Kelsey Halbert

Constructing the [parochial] global citizen

ABSTRACT Cultural exchange is privileged in many higher education programs across the globe. The Australian government’s New Colombo Plan refers to a ‘Third Wave’ of globalisation which foregrounds global interrelatedness through developing student capabilities to live, work and contribute to global communities and aims to make the global an ‘everyday’ experience for students. Mobility programs are promoted as the main strategy for fostering global perspectives, contradicting the idea of the global as an everyday experience. This paper unpacks constructs of global citizenship that underpin Australia’s recent international and global engagement policies, and implications for the ‘global’ wave in ‘local’ parochial contexts.

Teaching engagement: Reflections on sociological praxis

Sociology has a long history of engagement with social justice issues, and through concepts like the ‘sociological imagination’ we equip our students with the ability to think through, and ideally work to change, inequities. This engagement is under threat, however, from recent changes in the higher education sector that have shifted the focus from learning experiences to qualifications. There is little room within accreditation frameworks for social justice as an educational goal. This article will place these discussions of engagement and social justice as key outcomes of a sociology degree within the broader context of the changing higher education sector, and will explore how we teach students to use their sociological imaginations outside of the classroom. We recognise that this is a messy process, involving ambiguous learning spaces, sometimes conflicting institutional versions of ‘engagement’ and unforeseen outcomes. Nevertheless, ‘engaged’ sociology should encourage students to exercise their sociological imaginations and their own capacity to act as agents of social change.

Students’ perceptions of a ‘quality’ advisory relationship

The current research education context in Australia is one of increased pressures for timely completion with a spotlight on the scope and depth of training and a profound increase in enrolments. These factors inevitably shape the supervision experiences of doctoral candidates. This paper discusses student perceptions of supervision. Supervision is the most influential factor in candidates’ doctoral satisfaction. While this may be no real surprise, there is a need to tease out the differences and tensions in perceptions of supervision quality. Students’ notions of ‘the good supervisor’ can identify some common characteristics but also some variance depending on learning style and previous experiences. As a result, students’ expectations can be very different across and amongst modes of study, disciplines and stages of the candidature. This paper discusses the implications of these perceptions in relation to quality agendas. It draws on taxonomies of supervision and Foucault’s notions of subjectivity and power/knowledge to analyse the tensions that emerge from these different perceptions and what they reveal about the role of power, agency and knowledge production within a ‘quality’ supervisory relationship.

'Home and away': constructions of 'people' and 'place' in the world in history curricula in Australia, 1850-2000

Education history, especially in Australia, has been slow to respond to the spatial turn in the social sciences. Analysis of school history syllabuses and materials in Australia from 1850 to the present demonstrates that understandings of Australia and Australian identities were formed around notions of place, ethnicity and race, and metaphors of family, kinship and home as well as concepts of nation.

The Critical Global Citizen

Policy imperatives around mobility encourage students to take up international experiences to increase their marketability. These imperatives are framed in narrow ways by neoliberal metanarratives of globalization. As a result, peripheral mobility experiences are often positioned as key to internationalization and developing global citizenship. This individualized notion of the global citizen is counter to qualities of critical global citizenship, such as resilience, empathy, understanding one’s place in the world, and an ethical understanding of inequalities. Higher education institutions have an important role in shaping the social and disciplinary norms that construct these notions and in recognizing the diversity of local and international experiences that perpetuate them. This chapter puts forward a challenge to institutions to create supportive environments for the facilitation of critical global citizenship.

Local connections, global perspectives

Higher education is increasingly focusing on facilitating agentic, outward-looking, globally minded graduates. International mobility experiences are positioned as key to developing these qualities; however, not all students have the inclination, resources, or support to enable them to participate in such experiences. Student surveys reveal that the top barriers to participation—time, finances, work, and family commitments—are outside the influence of educators. In response, educators need to look to opportunities afforded through both local and international experiences. Service learning can enable students to explore democratic action in a local space within a framework that accounts for global perspectives. This chapter draws on findings of six local and international case studies to explore curriculum and pedagogical frameworks that facilitate global perspectives through community-based learning experiences.

Balancing classroom ready with community ready: enabling agency to engage with community through critical service learning

ABSTRACT Recent initial teacher education policy and regulatory frameworks privilege “classroom ready” discourses. Taking up “readiness” as technical skill requiring more “practice” leads to narrowing of teachers’ roles and efficacy with increasing pressure and regulation that marginalises ideals to equip pre-service teachers to be “community ready”. We argue that enabling preservice teacher agency to engage with community beyond notions of mastering bounded classroom practice is critical to teachers’ roles. Supporting teachers to teach in context as engaged global citizens requires a readiness of relational understanding and skills about the lived experiences of learners, and their wider community contexts. Data from a critical service learning case study highlight how preservice teacher agency to engage with community is conceptualised and experienced in simultaneously beneficial and challenging ways. These findings indicate the complex, yet necessarily significant contributions of service learning experiences to the development of preservice teacher “readiness”.