In Global Issues and Adult Education: Perspectives from Latin America, Southern Africa, and the United States, Merriam, Courtenay, and Cervero (2006) note, “Globalization is an exceedingly complex issue” (p. 486). It has the potential to build societies while it destroys individuals, groups, and communities within nation-states. It is no wonder, then, that in the age of globalization, North American adult education faces an urgent and perplexing set of questions about how to educate students for this new world. As Green (2002) argues, we cannot make the common claim to have the best system of education in the world unless our graduates can free themselves of ethnocentrism bred of ignorance and navigate the difficult terrain of cultural complexity. Although some evidence is emerging from the margins of the data, our findings suggest that research and pedagogy in adult education do not overwhelmingly expose students to international issues and concerns and, hence, prepare them for global and multicultural living and working arrangements. This study found only a small number of conference papers that critically examined the negative
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impact of economic globalization on adult education (Cruikshank, 1995; Sumner, 1999), work and workers’ education (Cruikshank, 1995, 2001; Spencer & Frankel, 1996), human rights (Mulenga, 2001), and recent immigrants (Alfred, 2005; Guo, 2005, 2010; Mojab, Ng, & Mirchandani, 2000). With respect to its impact on adult education, Cruikshank (1995) argues that under globalization, adult education has undergone massive funding cuts and has been pressured to operate as a business, profit making has become the priority, and the needs of marginalized groups have been ignored. In another study, Cruikshank (1996) explored the negative impact of economic globalization on the future of work. She maintains that globalization serves the interests of corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens. She identified the negative consequences of economic globalization as “high unemployment, increased poverty, a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, an increasing number of people who are homeless and forced to live on the streets of our cities, and a general feeling of helplessness” (p. 62). Furthermore, Mulenga (2001) suggests that globalization has adversely affected human rights for workers (particularly women workers), peasants and farmers, and indigenous communities, especially those in the South. As Nesbit (2005) notes in his review of the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education (edited by Arthur L. Wilson and Elizabeth R. Hayes, 2000):
I was surprised to find few authors refer to or reflect upon the national and international political issues that marked the 1990s. The corporate scandals, the rapid increase in economic globalization, the growing gap between rich and poor, the drift toward various fundamentalisms, continued conflict in the Middle East, including those of Iraq and Afghanistan (and a few others not so apparent), the demise of the Soviet Union, genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia … are hardly mentioned at all. (p. 74)
Overall, this study highlights the near static nature of U.S. and Canadian adult education and the reluctance to move beyond the local to more global issues. The finding has important implications for adult educators in building a research agenda that helps us understand the interconnectedness of the global community and our shared responsibility in building a global civil society.
From Stagnation to Action: Toward Global Citizenship through Internationalization
Despite the negative impact of globalization portrayed in the literature, Merriam et al. (2006) see the potential for adult educators to transform adult education to respond more constructively to the impact of globalization on marginalized populations. They suggest we (1) create space and listen to voices, (2) adopt a critical stance, (3) attend to policy, (4) develop partnerships, and (5) foster collective learning and action. To these we will add and give priority to a deliberate attempt to include and make visible an international dimension to adult education programs. It is through the internalization of the curricula and through critical pedagogy that we can begin to attend to the roles and responsibilities that Merriam et al. have articulated. Adult education must focus its attention on internationalizing the curricula so that both foreign-born and native-born students can find a more inclusive environment in the Canadian and U.S. classroom, one that is not entirely focused on local issues and cultures. Internationalizing the curricula has promise for incorporating an
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international dimension into the curricula to pave the way for inclusion of other ways of knowing, cultures, and learning systems. It has the potential for exposing students to global human conditions to include gender inequities, health disparities, poverty, the politics of war and its impact on groups and societies, and disparities in access to education, to name a few.
Introducing an international perspective may be unstructured or structured. Either way, it would necessitate the acknowledgment that learning about other cultures as well as one’s own adds a new dimension to the classroom and a different way of thinking. The primary goal would not be to make student experts in another culture but to introduce them to other worldviews; expose them to cultural, political, economic, and education systems; challenge them to question what one takes for granted in one’s own culture; and develop understanding of the behaviours and practices of groups who are different from them.
The advantages of using an international or pluralistic approach are varied. First, it promotes campus communities where students and faculty of every cultural and racial background feel welcomed and are encouraged to reach their fullest potential (Bennett, 2001). According to Bennett, research on K–12 desegregation shows that good race relations, high standards of academic achievement, and personal development among all students are most likely when school policies and academic curricula take a more pluralist or integrated rather than an assimilationist or a business-as-usual approach. While much of that research was carried out on public schools, the findings have implications for post-secondary education.
A second advantage to taking an international approach is that it creates opportunities for students to learn about various social behaviours and practices and the particular cultures that gave rise to them. Third, students learn to challenge their own assumptions about what constitutes a culture and to note that cultures are fluid, dynamic, and interactive, and are not defined in terms of hierarchical arrangement. In other words, one culture is not superior or inferior to another. Fourth, an international approach allows students to think about the patterns of cultural diffusion and its impact in an interdependent world. Fifth, through personal interactions among community members, immigrants in the classroom will learn about and question their assumptions regarding Canadian and U.S. cultures. Finally, all students will learn to examine inter-group stereotypes while promoting intercultural communication (Swaminathan & Alfred, 2003). Taking a more international approach will provide opportunities for both immigrants and citizens to learn about their own ideologies, even as they interact with and learn about different cultures and worldviews.
An international perspective in curricula and pedagogy opens space for the integration of a transnational dimension and holds promise for creating a more democratic environment where immigrant students can acculturate within the Canadian and U.S. culture while maintaining elements of their national culture. Such an approach can also present opportunities for members of the host country to learn about different cultures and ways of being, which will help us correct the problems of monoculturalized citizenship and achieve the goal of a de-monoculturalizing and multicentric understanding of citizenship meanings, citizenship rights, and possibilities that Abdi (2011) suggested.
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Call to Adult Educators
It is well documented that “for a small segment of the population, globalization means the concentration of wealth and power; for the rest of the human population, it means the globalization of misery and poverty. The numbers of those who fall into the category of ‘suffering’ are increasing day by day … we certainly need to examine how and why they inhibit human freedom” (Ramdas, 1997, p. 36). As a result, Ramdas calls for an international, integrated approach to adult education and suggests in order to make that happen, “we need to reinterpret—and reclaim—globalization” (p. 36). Adult education, however, has remained within a large instrumentalist, status quo framework as supported by the findings of this research and those of others in the field (Cruikshank, 1995, 1996, 2001; Hall, 1997; Nesbit, 2005). Alternatively, adult education, with its philosophy of social justice and equity, can take a more aggressive position in researching, teaching, and speaking out against the negative impacts of globalization, thus starting a revolutionary movement to address the fundamental issues of global citizenship. It is time for adult education to reclaim its radical tradition of international development and cooperation that supports shifts away from the global market version of growth-oriented, market-driven, and consumerist human societies and works toward the vision of building the responsible and democratic global civil society that Hall (2000) spoke of. In a plenary address to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s International Conference on Adult Education held in July 1997 in Hamburg, Germany, Ramdas noted:
In my view, adult education—in its broadest sense—is uniquely positioned to make an empowering intervention on behalf of the underprivileged in every society, and at the same time, influence macro policy. We need to take an imaginative leap, to move beyond the dialectics of the current discourse which continues to propagate a compartmentalized view of education and learning. I believe that our challenge is to re-interpret adult education as a powerful instrument, to build, in the words of Nelson Mandela, “a new political culture of human rights.” (p. 36)
To build this culture of human rights, we must begin to make more purposeful attempts at the internationalization of our research, our curricula, our pedagogy, and the development of global citizenship. Adult education, therefore, should answer the call put forth by Ramdas, then president of the International Council for Adult Education, to build an adult education that goes beyond instrumentalism. A new agenda for adult education, then, is to re/claim globalization and to engage in research and pedagogical activities that would highlight the benefits and pitfalls of the phenomenon. Engaging in the discourse allows space for the development of a critical pedagogy that would highlight and contest the hegemonizing effects of globalization on individuals, groups, and societies and work toward the goal of global citizenship.
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References
Abdi, A. A. (2011). De-monoculturalizing global citizenship education: The need for multicentric intentions and practices. In L. Shultz, A. A. Abdi, & G. H. Richardson (Eds.), Global citizenship education in post-secondary institutions: Theories, practices, polices (pp. 25–39). New York: Peter Lang.
Abdi, A. A., & Shultz, L. (2008). Continuities of racism and inclusive citizenship: Framing global citizenship and human rights education. In A. Abdi & S. Guo (Eds.), Education and social development: Global issues and analyses (pp. 25–36). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Alfred, M. V. (2005). Joining the conversation: Immigrant women explore identity and place in academe. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Adult Education Research Conference, 1–6. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia.
Altbach, P. G. (2002). Perspectives on international higher education [Resource review]. Change, 34(3), 29–31.
Anderson, B. (2002). The new world disorder. In J. Vincent (Ed.), The anthropology of politics: A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique (pp. 261–270). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Appadurai, A. (2002). Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. In J. Vincent (Ed.), The anthropology of politics: A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique (pp. 271–284). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Bauman, Z. (2002). Society under siege. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Bennett, C. (2001). Research on racial issues in American higher education. In J. Banks & C. Banks (Eds.). Handbook of research on multicultural education, (pp. 663-682). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Butterwick, S., Fenwick, T., & Mojab, S. (2003). Canadian adult education research in the 1990s: Tracing liberatory trends. The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 17(2), 1–19.
Cohen, J., Bloom, D., & Malin, M. (Eds.). (2007). Educating all children: A global agenda. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cruikshank, J. (1995). Economic globalization: Impact on university adult education. Proceedings of the 14th CASAE Conference, 62-66. Saskatoon, SK: University of Saskatchewan.
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