throughout the world.
References
Akkari, A., & Maleq, K. (2020). Global citizenship education: Critical and international perspectives
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Bosio, E., & Waghid, Y. (2022).
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