Reflections on Collaboration for a Better World: Global Learning, Hope and Justice
by Patrick Eccles, Sr. Associate Director, Global Learning Office, Northwestern University, and member, Collaborative steering committee
Earlier this month, I attended the first in-person summit of the Community-Based Global Learning (CBGL) Collaborative since the pandemic. Since registering last summer, I was looking forward to the resumption of one of my favorite professional gatherings in the field of international education. The topics of this year’s summit were wide-ranging and thought-provoking, from epistemic justice and climate coloniality to the implications of AI, from institutionalizing community engagement in higher education to fostering cultural humility in global education partnerships, among other important themes that delved into big picture and nitty gritty aspects of CBGL.
I’ve been coming to these summits since we hosted one at Northwestern in October of 2013. Coordinating that event was one of the first responsibilities I had in my then new job. As a previous organizer, I know how much work goes into hosting the summit, identifying on campus and off campus sponsors and collaborators, managing the costs and budget, promotion and outreach, coordinating the logistics of the space, a/v, and food, communicating with speakers, presenters and attendees, and opportunities for community building. A big thanks to Sarah Stanlick and her colleagues at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) for hosting a meaningful, practical and inspiring event for the 100+ faculty, staff, students, program providers, and community educators who attended this year.
I entered into the Summit this year in a post-election fog or stupor, but I left feeling motivated and mobilized in terms of the need and value of the work we do. Those of us who work in global learning are familiar with holding in tension the challenges and opportunities, paradoxes and incongruities involved in contributing to student learning, community development and social change all at the same time. We specialize in communicating across cultures, building intercultural understanding and identifying mutual objectives in complex, multi-layered partnerships. Yet, for those of us who operate from the U.S., we find ourselves in an increasingly polarized environment where, among ourselves as fellow citizens, it feels increasingly difficult to achieve these things. Over several days, in this strange post-election moment, the summit became an important inflection point for resetting our expectations and commitments to individual, organizational, and institutional change and our aspirations for ethical forms of global engagement that deepen and provoke local-global connections that hopefully result in more just, inclusive and sustainable communities.
When Northwestern hosted one of the early iterations of the Summit in 2013 (the Collaborative went by Globalsl at the time), we called it “Building a Community of Practice.” Practitioners of CBGL have always been a niche group of international educators and community organizers—operating on the margins or at the fringes of a larger industry, pushing for higher standards of ethical conduct in the field and thinking more critically about the power dynamics of global partnerships. We’ve sometimes struggled with a kind of inferiority complex, always trying to prove ourselves and the impact of the work we do in a larger field that doesn’t always share our concerns. One manifestation of this is that we keep changing the name of the sector or subfield every several years.
Over the last twenty years, it has gone from community-based learning to experiential learning, to global service learning, to engaged learning and back to community-based global learning again. Of course, all these terms and even their definitions might be somewhat interchangeable. But I wouldn’t dare nudge us down a messy rabbit hole of CBGL semantics. Instead, I want to focus on the ways in which the Collaborative has made significant progress as a community of practice, making important contributions to scholarship and standards setting in coordination with other international education associations like the Forum and GYA, as well as organizing for institutional change in higher education as community-engaged scholarship is increasingly embraced as central to the ethos and public purpose of our universities.
At this year’s Summit it was refreshing to reconnect with old friends, current partners and meet new colleagues who reinforce my trust in what we are doing as a network. The 2-day event provided an important moment for reflection on what we need to do in the years ahead: from how we refine our partnership practice and program structures according to fair trade learning guidelines, embrace interdependence and promote a pedagogy of cultural humility that respects a diversity of expertise and focus on lifelong learning and unlearning, and to identify the right mix of challenge and support for a generation of students who seem to demonstrate more critical consciousness about global systems but sometimes struggle to adapt outside of insular bubbles of a sheltered existence or isolation through the pandemic years.
One of my favorite quotes by Bill McKibben is: “The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.” If this resonates with you and you are looking for a community that is full of this kind of knowledge and experience, with collaborative people, resources and fresh ideas to support your professional or organizational goals, I invite you, your organization or institution to consider signing our pledge, joining an action team, or becoming a member of the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative today.