going global 2016: leading change institute
TRANSCRIPT
Perspective taking strategies
Ethics, values, and purposes of global
citizenship - Think with, against, & apart
from systems, structures, and institutions
An appreciative inquiry
What if…
Instituions of higher education were to
take an activist role in cultivating
capacities of global citizenship
perspective taking?
Asking different questions…
“I think that we should ask the question about poverty
differently, precisely because changing the questions
challenges our perceptions of the problem. That is
important because our perceptions are often part of the
problem: we disable/pacify people we think are helpless
victims of poverty, but by focusing on these people, we
let wealthier people off the hook, because they do not
feature as part of the problem's definition or solution…”
• South Africa - a post colonial, post apartheid
context
• Must create the conditions to “ask different
questions” to see the world in new ways
Reflections from the global North
…one of the most important lessons I’ve learned this quarter: just because you want to help, doesn’t mean you can or should…’
In the words of Adichie, “stories matter…[S]tories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity…
(Quote from a 2014 student on Stanford University’s Cape Town study abroad program)
As educators and policy makers, what are the
learning & teaching spaces we are trying to
create? What role might international service
learning play in asking different types of questions?
What might ‘de-colonisation’ mean for
institutions of higher education? For
international service learning?
When can an anti-oppression inquiry stance
reshape our epistemological and ontological
assumptions?
How is global citizenship understood from
multiple perspectives?
And social justice…? (where does social justice
work occur in higher education?)