Policy & Practice - A Development Education Review

 

 

'Never the twain shall meet?': Breaking barriers through a global citizenship partnership between NGOs and a higher education institution

issue2
Breaking Barriers
Spring 2006

Harry Blee, Alan Britton, Dr. Bob David & Dr. Ben Young

As part of DFID’s work to look at how initial teacher education and training might be used to effect longer term changes in the attitudes of teachers towards global development issues, four projects were funded in the UK.  In this article Harry Blee, Alan Britton, Bob Davies and Ben Young examine the project partnership between the University of Glasgow Faculty of Education and the International Development Education Association of Scotland.

 

Introduction

The Global Citizenship in Initial Teacher Education (GCITE) Project was designed to embed learning and teaching about global citizenship into three core Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes at the University of Glasgow. Funded by the United Kingdom (UK) Department for International Development (DFID), it was conceived and operated by a partnership between the University of Glasgow Faculty of Education and the International Development Education Association of Scotland (IDEAS).  This form of partnership, between a Higher Education institution and a coalition of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), provided opportunities for innovative practice in teacher education that utilised the traditional strengths of both sectors.

            However, from the outset the partnership had to acknowledge that alongside the opportunities presented there were a number of possible pitfalls awaiting the partnership.  These were associated with differences of culture, institutional priorities and values, working practices and underlying philosophies and ideology.  In the event, the partnership evolved organically during the three-year lifetime of the Project, and both the opportunities that emerged, and the remediation of divergence of outlook provide illumination and point to good practice guidelines that might help to inform similar projects and partnerships in the future.

            In conclusion, the authors suggest that the partnership concept described highlights the need for new models of inter-agency and cross-sectoral partnerships in the light of the rapidly changing global context that will inform future educational structures and policy.

 

Context

In 2001, DFID embarked on a programme to promote awareness of development issues in the UK. This programme arose from two policy position papers, Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century (1997) and Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the World's Poor (2000). The 1999 strategy paper Building Support for Development set out DFID's aim of working with the formal education system (schools and associated higher education establishments), the media, businesses, trade unions and faith groups. It is within this context that DFID funded four projects across the UK educational jurisdictions to look at how changes to the processes of initial teacher education and training might be used to effect longer term changes in the attitudes of teachers towards global development issues. A key element of the chosen projects was the core role of partnerships between the relevant higher education institutions and independent providers of ‘development education’. In the Scottish context, the successful bid was based on a partnership between the University of Glasgow Faculty of Education and IDEAS.

            The Faculty of Education of the University of Glasgow was established in 1999 by a merger of St. Andrew's College of Education and the University of Glasgow. Founded in 1895, St. Andrew's College had long held a historic responsibility for the preparation of teachers for Catholic Schools in Scotland, and within this responsibility there lay a long standing tradition of education for social justice, inclusion and care.  The mission of the College, and its associated values base, was retained through the merger and continues to be expressed in the mission statement of both the wider Faculty and the Religious Education (RE) department in particular (Department of Religious Education, 2004; Faculty of Education, 2006).

            IDEAS is a network of about forty organisations and individuals concerned with the promotion of development education in formal and informal education settings.  Development education is defined as “education which fosters knowledge, skills and attitudes which promote justice and equality in a multicultural society and interdependent world” (IDEAS, n.d). Its members include large international development and campaigning organisations such as Save the Children, Christian Aid and Oxfam as well as the development education centres and numerous smaller providers. Members of IDEAS work through the network to promote and deliver development education.

            Several other factors formed the backdrop to the project, and helped to shape it:

 

The Education for Citizenship agenda

In Scotland, Education for Citizenship: A Paper for Discussion and Development (2002) promotes (but does not prescribe) a cross-curricular and whole-school approach to citizenship education, assigning a central role to experiential learning and democratic structures in schools.  Unlike other UK jurisdictions, citizenship education in Scotland is not considered to be a discrete subject area, nor is it subject to assessment.  All teachers have an equal responsibility for the development of citizenship education.  The Scottish approach aims “to develop capability for thoughtful and responsible participation in political, economic, social and cultural life” (LTS, 2002:7).  It emphasises that everyone belongs to various types of community: “both communities of place, from local to global, and communities of interest, rooted in a common concern or purpose” (LTS, 2002:4).  As such, education for global citizenship can be seen as integral to education for citizenship within the Scottish framework.

 

The National Priorities

For education in Scotland, as approved by the Scottish Parliament in 2000, Values and Citizenship are highlighted as one of the five central goals of the Scottish educational system.  In particular, the National Priorities include the statement that schools are:

 

 “[t]o work with parents to teach pupils respect for self and one another and their interdependence with other members of their neighbourhood and society and to teach them the duties and responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society” (Scottish Executive, 2000).

 

The centrality of citizenship has been reinforced by A Curriculum for Excellence (2004), which states that educating for citizenship is one of the four core purposes of the curriculum, underpinned by values of “Justice, Wisdom, Compassion and Integrity” (Scottish Executive Education Department, 2004).  It is the view of the authors of this paper that these national policy statements lent considerable weight to the rationale and the legitimacy of the project undertaken at the University of Glasgow.

 

The global political and economic context

Shifting public attitudes towards global trends formed an important backdrop to the project. Public awareness of global trade and development issues was significantly raised following the emergence of popular campaigns focussing on global development issues at the 1997 meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle. The Jubilee 2000 movement to cancel the unpayable debts of poor countries further increased the profile of these issues, particularly among school age students. Public awareness of global political issues increased again following the September 11th attacks on the United States (US) and the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’; widespread public opposition to the US-led war on Iraq followed this. In all, the Global Citizenship Project takes place against a background of a level of public awareness of global issues which may be unprecedented and which finds its sharpest expression in popular movements such as the Make Poverty History campaign and the Live8 initiative.

 

Defining global citizenship

As a concept which means different things to different people, the notion of global citizenship required to be defined for the purposes of the Global Citizenship Project.  The project drew its understanding of global citizenship principally from work done by Oxfam (Oxfam, 2002; Oxfam, 2006).  Global citizenship education was thus understood as education which promotes:

·  understanding of how the lives of young people in Scotland are linked to those of people throughout the world

·  realisation of the interconnectedness and interdependence of modern living

·  critical understanding of the economic, cultural, political and environment contexts in which we live

·  empowering young people to take control of their own lives rather than becoming the victims of change

·  encouraging young people to work towards a more just and sustainable world.

 

Within this definition there is scope for broad variation on/in interpretations and the acceptable means of attaining the goals of global citizenship.  The principal point of debate seems to be the issue of priority. For educationalists, the goals of global citizenship could be seen as educational goods in their own right; experience of political campaigning might be thought useful as a means to the end of achieving them. For political campaigning groups the educational goals are a means to the end of producing active citizens. This difference in perspective suggests that different partners might have variable or even conflicting perceptions of the project's goals and methods. Contesting, negotiating and harmonising these potentially divergent understandings were an important part of the preliminary stages of the project.

 

The project’s objectives

The main aim of the Project was to build global citizenship into the philosophy and practice of ITE courses and, in so doing, provide a model for other providers of ITE. Successful ‘embedding’ would be evident when course documentation, staff and students, and the general ethos and operation of ITE programmes demonstrated critical adherence to, and shared ownership of, the principles of global citizenship.

 

1. Shaping the strategy

Shaping the strategy involved:

·  an initial audit of existing practice within the Faculty of Education

·  an early strategising phase in which initial plans for embedding were developed.

 

In the first year, an extensive review of the BEd Primary course was made to provide a baseline.  A formal audit of the practice of individual staff was not carried out as a shared understanding about the nature of education for global citizenship had not been developed.  Also, the project had not at that stage established itself to the point where other members of staff would justifiably prioritise work.  In addition, staff had other issues to consider: St. Andrew's College of Education had merged with the University of Glasgow and a number of courses were in the process of being, or were about to be, reviewed.

            IDEAS members developed workshops on global citizenship for Faculty staff, but initial plans did not come to fruition as these courses had to compete for staff time with other centrally provided initiatives focused on other elements of the fledgling faculty’s mission and identity. Instead, the ideas in these workshops were used as the basis for small-scale collaborative projects carried out with small groups of staff members. This approach to working was a response to the project team's developing awareness of the institutional environment. A formal series of workshops transpired to be inappropriate because faculty staff were too pressed to be able to commit to a series of workshops and because material relevant to global citizenship had to be carefully tailored to the needs of faculty staff in collaboration with the staff themselves.  The notion of a series of workshops misconceives the relationship between IDEAS members and Faculty staff: it tends to treat IDEAS members as external consultants brought in to correct a defect in Faculty practice, whereas the correct model, as was agreed later in the project, was one in which IDEAS and Faculty staff were to be seen as equals engaged in a collaborative problem-solving venture.

 

2. Effecting change to ITE course documentation

Change to course documentation was an important goal of the project. This was not assessed by looking to see how often global citizenship itself was referred to in project documents.  Rather, the documents were assessed interpretatively and holistically, in order to ascertain their overall degree of convergence with the development of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes contained within the project’s working and dynamic definition of global citizenship outlined above. 

            The review of course documentation was restricted to three of the Faculty's ITE courses: the BEd Primary, the PGCE Primary and the PGCE Secondary.

 

The established BEd

Documentation for the BEd was reviewed in year one with results being presented at the SCRE centre (9/5/03) by Project Team members. The review found that course documentation focused mainly on rationales, aims and frameworks, not on course content. As a consequence, conclusions about the extent to which courses reflected the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes at the basis of global citizenship could not easily be drawn (Blee et al, 2001-2002).  The review noted that the course documentation mentioned “developing awareness in students of national, regional, and whole school issues”, a formulation which excluded the global. In general, there seemed to be very little reference to the global dimension; reference to studying European issues was included in the course structure, but not to global issues; the Equal Opportunities section referred to stereotyping but not to prejudice and discrimination. There was, however, a reference to the importance of cross-curricular themes, which could, it was concluded, provide a basis for work related to global citizenship. The review suggested that while there was little reference to the global dimension, there were many opportunities for including it in revised documentation.

 

The revised BEd

The BEd course was reviewed in 2001-02, and, significantly, members of the Project Team were involved in this. The review was explicitly intended to reflect wider patterns of social and educational change.  The new course afforded a central role to education for global citizenship and sustainable development (described in a presentation given by the BEd Course Leader to the Project Team, 21/6/04), including strong support for active learning and developing citizenship skills and values through participation in community projects and through fostering student ownership of learning processes. One aim of the new BEd was that there should be a spirit of negotiation between students and lecturers by fostering participatory attitudes intended to transfer into the school classroom. The new BEd clearly held the potential for meeting the aim of embedding a model for education for global citizenship in Faculty practice.  An elective specialist study model for third and fourth year BEd students, “Personal and social development: citizenship” ran for the first time in 2005 - insufficient students opted for it to run in 2004.

 

PGCE Primary

This course was reviewed in 2000, before the Project was underway. Faculty staff indicated that global citizenship did not have a high profile in it. There were two exceptions: the Professional Development Week, which did prioritise global citizenship (although it was suggested that the ethos here had not been fully integrated into the rest of the course); and the emphasis on inclusion. It was thought by staff that this could change with the review of the course, which was intended to reflect the Scottish curriculum review by organising learning into overarching themes. Citizenship was seen to be an important part of this, with the purpose of the curriculum being defined in four capacities: successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors.

 

PGCE Secondary

This course was reviewed in 2002-03 and has now emerged with a strong emphasis on global citizenship, expressed in particular in the Professional Development Programme (PDP). The PDP sessions were two hour slots on Monday mornings. Typically the Project would approach these by structuring them into plenary discussions, workshops led by project team members, and a plenary with an expressive arts input from a visiting school. 

            The Global Citizenship Project managed the precursor to the PDP in the previous PGCE course; the precursor - the Professional Integrated Programme (PIP) - was run by the Project in 2002-03 with a strong and explicit focus on the global dimension.  The good practice exhibited during the PIP programme led to the Project having a firm relationship with the PGCE Secondary course when it was redeveloped in accordance with national policy as a professional graduate diploma (PGDE) in secondary education. Global citizenship inputs by Faculty and IDEAS staff remain a feature of the PDP programme in the rebranded programme.

 

Evaluation of PDP inputs

This was among the most high-profile and successful work of the Project, although a few student feedback forms said that they found the sessions politically facile, and that they promoted a thinly disguised, neo-liberal agenda. It is not possible to gauge the extent of these feelings; we can only note that the Global Citizenship Project did not speak to the needs of some highly politicised students. 

            Formal and informal feedback about the global citizenship input into the PDP was extremely positive. Students overwhelmingly thought the sessions were educational and enjoyable.  For example, on several occasions sessions received spontaneous applause and observational evidence suggests that there was a ‘buzz’ about the sessions, which suggests that the work done here was effective in raising the profile of the Project. The PDP sessions drew on the range of expertise available through the Project Team but - and this may have longer term implications - were labour-intensive.

 

Evaluation of this work

Global citizenship is being progressively embedded in ITE course documentation in the Faculty, with the greatest impact being in PGDE Secondary. This is a consequence of the Project and wider themes in Scottish education (The Curriculum Review and the emergence of A Curriculum for Excellence). In general, it seems fair to say that these wider educational themes are supportive of the aims and principles of education for global citizenship. 

 

3. Working with staff in the ITE institution

After the first year of the Project, the team settled into a model of collaborative working generally characterised by IDEAS members working with staff rather than directly with students. The object of the collaborations were seen as a mutually beneficial exploration of a variety of methodologies.

            Under this rubric, work was done with Music (three sessions on global issues, identity, and the political role of music with locally resident musicians), Modern Languages (global dimension linked to modern languages policy), Business Studies (bibliography created), Environmental Science (bibliography developed, themes identified and information provided), Health (activities designed, bibliography created), Art and Design (Curriculum Studies funding future joint work between locally resident artist and the arts base) and Religious Education (RE).

            In addition to this, collaborative work was done on Education by Design, the use of the Development Compass Rose in the BEd 1 course (Project Team provided training in the resource for the tutor team), bibliography on stereotypes and perceptions of learners provided for the BEd.

            The following subject areas were also thought to have worked in line with the aims and principles of global citizenship independently of the project and relevant staff members have been involved in the project in a variety of ways: Mathematics, Expressive Arts (Art and Design, Drama and Physical Education), Modern Studies, Geography, History, RE, ICT and English.

 

4. The general ethos and operation of the ITE institution

The project originally aimed at enriching the culture of decision making within the Faculty so that student voices would be more readily heard at faculty level.

            Very little progress was made here. In part this can be explained by the unexpected pressures put on staff through the merger and the resultant move of campus, alongside an underestimation of the pressures on students taking ITE courses. However, this explanation does not seem wholly satisfactory. More reflection is needed on the nature of decision-making and evaluation in the Faculty and how it would be possible to make an impact on this consistent with the practice of global citizenship. 

            The Project's attempts to change the ethos of the Faculty shifted to changing the atmosphere within the institution. This was done through the seminar series and several, high profile, large scale events (two ‘Big Days’ and the 15 CCEM Glasgow Youth conference) and displays of global citizenship education resources and public activities related to these.

 

The seminar series

Normally, these were attended by between 20 and 35 people, the exception being the presentation given by Anita Roddick, which attracted over 250 people. Participants were a mixture of Faculty staff, members of educational NGOs, teachers and postgraduate students. Project Team members felt some disappointment that more Faculty staff did not attend. Nevertheless, uniformly positive comments on the seminar series were fed back to the Project, with one comment being to the effect that it was the most significant research activity within the Faculty.

 

The Big Days

The Big Days devoted to global citizenship (11/6/02 and 9/6/03) were very large scale events which took over the institution for a day. They were intended to be “truly inspirational” and to generate an atmosphere akin to a popular Arts Festival, with a wide variety of academic, philosophical, theoretical and classroom-based activities for students to choose from. The scope of activities and presenters in each case was impressive. Students participating gave very positive feedback. 

            It seems clear that participant students felt that the day had a positive impact on their teaching practice. The presenters and organisers of the events were less uniformly positive. Although participating students were enthused, fewer students than anticipated attended with the result that attendance at many of the workshops was low. Questions were raised about whether the events really met the goals of embedding global citizenship into the Faculty, as participant students would soon move on.  Given this, doubts were aired about whether the immense burden of organising this could be reconciled with its overall impact. Some external contributors said that they would not participate again unless the event was organised differently. On reflection, such a high profile event was significant in advancing the Project's goals, as it demonstrated the competence and skills of the Project Team and greatly raised its public profile within the Faculty, not least among the decision-makers. Having served its purpose to raise the profile of the Project, the all-encompassing format of the Big Day was dropped in favour of smaller more targeted events in the third year. These included the National Seminar for ITE professionals, the Values and Citizenship Event for teachers and creative inputs into specific courses.

 

15 CCEM

The 15 CCEM Glasgow Youth event also raised the profile of the Project and drew students into active engagement with the Project Team. This event was aimed at secondary schools in the Glasgow area and aimed, over two days, to provide them with information about global issues and the skills needed to take action on them. Feedback about the event was overwhelmingly positive.  For example, a wide variety of people commented that this provided a model for a young people's event that must be repeated. No one yet has repeated an event on this scale. This is due in part to the tremendous problems experienced by the organisers, whose plans were persistently interfered with by outside agencies.

 

Library use and resources

It was recognised from the outset of the project that the level of uptake of the Main Library's school resource collection of global citizenship-related materials would be an important concrete indicator of the success of changing the general ethos within the Faculty. A detailed audit of this has not taken place, but as of October 2004, the library had 18 items within the School Experience Collection related to global and citizenship issues, only one of which was out. This suggests a low level of uptake. Similarly, few students have been using the resources held within the Project Office. This concrete information tends to run counter to the general impression of success in changing Faculty ethos, but a proper interpretation cannot yet be made. The low level of uptake does not necessarily indicate superficiality of embedding. It could equally reflect increased emphasis on web-based resources, a tendency for students to look outside school experience resources in working on projects. Further study needs to be done on this.

 

5. Development of national and international links

Work has proceeded on this and limited progress has been made but the work will continue beyond the life of the Project. Building national and international links between the Faculty of Education and other teaching institutions was always considered to be a slightly secondary goal of the Project so the lack of progress here does not strongly indicate failure to meet project goals.

            Nationally, a strong network of contacts has been built up, particularly through the National Seminar on Global Citizenship in Initial Teacher Education which provided a survey of the state of play across Scotland and was attended by staff from all the ITE institutions in Scotland bar one.

 

6. Research demonstrating that the project has been successful

An extensive mail survey of probationers from the Faculty was carried out in 2004, with the support of the GTC. This was intended to investigate the experience of students in trying to implement education for global citizenship, but it suffered from a very disappointing response rate (about 1%). In 2005, this was superseded by research that aimed to evaluate the familiarity with, and commitment to, elements of National Priority 4 among probationer teachers, and to establish the extent to which they are incorporating these elements into their everyday practice.

            A wide range of indicators is appropriate in gauging the success of the project, including: 700 visits per month to the website, a newsletter which went out to schools in all local authorities (distributed normally by the LA education departments) and to an extensive further list of contacts built up by the administrator, use of a plasma screen to promote events, resources principally borrowed by staff and some students (about six resources were borrowed per month on average) and overwhelmingly positive informal feedback. Earlier in the project there were indications that many members of staff held it in low esteem but these were never substantiated in feedback from staff questionnaires.  In the final year of the project the office received approximately ten enquiries per month related to global citizenship education issues, suggesting that it was beginning to build a profile as an information centre.

 

Conclusions

The conclusions to be drawn from a project of this scale and character are always provisional and even, in certain respects, ambivalent. Nevertheless, the project was founded upon principles of critical reflection and stakeholder evaluation directly intended to foreground lessons that might be learned for related and subsequent initiatives in global citizenship. Some of these now seem clear, and their emergence is itself one of the signature outcomes of the project as a whole.

            Endeavours that aim at far-reaching institutional change inevitably excite contrasting and vigorous responses from interests either threatened or empowered by the process of change. The unfolding of the project undoubtedly generated tension as long-held institutional practices were challenged or called into question and a headline lesson of the project would appear to be that the drivers of such change must emerge from within the institution even where external forces act as the initiators or catalysts of change. Revising key documentation and introducing innovative approaches to learning and teaching requires informed participation, negotiation and the affirmation of the institution’s existing attainments, expertise and capacities. The cutting-edge quality of global citizenship is more fully embraced when its core philosophical and ethical principles are shown to be fully consonant with the best traditions of Initial Teacher Education.  The enduring roots of these principles are in an essentially moral conception of education as an instrument for social justice, equality and shared prosperity. It is also vital to relate proposed innovation to favourable developments in the wider national and international political environment, towards which teachers and teacher educators are instinctively and professionally well-disposed.  Global citizenship echoes and amplifies progressive themes such as the core values of the Scottish Parliament and the extension of the international Human Rights agenda. Placing emphasis upon these affinities can better facilitate its integration into teacher education and its embrace by new and aspiring members of the teaching profession.

            It is also vital that raised awareness of global citizenship is generated out of local institutional practices that themselves reflect the overall ethic of the global citizenship movement, with its emphasis on participation and democratic decision-making. This again entails the validation of existing cultures of participation where these are seen to be just and effective. Building upon and enhancing established processes breeds confidence and averts the suggestion of top-down imposition, no matter how high-minded. It seems clear that the particular historical moment of the Glasgow experience is relevant here. The Global Citizenship Project was introduced into Glasgow University at a point where teacher education specifically, and university education more generally, was falling under the scrutiny of a strenuous regime of performance management, output measurement and accountability. The principles and values of the Project stood sometimes in uneasy relation to these trends and this could on occasion reinforce the impression that the Project was, in fact, marginal to the larger aspirations of the Faculty. The principal means of countering this perception was the targeting of high-profile events and interventions in the life of the Faculty designed to showcase the presence and impact of the project. It seems evident that this style of promotion must be accompanied by more ‘grass-roots’ confidence-building measures formulated and refined by the frontline personnel of the institution. These should include validation of existing staff expertise, dialogue with subject areas committed to processes of review and enhancement, cultivation of existing course content already sympathetic to the outlook and approaches of the project and direct engagement with student learners in the areas where their subject loyalties, aptitudes and professional values converge. In an important sense, this means an articulation of global citizenship less as a ‘dimension’ and more as a ‘method’ in Initial Teacher Education, recognised implicitly as part of their practical wisdom by teacher educators and their students. The values base of modern teacher education has profound affinities with the imperatives of global citizenship and the Glasgow project has shown that more could be made of this common outlook.

            Perhaps the most ambitious and innovative aspect of the Global Citizenship Project at Glasgow University was the partnership between the Faculty of Education and IDEAS. Although this partnership built upon a previous experience of collaboration, the form of synergy envisaged by the project represented a step change in the links between the teacher education sector and the coalition of development education interests identified with IDEAS. The ongoing task of project evaluation and review has confirmed the overall success and durability of the partnership, the fruits of which are to be seen in each of the project milestones and in all of its major educational outputs.  The relationship between the new Faculty Unit for the Study of Global Citizenship and IDEAS holds forth the prospect of collaborative work through the Enabling Effective Support initiative, and this could not have evolved had the original alliance been less than a success.

            With this positive point established, it is important to recognise the stages of development of the partnership and the challenges that were faced at each of these. Towards the mid point of the project it became evident that there was a lack of trust between the two sides. Members of the Project team highlighted that this should not have been seen as a general problem for the whole partnership, and that there were some relationships that remained strong and transparent. Nevertheless, the initial phase of the project ought to have devoted greater attention and energy to the potential divergence of cultures between IDEAS and the Education Faculty of a major metropolitan university. The origins of the IDEAS network in traditions of democratic activism, conscientiousness, and political engagement created periodic misunderstanding of the regulatory and stipulative frameworks within which teacher education is situated, especially in a period of increased centralisation and scrutiny. At the same time, the dispersed and consultative character of leadership within the IDEAS organisation appeared sometimes to Faculty staff as unduly diffuse and dilatory, delaying important steps in the realisation of the project goals and impeding progress in operational activities. Deeper ideological differences would also occasionally surface, when IDEAS members saw the Faculty as fettered to hierarchical forms of management at variance with the philosophy of global citizenship and the Faculty team bridled at the attachment of IDEAS to what appeared to be collectivist solutions to problems in education and development. The eventual identification of these difficulties enabled steps to be undertaken to resolve them and the frank and searching quality of the resultant dialogue laid the foundations of a much clearer and professionally productive relationship based on respect, trust and genuine complementarity of skills. Each partner came to be perceived as a much more complex organism by the other. The experience of the Glasgow project strongly suggests, however, that these issues should be ventilated and clarified at the outset of a collaborative undertaking of this kind. 

            The breaking of barriers to effective partnership requires an honest and open appraisal of the obstacles to mutual understanding as these arise in the course of shared work. The removal of barriers perhaps implies a more intensive form of vision-building at the incubation stage of transformative projects. Both approaches, at their best, express the hope and the reality of global citizenship as a way of learning and living.

 

References

Blee, H, Duncanson, C, McClosky, A (2001-2002) “Global citizenship and initial teacher education”, manuscript, Global Citizenship Project, p.15.

 

DFID (1997) Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century.

 

DFID (1999) Building Support for Development.

 

DFID (2000) Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the World's Poor.

 

Dower, N & Williams, J (2002) Global Citizenship: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Oxfam GB.

 

IDEAS, (n.d) Definition of development education, available: http://www.ideas-forum.org.uk/

 

LTS (2002) Education for Citizenship: A Paper for Discussion and Development.

 

Oxfam GB (2006) Education for Global Citizenship: a guide for schools, Oxford: Oxfam.

 

Scottish Executive Education Department (2004) A Curriculum for Excellence.

 

Scottish Executive (2000) National Priorities in School Education, available: www.scotland.gov.uk/education/nationalpriorities/priorities.asp.

 

University of Glasgow, Faculty of Education and Department of Religious Education mission statements, retrieved from:www.gla.ac.uk/departments/religiouseducation/index.shtml; www.gla.ac.uk/faculties/education/docs/about_mission.shtml.

 

 

Harry Blee was the former Co-ordinator of the Learning and Teaching for Global Citizenship Project.  He is currently programme leader of the PGDE secondary and director of the Education for Global Citizenship Unit at the University of Glasgow.

 

Alan Britton was the former Stevenson Lecturer in Citizenship and on the management team of the Learning and Teaching for Global Citizenship Project.  He is currently Faculty CPD officer and deputy director of the Education for Global Citizenship Unit at the University of Glasgow.

 

Dr Bob Davis is Head of Department of Religious Education in the University of Glasgow. He has taught and written widely on teacher education, childhood and professional ethics.

 

Dr Ben Young is National Co-ordinator of Jubilee Scotland and former Co-ordinator of the Learning and Teaching for Global Citizenship Project at the University of Glasgow.  He is a member of IDEAS and in 2005 was Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St Andrews.

Citation: Blee, H, Britton, A, David, B & Young, B (2006) ''Never the twain shall meet?': Breaking barriers through a global citizenship partnership between NGOs and a higher education institution', Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 2, pp. 24-39.

Citation: 
Blee, H, Britton, A, David, B & Young, B (2006) ''Never the twain shall meet?': Breaking barriers through a global citizenship partnership between NGOs and a higher education institution', Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 2