Engaging Dissonance: Developing Mindful Global Citizenship in Higher Education: Volume 9

The need for culturally competent, globally skilled students is evident (Goldberg, Pasher, & Levin-Sagi, 2006), especially given our current climate of unrest and cultural misunderstanding. Educational efforts that emphasize contradiction and indigenous knowledge to prepare students for global community engagement have the potential to lead students to complex and systemic understanding of themselves and the world in which we live. These constructivist practices can create an overarching structure that enables students to acknowledge the ambiguity inherent in complex systems, hold contradictory thoughts regarding basic beliefs and values, and thereby deepen their comprehension and critical thought while respecting the integrity of the communities with which we work. Recommendations for creating and facilitating an educational environment based on respectful inquisitiveness and acceptance of dissonance are presented through the description of a three stage, constructivist-oriented model.

In this chapter, we present a framework of inclusive pedagogy to foster education for global citizenship. We argue that certain conditions must be in place for students in higher education classrooms to engage critical issues, wrestle with difficult questions, and reflect on the ethical implication of their individual and collective action. We discuss how instructors can create these conditions, by focusing on three concrete aspects of instruction: Scaffolding, Interaction, and Noticing. While these aspects are prevalent in literature on effective pedagogy for international and/or multilingual students, we argue that they can benefit all students, preparing them for deep learning, toward the end goal of global citizenship. The pedagogical applications presented through this framework demonstrate the close relationship between Scaffolding, Interaction, and Noticing. Furthermore, we believe that the simplicity of this framework will serve as an accessible point of reference for instructors as they are planning for learning that centers student voices, values diversity in the classroom, and aims to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and values of global citizenship.

Transformational learning outcomes of short-term faculty-led international service-learning experiences can by stymied by cultural shock and improperly facilitated programs. Moreover, dissonance in dimensions of the self in contrast to foreign traditions and social interactions can be especially salient in American student encounters in India. How students resolve and make meaning of their own emotional entropy is traced across two institutional programs, two courses (1 undergraduate and 1 graduate), and multiple India community partner sites. An evidence-based pedagogical model and strategies for preparation, praxis, and processing are offered in supporting student reflection of themselves as global beings and in development of global agency which is manifested as intrapersonal, interpersonal, intercultural, academic, and professional competencies.

Too often students who study abroad are unable to adequately explain their transformational experience, nor have researchers figured out just quite how to measure transformation using a standardized scale (Savicki, 2008a). This chapter explores the outcomes of a faculty-led international service-learning course implemented at a large 4-year public institution in the southwest region of the United States. Utilizing personal inventories and the student development framework of “challenge and support,” students began to understand themselves and conversely how they come to navigate the world around them.

This chapter presents a case study of a community engagement project that was established in 2013, between the International Business School of Hanze University of Applied Sciences (UAS), Groningen, the Netherlands, and various communities within Mombasa County, Kenya. From an educational point of view, this engagement helped enrich the curriculum, in terms of learning how business is conducted in a different cultural setting, and how classroom knowledge can be applied within the field. From a community perspective, this engagement acted as a facilitator to knowledge and resource access. The authors highlight aspects that have explicitly added value to the projects, whilst simultaneously presenting engaging dissonance arising from the implementation of the project as well as discussing factors that could be addressed to improve this type of community engagement. The recommendations would be most applicable to projects within similar cultural settings and/or with a similar geographical distance.

This chapter documents a study based on an international partnership between faculty members at SUNY Empire State College and Tecnológico de Monterrey-Chihuahua. The collaboration presented an excellent opportunity to integrate cultural issues into the geology course as well as interdisciplinary collaboration in the programming course. The objectives were to: (1) create and implement learning activities to help students understand that scientific and technological advances do not occur in isolation, and (2) to evaluate their effectiveness developing a multicultural perspective. We adapted and generalized the virtual team model of Hertel et al. (2005) to the design of group activities in an academic setting. A series of learning activities were developed, including an experiential learning group project aimed at helping with the first objective if the study. Overall, the collaboration was a success. We also discuss the challenges both we and the students faced.

This chapter describes the special advantages of globally networked learning experiences (GNLE) for engendering cognitive complexity as a means for developing mindful global citizenship among undergraduate students. Practitioners discover pedagogical approaches that take advantage of the possibility of direct communication with the cultural “other” afforded by recent advances in cost-free, user-friendly, robust, and reliable technologies. Examples of effective pedagogical practices, ideas for building successful faculty-to-faculty partnerships, suggestions for preparing participants, guidelines for selecting and implementing appropriate technologies, and resources for further exploration are provided.

This chapter delves into the design of simulations based on literature that can be taught in secondary school. The main objective of the present fieldwork is to determine whether designing simulations is effective in introducing teacher trainees to the use of simulations in secondary education and build mindful global awareness over the issue of human rights. To achieve this, the flipped learning model is followed in which literary pieces and videos are read and analyzed on the part of the teacher trainees outside of class whereas practice, discussion, and simulation design are done in class. The findings of the qualitative analysis of postgraduate students’ perceptions are presented. Results show that the postgraduate students participating in the design of simulations based on reading texts on human rights find simulations as powerful tools to promote human rights and social consciousness.

This chapter will review teaching approaches used to develop students’ professional skills in preparation for their future role as veterinary practitioners. These approaches support student development beyond the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS. (2014). Day one competences. Retrieved from http://www.rcvs.org.uk/document-library/day-one-competences/) Day One Competences expected of graduates, and emphasize the key importance of life-long skills and resilience in a rapidly changing world.

As veterinary leaders, they will be expected to demonstrate skills in multidisciplinary group facilitation and community engagement. From a global perspective, students are encouraged to reflect on their learning in light of the impact on their local communities and the wider impact on the global ecosystem. This chapter provides an overview of how professional skills are developed over the course of the undergraduate program. Such approaches guide students as they learn to confront and engage with cognitive dissonance (CD) inherent to the role of the veterinary surgeon in practice. Areas where CD is clearly evident in practice will be considered, followed by a review of the teaching approaches to prepare students.

The teaching methods described will include the benefits and challenges of work-based placements, opportunities for self-development and reflection within a tightly packed curriculum, and the importance of facilitating student-led activities to build skills in leadership.

The aim of this chapter is to describe a five-year long cooperation between seven Higher Education Institutions (Universities of Applied Sciences and Universities) in Europe. The focus of the text is to describe the structure of the Intensive Program (IP) and the pedagogical approach behind it. The aim is to introduce the results of this course. Our question in this chapter is “How can the Intensive Program support students and teachers to develop their mindset of European professional (in their own field) and what kind of pedagogical approaches and teaching methods/pedagogical solutions are needed for it?”

This chapter describes a course in recent U.S. history that uses a pedagogy of “praxis” to help students understand themselves as both products of and actors in history. The twin centerpieces of the course are the students’ own personal histories in relation to five systems of domination, and a historically informed political action project that reflects the students’ values, assumptions, and goals in relation to one or more of the systems of domination. A key dissonance for students is between their expressed values and their relative positions within each system of domination.

This chapter discusses teaching strategies designed to help students develop an open-minded and critically self-reflective worldview. By attending to the perceptual dimension of global citizenship education, students and instructors begin the important work of reflecting on the deeper influences that consciously or unconsciously influence one’s global perspective. Research suggests that these goals are best achieved through cross-cultural learning experiences that involve people of different backgrounds. The cross-cultural learning experiences discussed in this chapter include meeting with local residents who moved to the United States within the last decade and who now send their children to the schools that students enrolled in teacher education courses would teach in. Additionally, technology was used to connect graduate students seeking their teaching license in the United States with graduate students and teachers in Durban, South Africa as part of an ongoing reflection on how one develops perspective consciousness. The learning activities described below align with the tenets of global education because they are not specific to one discipline or content area but rather focus on ways to develop habits of mind, perspective consciousness, cross-cultural learning opportunities, and a sense of responsibility as aspiring educators that are applicable across the sciences, arts, and humanities.

We start from the assertion that the concept of “global citizenship” is neither simple nor stable. Rather, it is a contentious idea that is often uncritically based upon assumptions of the “global” and “citizenship” as positives. In geography, however, the “global” and how it relates to the idea of the “local” is a complex and debated concept. Drawing upon critical geographic theories of scale, we suggest that the concept of global citizenship should be thoroughly interrogated to understand its problems and paradoxes as well as its possibilities. In this chapter, we offer one such interrogation grounded in the experiences of designing and implementing the Parks and People experience. We identify tensions within the program such as how to sell the program, how to navigate between individual and group experiences, and how to simultaneously support one-time encounters and ongoing relationships. In exploring these tensions, we demonstrate how the everyday practices of “global citizenship” are enmeshed in uneven geographies of privilege. We suggest that our goal should not be to separate ourselves from such inequality, but, rather, to face the complexities of the relationships we are trying to foster in the name of promoting social justice.

In this chapter, the co-authors contend that the social-emotional dimensions of teaching, learning, diversity, and inclusion are vital to the development of mindful global citizens. Through drawing on both shared and individual experiences within their university context, and tapping into research literature across the fields of education and social neuroscience, they attempt to present a case in support of this claim. The co-authors assert that in order for mindful global citizenship to be cultivated in authentic, optimal ways in university classrooms and co-curricular spaces, teaching and learning must be anchored in relational trust, social-emotional learning/development, and well-being.