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Capability, Capital and a Curriculum for Global Students

Presented as: Killick, D. (2014). Capability, Capital and a Curriculum for Global Students - Keynote presentation. Paper presented at the Acculturation and Internationalisation Symposium, Kingstone University, September 2014.

This talk focusses specifically on what all our students may gain from

a particular aspect of the internationalisation of the curriculum (IOC).

David Killick proposes that IOC should be a process relevant to all

disciplines if we want to better enable our students to make their

way, professionally and personally, in a globalising world. IOC,

approached properly, is a process to enhance learning, to create

greater academic equity, and to build the capabilities which all our

students will need to lead lives they have reason to value in the fluid

world(s) which await them.

INTRO

Thank you, Kingston – for mounting this symposium, and for inviting

me to offer a few perspectives to feed into the day.

The title and abstract for this talk perhaps suggests a level of

confidence with regard to the direction of travel for higher

education, and in particular for the internationalisation of the

curriculum. Let me say now that, while I do have some thoughts on

this, I am also acutely aware of two things, if nothing else.

Firstly, the future is uncertain and not nearly so far away as it used to

be; and, secondly, that we are all unique – as individuals and as

institutions. So, my thoughts are offered with a recognition of

uncertainty, and the examples I pull from work in my own institution

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may not be directly transferrable to Kingston or to your discipline

area. It is your thinking, today and every day that follows as you

grapple to do the best by your students which will make and keep

their curricula relevant for their futures.

Whatever the detail, though, a key message is that

internationalisation of the curriculum is aimed at all students. Your

symposium theme of acculturation is a lived reality for all students if

they are to integrate with, converse with, and have agency among

the complex diversity of their campuses and of their present and

future worlds more widely.

I plan to address each of the elements in my title in this brief talk,

though not in the order they appear.

I will begin with a short exploration of possible characteristics of the

global student, followed by the notions of capability and capital, and

finally something of how the curriculum inevitably does significant

work to disable or to enable the development of capabilities and

capital for the global student. Because of the specific focus of this

symposium, I will situate the talk on the internal: domestic student

nexus. However, I would note at this point that much of what I will

be discussing applies also across other borderlands within our

diverse student bodies – be they gender, race, sexual orientation,

social class, disability, age, or other.

Global Students

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Who am I referring to as ‘global students’? Given what I said in the

introduction, you won’t be surprised that by this I mean all our

students. They may not realise it, yet; we may not educate them as

such, yet. But it seems to me that neither they nor we can escape the

fact that the worlds in which they must make their way, personally,

academically, professionally, are global, and that fact – highly

unlikely to be less of a fact even in uncertain futures –

require of them mind sets, skill sets and heart sets that will enable

their acculturation and re-acculturation to the shifting realities of

global living.

If we had more time, we could explore how, in Tajfel’s terms, social

identity threat (Tajfel 1981; Tajfel and Turner 1986) might pose

significant barriers to intercultural living, en-thralling us within our

in-groups. We will have to take that as read, but we need to

remember that acculturation is, as much as anything,

a process of identity reformulation. A psychological process in which

the individual must re-imagine themselves into the novelty of a new

socio-cultural context or, put differently, must reshape the lifeworld

and their selves within it. It is, then, an act of vulnerability,

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and one which, therefore, may stimulate potent defence

mechanisms. Among which might be retreats to ethnocentrisms, to

prejudice, and, at the extreme, to fundamentalisms.

In our interconnected world, though, our students cannot do other

than encounter human diversity in multiple fields. Much of what I

want us to think about today, therefore, focusses upon human

relations. And in particular upon relations with humans who are,

whether actually or just habitually-seen-to-be, different to ourselves.

The American anthropologist, Ajun Appadurai (Appadurai 1997,

2006/1966)

proposes that we can categorise how we experience the world as a

series of ‘scapes’, metaphorical spaces (like LANDscapes) which

dominate our imagining of the world. Among these, and central to

this session, are our ethnoscapes – the others, and their

representations in our lifeworld, which the globalising world brings

forward – both physically through increasingly varied patterns of

migration

and through tourisms of the exotic,

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and virtually through the mediascapes and technoscapes through

which others and their behaviours and their values are

dropped/beamed into our living spaces.

Our capabilities (I’ll define how I am using this word shortly) to dwell

comfortably outside our established communities of similitude, our

in-groups of like-minded and like-experienced others, are

fundamental to successful acculturation.

To reiterate, though, dwelling in intercultural spaces is an act of

vulnerability, it requires confidence, successful experience to draw

upon, re-imagining the self as one who can, one who has, and one

who does communicate successfully with (cultural) others. The

advancing complexity of our ethnoscapes, I suggest, makes the

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capabilities of dwelling beyond similitude a priority for the global

student, and so of priority for our curricula.

As I will suggest later, a fundamental capability here is that of

confidence in conversation with ‘others’.

I realise that ‘capability’ is a difficult word, and one which might

smack of a somewhat technicist conceptualisation of our students

and their (higher) education. I need to be explicit, therefore, in how I

am using the term.

Capability

Some of you will be familiar with the work in global economics of the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (Sen 1999, 2003).

Briefly, Sen proposes that economic wealth is not an adequate measure by which to compare the states of being for peoples in diverse global contexts. Rather, we should be looking at the complex range of capabilities which constitute, (enhance or inhibit) people’s capacity to lead a life they have reason to value. Economic wealth is one such capability, access to clean water is another, political and sexual freedoms would be others. Sen does not use the term, but let is call these objective capabilities. But there are also what we might then call subjective capabilities - individual attributes such as the capabilities to engage in complex thinking, to critique the perspectives of others, to measure the ethical worth of action

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choices, to challenge (and to have the confidence to challenge) others, and so forth.

Leading a life we have reason to value implies, I believe, a life we

have the capabilities to deconstruct, to see our actions from the

perspectives of others they touch upon, an authentic life, an

emancipating life. Taking this understanding of subjective

capabilities, I frame internationalisation as a process for enhancing

the capabilities of our students to engage in a multicultural,

globalising world. Those familiar with the educational philosophy of

Paulo Freire (Freire 1970) or John Dewey (Dewey 1916/1966) will

find echoes here of the notions of education for freedom and

democracy.

Capabilities, then, far from being adjunct skills such as might be

promoted by advocates of, say, the employability agenda for higher

education, are in this usage fundamental to who we are and to how

we make our way in the world. The form part of our personal capital,

if we frame that broadly in Bourdieu’s terms.

Capital

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Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital (with its subset of linguistic

capital) is helpful here, although some posit that the habitus which

Bourdieu outlines as, if you like, an individual’s accumulations of

embodied capital, is unsustainable within or inadequate for

postmodern living (e.g. Archer 2007, 38).

What I feel Bourdieu contributes in particular to our exploration of

the development of the global student are the ideas that cultural

capital is embodied as “long-lasting dispositions of the mind and

body” (Bourdieu 2006/1986, 106), and as such its development

“implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation [which] costs time”

(108). The same, I’d say, applies to the capabilities we are interested

in – and as with cultural capital, this intercultural capital, as

something embodied, will not emerge through a set of theoretical

learning, or when presented as something divorced from either a

student’s disciplinary focus or her lived experience of university

culture. So, this is to acknowledge that much more needs to be done

than work on the formal curriculum which we will look at briefly at

the end of this talk, and also to flag that the work we do undertake

within the formal curriculum needs to be thoroughly grounded

within each discipline.

Curriculum

There is not time to outline further what specific range of capabilities

might be of most value within a curriculum for our global students,

so for the purposes of this event, I will focus on what I believe to be

fundamental to the challenge of living (ethically, inclusively) among

local and global diversity. This is the capability to communicate

across cultures. In his version of cosmopolitanism Kwame Appiah

speaks of the centrality of conversation (Appiah 2006).

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Not necessarily conversation to agree a solution, even, but

conversation to begin to get along together, to open up a shared

space.

But, however much we profess to celebrate or promote diversity,

however much we might wish to believe in acculturation to a richly

diverse university campus society, the lived-experience of the

majority of our students appears not to be one of shared

conversations, let alone productive, successful, mutually enhancing

and empowering intercultural contact.

(Arthur and Bohlin 2005; Leask 2009)

Our students, like ourselves, find comfort among those they

resemble (in looks, in ideas, in values, in hobbies, in cultural

reference points, in aspiration, and the rest). And yet, of course,

sharing ideas with like-minded folks is surely the weakest basis for

shaking our habituated ways of being - for developing alternative

perspectives, critical stances, understandings of self as seen by

others, and so on.

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So, as the cultural arbiters and creators of the university

environment, we need to interrogate the hidden curriculum and its

potential to impact positively or negatively upon the development of

intercultural capital. The reported experiences of the home:

international student nexus do not suggest that our university

environments are doing much to support its development. By way of

example, a quick look at almost any university web site suggests how

we are sending quite overt messages of segregation - rather than

normalising integration and facilitating conversation.

There are subtle and not-so-subtle messages of identification here –

international students are a homogeneous entity, they don’t speak

English as a first language, they don’t speak English well, they need

special support. This is referred to as the deficit model of the

international student, and is the tip of a stereotyping iceberg. In

many institutions, as we delve further, we find significant acts of

segregation, including, for example - segregation at induction,

segregation in halls of residence, segregation through dedicated

social events, segregation at the student finance office, segregation

in dedicated Students’ Union Societies, segregated learning

resources – and of course differentiation in terms of fees. Now, of

course, apart from the fees question, these are well-intentioned acts,

but they are not acts of inclusion, they do not encourage either

home students or international students (and most certainly not the

invisible EU students) to see their peers as people with whom to

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open up conversations, let alone as equal partners in the learning

experience or as sources of critical insight and valuable alternative

perspectives.

Clearly, there is much to work on within the hidden curriculum, but I

will finish with a couple of ideas concerning the formal curriculum,

taking work in my own institution by way of example.

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(Giroux and Purpel 1983)

Appadurai, A. 1997. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Appadurai, A. 2006/1966. "Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy." In Education, Globalisation & Social Change, eds. Lauder, H., Brown, P., Dillabough, J.-A. and Halsey, A.H. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 179-188.

Appiah, K.A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton.

Archer, M.S. 2007. Making our Way through the World. Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Arthur, J., and Bohlin, K.E., eds. 2005. Citizenship and Higher Education: the role of universities in communities and society. Abingdon: Routledge Falmer.

Bourdieu, P. 2006/1986. "The Forms of Capital." In Education, Globalization & Social Change, eds. Lauder, H., Brown, P., Dillabough, J.-A. and Halsey, A.H. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 105-118.

Dewey, J. 1916/1966. Democracy and Education. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, Canada.

Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

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Giroux, A., and Purpel, D. 1983. The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education. McCutchan Publishing.

Leask, B. 2009. Using formal and informal curricula to improve interactions between home and international students. Journal of Studies in International Education 13 (2): 205-221.

Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2003. "Human capital and human capability." In Readings in Human Development, eds. Fukudo-Parr, S. and Kumar, A.K. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tajfel, H. 1981. Human Groups and Social Categories. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.

Tajfel, H., and Turner, J.C. 1986. "The social identity theory of intergroup behavior." In Psychology of intergroup relations, eds. Worchel, S. and Austin, W.G. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. 33-47.