The Gender and Equity Committee has been busy preparing their workshops for the M3 students, which are officially taking place on Monday, April 24th and Tuesday, April 25th. I continue to be impressed with the students’ initiative planning this workshop, as well as the way they incorporate critical global citizenship.

Over the March Break, students assigned each other responsibilities to do research for the workshop. For example, two students did research about cis-gender privilege in various aspects of our lives: the media, the workplace, in politics and the law, the medical system, in relationships, in public spaces, and in schools. Other students did research on how male privilege manifests in these different aspects of society, and others looked into how transgender allies can better respect and support transgender people. As the OECD states in the document “Global Competency for an Inclusive World”, “valuing human dignity and valuing cultural diversity are thus important elements in the development process leading to global competence” (p. 4). The students in the GEC are becoming globally competent by researching and understanding how transgender people experience different aspects of society. They are educating themselves on things like rates of suicide amongst trans communities, or the lack of representation of trans people in the media. And what is even better, is that these students are going to share this important knowledge with the M3s, allowing them to “[value] human dignity” (p. 4) and value diversity. With inter-cultural knowledge being one of the main components of global citizenship, as defined by the OECD, I think this workshop will be important in planting the seeds of knowledge about transgender people and their lives. While this isn’t inter-cultural knowledge exactly, knowledge about gender diversity is equally important as knowledge about cultural diversity. What I appreciate about the GEC students is that they are taking the time to inform themselves. With only one student who identifies as non-binary, the students are informing themselves on how they can best be allies to the transgender community, and they are going to use this knowledge to inform other members of their community.

In my future classrooms, I hope the students can engage with critical global citizenship in the same manner the GEC students do. In Andreotti’s article outlining the different between soft and critical global citizenship, she explains that the basis for caring in critical global citizenship is responsibility “towards the other” (p. 47) as opposed to “for the other” (p. 47) in soft global citizenship. With the GEC, I believe that the students are enacting the values of critical global citizenship because they want to learn and understand with “the other” in order to create a safer space at UTS for transgender students. For example, they are informing themselves about transgender issues through listening to transgender people talk about their experiences. The GEC’s approach to creating social change is also illustrative of Andreotti’s model for critical global citizenship. Because while soft global citizenship does acknowledge that to create authentic change there needs to be institutional, structural change, critical global citizenship acknowledges that there must also be a shift in belief systems. The GEC is recognizing that the belief system at UTS around transgender people is misguided. Their initial motivation to do this workshop came from hearing students making offensive jokes about transgender people. This behaviour demonstrates that these students haven’t thought about how their words may be problematic, and how they are creating a culture that is unsafe for students who may identify as non-binary. By doing this workshop, there is a potential for these belief systems and assumptions to shift, just like Andreotti is advocating for.

The big question remains, though, will the GEC students reach the M3s in their workshop? The students are being very mindful of the way they want to get information across, and as mentioned before, they will start the session off with a blind privilege walk, as a minds-on for thinking about the concept of privilege more broadly. They are still trying to figure out the best ways to incorporate other activities into the workshop, because they want to ensure they have a solid balance of “direct instruction” while also letting the M3s collaborate and learn together. I am impressed that they understand the need for a combination of both direct teaching and activity based learning, and so far I haven’t had to do much more than encourage them to keep thinking in this manner, once again demonstrating their initiative. Seeing the GEC students take initiative in the way that they do reminds me of the power of relevance and passion in a classroom. For these students, transgender issues are something they care about deeply. When there is passion, there is motivation, and I have reflected about how creating the space for students to pursue things are passionate about will be important in my future classroom teaching.

The next GEC meeting will be April 18^th, which will be the last one before the workshops on the 24^th and 25^th. I will be reporting back on the success of the workshop, as well as how it could be improved for next year at the conclusion of the workshop.

References:

Andreotti, V. (2006). ‘Soft versus critical global citizenship education’, Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 3, Autumn, pp. 40-51

Ramos, G. and Schleicher A. (2016). Global competency for an inclusive world. OECD. Retrieved from: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/Global-competency-for-an-inclusive-world.pdf