Teaching to discern. Hernando Arturo Estévez Cuervo
pedagogical practices are taking place; at the same time, in this field, novel political paradigms and ideas of equality, equity and human rights should be confronted.
In summary, nowadays pedagogical practices have two main challenges: first, to introduce local and traditional experiences of teaching to broader perspectives; second, to understand what a globalized education implies and to participate in the transition towards new paradigms that make a global education possible.
The anthology presented herein aims to provide a novel context for academic dialogue on globalized pedagogical practices. Specifically, it focuses on what it means to teach abroad, which means discussing methodologies, pedagogies and contents used by educators who have had the opportunity of teaching in a foreign country. This book is a dialogue that engages academic experiences in a theoretically expansive and encompassing, methodological and content-driven framework around the topic of teaching abroad.
Universidad de La Salle in Bogotá, Colombia, is the context in which all those practices took place. This anthology presents the experiences of different foreign educators who have taught at the University under the Summer Academy program, which was created, organized and implemented by the International Office (ORII). It also presents the experience of the staff members in Bogotá who have had the important duty of organizing the event in two different occasions.
The anthology has three parts: In the first part, it presents the experience of two organizational members at Universidad de La Salle; they provide the perspective of experts in the academic field who have had the challenge of integrating local and foreign educational practices. In the second and third part, this anthology provides the experiences of educators from around the world who participated in the Summer Academy on two separate occasions: 2016 and 2017.
This book is not restricted to discussing methodological problems or accomplishments of the Summer Academy. Instead, they gather the subjective experiences of each partaker, which allows the reader to understand, in different levels, the value of participating in these experiences.
This anthology has two goals: first, to contribute to current dialogues between academic institutions and to foster the creation of novel pedagogical methods by describing the ideas and problems that arose in the context of the Summer Academy at Universidad de La Salle; and second, to provide a space for participants of the Summer Academy, both professors and students, to share their learning experiences and explorations in the context of a study-abroad program.
The first part, “Experience of the Summer Academy from an organizational perspective,” is composed of chapters by two staff members at Universidad de La Salle who participated in the organization of the Summer Academy:
Giovanni Anzola’s essay, “Grappling with the Challenges of Social Development through In-House International Training,” recognizes the academic and administrative challenges that come with implementing an in-house study abroad program. This program requires an institutional commitment that derives from recognizing the emergence of a new generation of students that think, act and communicate in a global perspective. For Anzola, the Summer Academy has become an academic tradition at the university that has focused on several topics: Latin American thought, leadership and global understanding, alternatives to socio-economic growth, peacebuilding, innovation, entrepreneurship and sustainable development have been some of the umbrella themes that have been used to invite people from all over the globe to teach local students in Colombia. This essay brings into consideration a notion of education that goes beyond a mere interaction between individuals, seeing it as a common production of knowledge that can go from the classroom to the solution of real-life problems.
“Education, Pedagogy and Educational Content,” by Hernando A. Estévez suggests that education is always a political act that involves theories, methods and truth values; therefore, it is neither neutral nor impartial. To educate is to politically commit oneself to either reproducing what is already in place or to create new social and political paradigms. In that sense, the contents of an educational program become a tool for mediating between the classroom and reality, to understand its complexities as well as the role educations plays in its construction. Educators must be aware of their responsibility as they promote a specific relationship between teacher and student, which in many cases is reinforced by a content that reproduces a fixed way to understand reality and leaves no room for thinking new social and political paradigms. Thus, an educational program and, in this particular case, a program related to teaching abroad, can be improved by the study of alternative contents, which allow students know other ways of being that transcend the social, political and economic perspective already present in their society.
The second part gathers three experiences of educators enrolled in the Summer Academy:
Elizaveta S. Golousova’s contribution to the anthology, “Rewards and Challenges of Teaching Abroad,” reflects on what it means to teach overseas and how this experience can be a helpful testimony for others, as there are plenty of programs offered by various educational institutions for those who want to study abroad. Her writing describes what educators experience while they are away from their home countries. One of the key issues every visiting professor must deal with is the necessity to adapt to a local style of mentoring — e.g., the ability to develop intercultural competence. The author describes some of her experiences on cross-cultural communication and shares her ideas about certain techniques and methods that might be useful for visiting scholars.
“Making Relations: A Decolonizing Perspective on Teaching Abroad,” written by Janice Cindy Gaudet, highlights an Indigenous pedagogical approach and teaching philosophy based on “making relations” through notions of decolonization, indigeneity, and gender. Her experience of teaching abroad at Universidad de La Salle inspired a deeper reflection on what decoloniality evokes when one is teaching outside of a familiar context. In this chapter, Gaudet explores the problem of creating an academic environment grounded in a decolonial framework; namely, an environment in which students and educators, together, deconstruct history, traditional identities and myths based on our colonial past. She proposes the creation of learning spaces grounded in Indigenous thought, which give voice to ancestral knowledge and allow us to rethink the meaning of our own culture and selves. She espouses a commitment to building relations between students and Indigenous peoples from Colombia that disrupts dominant models of pedagogy through co-creative learning. Collectively, yet also uniquely, the idea is to share in a process with the aim “to nourish the learning spirit” and to imagine a “good life (buen vivir)” for all of us.
In “Teaching Creativity and Innovation in an International Context,” Jordi Mass-Castella analyzes the relevant aspects involved in teaching creativity and innovation to an international group from his experience during the Summer Academy in 2016. Some aspects are related to the cultural distance between the teacher and the students and also to the multicultural nature of an international school. In such multicultural environments, it becomes critical that instructors develop skills to deliver culturally sensitive and culturally adapted instruction. Other aspects depend on teaching creativity and innovative skills: In education, creativity has more to do with the process than with the final product and focuses on the development of thinking and cognitive skills. The text discusses a selection of different methodologies (business model canvas, design thinking, etc.) to foster creative thinking and innovative skills.
The third part of this anthology gathers the experiences of five educators who participated in the Summer Academy, which focused on the “Peacebuilding Generation”:
Donna Maria Maynard’s essay, “Teaching Abroad: Multidisciplinary Perspective,” outlines her experience as a lecturer from two different cultural contexts and reflects her experience of dealing with a new cultural context and a foreign language under her position as a visiting scholar in the Summer Academy at Universidad de La Salle. She shares her reflections and theoretical insights while teaching an undergraduate course in Counseling as a visiting scholar. She shares her teaching philosophy, inspired by Jean Piaget’s (1952) theory of constructivism, which supports the use of exercises to let students play an active role in their learning process, based on the idea that knowledge depends on action. She also describes what she thinks are the Colombian students’ needs, which includes altering the course syllabus and activities. In addition, she provides an overview of the Pre-service