Facilitator's Manual: Collaborative Intercultural Encounters in ECLS

This set of resources have been designed to promote critical thinking and dialogue among undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Education Communication and Language Sciences (ECLS), Newcastle University, UK.

Some of the activities loosely follow the ‘world café’ method originally developed by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs in 1995. There are nine topics covered in this manual. Most of these topics were suggested by a group of ECLS students during the pilot stage of the project. The purpose of the sessions is to encourage dialogue and the collective construction of knowledge.

There are different approaches to global education. On the ‘soft’ side of the spectrum, global education is about getting people from different countries and cultures together, so they can understand each other’s values and perspectives. Many global education initiatives, especially in the Global North, are based on the assumption that all it takes to build a harmonious and flourishing society is for people to respect their cultural differences and appreciate their common humanity.

However, there is another way of thinking about global education, one that takes into account histories of oppression, colonisation, exploitation, violence and discrimination. In the UK, this approach has been around since the 1970s, and it owes a great deal to the work of radical educators such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks. Critical and participatory pedagogies are central to this type of global education which, not surprisingly, has attracted the criticism and opposition of conservative and right-wing sectors of society.

So, what does global education look like in the 21st century? It is fair to say that current debates about the decolonisation of the curriculum, coupled with social movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter, have made clear the need for a more critical approach to global education. In other words, getting to know other cultures and peoples from around the world is not enough, it is important to create spaces for deep conversations that unsettle our privileged positions and question systems of oppression locally and globally. More importantly, global education today is, perhaps more than ever, about fostering individual and collective action.

This resource is informed by this current scenario, while also reflecting the academic interests of the authors. Postcolonial theory, feminist theory, decolonial thinking and critical race theory are among the conceptual frameworks underpinning the design of the sessions and their pedagogical focus. For those studying education, either at undergraduate or postgraduate level, the resource is in itself an invitation to think about the role of education in an increasingly complex world that requires creative minds and socially-committed hearts.