Worldview diversity at global liberal arts colleges & universities: initial findings

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: An inter-cultural & interdisciplinary perspective to higher education

Proposal

In this roundtable I will share empirical research in progress about worldview diversity education at global liberal arts colleges and universities located outside of North America (Godwin, 2015; Boyle, 2022, Author, in press). The study explores whether and how education for religious understanding is unfolding across these campuses, and the ways it connects to other initiatives and policyscapes in international higher education. I analyze educational practice connections across time and space, incorporate a critical, contextual approach, and esteem the perspectives of local campus senior leaders.

Important connections have been established between diversity and global learning (Hassim & Green, 2022; Williams, 2013; Deardorff et al., 2021; Ozturgut, 2017) and between worldview diversity and global citizenship (Edwards & Kitamura, 2019). I center non-Western experiences of religion as community-oriented, intersectional identities (Edwards, 2016, 2018; Perez, 2019; Stewart & Lozano, 2009, Trowler & Schreiber, 2020). Worldview is an underemphasized aspect of global citizenship and diversity education critical to students’ ability to negotiate religious difference, understand religion’s dynamism with culture, politics, geography, and history (Moore, 2022) in addressing global problems, and, from a decolonial perspective, to advance epistemic justice (Dei, 2016; Zine, 2004). I view education for religious understanding from a social justice lens as a contribution of International Higher Education for Society (Leask & de Gayardon, 2021) in a religiously plural world.

Seeking to be responsive to calls from CIE and diversity leadership scholars for multi-theory, multidisciplinary research to understand the interconnectedness of global education leadership, policy, and practice (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Stromquist, 2002; Ball, 2012; Kezar & Eckel, 2008; Adserias, 2017), I adopt an ecological systems view of local educational practices as enacted global education policy connected to formal and informal global flows (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). I discuss issues of positionality in conducting CIE research on the topic of religion in education and operate from a critical realist paradigm, incorporating Bhattaharya’s (2022) critical approach to qualitative research. The study is guided by comparative case study (CCS) methodology (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016, 2017), attending to education for religious understanding across horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes that address comparisons across manifestations, scales ranging from the local campus to transnationally, and global policyscapes across time.

The two stage study involves a broad survey distributed through liberal arts networks to better understand the phenomena, followed by purposive sampling of senior leaders that represent a range of approaches to religious diversity, campus types, and regions. Semi-structured elite interviews will be analyzed using codebook thematic analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2021) and supplemented with other methods as guided by the inquiry, which may include document analysis, informant interviews, and network visualization tools. The methods were selected to align with my paradigm and conceptual framing of local manifestations within regional and global education networks as expressions of interconnected reality, and human perspectives as situated and partial. As research in progress, I anticipate reporting on the initial analysis related to the degree and manner in which global liberal arts colleges and universities are engaging with religious diversity, and to seek roundtable feedback on the developing inquiry.

Author

• Renee L Bowling, The Ohio State University