Teaching and Learning with the Excluded & Beyond Borders

• In Event: TLC at APSA Luncheon: Online Learning and a Global Student Body

Abstract

“Why do borders matter? Borders are physical representations of when good ideas begin and when bad ideas start. If you don’t believe me just ask East and West Germany, or North and South Korea. ” This excerpt of a video talk at Turning Point USA #BigGovSucks was retweeted frenetically by Donald Trump and its supporters on the online sphere in Dec 2018. We are living in an age where populists are rising and creating a global map of ‘where good ideas begin and bad ideas start’ and promoting thick, long walls of division. Populist’s success to achieve and retain power stems from creating and normalising the idea of the need to defend ‘us’, ‘the people’, the ‘good’ from the ‘others’, the ‘bad’ and shaking the foundations of the ‘status quo’ and the ‘establishment’ for ‘real change’. Whether these walls are made from brick and mortar or from fuzzy identities propelled by hate, fear and mistrust they all have in common a simplistic and normative idea of difference, of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ moralities tagged into differences of race, class, ethnicity, gender, nationality or any other trait that can be weaponised, used as a tool to difference ‘us’ from ‘them’.
The challenge for those analysing and disseminating critical knowledge to students on the social phenomena of populism and its links to wider society such as privilege and social exclusion is on how to do it effectively for positive change. It stems not only from the fuzzy and contested nature of the concept of populism, as populists do not embrace any distinct ideology and come in all shapes and sizes; but on the trending post-truth scepticism on knowledge emanating from ‘experts’, from ‘the privileged’ and the ‘establishment’. Teaching globalised online courses to students living in very diverse contexts from Western and Global South countries and regions requires not just a critical approach, but new ‘socially aware’ methodologies.
How can we unpack populism with critical pedagogies adapted to challenge the very idea of “post-truth facts” or the mistrust to “expert knowledge” in university online courses that have a globalised studentship? In this paper, I explore a range of conditions and methodologies critically analysing ‘what works’ when teaching online courses that include contested issues such as ‘populism and privilege’. Using examples based on my experience of designing and teaching online courses in international development in the Global South, especially from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, I propose a three-dimensional approach: Learning with Power for using and adapting technology for co-teaching and co-learning issues with methods and techniques online related to populism and privilege. In the framework I propose, I synthesize an operational five-step cycle of Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ ‘conscientization process, Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach and Steven Lukes ‘three faces of power’. I review this framework in the light of how teaching contested subjects on populism adapted to people in the Global South is different and how this affects our own teaching approach to infuse reflexivity, ‘critical thinking’ and knowledge co-created with students to go beyond post-truth ‘facts’. Its implication for ideas of global democracy, global citizenship are analysed.

Author

• Carlos Salvador Zepeda, The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London