STUDENTS AND GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP IN AN UNCERTAIN ERA
by
RONALDO MUNCK*
for
The Internationalisation of UK Higher Education Lecturing and Teaching
Reflections on policy, practice and theory
C. SAP Conference
27-28 November 2008
Edinburgh
*
Ronaldo Munck works in the Presidents Office at Dublin City University where he is responsible for
strategic Foresight and the civic engagement strategy. He is also Visiting Professor of Sociology at the
University of Liverpool and has written widely on the impact of globalization.
Introduction
Higher education is now clearly part of a global system of knowledge
generation and transmission and, increasingly of a global labor market. Yet in the
discourse of most Western universities ‘Internationalisation’ denotes simply the
attraction of more high-fees paying overseas students. Little attention is paid – not
even theoretically – to students as global citizens. The internationalisation of the
curriculum also lags far behind the internationalisation of research. Globalisation – or
the new knowledge society – is having a massive, but as yet underspecified impact on
the academic disciplines. Another aspect of globalization – namely migration – is
also changing the nature of the university, at best recognized by token policies on
diversity.
These are the issues I am going to take up on the basis of a broad
theoretical perspective and also the practical experience as a strategic planner at
Dublin City University where internationalisation is seen as a priority concern. The
views expressed are of course, strictly individual ones and should in no way be seen
as an institutional perspective.
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The grounded global university
Despite the recent financial meltdown and the virtual collapse of the selfregulating market model we still live in global times. The university, like other
institutions in society, is subject to a global knowledge system. The era of the
national university serving a nation-state directly and unequivocally (see Delanty
2001) is well and truly superseded today. As a recent OECD paper on globalization
and higher education puts it “the role of national purpose is itself in doubt” (Margison
and Van der Wende 2007:70). The information revolution on the one hand and the
new public management on the other have transformed utterly the traditional notion of
the university. The global market place for ideas, commercialization and increasingly
researchers and students, transforms the university into a player in a global game.
That game is, of course competition in terms of global rankings. Even a small
peripheral nation-state such as Ireland feels compelled to get at least one or two of its
universities listed in the global rankings, whatever suspicions there are around their
methodological rigor and relevance.
For the universities that cannot realistically compete in the global market there
is, of course, the option to serve local or regional needs.
Many of the ‘new
universities’ in the UK, for example, explicitly orient towards the local economy and
its needs and seek to serve local social needs. There is a long and honourable
tradition of the civic university. These were founded in the 19th century by many
major cities and were designed to provide ‘practical’ as well as academic knowledge.
There are many universities today which serve a regional function orienting to the
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needs of the regional economy and society. However, the incentives provided by the
global raknings are such that they have a powerful effect in ‘normalizing’ the
university sector as a whole. These rankings have tended to make most university’s
focus almost exclusively on scientific research outputs to the detriment of their other
roles. There may well be some form of backlash here given the inherent limitations of
these ranking methodologies (see Van Dyke 2005) and a re-valuation of the local and
regional university with an explicit social agenda.
If we were to think beyond the local-global binary opposition we could
conceive of a ‘grounded global’ university. Critical studies of globalization have
shown that it is not a ‘nebula’ out there somewhere ‘doing things’ to us. Rather
globalization only operates successfully when it is grounded. In the business world
the SONY Corporation realized this early on and developed the conception of
‘glocalization’ to articulate its commitment to local embeddedness of its global
consumer goods. The term is derived from the Japanese world dochakuka which
translates more or less as global localization. Glocalization , in terms of social theory,
can be seen as a reflection of the general tension between the universal and the
particular. I would argue that universities are glocal organizations on the whole, that
is they have both local roots and a global reach or context. To promote a grounded
global university means to recognize that the world of knowledge is global but also
that knowledge must be applied and grounded to be effective. The new grounded
university would be well placed to articulate global citizenship as a key element of the
student experience.
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Future scenarios
In the presently deeply uncertain times we are living through it is essential for
a university to have a vision of the future. As Helga Nowotny et al. put it, the main
challenge for the contemporary university is how to deal with uncertainty (Nowotny
et al 2005: 258). The contemporary university needs to be flexible, able to adapt and
focused to take advantage of new opportunities.
If we are to be able to react
creatively and rapidly to these opportunities we, necessarily, need to be less
bureaucratic as organizations. Our visions may well be universalistic but our response
will be particular in the way we adapt to uncertainty and change. While of course, we
cannot know the future, we must plan for it and, as far as possible, future- proof our
strategies. With the increased uncertainty in the world around us there is an ever
greater need to explore creatively the wider context in which university strategy
decisions are taken. If university strategies are to be robust over time – i.e. applicable
to different futures – then we need to explore the complex web of change within
which we operate and seek to map out the choices we face.
The DCU Foresight Exercise created two possible scenarios for the future.
These were not meant to be realistic in any meaningful sense. Rather, they were
designed to provide two sets of polarities around which our future might oscillate.
These two worlds were to include all the economic, political, social and cultural
elements that could impact on the university. After long discussion our framework
scenarios looked like this:
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Framework scenarios
Research for Tomorrow, Today
Workshop 2
Government /
Community / Citizen
A localist, less mobile world, with strong emphasis
on carbon reduction and resource use. More
inward looking, re-focusing on local cultures &
communities; consensus & social contribution. New
approaches to establishing priorities for
local/national social needs.
Economy -------- ---------- Society
Less mobile
Politics----------
Global / Mobile
----------Culture
Community Resurgent (Scenario B)
Less open
Open
Market Ascendant (Scenario A)
An open, mobile world driven by personal
performance, efficiency, MY needs and
money. The market provides and
entrepreneurialism rules. Personal profiles
define service and price, while visibility and
celebrity ethos creates ‘star’ performers.
Market / Individual
/ Consumer
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From the scenarios we developed two distinctive ‘storylines’ that were internally
consistent and credible, while also being radically different from one another. Each of
these two potential worlds would have extremely different implications for what the
university strategy might be.
A smart strategy, of course, might be relevant
whichever scenario would actually materialize and can thus be dubbed ‘robust’.
Futures planning and the use of scenarios may, at the very least, operate as a
heuristic device to assist the university planner. It may also, however, provide us with
a compass for the type of university we aspire to have. It is here that the notion of
students as global citizens could provide a powerful driver for a more engaged and
socially responsive university in the future. Our students are, at the end of the day,
our raison d'être. At present most universities have an uneasy conceptual relationship
with their students. Are they clients simply paying for a service that universities can
provide? Are they just a necessity of life that allows universities to get on with the
real business of high-level scientific research? If a university decides to foreground
its functions in terms of citizenship, however, that would have certain implications.
The university has to itself act as a ‘good citizen’ (see section on civic engagement
below). Then, in the way it chooses its priorities it needs to be clear that the research,
for example, is not geared to profit but, rather, social need. The DCU Foresight
exercise had as its guiding principle therefore, ‘applying knowledge’ to meet human
need’.
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Foresight opportunities
The DCU Foresight Exercise was designed to ‘brainstorm’ possible
opportunities for the university going into the future. We had prior sight of the
national Forfás (Ireland’s national economic development authority) project SocioEconomic Scenarios to 2025 setting out the options for ‘Ireland Inc’. Thus our
university level scenarios were consistent with wider national perspectives on change.
Stakeholder consultations were held across various sectors and an e-questionnaire
provided a Wisdom of Crowds input. The main work has carried out, however,
through a series of intensive workshops consisting of leading researchers. Workshops
are a vital tool in scenario development providing an opportunity for people across the
university to exchange insights, discuss assumptions and integrate wide ranging
knowledge and expertise. In doing so they may develop a shared understanding of the
issues facing the university, what is creating change in the operating environment, and
what are the challenges/opportunities it faces. This team approach may also generate
new inter-disciplinary relationships and perspectives. The results in terms of Foresight
Exercise were as follows:
FORESIGHT DOMAINS
Managing
your health
Educational
Innovation and
Translational
Learning
Development
and security
in a complex
world
Always on networks
and
communications
Sustainable
resource use for a
carbon neutral
world
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In some of these areas DCU already had a ‘competitive advantage’ such as Managing
Your Health focused on pro-active and preventative approaches and technologies to
manage well-being. Always on Networks also sat naturally in a strongly IT oriented
university and would focus on the impact and implications of embedded intelligence
for social interactions.
The other two areas focused around development and
sustainable resources were newer but utilized existed research strengths in novel ways.
Foresight itself also emerged as an area considered a priority with the intention that it
would provide strategic direction and ensure the university remained innovative and
competitive.
What is most interesting from the point of view of this particular piece is the
importance given to ‘educational innovation and translational learning’ when
prioritizing the key areas in which the university would be applying knowledge to
meet human need. There was an explicit understanding of how marketisation had led
to a ‘commoditization’ of education. There was also, however, a recognition that in
an era of greater diversity of the student body we should be developing education
which is flexible and tailored to the individual needs of students. Flexible learning
would involve more effective profiling, assessment and research into learning styles
to understand the roles and benefits of different approaches to learning. We are now
much more focused on the potential of virtual worlds, group work, online teaching
and f2f (face-to-face) learning approaches. Against which might be considered the
innate conservatism of the teaching world we promoted ‘a dare to be different’
philosophy that would research and promote new forms of provision, delivery and
assessment based on our own educational research and that of others.
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Learning Innovation
A law student at Birmingham University was questioned about the ‘great crash
of 2008’ and her answer was “Young people don’t understand economics because
we’re not taught about it. I guess it probably does affect us, but it sort of feels
irrelevant” (Mc Veigh 2008:22). We could just say that maybe students should be
reading newspapers a bit more. But in reality it is the universities that are failing in
their traditional educational function. So we could grasp the nettle and admit that
most universities have not done a terribly good job of “educating global citizens in a
diverse world” (Banks 2003). Citizenship education has traditionally had a national
not to say nationalist and assimilationist character. But, as James Banks puts it:
“Citizenship education must be transformed in the 21st century” (Bank 2003:2). In
Ireland
there
has
been
a
campaign
to
develop
‘active
citizenship’
(http://www.activecitizenship.ie/) but this has mainly focused around volunteering
and the theoretical underpinning has been a simplified version of the contested
notions of Robert Putnam around ‘social capital’.
At DCU there was already an inter-faculty practice-based module called the
Uaneen Module (http://www.dcu.ie/uaneen/ ) administrated through an office attached to
the Students Union. This was quite popular amongst students and was promoted by
some academic staff. It was based on translating some practical student experience
(e.g.the running of a sports team) into academic credits. There has also been a move
towards mainstreaming CBL (Community based learning) with clear guidelines on
how community learning can be integrated into the curriculum. It has been less easy
however, to create the structures that would allow all students to take, for example,
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modules on Sustainability, Globalization or indeed Citizenship.
The established
Faculty, School and disciplinary boundaries and structures conspire against such
innovation. Perhaps we need to move beyond the realm of service learning and
volunteering discourses to (re)discover a more challenging and radical conception of
learning as empowerment and a tool for social transformation?
If learning innovation is going to have a role in promoting the notion of
students as ‘global citizens’ then a real change of mindsets will need to occur. One
way of pursuing this objective is through what is called in the US international
service-learning initiatives. By working in communities overseas students should
develop a global awareness and begin to acquire the attributes of global citizenship.
In the UK there is the experience of VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) providing
similar initiatives. However, one US study has found that there are a number of
systemic problems inherent in developing this approach:
1. A lack of administrative integration at the campus level in terms of staffing
and credits;
2. A mismatch between academic calendars and the international service needs
context;
3. A mismatch between the broadly stated institutional goals and academic
constraints on campus;
4. The narrow demographic range (white/middle class) of those who engage in
these schemes (Brown 2005:3).
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These institutional barriers are considerable and show how far we are from
‘mainstreaming’ global citizenship.
We now need to consider whether other
initiatives in the areas of internationalization and of civic engagement (developed
below) may to some extent fill the gap between the vision and reality of global
citizenship.
Internationalisation
Like
most
other
universities
DCU
is
currently
designing
an
internationalization strategy. We would be conscious that “too little attention has
been paid to identifying the kinds of skills and learning outcomes that are most likely
to lead to… students who are well prepared to live and act as “global citizens””
(Brown 2007:1). In truth this area is in its infancy and many proclamations are
aspirational only. Certainly we need to understand much more clearly the importance
of the international domain to universities now and in the future. Its role is linked
with other aspects or domains of the learning agenda. First we should explore the
interlocking learning domains we work with, which in diagrammatic form might look
like this:
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Learning domains
International/isation
Campus Based
ICT and e-learning
Work Based
Community Based
(Adapted from Harman 2007:7)
E-learning (and ICT more broadly) acts as a learning commons, an enabling platform
for different forms of learning. The university is mainly campus based but may have
workplace and community learning engagements. What is less clear is the role which
the international (and internationalization) domain plays or might play in this
paradigm. Is it an add-on or is it integral to a university in the era of globalization?
The internationalization of the curriculum is clearly indispensable for
internationalization and the intention of promoting global citizenship amongst
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students. Yet in practice there has not been much progress on this point. To some
extent faculties, schools and disciplines have built up a world view and a modus
operandi which is inimical to an initiative which cuts across these established norms
such as internationalization.
The influential analysis by Nowotny et al on the
transition from Mode 1 to Mode 2 knowledge production has posited that “in order to
cope
successfully
with
uncertainties,
which
they
themselves
are
proliferating,…universities will have to become more flexible” ( Nowotny et al 2001:
225).
Bureaucratic divisions of institutional labor prevent rapid and creative
responses to changing circumstances. In this area there is as well, I suspect, a still
strong influence of what we might call methodological nationalism. Apart from a few
carefully circumscribed areas where the international/global has its space, the main
drivers, structures and implicit world views of the university remain national, if not
nationalist. This applies of course, particularly to small, peripheral countries such as
Ireland.
Finally, I believe there is a clear and crucial relationship between the
internationalisation and diversity agendas. As part of the Civic Engagement Strategy,
DCU promoted the notion of an ‘intercultural campus’. It was based on the very
rapidly changing composition of the student body and the wider society. From what
might have been called with only some exaggeration a mono-ethnic mono-cultural
society, Ireland became in the second half of the 1990’s a society where at least 15
percent of the population had been born overseas. We were also very conscious of the
international experience which showed that students who were exposed to
intercultural influences were simply more employable in the era of globalization.
Some progress was made including some cultural initiatives engaged in conjunction
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with the student’s union. But overall it could not be said that this initiative awoke
huge enthusiasm across the system. For the 2009-2011 strategic period we propose to
strengthen the intercultural campus initiative and in some way ‘mainstream’ it.
Preliminary indications, especially in the context of a economic recession which has
sharpened focus, are that the intercultural campus will pass from the realm of words to
deeds.
Civic Engagement
The other component plan of the university strategy which impacts on
students as global citizens is the civic engagement strategy. This was a new departure
for the 2006-2008 strategic period. The argument was that community or citizenship
was, or should be, the ‘third leg’ of university core business alongside teaching and
research. The main plank chosen to implement this new strategy was the opening of a
teaching centre in neighbouring Ballymun in partnership with the local regeneration
company Ballymun Regeneration Limited. North Dublin in general and Ballymun in
particular had exceptionally low levels of access to higher education. The town/gown
divide was at its widest. So the decision to set up DCU in the Community was
deigned to address this deficit. We enlisted the help of Whitehall Community College
(a further education provider) and all the relevant employment and education agencies.
Preliminary indications are that DCU in the Community will establish itself despite a
number of quite serious problems. One interesting element is the way in which the
School of Education students will carry our research at the centre and engage in
teaching in a community context.
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If DCU in the Community was the main vehicle for taking the teaching function out
into the community then the DCU Science Shop - Community Knowledge Exchange
was designed to build research links with the Community. The inspiration for this
move came from the Dutch Science Shop movement of the 1970’s and the long
standing Science Shop at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster.
Communities generate research problems or question which can be quite wideranging from social attitudes towards waste to practical engineering problems. Within
the university there is a vast array of research capacity which is, of course, subject to
commercialization.
But it can also be deployed for the purpose of community
development and empowerment. With some EU support we engaged in a pilot project
with a specialist NGO working on the mental health needs of the new migrants. Now
the challenge is to establish procedures and structures to mainstream ‘community
knowledge exchange’ in a similar way to ‘community based learning’ in the
curriculum and, a much greater challenge I believe, in the habitus of the lecturers.
For students involved in this work citizenship learning is matched by the new social
and technical skills gained.
While the 2006-2008 Civic Engagement Strategy was successful in terms of the main
planks it was still largely seen as an ‘add-on’ to core business. Therefore for 20092011 we decided the main objective should be the ‘embedding’ of civic engagement
across the university. The objective of building citizenship was fore-grounded much
more clearly. Further than that what we realized was that this ‘third leg’ of university
work needed to be mainstreamed if it was to be successful. Thus DCU in the
Community and the DCU Science Shop were taken respectively into the main
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teaching and research structures of the university. We did, however, launch one new
initiative, namely Sustainable DCU designed to make the university sustainable in
economic, social, environmental and cultural terms. What is noticeable about the
emergence of this theme through a process of consultation around the new civic
engagement strategy, has been the enthusiastic support of the students union executive.
It could well be that the broader objective of fomenting global citizenship amongst
students could find an empowering platform in the Sustainable DCU project.
Conclusion
The agenda of the grounded global university is very much a work in the
making. It will not shift the student as consumer discourse to one based on global
citizenship overnight. However, I do think my analysis provides some evidence that
there are realistic options to the neo-liberalization and marketisation that critics (see
Lynch 2008) tend to see as overwhelming. It sometimes seems as if the critics are
imprisoned by the overwhelming logic of neoliberalism. Certainly I would not wish
to minimize the very real pressures of marketisation but universities very clearly are
not and will not, become businesses. The battle for ideas is now on and the future of
the university cannot be assumed as it will depend on circumstances and political will.
The objective of orienting the grounded global university towards a new mission of
encouraging the students towards global citizenship is a worthy and realizable
objective. It will most certainly entail a change in the mindset of many systems and
staff, not to mention students themselves, but it would provide a valuable addition to
the traditional university objectives in an era of global complexity.
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References
Banks, J (2003) “Educating Citizens in a Diverse World”,
[http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/multicultural/banks2.htm]
Brown, N (2006) “Engagement In Higher Education: Preparing Global Citizens
Through International Service-Learning”, Campus Compact 20th Anniversary,:
Education, Citizens, Building Communities
[http://www.compact.org/20th/read/elevating_global_citizenship]
DCU (2008) “Managing our destiny in uncertain times: DCU Foresight Report”.
Dublin: Dublin City Universtity.
Delanty, G ( 2001 ) Challlenging Knowledge. The University in the Knowledge
Society. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Harman, E (2007) “Learning (In) Contexts. Re-imaging Campuses and Partnerships at
a New School of Thought” , Paper presented to the High Education in the 21st Century
Diversity of Missions, Conference, Dublin Institute Technology.
Lynch, K (2006) “Neo – liberalism and Marketisation: the implications for higher
education”, European Educational Research Journal, Vol 5 No1, pp.1-17.
Marginson, S and Van der Wende, M (2007) Globalisation and Higher Education.
OECD, Directorate for Education.
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Mc Veigh, T(2008) “The generation facing its first recession. How will they cope”.
The Observer 12/10/08
Nowotny, H, Scott, P and Gibbons, M (2001), Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and
the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press
Van Dyke, N “Twenty Years of University Report Cards” Higher Education in
Europe Vol 30 No2, pp103-124.
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