Nothing is Random: How I ‘Un’-randomly Chose to be Educated in the West

• In Event: Border crossings and hybridity in education for sustainable development

Proposal

As someone brought up in a family of educators, I have learned to deeply respect education. Since the day I attended my first lesson in kindergarten, I have always been connected to the field as a student, teacher, or researcher. I was educated in the sciences; my first Master’s degree was in genetic engineering and earned in the United States. Following this, I went back to India and taught high school science. After teaching for about four years, I returned to the United States to formally study education. Why did I come back again? What about Western education made me come to the United States twice? What does the context offer that is so enticing and unavailable back home?

This paper explores these questions and the multiple roles I have assumed in the domain of education: as a student of Western education, as a propagator of Western education through the International Baccalaureate program (IB) in India, and as a researcher tracing how Western education has impacted and shaped my personal epistemology. This (auto)ethnographic reflective study highlights my struggles to understand the mish-mash of ways in which global, international, intercultural, and Western education are defined and delivered. I also reflect upon the narratives of five students who shared with me their experiences with Western education through the IB in India and/or their current education in the U.S. or Canada.

Before I jumped into involving these students, it was very important for me to understand that, in qualitative research, something is always “happening” between the researcher and the researched. Granek (2013) explains this relationship as being “intertwined with each other in ways that move beyond the need to publish or perish” (p. 179). Since I already had an established relationship with the students as their former teacher, it seemed appropriate and important to move beyond interpreting their narratives of Western education to also find meaning with respect to my own epistemology through the intersubjectivity of this process. This (auto)ethnographic “reflective” study process was further enriched by my review of the personal essays of four doctoral students from Canada (Laurila, 2016; Smith, 2016; Karki, 2016; Song, 2016), which detail their own struggles situating their personal epistemologies in their doctoral research work.

Though this paper centers on the education I received in India and the U.S., it also speaks to broader understandings of how education plays a role in globalization. I interviewed twelve students from India and decided to use the experiences of five for this paper. After similar educational trajectories, these unique individuals now have distinct plans for the future. In the context of the varied backgrounds of these students and my own experiences with education, I have explored the opportunities that education opens for students such as these, and how education shapes their “being.”

References:
Granek, L. (2013). Putting ourselves on the line: The epistemology of the hyphen, intersubjectivity and social responsibility in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(2), 178–197.

Laurila, K. I. (2016). Indigenous knowledge? Listening for the drumbeat and searching for how I know. Qualitative Social Work, 15(5-6), 610–618.

Karki, K. K. (2016). Walking the complexities between two worlds: A personal story of epistemological tensions in knowledge production. Qualitative Social Work, 15(5-6), 628–639.

Smith, A. P. (2016). Redeeming the rejected: Curious George and evidence-based approaches. Qualitative Social Work, 15(5-6), 671–681.

Song, W. J. (2016). A new face of homelessness? Researching the experience of “home” with Chinese high school students in Canadian homes. Qualitative Social Work, 15(5-6), 650–660

Author

• Maulshree Gangwar, World Bank