Last week I had the pleasure of attending the World
Education Research Association (WERA) Focal Meeting held in Guanajuato, Mexico,
November 18 to 22, 2013. WERA is an association of national, regional, and
international specialty research associations aimed at advancing education
research as a scientific and scholarly field. The Focal Meeting was part of the
XII National Congress for Education Research, sponsored by the Consejo Mexicano
de Investigacion Educativa (Mexican Society for Educational Research) and
Guanajuato University.
The Focal Meeting symposia and
paper sessions were comparative, cross-cultural, international or transnational
in scope or design. Education research was presented from countries around the
globe with issues often juxtaposed cross-culturally. For example, a session on
fostering global citizenship through study abroad included presentations on
South Africa and Mexico. One of the
speakers explored ways to foster social justice and counter stereotypes through
study abroad citing examples of American students who had come to Mexico and
learned new perspectives beyond what is typically portrayed in the American
press. The research showed that student study abroad participants showed
measured gains in global perspective, greater understanding of social justice
issues, as well reflexivity. One of the session attendees, a teacher at an open
enrollment Mexican university, agreed that it was important for US students to
have this experience and the opportunity to change their perceptions of Mexico,
yet she also felt that her Mexican students may have misconceptions about the
US. She mentioned perceptions of US imperialism, as an example. “Unfortunately,
I don’t think my students can have a similar opportunity to visit the US to be
disabused of their prejudices. They
would not be able to get a visa.” Even the opportunity to study prejudice,
global inequality, and social justice, must include the recognition that such
an opportunity carries privilege within it.
In my
session, several papers were presented that explored the intersection of
education, corporations and government policy.
While three of the four, mine included, took a critical view of various
incarnations of corporate involvement in education, one presented an
alternative conception. Taking Costa Rica as a case study, the paper presented
the positive impact of multinational corporations work in primary and secondary
schools. Despite spending 7.2% of its GDP on education (the US spends 5.6%),
Costa Rica relied on significant additional funding from multinational
corporations to achieve gains in STEM education in K-12 schools in impoverished
communities resulting in greater achievement and equity for students regardless
of ethnicity, primary language, socioeconomic status or education level of
parents. While several in attendance
took issue with the source of funding, the dramatic results of infusing schools
with resources were irrefutable.
Heading
home I continued to consider the various impacts of globalization on the lives
around me including my own. I called my children from Mexico to remind them to
do their homework, an experience my mother and I would never have had. In the
long line at US customs, I met a man from the US, also on his way home. Trained at his local community college in
Indiana he had the expertise to build and maintain auto assembly lines. He
works for Honda establishing a new plant near Leon, Mexico. He had been away from his family, his three
children, for 180 days. He would be home
for a few weeks, and then go back to work for another 180 days. Likely his
local community college counts him as a success, “a completer,” but the local
impact of his work seemed to me, hard to measure. On the one hand, he has a job, no small thing
in this economy. On the other hand, his family and community does without him
for 180 days at a time.
Several
times at the conference I heard references to Clifton’s study finding that in
the current global economy, what people want most, more than health, peace, or
even happiness, is a good job (2011). Standing in line at the airport, waiting
for delayed flights, that poll did not ring true. Looking at the representative sample of
humanity slouched against walls, heaped into airport chairs, scanning their
phones, the impact of globalization did not seem to me to have altered the
essence of human desire or humanities’ struggle all that much. Despite the tremendous
technology in our hands and surrounding us, in the end, our journey was
controlled by the weather, as it has always been. Regardless of the unequal
impacts of globalization on our lives, whatever mobility had given or taken
from us, whatever prejudices we carried with our baggage, we all watched the
sky for the end of the storm and the resumption of flights. What we all wanted most was to go home.
Clifton, J. (2011). The
coming jobs war. New York, NY: Gallup Press
by Allison Witt
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