Global Education for a Global Generation

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

This short reflection discusses the possibilities that the digital age offers to education. The author argues that reaching a generation accustomed to global networking requires meeting it on its own terms, and that the pandemic accelerated the adoption of tools that were already available but little used. The central proposition is that educational institutions can now function as an intersection between globally distributed expertise and a globally distributed body of students, so that neither faculty nor cohort is defined by location. The author observes that the resulting exchange runs in both directions, since a diverse teaching staff enriches students while diverse students inform those who teach them, and closes with the aim that has guided his own practice: a training in mediation designed for a global community that does not import European concepts into other people’s lives but works from the background each participant brings.

KEYWORDS

Digital education, global generation, online teaching, knowledge exchange, cultural adaptation, internationalism, faculty diversity, mediation training, accessibility, pandemic, higher education, globally inspired expertise

INTRODUCTION

Thank you very much for sharing your time with me, as I am about to share with you my perspective on how to reach a youth that is longing for interactivity, internationalism, and globalism in its widest meaning.

Being responsible for the education of a new generation means first of all to reach this community and to communicate on one common level. Nowadays, we need to accept that the digital age created enormous changes in our daily life. While I do not want to speak about digital addiction and burnouts caused by the restless use of mobile devices, I would like to focus on the chances that the digital age offers us.

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Reaching those who could never have come

In order to fully appreciate what this development means, we may want to think for a moment about all those persons who, in the past, were simply not able to participate in higher education, not because they lacked the interest, the discipline, or the intellectual capacity, but because the doors that lead to such institutions were geographically, financially, or socially closed to them. I am thinking of the young woman in a rural area who cannot leave her family, of the practitioner in a region where no such training exists, of the person who works during the day and can only study at night, and of the many colleagues who would need a visa that will not be granted to them. For all of these, the campus was never an option, and their absence was never a decision they made.

Now, and this is what makes this development so meaningful to me, the question is no longer whether such a person can travel to us, but whether we are willing to organise ourselves in a way that allows them to reach us from where they are. Accordingly, the responsibility shifts, and it shifts towards the institution. We ought to ask ourselves whether our materials can be opened on a mobile device, whether our sessions can be attended from a different time zone, whether our language is accessible to those who did not grow up with it, and whether our fees reflect the economic reality of the regions that we claim to serve. These are not technical details. These are the very questions that decide who becomes part of our community and who remains outside of it.

The classroom as a place of encounter

By bringing together students from a broad diversity of countries, cultures, and professional backgrounds, we create something that goes far beyond the transfer of curricular content, namely a space in which difference becomes visible, tangible, and workable. In such a setting, a participant from one region may describe a practice of dispute settlement that a participant from another region has never heard of, and both of them may discover that what they considered to be the natural way of handling a conflict is, in fact, only one way among many.

To me, this is the most valuable aspect of what we are discussing here. In a field such as ours, where the ability to understand another person’s perspective forms the very foundation of our professional work, the diversity of the classroom is not a pleasant side effect but the essence of the education itself. Our students do not only learn about Cultural Sensitivity, they practise it every single time they speak and every single time they listen. And, as far as I understand and believe, a competence that has been lived is carried much further into a professional life than a competence that has only been described.

Therefore, we may say that the composition of a group forms part of its curriculum. Whoever sits in the room, or in the digital equivalent of it, teaches the others something that no lecturer can deliver.

The changing role of the lecturer

All of this asks something of us who teach, and I believe that we should be honest about it. In a traditional setting, the lecturer stands in front of a group that shares, more often than not, a common language, a common legal system, and a common set of assumptions about how things are done. Under such circumstances, it is comparatively easy to be the person who knows. In a globally composed group, this position is no longer available to us, and I would like to say clearly that this is a gain and not a loss.

Once we accept that we cannot possibly know the customs, the legal frameworks, and the social realities of every participant in our group, we are free to take a different role, namely that of the person who structures the exchange, who asks the questions that make knowledge visible, and who ensures that every voice in the room is actually heard. Accordingly, our authority no longer rests on possessing all the answers, but on our ability to create the conditions under which the group finds them together. This requires humility, it requires preparation, and it requires the willingness to be corrected by a student, publicly and in front of others.

So, by giving up a certain kind of authority, we receive something that is, in my view, far more valuable. We become part of the learning process instead of standing outside of it, and we grow alongside those whom we accompany.

SUMMARY

The reflection’s organising claim is that the possibility opened by digital teaching is not the delivery of existing courses to a larger audience but the removal of the constraint that made a faculty and a cohort local by default. Once neither teachers nor students need share a place, an institution becomes a meeting point rather than a location, and the author’s emphasis falls on what that changes about the direction of learning: a lecturer addressing students from a dozen countries is being taught as well as teaching. The point that carries the piece is the one made last, that a training designed for a global community must not consist in transmitting the concepts of one region to the rest, and that the aim is to work from what each participant already brings.

CONCLUSION

This reflection may encourage all of you to follow this path, to take the next step, and to reach out to a young generation that is longing for your individual expertise. Because only by unifying individual lecturers and students, we become a diverse community of global experts, that is equipped to manage the challenges of this millennium.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The argument the author makes last is the one that carries the most weight and it deserves to be separated from the general case for digital teaching, because the two can come apart.

Distance teaching removes the constraint of place, and it does not by itself remove the constraint that matters more, which is whose knowledge is being taught. A course delivered from one region to twenty others can reproduce the very asymmetry the author warns against, and at greater scale than a campus ever could, since the same materials now reach everyone. The field this journal serves has documented what follows: participants trained in a model developed elsewhere return to settings in which the model does not fit, and either abandon it or apply it against the grain of practices that were working. The author’s formulation, that the aim is to merge with the participant’s background rather than to introduce concepts into their lives, is therefore not a courtesy but the substantive design question, and it has practical answers. Curricula that treat the local tradition as material rather than as background. Case studies drawn from where the participants actually work. Assessment that asks a participant to apply what they have learned in their own setting rather than to reproduce a procedure. And, most consequentially, faculty drawn from the regions the students come from, which is the measure by which the author’s proposal about international teaching staff can actually be tested.

Two qualifications on access. The removal of distance is a genuine gain and the barriers that remain are not evenly distributed: connectivity, the cost of data, the availability of a quiet place to study, and the language of instruction each exclude, and each excludes precisely the participants whose settings most need the training. Design choices answer most of them, including materials that work at low bandwidth, sessions recorded for those in incompatible time zones, and mobile first delivery, and they answer them cheaply. The evidence on outcomes adds one more: distance courses that consist only of recorded material have very low completion, and those that combine it with regular contact between participants do not. The exchange the author describes is therefore not merely a benefit of the format but the condition on which it works.

Finally, the piece is a reflection on education and it belongs in a journal on conflict management for a reason worth stating. A classroom containing people from a dozen countries who disagree about what a fair process looks like is itself a setting in which difference has to be handled, and the way a course is conducted teaches more than its content does. A programme that models the practice it describes, in which participants are heard rather than instructed and their traditions treated as knowledge rather than as local colour, has taught the substance before reaching the syllabus. That is the strongest argument for the approach the author sets out, and it is available to any institution willing to organise itself accordingly.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

FURTHER READING

Avruch, K. (1998). Culture and Conflict Resolution. United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington D.C.

Lederach, J. P. (1995). Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse.

Garrison, D. R., & Vaughan, N. D. (2008). Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines. Jossey Bass, San Francisco.

Bates, A. W. (2019). Teaching in a Digital Age (2nd edition). Tony Bates Associates, Vancouver.

Selwyn, N. (2016). Is Technology Good for Education? Polity Press, Cambridge.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2020). COVID 19 Education Response, Paris.

Reimers, F. M., & Schleicher, A. (2020). A Framework to Guide an Education Response to the COVID 19 Pandemic. OECD, Paris.