Blended and Online Learning for Global Citizenship

New Technologies and Opportunities for Intercultural Education

William Hunter, Roger Austin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367408213
• eBook ISBN: 9781000210477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

By showcasing international, European, and community-based projects, this volume explores how online technologies and collaborative and blended learning can be used to bolster social cohesion and increase students' understanding of what it means to be a global citizen.

With the pace of technology rapidly increasing, Blended and Online Learning for Global Citizenship draws timely attention to the global lessons being learned from the impact of these technologies on peace building, community development, and acceptance of difference. In-depth case studies showcasing successful projects in Europe, Northern Ireland, and Israel explore blended learning and illustrate how schools and educators have embraced online technologies to foster national and international links both within and beyond communities. This has, in turn, equipped students with experiences that have informed their attitudes to cultural and political conflicts, as well as racial, ethnic, and social diversity.

Building on the authors' previous work Online Learning and Community Cohesion (2013), this thought-provoking text will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of international and comparative education. Educators and school leaders concerned with how multiculturalism and technology play out in the classroom environment will also benefit from reading this text.

1
Blended Learning in an Age of Conflict

William J. Hunter, Roger Austin, and Rhiannon Turner

A World in Conflict

The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) is a think tank that has been dedicated to developing measures of peace and conflict internationally and relating those measures to economic activity for just over a decade (IEP website, n.d.). One of the organization’s principal activities is preparing an annual summary of the level of conflict in the world using an aggregate of 18 measures of the economic costs of “containing, preventing and dealing with the consequences of violence” (p. 63)—the Global Peace Index (GPI).¹ In addition to reporting data and rankings for virtually all of the world’s nations, the index makes comparisons over time. In 2019, for the first time since it was first published, the index showed a slight increase in peacefulness; however, the trends that the IEP has reported since 2008 have been daunting:

• The average level of global peacefulness has deteriorated by 3.78 per cent since 2008. Over that period, 81 countries deteriorated in peacefulness, while 81 improved.
• The gap between the least and most peaceful countries continues to grow. Since 2008, the 25 least peaceful countries declined on average by 11 per cent, while the 25 most peaceful countries improved by 1.8 per cent on average.
• Conflict in the Middle East has been the key driver of the global deterioration in peacefulness.
• Of the three GPI domains, two recorded a deterioration while one improved. Ongoing Conflict deteriorated by 8.7 per cent and Safety and Security deteriorated by just over four per cent. However, Militarisation improved by 2.6 per cent.
• The indicator with the most widespread deterioration globally was the terrorism impact indicator. Just over 63 per cent of countries recorded increased levels of terrorist activity. However, the number of deaths from terrorism has been falling globally since 2014

(Institute for Economics and Peace, 2019, p. 4)

The world is in conflict and children are suffering as a consequence. Moreover, current events suggest that the problem is expanding. For example, in the autumn of 2019, as this chapter was being written, 600,000 children in Cameroon were being denied access to education as a consequence of internecine conflicts rooted in the area’s colonial past (U. N. News, 2019; Tah, 2019). Still, it is worth noting that Save the Children’s 2019 Global Childhood Report (Save the Children, 2019) provided documentation for a lot of positive global achievements in child health and education (e.g., fewer child murders, more children in education, less malnutrition) over the last century, but the exception to this pattern of improvement was with respect to the impact of conflict on children, evident in data provided in UNICEF (2018b):

Worldwide, nearly 31 million children have been forcibly displaced at the end of 2017. This number includes some 13 million child refugees, approximately 936 thousand asylum-seeking children and an estimated 17 million children displaced within their own countries by violence and conflict. Yet more children have been displaced by natural disasters and other crises, though they are not included in this total.

(2018a, unnumbered)

UNICEF went on to break these numbers down by country and region and reported that the largest numbers by far were in Syria and Afghanistan.

If we are to reverse these worrying trends, it will be essential that human beings learn to have a greater appreciation of cultural differences and that they learn skills to improve communication and cooperation with people from different cultural groups. The digital tools that are now available in much of the world provide us with technologies that make such communication more feasible and more accessible than has ever been the case before. Information and misinformation travel at the speed of Twitter and events anywhere are having impacts everywhere. One arena in which nations can promote and develop the skills and understandings necessary to shape a more harmonious world is in the education of children. That is the focus suggested by the title of this book: Blended and Online Learning for Global Citizenship: New Technologies and Opportunities for Intercultural Education. That is to say, the tools and methodologies that enable international communication are starting to be used to deliver education that fosters both local and global citizenship through education about cultural differences and across cultural boundaries.

Conflict in Schools

Throughout the world, teachers are struggling to deal with conflict and violence in their students’ lives. In the most extreme cases, this may mean that children are not getting any schooling at all; for example, UNICEF (2018a) reported that globally 263 million children and youth were not in school. Many of these children live in countries beset with conflict and violence. However, direct violent attacks on schools, teachers, children, and administrators may well be a bigger problem than the lack of access to schooling. O’Malley (2007) provided a truly frightening list of such direct attacks (bombings, large-scale kidnappings, missiles, torture) in six of the most difficult countries. The political climate in some countries may also threaten children. The growth in nationalist and popu-list politics in many nations has been well documented by the United Nations in its International Migration Report (2017), which notes:

• The number of international migrants worldwide has continued to grow over the past seventeen years, reaching 258 million in 2017, up from 248 million in 2015, 220 million in 2010, 191 million in 2005 and 173 million in 2000.
  (p. 4)
• The number of international migrants worldwide has grown faster than the world’s population. Due to this faster growth rate, the share of migrants in the total population increased from 2.8 in 2000 to 3.4 per cent in 2017.
  (p. 5)
• The global level of forced displacement across international borders continues to rise. By the end of 2016, the total number of refugees and asylum seekers in the world was estimated at 25.9 million representing 10.1 per cent of all international migrants.
  (p. 7)

Reactions to all of this migration have included substantial backlash, including a rise of populism and nationalism in Europe that Galston (2018) characterized as a threat: “Left unaddressed, the rise of anti-immigrant, anti-internationalist sentiment, which has shifted the political balance within Europe, could have grave consequences for liberal democracy itself” (para. 3). As we noted in our previous work, children around the world already suffer a variety of consequences rooted in ethnocentricity, racism, and religious bigotry (Austin & Hunter, 2013). The current chapter was written in the summer and autumn of 2019 at the time of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweeted threats to round up and deport aliens, his tweeted call for outspoken congresswomen of color to “return to where they came from,” his alienation of key allies in Europe, his trade war with China, and his attempt to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census—a move that many believe would serve to reduce federal support to communities with larger numbers of immigrants. A direct reflection of the impact of such attitudes is the incarceration of children at the U.S. border (Associated Press, 2018). The combined impact of such assaults on children of racial and ethnic minorities may not be known for years to come but Potok (2017) made a good start in cataloging the ways schools and children were responding to the hate-filled rhetoric of the presidential campaign and the first two months of Trump’s presidency. Below we outline a few examples of the anecdotes he reports:

• An Arizona high school counselor reported white students holding up a Confederate flag in a school assembly (a direct taunt to African-American children whose ancestors were slaves prior to the Civil War).
• A middle school teacher in Washington told of a student blurting out in class, “I hate Muslims.”
• A Georgia high school teacher said many students were making jokes “about Hispanic students ‘going back to Mexico.’”
• A teacher in Oregon described a black girl running out of a classroom in tears after being racially harassed in two classes.
• A Massachusetts middle school teacher described how a white student, on the day after the election, went around asking each non-white student he passed, “Are you legal?” (online, Hate Goes to School, para 4, parenthetical explanation added)

In short, direct violence against children and schools and the impacts of broader social conflicts on children are widely recognized as problems of global proportions. The magnitude of the problem may leave people with a sense of hopelessness and a kind of paralysis that might prevent effective action. Those attitudes amount to an abandonment of our children and their future; educators must develop effective ways of protecting children and preparing them to build a better future.

Six months later, as we prepared this manuscript for publication, the Global Coronavirus pandemic created a whole new context for all of this conflict, the impact of which may not be clear for quite some time.

In the remainder of this chapter, we will outline responses to the conditions that are posing difficulties for children with particular attention to intercultural communication, global citizenship, intergroup contact, and the use of communications technologies.

Response and Reaction

Education, broadly conceived to include informal education, may be considered to have both positive and negative effects on children according to Bush and Saltarelli (2000). They therefore put forth a vision of peacebuilding education that would seek

to initiate or support an educational process that allows students to articulate, accommodate and accept differences between and within groups, particularly (though not exclusively) in regions characterized by latent or manifest violence. This entails a distinct two-fold process that nurtures and constructs positive inter-group relations while marginalizing and deconstructing negative inter-group relations.

(p. 23)

Bush and Saltarelli’s vision is now nearly two decades old but the problems persist. In 2010, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack² was formed and has been monitoring and documenting attacks on schools (e.g., Education Under Attack, 2018).

Faced with these challenges and equipped with the availability of tools that enable intercultural communication, one appropriate direction for educators would be to reexamine our views of what citizenship is and what it should be.

Intercultural Education as a Vehicle for Moving Toward Global Citizenship

We will be using the term “intercultural education” to refer to a wide range of approaches that focus on increasing cross-group communication and understanding. Those approaches include cultural pluralism, intercultural relations, culturally relevant pedagogy, and others aimed at improving intergroup understanding. Examining this work is complicated by the variety of methods used, the range of subject areas and age groups included, variations in dependent variables (achievement, attitudes, attendance, etc.), the country or countries studied, and the groups included in the study (i.e., particular immigrant groups, racial minorities, subcultures within a nation, etc.). Historically, much of what we refer to as intercultural education has its roots in “multicultural education.”

Intercultural and Multicultural Education

Multicultural education is generally portrayed as teaching that respects diversity by recognizing cultural differences and incorporating teaching materials and ideas that reflect the world views and experiences of the groups represented in a class. The originator of the concept, James Banks, argued that it was also about power shari...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors and Contributors
• 1 Blended Learning in an Age of Conflict
• 2 Shared Education in Northern Ireland: Systemic Change Through Blended Learning
• 3 Lessons Learned From 15 Years of Multicultural Online Collaborative Learning in Israel
• 4 Building Cultural Awareness and Understanding in Europe’s Schools: Insights From the European Commission’s eTwinning Programme
• 5 International Links and Global Citizenship
• 6 Blended and Online Collaborative Learning for Citizenship in Catalonia, Spain
• 7 Promises Fulfilled and Challenges Ahead
• Index