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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: D16-10. To panel D16.

Title of paper:

Author:

Lothar Smith (Nijmegen School of Management).

Long abstract paper:
Over the last decade education on themes linking globalization to human mobility and developmental issues has seen increasing revision. This is not only because of fast changing dynamics in the current world order, but also because of increased recognition, through debates in fields such as critical feminism and post-colonialism, that the theoretical premises of our educational programmes still very much rest on increasingly problematic paradigms. These hail from a past in which development was seen as singularly progressive, and in which the role of governments was clearly scripted along visions based on western ideals (Simm & Marvell 2017). This hegemony in theorizing societal development is problematic, for it accords superiority to such theories, and fails to accept the value of alternative perspectives. Fascinatingly, where insights from the global south have permeated into academic discussion on developments in the global north (e.g. community participation), these often derive from developmental practices in the global south, as applied by practitioners from the global north. However, this is now slowly changing, as efforts are made to be more open to alternative perspectives when conceptualizing a particular societal development, e.g. the rising popularity in Europe of the concept ubuntu (van Oorschot 2003: 26; Baart 2016).

To the detriment of the student, as a budding, critical global citizen, cross-fertilization has remained rather more limited in education. However the emerging worlding classroom approach exemplifies an important cultural turn in education, bringing internationalisation to a next level. It calls for a 'reevaluation of the interrelationship between space and learning',(Waters, 2017: 282) and marks an important shift away from archetypal local educational spaces (ibid, 279), not only by recognizing the increasing diversity within student populations (Paull et al. 2016: 490), but also by inciting student-led learning processes.

With a transnational design, connecting universities around the world, the worlding classroom seeks to incite serious comparative analysis of situations around the world by connecting students (and indirectly supporting academics) to jointly assess particular societal processes (Solem 2007:168). Such an approach helps to better understand global-local connections in issues such as societal views on migrants, the meaning of citizenship and the future of cities. Issues studied are intimately connected to society, and require a learning approaches with this society (communities of practise). Thus given study sites are also places of practices, and not distant, objective entities (Comaroff & Comaroff 2012; Hentschel 2015; Roy & Ong 2011).

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