Service learning as post-colonial discourse: Active global citizenship.

Chapter 11 from :Contesting and Constructing International Perspectives in Global Education edited by R.Reynolds, D.Bradbery, J.Brown, K.Carroll, D.Donnelly, K.Ferguson-Patrick and S.Maqueen published by Sense Publishers, Jan 2015.In this chapter we discuss, critically analyse, and report on a practice that is prevalent in global citizenship education: that of local and global service learning. Using Postcolonial Theory and Critical Pedagogy, we examine these practices, focusing on and contesting traditional conceptions of 'service' by questioning, 'who is providing a service to whom? Who benefits? And how can it be reconceptualised to enable all in the relationship to enact their entitlement as active global citizens? Our findings indicate that a critical understanding of both identity, and the socio-political and historical contexts are needed to engage as ‘active’ global citizens

De/colonizing the Education Relationship: Working with Invitation and Hospitality

This is the final version. Available on open access from the Academy for Educational Studies via the link in this recordOur previous studies have shown that culturally responsive pedagogies (CRP) are not successful across all contexts: they have not been developed for culturally plural classrooms; white pre-service teachers have developed a teacher onto-epistemology that makes CRP unintelligible to them. In this article we report the findings of a Culturally Responsive Language and Literacy Education (CRLE) course that we revised to locate CRP within a broader, de/colonizing framework that aimed to disrupt pre-service teachers’ colonial habits of mind and being. At the heart of this process was an eight-week tutoring element during which pre-service teachers worked one-on-one with a marginalized student who had been failed by the education system. We investigated how pre-service teachers opened up inviting and hospitable spaces for learning, how they maintained students’ engagement over time, and whether this led to changes in their praxis. We invited pre-service teachers to withdraw allegiance to the hegemony of modernist/colonial models of education and to begin to let go of the socialized teacher onto-epistemology that they were invested in. Our findings show that the concepts of invitation and hospitality helped the pre-service teachers to begin to operationalize new teacher ontologies and to divest themselves of colonial ways of being, but that such fundamental changes to the self would be a lifelong process