Abstract
This chapter draws on experiences and encounters collaborating with undergraduate student researchers and teachers, students, alumni, and administrators at an elite boarding school in Jordan involved in a multi-sited ethnography of what students learn at elite schools about themselves, others, and the world around them through global citizenship education about their place in the world, their relationships with others, and who they are. The author explores the possibilities of this collaboration in charting a justice-oriented collaborative approach that provides an epistemology for researchers and participants to challenge, contest, and transform practices reinforcing privileged ways of knowing and doing. Some limitations of this collaboration are considered to question whether such a research approach reflects social justice practice.
What drives our school’s mission, more than anything else, is preparing our students for a global, more interconnected world. We know that they’re going to operate in an environment where they need to be able to work with and understand people who speak different languages, people who come from different faith backgrounds, people who come from different cultures and operate from different belief systems. We want to graduate young people who cannot simply live comfortably with conflict but have the skills to work through conflict. I tend to think of it as certain kind of competencies that our students need to have if they are going to be successful and able to address the more complicated issues that this part of the world is facing, and that the rest of the world is facing. Some of those are intellectual skills and some of them are social or emotional. These are the twenty-first century skills that people talk a lot about like collaboration , teamwork, empathy, an ability to listen to people, and even the ability to talk about difficult things respectfully. What lies at the heart of what we do here is offering, or facilitating, an educational process that provides opportunities for students to develop these skills.
Dr. Thomas, Headmaster, Olive Grove Academy
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Howard, A. (2018). Making It Political: Working Towards Transformation in the Study of Internationalisation of Elite Education. In: Maxwell, C., Deppe, U., Krüger, HH., Helsper, W. (eds) Elite Education and Internationalisation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59966-3_20
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