The power of university instructors' aspirational meaning making: Educating for global citizenship in U.S. higher education

• In Event: Focusing on practice and leadership in university offices and initiatives (II)

Proposal

In recent decades, Education for Global Citizenship (EfGC) has emerged as a prominent way to discuss internationalization and global learning efforts in higher education institutions (HEIs) (Braskamp, 2008, p. 2010; Gacel-Ávila, 2005; Haigh, 2014; Jorgenson & Shultz, 2012; Khoo, 2011; Rhoads & Szelenyi, 2011; Sklad et al., 2016). The concept of global citizenship is a controversial one though, and there is no consensus on a definition of global citizenship nor on EfGC (Jorgenson & Shultz, 2012). Views on global citizenship and EfGC may be approached from a wide range of ideological perspectives and motivations (Andreotti, 2006; Pashby et al., 2020; Stein, 2015). A great deal of recent literature on global citizenship education has focused on attempts to define and classify typologies of global citizenship and global citizenship education (Andreotti, 2006; Jorgenson & Shultz, 2012; H. Marshall, 2011; Oxley & Morris, 2013; Shultz, 2007; Stein, 2015; Veugelers, 2011). This leaves a gap in extant scholarship in adequately exploring the aspirations and agency expressed by local social actors in light of these factors in the ways they understand these contested concepts and make pedagogical decisions. This study represents a departure from recent scholarship on global citizenship education by taking an idiographic approach in exploring the tensions, contradictions, challenges, and opportunities that occur when social actors make meaning and act according to their lived experiences.

This qualitative case study at one U.S. university focused on: (1) how university instructors made meaning around the concept of global citizenship; (2) how instructors believed they educated for global citizenship and how students perceived EfGC efforts; and (3) how educators felt motivated, enabled, or constrained in their pedagogical pursuits around global citizenship. To answer these questions and analyze how these understandings and educational practices are shaped by specific personal, contextual, and temporal factors, this study utilized a constructivist paradigmatic framework, which assumes that people actively construct meaning of their experiences and interpret what happens to them based on their current assumptions, motivations, and context (Dewey, 1916; Kegan, 1982; Piaget, 1950; Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). A grounded theoretical model of aspirational meaning making was developed to analyze university educators’ ways of understanding and educating for global citizenship based on their ways of knowing, being, doing, and aspiring.

Findings from this research suggest that instructors’ understandings of global citizenship and ways of educating for global citizenship are deeply complex, context-specific, and far more dynamic and adaptable than has been acknowledged in previous studies. Taking place during a uniquely challenging time during the COVID-19 pandemic, findings from this study highlight instructors’ need for support across multiple dimensions in their ways of knowing, being, doing, and aspiring. Findings further demonstrate how the ambiguous and adaptable nature of EfGC, combined with the contextual adaptations instructors made, allowed instructors to keep their educational efforts responsive and applicable to contemporary concerns.

This research contributes to the fields of comparative and international education, higher education, and global citizenship education by addressing a gap in the literature on internationalization and global learning, specifically on how global citizenship and EfGC is understood and practiced by individuals in a particular temporal and situational context in a U.S. HEI. This study contributes to scholarly examinations of how understandings of global citizenship and EfGC are not prescribed by some single entity at a particular point in time but are continuously constructed by multiple social actors in their own socio-cultural and temporal contexts. By analyzing these processes of meaning making, we may better understand the understandings, motivations, and pedagogical decisions that arise through these contexts. The theoretical model of aspirational meaning making put forth in this research offers a new way to do this in the context of EfGC.

Author

• Kathryn K Burden, The Ohio State University-Columbus - Columbus, OH