Learning Democracy and Sustainability by Doing: Lessons from a Six Country Course Development Collaboration

University of Alberta

CANADA

Global

http://www.ualberta.ca/

Contact Information

David Kahane

observatory@guni-rmies.net

Summary

We will share learning from a two-year course dialogical process of curriculum design between teachers and trainers from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the UK. We designed university-based courses as well as trainings for public officials on innovative and sustainable forms of citizen participation in the global south. All of us had participated in an eight year comparative research project around citizen participation and development; now we wanted not only to teach the outcomes of this research in our very diverse contexts but to embody its lessons in how we related to one another in our collaboration, and how we created spaces for democratic participation in teaching and learning. We will share lessons about nuances of power, inclusion, and leadership in our collaboration, about obstacles to democratizing teaching and learning in our diverse contexts, and about strategies for supporting one another in this crucial work.

Description

This project grew out of the Development Research Center on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability (DRC), a 14-country research collaboration (now in its tenth and final year) that has explored the dynamics of citizen participation and political change in the global south. The project has been innovative not only in the political and community engagement of its research and its methodological creativity, but in the reflexivity of the large research team about power and inclusion in its own process. The research has yielded deep learning about citizen mobilization and political inclusion in southern contexts, including about the challenges of building sustainable and authentic forms of citizen and civil society involvement in political structures. In the final two years of the DRC (our funding from the UK Department for International Development will end in 2010), we have looked at how to share our research with civil society, government, and development communities across our contexts, and one stream of this work was through university courses and trainings for officials. A ‘Teaching and Learning’ (T&L) group was formed, and our Good Practice emerges from our experiments in pursuing this T&L work -- at face to face meetings in India, South Africa, and the UK, through online collaboration, and in a back and forth between work in our own institutional contexts, classrooms, and contexts of training; and the peer support and cross-context learning that we did together.

Purpose and specific objectives

Authentic, sustainable, and transformative teaching about democratic participation requires that participants explore identity, power, and inclusion in the learning space itself. Yet this democratization of learning spaces presents deep contextual challenges -- for example, embedded cultures of teaching authority in Bangladesh, overcrowded and under-resourced classrooms in South Africa, and patterns of student deference in Canada. Moreover, we as teachers need to learn to distinguish between institutional constraints that bind us, ones we can get around, and internal colonization that we can resist. Our project aimed at supporting transformative learning by teachers and students by building democratic reflexivity into these relationships.

Main activities

Only some of the courses developed through our collaboration focused on issues of environmental sustainability however, all of them involved questions of power, inclusion, and collaborative decision making central to both social and environmental sustainability. As we came together to support one another in designing and teaching courses, we grappled with how to talk across profound differences in political and institutional contexts, cultures of teaching and learning, and disciplinary location. Insofar as we thought about our teaching challenges in didactic terms--transmitting what we knew about citizen participation to an audience of learners--these differences were a difficult obstacle to our collaboration. Our collaboration underwent a profound shift, however, when we began to talk about how learning about socially sustainable democracy might require reflecting on the democratic features of the scene of learning itself--and to realize that this challenge of reflexivity was also present for the process of our collaboration. Our learning within the project traversed the following themes and areas:

Moving from a focus on transmitting content to embodying content in how we teach and learn.
Recognizing that the dialogical process of designing courses and curricula mirrors many of the tensions and democratic challenges that we face in our classrooms and training contexts. Through our collaboration we saw that we must support our students in reflecting on HOW they learn since this contains many of the dynamics of WHAT we want them to learn about collaboration, democracy, and sustainability. But we also applied this to ourselves. Our own identities, placement in power relations, epistemic standpoints, and forms of citizenship play out in how we teach, and how we engage in our teaching collaboration.
Treating difference as a resource for learning, not an obstacle to be overcome. Our deepest learning came from exploring profound differences in our disciplinary, cultural, social, and institutional contexts. As we developed a comparative sensibility about our teaching, it destabilized our taken for granteds about favored pedagogies, how to relate theory to practice, and risk-taking as teachers.
Complicating our sense of ‘external’ constraints vs. limits that we place on ourselves. As the description of GUNI thematic lines notes, “The educational challenge of this process is vast since it implies a lifelong learning framework whose major aim lies in transforming at the same time our inner world and our way to deal with others.” This is a key insight when it comes to how we create spaces of transformation within our own educational institutions. In out teaching contexts we faced some immovable institutional constraints, found strategies to open up new teaching possibilities within certain other constraints, and recognized forms of self-constraint (in our assumptions, our habits, and our willingness to take risks).
All of this learning took place in a back and forth between face to face international meetings (which were costly and had large environmental footprints), and distance collaboration using a variety of technologies. Thinking about the nuances of combining these modes also applied to our own classrooms and training contexts.

Results

The international T&L collaboration has shaped courses and trainings delivered in Brazil, Canada, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the UK, with other teaching under development in Angola and Bangladesh -- all of these involving democracy and social sustainability, and some addressing environmental sustainability and issues of climate change. The project has reshaped initiatives within our institutions -- for example, building participatory democratic methods into sustainability initiatives at the University of Alberta in western Canada, creating new supports for participatory teaching methods at the University of the Western Cape, and creating
new curriculum at BRAC University in Bangladesh. The project has led to ongoing north-south and south-south collaborations -- formal institutional linkages; a meeting of ‘pioneers of participation’ from across southern Africa; connections between students in different contexts; and shared teaching materials, modules, and methods. We currently are developing written and video products about our collaboration and learning through teaching, to be shared with international and local
audiences.

Innovative aspects

Course content: Building courses on sustainable democracy and citizen participation centered on comparative case studies and theorizing from across the global south. Teaching method: Bringing innovative forms of student participation, reflexivity about power dynamics in teaching and learning, assignment and evaluation structures, and connections to contexts outside the classroom into courses in six countries. Dialogical curriculum development and peer support: Our focus in the presentation will be on how attention to the democratic dynamics of our own collaboration not only led to richer learning, but reshaped our sense of possibilities in our institutions, classrooms, and trainings for officials.

Start date, estimated duration and current status

12/01/2008; active