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Recognizing the need to build global-minded citizens, higher education institutions are increasingly trying to find ways to leverage their international programs to develop students’ intercultural competence. The MA in global leadership at Royal Roads University, Canada, created an international partnership in Ecuador that serves to go beyond the traditional student study abroad or service learning focus and instead focuses on developing competencies of global mindedness and strategic relationships. In this chapter, we present an analysis of how an international student group engaged in building dynamic partnerships within a Global South country to create change for sustainable development initiatives of mutual concern. Through a case example, we describe how these partnerships evolved and adapted in ways that enhanced the learning needs of the students while simultaneously supporting the development of new educational opportunities for Ecuadorians. To illustrate, this chapter delineates the activities that members of the program undertook to connect and develop a mutuality of relationship across diverse stakeholders in Ecuador. The authors analyze this network-building process from the perspective of cultural context, building trust and influence, and responding to social development needs of host communities.

Responding to local, regional and international demands and initiatives, the government of Ecuador has rolled out an innovative program Sistema Integral de Tecnologías para la Escuela y la Comunidad (SíTEC) to place information, and communication technologies (ICTs) into the hands of students, teachers, and other educational institutions. SíTEC draws upon several elements of social entrepreneurship and has successfully reached some of the most regionally remote and culturally diverse communities in the country. The SíTEC program is emblematic of many of the criteria set forth regarding social entrepreneurship including the vision of leadership, the focus on a social mission and the importance of innovation in partnership and resource allocation. This study looks at survey and interview data from the Shiña community teachers and school leaders to determine the effects of the SíTEC program and the availability and use of ICTs in schools, SíTEC has equipped public schools with computers, projectors, digital boards, and Internet. Additionally, SíTEC organizes training courses on ICTs for public school teachers and provides schools with educational software available in Spanish, Kichwa, Shuar, and English. While there is still much work to be done, SíTEC and the associated partnerships and programs are beginning to have impact in their specified outcomes. Creative partnerships developed within the Ministry of Education, Office of Bilingual Education, Shiña community have allowed for communication and exchange of knowledge and resources across multiple partners. This chapter explores SíTEC as an innovative government-based program that meets targeted social outcomes in ICTs and education.

Focusing on the theory of a humanizing pedagogy implies the building of an academic freedom in class to seek for students’ critical thinking and development. To achieve this aim, a qualitative investigation was carried out with 27 eighth-level Applied Linguistics School students who were undergoing their degree process at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in Esmeraldas, from 2018 to 2019. The teacher in charge of the subjects degree I and degree II taught the students with a humanistic approach, by means of which the students were encouraged to investigate the real problems on English language teaching (ELT) faced in their community, guiding the students to look for proposals to solve these problems. A humanistic theoretical approach was designed to lead the students’ research process taking into consideration three important dimensions: ELT contextualized assessment, ELT innovative intervention and ELT experiment projection. As a result of the process, 27 educative research projects, which mainly focused on free innovative didactic ELT methods, methodologies, strategies and didactic materials, were carried out with successful results for the ELT community in Esmeraldas, since teachers were provided with the necessary tools to get the students involved in the teaching–learning process to improve their English level.

The goal of this study was to use census information to measure the level of occupational segregation of workers of African descent with respect to whites in various Latin American countries. I further investigated the extent to which segregation levels can be accounted for by different workers’ characteristics. The results show that Afro-Latinos are generally highly segregated across occupations but with high heterogeneity across countries. A large proportion of this segregation would not exist if Afro-Latinos had attained the same education as whites in Brazil and Ecuador, where most segregation occurs across major occupational categories. However, the proportion of occupational segregation explained by educational inequalities is much lower in other countries, where most segregation occurs within the major occupational groups. Further, occupational segregation would be even higher, especially in Costa Rica, if the geographical distribution of black and white populations were similar across these countries.

This chapter provides higher education faculty with a model that promotes equity and inclusion by engaging students in developing critical consciousness about their country’s social problems. This model has been developed and refined through research and practice at a private liberal arts university in Quito, Ecuador since 2011. It is a service-learning program where students work directly, for 80 hours, with a vulnerable human group while taking a course where the academic content includes topics, such as poverty, education, health, gender, and discrimination. With this experiential learning model, students have gone through a transformational process that has allowed them to question their mental schemes. This transformation has been documented with qualitative data. The impact of this model has been researched using both quantitative and qualitative measures of students’ civic attitudes and skills using a scale called the Civic Attitudes and Skills Questionnaire, which includes six factors: Civic Action, Interpersonal and Problem-Solving Skills, Political Awareness, Leadership Skills, Social Justice, and Diversity Attitudes. A significant impact of the course on students’ skills has been found on almost all factors in two studies conducted in recent years. This chapter describes the service-learning program in detail mentioning the research done.

What is the historical, normative and institutional setting that helps leading Latin American and Eurasian countries to implement a post-hegemonic agenda and contribute to the multipolarization of global politics? Post-hegemony describes a situation in which the unipolar organization of the world political economy is challenged by a plurality of alternative projects, without however being entirely replaced by another system. Emblematic of post-hegemonic initiatives is the rise of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa countries who have taken the lead in creating alternative institutions that constrain US global hegemony, while however failing to spearhead a coherent, uniform and confrontational opposition movement. Regarding post-hegemonic regionalism, Latin American regionalism – as represented by Bolivarian Alliance for Our America (ALBA) – is characterized by a social justice-driven agenda that refutes US neoliberal hegemony, whereas the peculiarity of Eurasian regionalism – as represented by Shanghai Cooperation Organization – lies in its security-oriented focus that confronts US interventionism and international terrorism. An underlying commonality of both Latin American and Eurasian experiences is that they constitute a multi-front struggle centered on four main areas: culture, economy, financial cooperation, and regional defense. They both hinge on a strong normative framework and firm commitment in the regionalization of an endogenous culture, educational cooperation, and defense system. They all accord primary importance to social, financial, and infrastructural development. Overall, these experiences suffer from unresolved tensions between national sovereignty and supranationalism alongside the predominance of charismatic leaders inhibiting institutionalization. The limitations and contradictions of post-hegemonic transformations also include Latin America’s inability to resolve the question of extractivism, Eurasia’s neglect of the question of democratic participation, and both regionalism’s failure to offer a coherent alternative model of economic development to US hegemonism.

I suggest in this section that throughout their formation processes, Argentine and Brazilian educational systems have been subject to similar influences. However, it will also be suggested that these influences have been interpreted differently, resulting in particular patterns in each of these systems, since “Educational ideas do not just migrate; in speaking to different cultural histories and conditions they also change” (Alexander, 2000). Thus, in this section Argentine and Brazilian systems of education will be analyzed as contexts of reception and adaptation of two major international influences: Positivism and The New Education Movement.

The Waorani are an Amazonian indigenous nationality with a population of 4,000. They inhabit three provinces of Ecuador: Pastaza, Napo and Orellana, and their ancestral lands contain a wealth of natural resources, which attracts the onslaught of the processes of extractivism. Significant social and economic asymmetries have also arisen in the decades since first contact. It is in this context that the Waorani Women's Association was created in 2005. Its main purpose is to end deforestation and illegal hunting of species in Waorani territory by promoting initiatives such as the cultivation of organic cocoa and handicrafts to improve the economy of families and to diminish the reliance on the preponderant economic system of use and abuse of non-renewable resources. This chapter analyzes how the spirituality of the Waorani nationality, manifested by the women who work in cocoa farms and chambira palm crafts, combine syncretism and ancestral knowledge in their daily work. It also analyzes the change of spiritual identity from the first contact with the Summer Language Institute missionaries, and subsequent evangelical, Catholic, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Latter-day Saints missions to their lands.

The objective of this chapter is to identify the key characteristics of Global Services businesses that will thrive and achieve success in the future. These factors are integrated into three main pillars, which we refer to as the Triple-Win. The first and most obvious pillar is technology as a tool. The second pillar is the design and sustainability of the business model, without which the previous factor would be merely a cost and not an investment. And last but not the least, there is the purpose which gives meaning to the proposal, focusing on the human being and their environment. The DIDPAGA business model sits at the intersection of these three elements.