The Critical Global Educator

Global citizenship education as sustainable development

Maureen Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317499510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An acknowledged challenge for humanitarian democratic education is its perceived lack of philosophical and theoretical foundation, often resulting in peripheral academic status and reduced prestige. A rich philosophical and theoretical tradition does however exist. This book synthesises crucial concepts from Critical Realism, Critical Social Theory, Critical Discourse Studies, neuro-, psycho-, socio- and cognitive-linguistic research, to provide critical global educators with a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework for self- and negotiated evaluation.

Empirical research spanning six years, involving over 500 international teachers, teacher educators, NGO and DEC administrators and academics, traces the personal and professional development of the critical global educator. Analyses of surveys, focus groups and interviews reveal factors which determine development, translating personal transformative learning to professional transaction and transformational political efficacy. Eight recommendations call for urgent conceptual deconstruction, expansion and redefinition, mainstreaming Global Citizenship Education as Sustainable Development. In an increasingly heteroglossic world, this book argues for relevance, for Critical Discourse Studies, if educators mediating and modelling diverse emergent disciplines are to honestly and effectively engage a learner's consciousness.

The Critical Global Educator will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of citizenship, development, global education, sustainability, social justice, human rights and professional development.

1 Bible to bibliography Personal, professional and political efficacy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315713946-1

The first important task in studying the intellectual contribution of a writer is the reconstruction of the author’s biography, not only as regards his practical activity, but also and above all as regards his intellectual activity.

(Antonio Gramsci, 1971: 382–3)

This book is written from a Western stance, yet heavily imbued with a global life and learning. My husband’s career and, since his retirement, further teacher-training and consultancy assignments for British universities, publishers and English language teaching organisations have meant diverse, complex influences in a myriad of countries. This autobiographical chapter traces my journey from personal subjectivity to professional identity and a growing awareness of political efficacy as a critical global citizen. It demonstrates a discursive psychology that, while it deepens insights into conventional language use, seeks to integrate intellectual and practical activity. Treating thought as internal dialogue (Bakhtin, 1991), discursive psychology explores abduction and retroduction, inference, metaphor, and metaphysics as meta-real identity. Discourse – language-as-social-practice, language-in-action – expands language to encompass dialectics, semantics, pragmatics and semiotics (the science of signs). Formed, negotiated and shaped in social interaction, discourse affords access to human consciousness, as citizens who ‘make sense’ simultaneously make ‘self’. Communication as inconspicuous construction of social reality, implicit ontology, exposes ‘the role of language in constituting the institutional fact’ (Searle, 1995: 120), processes generally airbrushed from reckonings.

In attempting to walk the fine line between introspective indulgence and an epistemic contribution, I have used four main theoretical frames to acknowledge ‘voices’ and ‘texts’ that have allowed me to theorise passion, synthesising and lending coherence to my developing conceptualisation of critical global educators. The chapter concludes with a rationale.

A Bourdieusian habitus

One Christmas Eve, watching urban youths dancing with the local women in a rural restaurant while peasant eldest sons looked on, Bourdieu felt a rush of sympathy for his bachelor contemporaries and a sense of pathos. Jenkins (2006: 48) explains a long tradition in French sociology that, ‘sees the family as a key to the ordering of other social institutions’, where ‘the sociology of the family … could only be a particular instance of political sociology’ (Bourdieu, in Jenkins, 2006: 52). A study of human consciousness needs to trace primary perception, persuasive frames and imagery that founds icons and founts imagination, to track law buried in lore.

Bourdieu’s ethnographic Béarnais fieldwork, linking his biography to his theory of reflexive sociology (Jenkins, 2006), constituted cultural politics. As the eldest child and only daughter, conscious of duties, obligations and cultural heritage, I feel an affinity with Bourdieu, appreciating his concept of habitus, Aristotle’s hexis, as a durable system of dispositions cultivated by material conditions of existence and family education (Bourdieu 1998: 171). In a privileged, upper-middle-class Anglo-Indian family, four younger brothers and I for too long took for granted the enduring linguistic and sociocultural dispositions of a colonial society. The guilt of unearned status still personalises for me Paolo Freire’s insistence (1998) that transformative development requires conscientisation of unwitting oppressors.

My father’s whole-hearted commitment to the Anglo-Indian community offered a civic republican vision of citizenship, supported by my mother’s more laissez-faire liberal individual model. While he spent most evenings on school and community boards performing vital educational and social services, my young mother read Western philosophers who later led her to challenge the Anglican routines so foundational to our family life. My father’s aspiration that I should one day be headmistress of Kimmins, an elite boarding school run by British Bible Medical Mission Fellowship missionaries, at a hill-station about 80 miles from Bombay, was a decisive early influence in my life.

Kimmins offered an uncompromisingly exclusive education along British public-school lines, with a strong religious component and deep moral principles designed to create responsible, ‘disciplined’ subjectivities, so that, years later, reading Foucault was like hearing someone tell my story. An idealistic community, positivist faith, head-girl status, language proficiency, a distinct edge in literature and aesthetic appreciation inculcated a trust in language, but also an inability, for many years, to see Derrida’s ‘impurity in language’, to move from regimes of truth to games of truth. Foucault’s distinctions of Greek parrhesia, truth, self-knowing, self-care versus telling, establishing, problematise for me Christ’s master–slave relationship with his disciples and help explain Freire’s demand for teacher/taught dialectics beyond dialogicity.

In the last decade of his life, compiling three articles with an introduction, Bourdieu reflected on ‘the place of biography in the reception and generation of social experience’ (Jenkins, 2006: 45). In the corpus, Bourdieu linked personal knowledge to anthropological method, avoiding both subjective intuition and objective determinism and affirming the primacy of meaning. He acknowledged his use of various techniques to neutralise the personal emotion at the root of his interest into an objectivised account. Jenkins believes that ‘the link between biography and theory’ in the Béarnais corpus provides ‘a vindication of the ethnographic method’. Jenkins asserts that, although:

other social sciences are constructed through an ignoring of the everyday in the name of a move to abstraction that is supposed to constitute the ‘scientific’ approach, in fact, by this act of repression, they are incapable of achieving their objective.

(p. 47)

‘Bourdieu emphasizes the significance of generating sociological concepts from indigenous practices’, employing local materials to think ‘in a dialectic with formal sociological concerns’ (p. 60).

Bourdieu’s intellectual synopsis bridges a journey from the local to the cosmopolitan, from patois to French and from traditional to modern perspectives. This dialectic, exposing the layered anthropological mode of understanding on which the sociological is founded and linking Hindi agni (fire) to Promethean fire, ignited and aligned insights that have been significant in my understanding of myself as a glocally constructed educator. As a teacher, encouraging students to ‘uncover’ the biographies of their ‘saints’, I noticed ‘theory’ increasingly assume weight in my research. On the task of the sociologist striving to transform social conditions, to ‘convert self-therapy into tools that may be of use to others’ (Jenkins, 2006: 67), Bourdieu says that reflexive sociology will never be free of all unconscious elements, but, when successful, will be free of ‘ressentiment’ and will be generous, in the sense of giving freedom.

Mezirowan/O'Sullivan transformative learning

Using the notion of ‘frames’, Mezirow treats the construction of meaning as key to understanding adult education and workplace learning. Norms, perspectives and lenses operate as perceptual and interpretive codes, framing participants and processes involved in the various genres of our daily activities. Emigration to Australia soon after the completion of a Masters in English and Aesthetics, teaching English at a secondary school along the west coast and, later, marriage to a member of the British Diplomatic Service dramatically challenged my sociological, psychological and epistemic frames. Schemata, cognitive structures (Mezirow and Taylor, 2009) or ‘frames of reference’ embed Vygotskyan (1978) constructivism. Social, religious or aesthetic assumptions, psychological scripts, each entail cognitive, affective and conative dimensions. Habitus, impregnating habits, expectations and attitudes filter sense perceptions, constructing positive or negative meanings and governing cognition and memory. Learners challenged by disorienting dilemmas or conflicting frames can solve problems by self-examination, critically assessing whether schema, authority figure, anxiety, emotion, habit, self-image or the frame itself has become obsolete, then exploring new relationships, roles and action.

At a university in South America, a couple of years teaching North Korean communist diplomats and BEd students provided contradictory risks and rewards. Professional commitments, educational purposes, curriculum and assessment conflicted variously with diplomatic status, national identities and party politics. Disjunctures of policy, administrative malpractices, blatant injustices and official constraints on personal expression provided salutary cognitive dissonance. Mezirow and Taylor (2009) demonstrate how critically reflective rational discourse can enable adults to reconcile and transform painful experiences, taking responsibility for more inclusive, differentiated, permeable and integrated perspectives.

Along the Essequibo River with a circuit judge, and years later in a law court in Kenya, I began to appreciate the significant consequences of post-colonial linguistic policy, watching peasants and advocates struggle through formidable procedures and necessary translations to secure legal rights. Rapacious biopiracy, indigenous knowledge exploited without permission or compensation and local populations constrained to buy back seeds and medicines from pharmaceutical giants, compounded by poor linguistic and literacy skills resulting from being taught in a foreign language, became apparent. Back in London, discussions with authorities, senior administrators and English language teaching (ELT) authors who resisted linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992) made me question why complexities of language policy, linguistic rights and ‘linguicide’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2012) had never entered my education as a language ‘specialist’, not even in a London University Masters in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

Teaching English for Academic and Specific Purposes, such as International Relations, Business, Science, Law and Medicine, at King’s College London and SOAS raised my awareness of Wittgenstein’s (1953) disciplinary ‘grammars’ and ‘vocabularies’. Applied linguistics apparently diluted Habermas’s (1984: 25) potential ethical, cross-cultural ‘ideal speech situation’. Answers to problems of pollution and conservation, at that time in the forefront, seemed to lie disconcertingly in complex, interdisciplinary, political economics and geopolitical and cultural-economics interstices. Comparative linguistics, highlighting translations that prioritise noun clauses over transitivity; languages without future tense, articles, gender distinctions or neuter forms; syntactic contradictions of ‘the only son’ as against ‘only the son’, ‘just a man’ distinct from ‘a just man’, all prompted more realistic critical analysis of Foucault’s (1972) regimes of truth.

Jordan’s phenomenal biblical beauty revitalised glimpses of Teilhard de Chardin’s (1965) noumenal Mass on the World, his religious anthropalaeontology. Fundamentally uniting reflection, invention and soul, Teilhard’s evolutionary ‘noosphere’ has more recently been related to the Internet, blending time, space and mankind’s material, organic and psychic strands with the cosmos. Serene nights in the desert, on rare camping trips with Bedouin hosts, seeded a post-cosmopolitan vision. Writing teachers’ textbooks for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation Al Quds University, my perception of literal versus liberal education was contested by fundamentalist (a)versions. Habermas’s (1984: 17) reflexive, communicative rationality, open to dialogue and argument, portrayed the communication process as ‘oriented to achieving, sustaining and reviewing consensus – and indeed a consensus that rests on the intersubjective recognition of criticisable validity claims’. Professional silences, incongruences of abstinence and excess, opulence versus basic survival, and dangerous abstraction or sociopolitical expedience hollowed the professed communicative approach.

Teacher-training assignments in Russia and several Eastern European countries, around Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’, provided first-hand experience of fear, suspicion and manipulative ‘language games’, as teachers, warning of naïve references open to misinterpretation and pointing out Party ‘informants’, risked their own and their children’s careers to take me to church. Professionals who understood power in terms of material resources, social practices, funding and privilege were better equipped to determine where to align their own powers and allegiances. Training assignments alongside experts from other Western nations highlighted different contractual arrangements, alternative systems for dividing cost and labour, distinctly different sociocultural and academic values and multilayered deferential outcomes of what I later understood as cultural imperialism. Attempted negotiations with powerful British ELT examination bodies, on behalf of emerging East European democracies, to lower costs and ameliorate structural arrangements around highly marketable certification met total resistance.

O’Sullivan’s (1999) transformative learning added a much-needed spiritual dimension to Mezirow’s sharp focus on the cognitive, extending my interpretation of ‘rationality’ and reinstating intuition, imagination and empathy. Tracing the loss of awe, O’Sullivan calls for a five-point shift in consciousness, which includes planetary consciousness responding to the cosmos and biosphe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Bible to bibliography Personal, professional and political efficacy
• 2 Globalisation Sustainable global citizenship
• 3 Philosophy transcends mediated modes
• 4 Personal search, public research
• 5 Policy, politics, glocal integrity
• 6 Conviction, verification, in-forming CHAT
• 7 Dreams, drama, performative dharma
• Appendix 1: Initiatives and publications related to GCESD
• Appendix 2: Discourse for deliberative democracy: Unlocking cryptogrammar
• Appendix 3: Halliday: Systemic functional linguistics
• Appendix 4: Outline of research design: 2007–13
• Appendix 5: ITE questionnaire: Becoming a Critical Global Educator
• Appendix 6: Preliminary PGCE survey, practitioner focus groups and interviews
• Appendix 7: Practitioner questionnaire: Professional development of the Critical Global Educator
• Appendix 8: Familiarisation notes
• Index