Educating Global Citizens

It was summer 2011, August to be precise. The weather was particularly hot and humid and the pain in my injured foot was impossible to ignore. The TV was showing live coverage of the drought in the Horn of Africa-;- the heart-wrenching images of men, women and children helplessly wondering in the endless desert made my foot pain disappear and I suddenly remembered that in the nineteen eighties there was a similar drought and that I wanted to be part of the community that helped bring relief. Unfortunately, I could not do much about my wish then for reasons pertaining, at large, to the culture that I grew up in.

Not only did this incident and the following collective effort by a fantastic team of my students and colleagues to collect donations that was matched, dollar to dollar, by the Canadian government validate my desire to be of help to humanity at large (or so I love to think), but it also vividly brought to my awareness the concept of global citizenship. Especially that, as a professor working in the Canadian post secondary education system, I was practically in the field of educating global citizens-;- most of whom, including myself, are newly landed immigrants in Canada.

That leads us to the idea of immigration: Why do people migrate? And to be true to the picture that I am trying to portray, why do they choose Canada as their preferred destination´-or-country of choice? For apparent reasons I will exclude seeking asylum from the motivations for immigration, as I will restrict my analysis to voluntary immigration. Before becoming a world wanderer myself, I have always wondered why people leave what they have been familiar with to go to strange places with strange people and stranger customs! Why do they abandon the warmth of their extended families, their childhood memories and the friends that they loved to hate and hated to love?!

I would imagine that they do so for various reasons of course, but we can comfortably cluster all of these reasons under one umbrella - they aspire to the idea of “BETTER”… better options for themselves and their children, better atmosphere to express what they think´-or-believe with utter freedom of thought and speech, better day to day living, better scenes and sounds, better transportation systems, better health policies, better education, better conversations and even better ways to express disagreements. People go west yearning to live the life that all humans crave: life with the dignity that only comes with choice.

I am extremely fascinated with definitions and, moreover, with redefinition: the idea of dismantling the conventional, confronting the norms, and looking at things from a different perspective-;- and because I come from a non teaching background I always wondered whether I was an educator. I know pretty well that I am a communicator though--;-- true communicators listen and observe almost as much as they talk. I’m a leaner too, a keen and really weird one, but that is a different story!!!

It’s only when I joined the Canadian post secondary education system in the year 2010 as a professor teaching business communications and integrated marketing communications, that fascination with re-definitions found a new life. I remember the first few weeks after I was newly appointed, when I used to observe the students who come from the four corners of the world, I wondered…Who are these kids (I use the term loosely for the majority of students are about the age of my own children)? What goes on inside their heads? What’s their story, stories rather? How many gaps are there between one of them and the one next to him´-or-her? How deep is the gap between them, collectively, and the community that they are now part of? How can this community close that (those) gap(s)?

In any educational institute in Canada, there are over one hundred different sub-cultures, ethnic and otherwise, that the students and staff represent. How can one community be inclusive and I mean really inclusive? How can these individuals, while respecting what they, selectively, embody, also acquire that sense of belonging in their new environment?!

A friend of mine once described Toronto as a “Bowl of Salad”, compared to New York which he described as “a Bowl of Soup” I find fascination in this simple de-script-ion-;- to be one yet part of a whole-;- to form unity, while preserving your identity-;- to know who you are and to be proud of your background while contributing to your new community and enjoying the safety and equity that it offers.

Only by self installing the idea of learning while teaching, can one grasp this simple rule: The bowl of salad rule. This agrees with my nature as a communicator who believes that a conversation is a two way street: we learn from students as we are teaching them, one day at a time and one conversation at a time. To lots of educating minds, students may fall under the four colour category´-or-under the east versus west paradigm-;- there is nothing wrong with this so long as it shifts from being a rigid mindset to a primary introduction to a world that you are not familiar with.

Before classes started, and as an ice breaker, I used to send an introductory communication to my students greeting them in their own language. Google Translate was a great help that made my task really enjoyable-;- not only that, the students came to class with their own version of linguistic ice breaking techniques. My classrooms spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Turkish, Greek, Malayalam, Tamil, Swahili, Amhari, French, German, Italian, Tagalogue, Arabic and of course English, so you have an idea of how culturally enriching that exercise was.

I remember reading that the word Canada means “The big village” and that the word Toronto means “The meeting place”-;- how apropos to my new vocation, let alone my new home, especially when I realized that I always walk into a mini-United Nations when I walk into class.

Educating global citizens involves also educating ourselves on the concepts of global citizenship, equity and social justice. We, as educators and communicators, especially in the information age, must enliven our commitments and our mission in life by encouraging creative thinking, by thinking anew and acting anew and by always challenging what others take for granted.

People usually end their talks, written and spoken, with a profound quotation from a great poet´-or-philosopher. I always do too, but this topic calls for its own finale: You cannot educate global citizens and you cannot communicate with global citizens if you are not one.

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