It’s A Small World

By Karen Taylor, PhD., Director of Education and of the Ecolint Institute, Ecole Internationale de Genève

(Photo : Students’ photo panel for UFPA’s 60th anniversary, 2017. Photos by Octavio Cardoso)

There is something strangely comforting when you realise you are not alone in the challenges you face. It is equally comforting to know that you share similar values with other educators even if your contexts are very different. 

There are a number of prevalent themes in the current discourse on education. Among them are inclusion, intercultural understanding, transdisciplinarity and the need to rethink our approach to the assessment of student learning. There are others, of course, but these are the themes that are most often on my mind. They are also important areas of focus for Ecolint. A few days ago I discovered that I share my passion for these subjects with some rather incredible colleagues at the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil. 

Professor Abdeljalil Akkari of the University of Geneva and I were invited to share our reflections on flexibility, interdisciplinarity and global citizenship in higher education with university leaders as they move towards a transdisciplinary requirement for undergraduate students. This constitutes a major undertaking in change management; it also represents a commitment on the part of the university’s senior leadership teams to make the learning experience of their students more relevant than was the case in the past and better positioned to prepare them for the future. Our Brazilian colleagues were interested in the work that Ecolint has undertaken in collaboration with UNESCO - IBE: our commitment to UNESCO’s seven macro competences, our emphasis on inclusion, an education for peace and sustainability, and global citizenship.

Somewhat like Ecolint albeit on a much larger scale, the UFPA is not just one university but 12 campuses with more than 50,000 students that make up a diverse whole. The campuses are widespread and the student body ethnically and linguistically diverse. I learned, for example, that one does not speak of Amazonia, rather of Amazonias.

The UFPA is grappling with questions similar to our own:

• How to develop a fully inclusive learning environment that is respectful of and draws from the rich backgrounds of its student body 
• How to redesign curricula
• How to break down disciplinary silos
• How to adopt pedagogical approaches suited to a changing environment

The UFPA is as committed to diversity and inclusion as we are. The integration of indigenous and quilombola students, (1)many of whom are new to academic life, offers an interesting opportunity to reconsider assessment. How might these students demonstrate their learning in non-academically traditional forms? Might this not be an opportunity to demonstrate the value of oral traditions? In the future, will students in Pará or anywhere else in the world find it necessary or even relevant to produce academic writing in traditional ways? This is a provocative question, I grant you, but perhaps worth thinking about. 

Belém will be the site of COP 30 in 2025. I heard colleagues express concern that the perspective of those who live in Amazonia might not be taken sufficiently into consideration. The question of indigenous knowledge (its importance and its negligence) was a recurring subject of conversation. It struck me that the UFPA is in a unique position to positively challenge contemporary hierarchies of knowledge be they linguistic, cultural or otherwise. 
 
There was yet another fascinating question, one not limited to the UFPA. How to support practitioners, in this case university professors, to break down the barriers between disciplines? Several times, people spoke about their discomfort in welcoming students from other disciplines into their classrooms. What if they were not able to answer the students’ questions? There was recognition on the part of the university rector and his team that the success of their project will depend in part on supporting professors in adapting to change. 

I speak frequently about my belief that, as practitioners who wish to model a learning for life attitude for students, we need to learn to be comfortable with discomfort, with uncertainty, with vulnerability. It is as challenging in Belém as it is in Geneva and yet, what a benefit to students when we open our doors to one another in a spirit of collective intellectual exploration and discovery. This is certainly what I felt in exchanging with our colleagues at the UFPA. 
 

(1) UFPA publications indicate that 85% of UFPA’s students are economically vulnerable, 72% are from public schools and 85% are black or indigenous.