Exploring International Educators' Learning About Local and Global Social Justice in a Virtual Community of Practice

Exploring International Educators' Learning About Local and Global Social Justice in a Virtual Community of Practice

Bima Sapkota, Xuwei Luo, Muna Sapkota, Murat Akarsu, Emmanuel Deogratias, Daphne Fauber, Rose Mbewe, Fidelis Mumba, Ram Krishna Panthi, Jill Newton, JoAnn Phillion
Copyright: © 2024 |Pages: 34
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-7813-4.ch003
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Abstract

In this chapter, the authors report themes that emerged when a cross-cultural team of researchers involved in a virtual international community of practice (Global Social Justice in Education-GSJE) investigated reflections on activities focused on social justice in local and global contexts. The findings suggested that the activities elicited GSJE community members' understandings of the complexities of social justice associated with naming practices, privilege, and the arts within their own and across contexts. The authors discuss implications of the activities to advance diverse educators' understanding of social justice in global and local contexts. They also unpack the opportunities and challenges that resulted from the collaborative research process and the writing of this chapter completed by the international author team comprised of 11 education scholars from seven countries.
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Literature Review And Theoretical Framework

The authors conceptualized GSJE around four frameworks: (a) United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (hereafter referred to as “UN 2030 Agenda”) (UN, 2015), (b) Social justice in education (Cazden, 2012; Fraser, 2005), (c) Intercultural competence (Deardorff, 2006, 2011), and (d) Communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In the following sections, the authors briefly describe these frameworks and how they guided GSJE and our study. In particular, they present examples on how each framework guided the development of GSJE activities.

Key Terms in this Chapter

Patriarchy: A system or norm of society in which the father or the eldest male is considered as the superior of the family. Females and children have a legal dependency upon the eldest male members of the family.

Virtual Intercultural International Collaboration: A collaboration between ethnically, racially, linguistically, and geographically diverse educators that requires online communication and exchanges for teaching and research purposes.

Cross-Cultural Communication: Verbal and non-verbal communication (e.g., discussions and gestures) among culturally diverse educators.

Social Identities: Groups created by society based on the physical, social, and mental characteristics of individuals.

Intercultural: Competence: A person’s ability to understand one’s and other’s culture, communicate effectively with people of different cultural backgrounds; being open and empathetic towards others’ cultural practices.

Privilege: Special rights and advantages provided to certain groups of society.

Global Community of Practice: A platform in which educators from around the world come together to develop a shared understanding of an issue/topic.

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