The Challenge of the

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The Challenge of the Global Dimension for
Higher Education

• Doug Bourn, Director
• Development Education Association

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Challenges of 2005

• Where has education been?
• Government responses
• Development education and DEA members
• Role of universities
• Examples of where changes are needed
• Promoting debate
• Critical reflection on role and purpose of
  education

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Where has education been?

• Tsunami
• Commission for Africa
• Make Poverty History / G8 / Climate Change
• Terrorism in London
• Denial of civil liberties
• Hurricane Katrina

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• Launch of the UN Decade on Education for
  Sustainable Development
• European Year of Citizenship

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Educations Response

• Conflicting information regarding causes of
  Tsunami
• BBC Africa season attempted to address
  stereotypes but did it succeed?
• Make Poverty History campaign reduced issues to
  simplistic messages
• G8 and Global Citizenship
• Have people a grater understanding of causes of
  climate change
• Mixing causes of terrorism with the war,
  xenophobia and racism

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• Education has not yet equipped people with the
  knowledge, skills and values to be able to
  respond and understand and critically assess for
  themselves what all these events and hopes mean.

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Governments Response to Changing Events

• Sustainable Development Action Plan
• Higher Education Funding Council for England
  Strategy for Sustainable Development
• Putting the World into World Class Education
  International Strategy
• Learning and Skills for a Global Economy

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Critique of Government statements

• Understanding sustainable development is more
  than changing behaviour and environmental
  management indicators.
• Minimal references to social justice and needs of
  wider world.
• International strategy emphasises student
  mobility, skills for ICT and languages and
  standards but says little about mutual learning,
  interdependence and impact of globalisation.

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Role of Development Education

• A common definition of development education is
• Enabling people to understand the links between
  their own lives and those of people through out
  the world
• Increasing understanding of the global economic,
  social, political and environmental forces which
  shape our lives
• Developing the skills, attitudes and values which
  enable people to work together to bring about
  change and to take control of their own lives
• Working to achieve a more just and sustainable
  world in which power and resources are equitably
  shared.
• (DEA)

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DEA members responses engaged in higher education
work have included

• New undergraduate and post graduate courses on
  Global ethics at Leeds Metropolitan University.
• Global Health Network coordinated by Skillshare
  International.
• Student led initiatives by People and Planet and
  Development in Action.
• Seminars and publications on role of media and
  public communications on public understanding of
  development.
• Range of initiatives at Bournemouth University.
• Proposal for a Research Centre on Development
  Education at Institute of Education.

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• Value of partnership initiatives with NGOs and
  engaging civil society.
• Maximising resources that exist and providing
  space for students to take their enthusiasms and
  interests further in the local community.
• DEAs Graduates as Global citizens conference and
  follow up publications.

www.dea.org.uk/downloads/ h_dea-grads-as-global-ci
ts.pdf
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Fair Trade

• Fair trade would not be trade if its is just
  campaigning.
• Complexity of the debate
• Economic dimension
• Creative dimension
• Charity dimension
• Trade dimension
• Political dimension
• Learning is individually and situationally
  different and cannot be determined. More
  different the learning activities are - the more
  individuals get the opportunity to learn
  something.
• (Asbrand 2004 DE Journal 11.1 pp 15-17)

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Learning and Education for Sustainable Development

• Education for sustainability is to a greater
  extent a concept that stems from an expression of
  (international) political will. It could be
  understood as a kind of mission from the
  political arena, given to education professionals
  and academics, to design an educational concept
  that correctly deals with the necessary
  requirements for sustainable development in our
  world.
• (Rost 2004 DE Journal vol 11.1 pp 6-8 )

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• Sustainable development cannot possibly mean an
  end state to be achieved because there are no
  end states. If sustainable development means
  anything it can only be a way of describing an
  adaptive approach to managing human-environment
  co-evolution.

(W Scott S Gough 2003 Sustainable Development
and Learning)
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• Global education provides knowledge about the
  global world society, but they also need to know
  how to deal with contradictions and complexity
  and the skills to translate this thinking into
  concrete action.

(Scheunpflug 2003 Evaluation, Quality Learning
in Global Education)
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• We ourselves argue that the challenge for
  learning in relation to sustainable development
  is to confront learners with competing accounts
  of human and environmental reality wherever
  complexity and uncertainty mean that it is
  possible for competing rationalities to yield
  competing versions of the truth
• This, we suggest, radically revises our view
  of learning from a process which acts on
  individuals characteristics in order to change
  the world
• to one which challenges individuals views of
  the world as a means of influencing their
  characteristics and hence ways of thinking and
  living.

(W Scott S Gough 2003 Sustainable
Development and Learning)
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Approaches to Learning

• Learning is generally been understood to be the
  process through which individuals go in acquiring
  their knowledge, skills, attitudes, values,
  beliefs, emotions, senses.
• Human learning occurs when individuals are
  consciously aware of a situation and respond, or
  try to respond, meaningfully to what they
  experience and then seek to reproduce or
  transform it and integrate the outcome into their
  own biographies. In this instance, biography is
  the totality of our experience, which is an
  integrated

(Jarvis 2003 Theory and Practice of Learning)
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• Learning is a process of active engagement with
  experience. It is what people do to make sense of
  the world. It may involve an increase in skills,
  knowledge or understanding, a deepening of values
  or the capacity to reflect. Effective learning
  needs to change, development and a desire to
  learn more.
• (Campaign for Learning 1998)

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Learning for a Global Society

• Beck has suggested the need to address the
  rapidly changing society, the need for learning
  to be not about facts and knowledge but
  seeing to understand and be critically aware
  of the things to be studied. This he suggest is
  so central to learning within a global society.

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Conclusion

• NGOs and government have led debates about
  understanding the world and sustainable
  development.
• Whilst this had led to some creative practices
  and political debates, the learning process has
  not been at the heart of the discussions.
• Education for sustainable development and
  learning to understand our global society has to
  be part of university life, course development
  and ethos.
• Otherwise we will be short changing our students
  and the needs of societies and economies in the
  future.

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• However it needs to be developed in a form that
  is built into debates about processes of learning
  and students engagement.
• Not as another initiative on the margins of
  university that is well meaning and makes us feel
  good but do not challenge the students and our
  perceptions and understanding of the world in
  which we live.

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Further information

• Email doug.bourn_at_dea.org.uk
• Website www.dea.org.uk/higher