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PLENARY SESSION

Olga V. Kovbasyuk

Deputy Dean for International Connections,

International Economic Relations Department of

Khabarovsk State Academy of Economics and Law,

PhD in Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor

GLOBAL LEARNING AS A RESOURCE TO

RAISING CULTURAL AWARENESS

Abstract

It is becoming apparent to educators around the world that future graduates should be able to understand world cultures and events, to appreciate cultural diversity, and to collaborate effectively to promote world existence and peace. Global learning serves this goal with the help of modern communication technologies, which allow people of vastly different cultures and widely separated countries to interact with each other on a daily basis as part of their work, studies or recreation. Meaningful education serves as a resource to global learning. It enables students to create their personal meanings, and transform personal values, thus heightening self-awareness and cultural awareness, all of which help them create their identities. The most essential value of meaningful education is that it supports personality self-development, which feeds the entire process of self-improvement and the world’s improvement. This paper describes the ways meaningful education enriches the possibilities of how global learning will heighten self awareness and cultural awareness of students and help them to become globally oriented personalities. Theoretical underpinnings of personality and identity development are explored. Cited also, are specific examples of teaching intercultural communication that provide an insight into how meaningful learning/teaching and nurturing develop global graduate attributes, and how these practices can be integrated into global learning.

Keywords: Meaningful education; Personality; Identity; Personality self-development; Global learning; Global graduate.

Introduction

Teaching and learning are critical to our individual and collective survival as well as the quality of our lives on the planet Earth. The pace of change in a global community has precipitated complexities, confusions and conflicts among people and countries that will diminish, or obliterate us, if we don’t enlarge our capacity to share and to learn from each other.

Global learning and meaningful education enable us to share and learn from each other because of their dialogic nature; the fundamental goal of dialogical teaching is to create a process of learning and sharing. Freire (2004) found dialogical teaching “invariably involves theorizing about the experiences shared in the dialogue process” (p. 44). Global learning is defined as “the combination of multiple cultural perspectives arising from interactions via modern communication technologies” (Rimmington, 2005, p.106). Meaningful education involves creating cultural perspectives/personal meanings about what we are and how we relate to ourselves, as well as to the world around us. It fosters transformation of our personal value hierarchies in order to relate more adequately to ourselves and to other people and cultures. Thus, meaningful education contributes to developing the global orientation of students and fosters developing their multiple cultural perspectives. Consequently, global

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graduates are the people who will have experiences in global learning studies (embedded in regular classes), and who are able to apply global knowledge and skills to effectively interact and collaborate with world cultures. Meaningful learning/teaching input will enable global graduates to create their own identities, which is the major attribute and quality of personality.

As educators, we face controversies about how to educate generations in order to prepare them to deal with the complexities and conflicts arising from interconnectedness and interdependence of cultures in the world. On the one hand, the global community realizes the importance of helping young people to become globally aware and tolerant as well as to be able to collaborate and think critically. On the contrary, world governments seem to persist in manipulating populations in their interests of power rather than providing conditions of truly democratic choice of self-determination for them. As Freire (2004) states: “... our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system” (p.33).

Education is making sincere attempts to renew its focus and ways of teaching in order to meet the expectations of the global community. However, a comprehensive educational theory that provides the common basis for a global education is lacking. The “banking concept” of education (Freire, 2004), which entails “depositing” knowledge in the heads of students), is still dominating, and negates learning/ teaching as processes of inquiry and development of critical thinking as well as skills to communicate and collaborate meaningfully. In fact, it regards students as passive, adaptable and manageable beings, who receive “deposits of reality” from the world outside. This concept of education is blind to creating human identity and the development of personality.

In our understanding, the contemporary world needs a comprehensive educational theory designed to raise the personality who strives for constant self-growth and who can contribute to the development of a more people-focused transformation for the world. Regrettably, much of higher education today is still more directed toward the training of a professional who is capable of performing certain functions and responsibilities, rather than nurturing a personality with high professional competency. We hold that education should contribute to developing the personality rather than just acquiring professional attributes, because the individual’s pursuit is to become and to create, to move from “beings for others” to “beings for themselves” (Freire, 2004, p.75), thus to strive for intelligence, professional competency, and for moral self/world-improvement. Not each professional development, however, needs to involve moral self-transformation and humanist personality-focused transformation of the world.

Our professional and intercultural experiences, along with the studies of relevant philosophic and educational literature, enable us to advance the idea that meaningful education can serve as a common basis for a global education as well as a resource for global learning. Its purposes are: nurturing a personality capable of becoming/ creating her/his identity; making the world more relationship-oriented; and developing high professional competency to meet the demands of the global community, such as peaceful interaction and collaboration among all world cultures.

Let us consider the similarities between meaningful education and global learning in order to demonstrate the direct attention which enable their integration in the classroom.

Global learning involves experiential learning. Meaningful education appeals to the discourse of students’ personal existential experiences, since it provides the conditions of making personal discoveries/inventions, which are experiential by nature. As students attain personal knowledge of reality through inventions, they discover themselves as reality’s permanent re-creators.

Global learning and meaningful education are dialogic in nature and thus encourage learners to actively seek, express and negotiate meanings in dialogues. Such dialogues have the potential for fostering value-oriented relationships and appreciation for the diversity of the

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world, as well as for developing students’ critical self-reflection and skills of meaningful communication and collaboration. “Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education” (Freire, 2004, p.93).

What is unique and resourceful about meaningful education and why it can provide the common basis for a global education is that it facilitates people’s capability for constant selfdevelopmental growth, which is innate to being human.

In real life a human being is doomed to create her/himself as a personality. To live is, first of all, to take maximum efforts in order to create what a human being can become. To live means to provide all that is needed to fulfil one’s innate pursuit of identity. This pursuit is a concrete subordination and hierarchy of values, goals and meanings, ordered according to the level of importance at each exact time of life. Education plays the primary role in this process as it represents the tendency of the culture, and fulfilling the pursuit of identity is the only way to help a human being create an authentic project of his/her life activity. (Sharov, 2005, p.245).

We define personality as a human being who is capable of fulfilling his/her human mission to constantly self-develop, to move and to engage in search of meaning of life. Personality involves thinking critically and being able to take full responsibility for constructing and fulfilling her/his life strategy, for her/his personal growth. Thus she/he becomes the author of her/his life. Irrespective of age, ethnicity, or gender, human beings are capable of gradually developing themselves as thinking and effective personalities. Identity is a major attribute and quality of personality. We believe that each personality is unique and owns her/his unique identity – the constantly constructed and reconstructed combination of meanings, values, goals, and thus behavioural patterns and attitudes that are integrated into the individual character. Personality self-development is a complex combination of all the processes of identity formation, such as: self-cognition, conscious self-regulation, selfrearing, self-improving, increasing self-efficacy, spiritual self-strengthening, selfdetermination, and self-actualization. (Spiritual here is a notion of self – regulation; an internal human core of a personality, which allows her/him to act beyond the threshold of social necessity.)

Meaningful education is defined as education which creates conditions for and supports students’ self-developing growth. It enables students to consciously construct and fulfil their identities. It is personality-focused and based on humanist values as well as value relationships to the world. Its full impact on students can not be measured and assigned a numerical value, but it makes all of us more humane, which in the long run, may prove to be more valuable than any form of measurements.

In this paper we contend that the theoretical concepts of personality, identity, and personality self-development provide foundations for a framework of meaningful education and are related to a general curriculum about meaningful education. It may serve as a common basis for global education as well as a resource for global learning. We will share the characteristics of meaningful education in which global learning experiences are fully integrated. This will help to reveal meaningful education underpinning values and its dialogic nature and what that means for global graduate attributes.

We will discuss the practical ways of implementing meaningful learning in intercultural communication classes. However, this is not to be viewed as intercultural research, but may be viewed as an attempt to develop a program, which integrates Pragmatism of the Western School and Spirit of the Russian School in order to enable students to become authors of their lives, capable of multiple thinking, acting globally and being responsible for the world’s improvement.

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Philosophy and psychology of personality self-development: foundation for meaningful education

In the process of self-conscious evolution, humankind came to understand that a human being is not merely a once-created “product”, but “an unfinished, uncompleted being in and with a likewise unfinished reality” (Freire, 2004, p.84). This historical movement of “becoming” in order “to be” engages people as being aware of their incompletion and striving to improve, thus to enrich their human existence... (M.Heidegger, S. Kierkegaard, M. Buber). Personality and identity have been of great interest for world philosophers from ancient to modern times. The major reason for this is a constant rebirth of belief in human beings’ moral power and spirit at numerous social epochs of crisis, and hope for world survival. Human self-strengthening nature and human aspiration for meaning in life have become a highly spiritual unity, because people have always desired to build their lives on the basis of spiritual and moral interpersonal relations (spiritual relations stand here for human relations, characterized by openness to people and to the world: Kovbasyuk, 2000).

The idea of man becoming the author of him/her self has been deeply discussed in

Russian philosophy of the “silver age”. The value of individuality and her/his ability of self - creation were emphasized by Rozanov (1990), who described creativity as a purely human phenomenon. “A person creates, i.e., brings something new to the world by the exceptional and unique nature she/he possesses” (Rozanov, Ibid, p.134). The belief that each person acquires a unique identity is fundamental in meaningful education, which supports the exceptional character of each individual to create and recreate self and realty. As William Glasser (1975) states: “The single basic need that people have is ...identity: the belief that we are someone in distinction to others, and that the someone is important and worthwhile” (p.31).

Contemplating the nature of moral self-perfection, Soloviev (1996) stressed that a person does not exist separately from other people, “…according to the moral foundations of life, we hold the process of human perfection as a collective process, which a collective person goes through, since the process of self-formation takes place in a family, among people, in mankind” (p.64). This assertion emphasizes the importance of two critical issues: one holds that it is not only the individual efforts of people toward self-perfection, that are valuable, but also the general efforts of all people to perfect themselves and society, i.e., he sees a person as the author of general social moral self-development. The other emphasizes the importance of human-world relationship, which is affirmed by Freire (2004): “since people do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement of becoming must begin with the human-world relationship” (p.85). Thus, from an axiological point of view, the problem of human-world relationship is humankind’s central problem, as the pursuit of full humanity cannot be carried out in isolation, but only in cooperation between people. In the context of meaningful education, cooperation is regarded as a major characteristic of dialogical learning/teaching and value-orientation to the world, and becomes both a prerequisite and a consequence of such education.

A personality is constantly changing her/his life in order to meet various unexpected challenges of reality, so she/he cannot help being in need of expedient self-formation and this is the only way for a personality “to overcome her/his limits” (Berdyaev, 1999). Internal movement of a personality toward her/his perfection is her/his determination of personal freedom. This philosophy suggests a very important idea of viewing a person from the point of “philosophy of values” (Berdyaev, 1999), which is contrary to the “philosophy of benefit”/“social need”. The “philosophy of values” holds that personality is the highest value in the world and should be free to choose a degree of social interaction/ ways of service rather than meet the needs of society.

Every epoch brings its own characteristics to understanding this issue. Moreover, every philosophical school includes its own specific interpretation of this phenomenon. The critical

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social theory affirms the priority of “beings for themselves” over “beings for others” (Freire,

2004), which brings into focus the power of utilitarian forces to restrict personal freedom to grow, related to power relationship between teacher and student in authoritarian education. Meaningful education breaks the vertical patterns and fulfils its practice as the practice of partnership between teachers and students, when “they become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (Freire, Ibid, p.80).

Contemporary Russian philosophers increasingly understand that individual life is an individual human creation, and acknowledge that pressure of external circumstances, which once would make a person “cave in”, would instead meet his/her internal resistance, or in other words, his/her meanings, will, and spirit. Thus, they emphasize the primacy of personality, her/his internal activity to self-develop and self-create as well as individual consciousness in the system of social self-movement (Bueva, 2004, Volkov, 2000, Yakovez, 1997 and others). Although socialization and enculturation of a personality are not neglected and are in fact recognized as crucial factors of individual development, modern Russian philosophy prioritizes the active nature of personality in constructing her/his life strategy. “A person being a demiurge, a creator of his/her own present and future life, has to take into account the laws of the surrounding world … and to use these laws in order to achieve his/her goals” (Yakovez, 1997, p.45). The combination of the two pre-conditions, socialization and active nature of personality, constitutes the new understanding of the concept of human nature in the sense of its ability to fully “unfold” itself in order to fulfil the inborn mission of self-creation.

Our view is that at some point during/in personality development external social circumstances do play a strong role in determining individual behaviour and life strategy. This awakens and even strengthens some personal qualities of an individual, and thus advances her/him to movement and development. But the growing role of human internal force is becoming crucial when we speak of personality as a self-growth of the human being. This idea of personality development is viewed at the crossroad of two axes of determinants, namely the influence of external forces of the society and internal forces of a human being. This concept makes it possible to understand that humans are capable of growing from a weak adaptive existence to a strong purposeful and self-building life, which characterizes a personality. This concept also makes it clearer that education, as a social institution, can either support individuals in personal growth, or suppress it. Meaningful education seeks to foster students’ purposeful self-creation in order for them to become responsible and globally aware personalities, capable of transforming selves and the world to a more humane place to live. Its relationship to global learning is evident: it heightens self and global awareness of students, develops multiple thinking perspectives as well as value-orientation to the world.

Creating conditions for students’ personal growth, we, as educators, need to address psychological tools of personality selfdevelopment and develop related educational approaches. We will focus on the following three, which are viewed by the following authors as a basis for underpinning values of meaningful education: interactive character of human nature (Rubinstein, 1957, Myasishev, 1989), reflection (Zvenigorodskaya, 2001, King, 1993), and human subjective power (Leontiev, 1975; Zinchenko, 2004).

Interactive character of human nature preconditions the dialogic nature of personality self-development. The related theory (Bakhtin, 1990) confirms that dialogic interaction of an individual with her/himself and with other people constitutes the main factor of personal selfcreation. Dialogue is viewed by Freire as “an existential necessity” (Freire, 2004), as it enhances self-esteem and self-worth. It entails partnership of students and teachers. “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the students, and the students-of-the teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Freire, Ibid, p.80). True dialogic interaction cannot exist without hope and love, humility and faiththe values which constitute the main fabric of human life and become its core. “The human heart is woven of human