In a world of toxic boundaries, we need global learning

Hilary Landorf and Joanna Regulska’s recent article, “Beyond internationalisation and towards global learning”, explores the definitions and underpinnings of global learning, and why it is desperately needed at this moment in time.

As a follow-up, I would like to dissect the global learning principle of interdependence, which Landorf and Regulska write is the “idea that people, entities and systems need each other for support, functioning, and survival”. The authors frame it at the heart of collective well-being that flies in the face of the current trends of isolationism. I couldn’t agree more.

For global learners, activating interdependence requires one to be aware of oneself and one’s connections across various geopolitical and sociocultural contexts. One might define this learning outcome as emergent global critical consciousness, which is a mindset that crosses geographies and borders of all kinds, ultimately aiding learners to navigate difference.

It also allows learners to articulate, recognise and give meaning to the individual as much as the collective, an imperative in global mindedness.

The term critical consciousness comes from Paulo Freire, who uses the concept to advocate for forms of active education that make a difference in the world, particularly by challenging systemic inequalities.

Global learners can become influential agents of change, by acquiring skills to dig deep into the various internal and external points of interdependence that may or may not be visible to them. And, once that deep social and political infrastructure is laid bare, then and only then can learners transform their awareness into action. This act can produce new collective geographies that chip away at isolationism.

A global sense of responsibility

We know that global learning is not just about knowledge, skills and dispositions but rather about taking action on the knowledge, skills and dispositions obtained through the process of learning.

The ability to take action, clearly an essential piece of global learning, as Landorf and Regulska affirm, rests with the development of a global critical consciousness, which requires learners to embody interdependence.

Interdependence is also aligned to a broader sense of responsibility. For example, when one’s identity is built conceptually as global, as an interdependence of people, places, phenomena and politics, then learners are able to expand their senses of responsibility. In a way, it makes them care more.

Learners can make the leap to no longer simply imagining their scopes of commitment being aligned to a limited, usually localised, geography. Rather, learners can activate a global sense of responsibility, which, as Doreen Massey argued in 2004, is ultimately sustained by a learned global critical consciousness.

Again, responsibility is predictably aligned with one’s identity, and identity is often formed around geographically bounded territories, whether a community, a region or a state. Therefore, taking action beyond what is typically a local sense of responsibility, starting to care about others around the world or even across a city block or town, requires learners to recognise the connections around them as giving meaning to themselves.

Ultimately, it comes down to identity and seeing one’s identity as not isolated but as interdependent. It is about seeing ourselves and our lives as unapologetically global.

We should demand this global sense of responsibility, now more than ever. This requires learners to dig into their sense of self and, ultimately, all subject matter to articulate the connections that give it meaning.

Pacific Studies

When critically conscious across geographies, students can toggle back and forth between the local and the global, the particular and the general, the individual and the collective, their own biases and concepts that frame others’ perspectives. They can chip away at tired binaries and question the dominant messaging that distracts us more and more from the geographic collective.

Pacific Studies is a case in point.

Pacific Studies is a field of study that explicitly emerged as a critical response to the problematic histories of colonisation, cultural collection and resource extraction that had defined (and often still do define) the Pacific islands as an empty space between major geopolitical territories.

In his renowned essay, “Our Sea of Islands”, the writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa outlines how Pacific and Oceania Studies reverses the misappropriated representations that academically, economically and politically define the Pacific as being made of isolated and disempowered islands in a far sea.

Rather, Hau’ofa proposes an alternative geographic vision of the Pacific as a sea of many islands, where both roots and routes are integral to one’s identity and where one is politically positioned in the world.

To Epeli Hau’ofa and other Pacific Studies scholars, the sea is not an empty space between islands and other landmasses but is equally part of what gives islands and other topographies meaning.

Pacific Studies reverses the conceptual underpinning of Oceania, and the Pacific Islands and Islanders, as marginalised and as merely in-between the geopolitical powers of Australia, Asia and the Americas. Instead, the multitude of islands envisioned through Pacific Studies undoes the geographic rendering of agency, and lack thereof, and creates a new geography in response.

Pacific Studies is thus not just a form of scholarship but is also pursuing a form of global critical consciousness where the geographic manifestations of local and global are recreated.

Similarly, in this reframed geography of the Pacific, identities, cultures and rituals are not only rooted to the land but also to the waterways and routes that connect them to others far away. The connections between the islands matter as much to a sense of identity as the islands themselves.

Global educators focus on the islands, yes, but they also ask learners to consider what connects the islands to others around the world. So, while global learners understand the ‘micro’ rootedness of identities, culture, ethnicity and politics, they are also aware that these representations of the world are created by ‘macro’ routes that circumnavigate islands and oceans.

Global learning

Today, in a world where performed and political boundaries are hardening, we need new geographies. We need learners to easily cross boundaries and embody our interdependence. We need to challenge the mappings of our world(s) that are increasingly becoming siloed and singular. We need global learning.

Global learning helps students dig deep into the complexity of subject matter and into themselves. It allows learners to critically self-reflect such that they can recognise their interdependence of roots and routes.

Global learners see deeply into common categories or dichotomies that harmfully simplify the worldviews of too many. Global learners acquire broader senses of responsibility and commitment that span from the local across the global.

Never have we needed global learning more. We now need learners to acquire these skills so they can push against the tide of isolationism and challenge the rigid identities that are tenaciously ‘locked’ to geographic borders.

Now more than ever we need to dig beyond those dominant representations and recognise their flimsiness rather than their fortitude. This is why higher education and the world need global learning, so we can tend to our local islands and our shared oceans, both of which are necessary to counter toxic geographies of separation for generations to come.

Hilary E Kahn is vice provost of international affairs and associate professor of anthropology at Indiana University Indianapolis. She is also an inaugural member of the National Academy for International Education.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.