Dismantling disconnects between practitioners and researchers: An experimental book project in cross-silo dialogues on critical Global Citizenship Education

• In Event: Innovative ideas and perspectives in teacher education and the teaching profession

Proposal

This (applied research) paper presentation will share about an experimental book project that brought together 35 academics and primary/secondary educators from 6 continents to discuss critical Global Citizenship Education (GCE) efforts in schools. Our forthcoming book, Enacting Equitable Global Citizenship Education in Schools: Lessons from Dialogue between Research and Practice (anticipated publication with Routledge in the Critical Global Citizenship Education series, spring 2022), purposefully situates itself at the intersection of academic and practitioner realms, a space that is rarely present in published work (as most published texts target one audience or the other). This space of possibility brings diverse authors together in dialogue to imagine how GCE can be enacted in ways that are intentionally equitable. With a unique aim, process, and style, this book project has been an exploration in both approach and form. Critical reflections on the process of writing it and the product itself can help us consider new ways to connect research with practices in schools.

Our presentation aims to answer to the following questions:
• How can/did we reimagine ways that a book project can dismantle academic/practitioner silos?
• What are the possibilities and challenges of book efforts grounded in dialogic principles, especially ones with diverse stakeholders?
• What are the challenges and possibilities of disrupting norms in educational writing?

Rationale for our project: As co-editors, we are academics/teacher educators who are passionate about fostering young global citizens in primary/secondary schools and equipping educators with the knowledge and skills necessary to do so. We recognized a disconnect between the conversations happening in schools and those in higher education settings around GCE and the chasms separating those two groups. Despite this gap, we saw few opportunities for cross-context dialogue between practitioners and university faculty in the publishing realm. Furthermore, as academics in two distinct geographic locations, we saw that there are several recent examples of cross-regional dialogues (Akkari & Maleq, 2020, Bourne, 2020), most texts targeting schools in single regions only or only focusing on public or private spaces. Drawing on Freirean (1994) dialogic principles and recognizing the value of recent dialogic text approaches, such as Bosio’s (2020) collection,we embarked on this project with the aim of creating a type of third space (Bhabba, 2004) where academics and primary/secondary educators from many nations can come together to tackle critical GCE issues at hand.

Our presentation will begin by offering a rationale for our approach, drawing on theories alluded to above as well as some of the global citizenship literature that grounded our discussions. Next, we will explore the first question offered above. We will describe the experimental nature of our project and the way our approach evolved to meet our aims. For example, we will explain how contributors were thematically “mashed up” and asked to engage in dialogue with academics/ practitioners around the world. We will describe the innovative dialogue chapters we used at the end of each section of the text to further promote dialogue across book contributors. As we describe our process, we will consider the ways that dialogue was central to everything from our editorial conversations to our chapter dialogues to our contributor feedback. After considering the shape of the project, we will transition into critical reflections on possibilities and challenges. Specifically, we will consider possibilities and challenges of dialogic approaches, navigating conversations across such diverse stakeholders, and the process of inventing new stylistic norms. Throughout, we will draw on specific examples from the project that illustrate these possibilities and challenges. We will finish by reflecting on the implications for future scholarship.

Ultimately, through this project, we saw tremendous possibility in a dialogic writing venture. We think this sort of scholarship has considerable promise for exposing blind spots and seeing the influence of contexts. But such cross-stakeholder collaborations are certainly not without challenges including everything from linguistic challenges to logistical ones. Nonetheless, we see the dismantling of divides between research and practice as essential in pursuing critical GCE in primary and secondary schools. We challenge those attending this presentation to reflect upon ways that dialogic principles can be further integrated into our scholarly work going forward.

Significance to the conference theme and to the SIG: This proposal ties closely to the conference subtheme, “Beyond the horizon – reimagining everything,” and specifically its desire to “Play with new ideas, theories, and ways of knowing in education and educational research.” This book project creates a hybrid space for new knowledge to emerge. Through dialogic approaches with diverse stakeholders, we consider how new scholarship patterns might extend critical consciousness (Freire, 1994) to prompt equitable practice by uniting research and practice. As this work is done by teachers and teacher educators with the aims of impacting practices in primary/secondary schools, it is of especial interest to the TETP SIG membership. Furthermore, as a book venture that is focused on dialogues around global citizenship education, it is a topic of interest for a broader subset of CIES members as well, including those in the CANDE SIG.

Author

• Sarah R Lillo Kang, Southeast Missouri State University