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A/Prof Kevin Kester from Keimyung University coming to NSYSU to talk about peacebuilding in education and decolonising education

Kester

 

A/Prof Kevin Kester, from Keimyung University, Korea, came to NSYSU to deliver two talks on peacebuilding in education and decolonising education.

 

In first talk of Education, Conflict and Peacebuilding, A/Prof Kester shared the findings of an international project which he worked on with other international researchers. In the beginning, he pointed out that the objective of such research is to achieve education justice. Then he gave the audience the facts that children living in the violence-inflicted countries are not sharing the same quality of education as the children in the developed countries. As for methodology, he used ethnography, in-depth interviews, document analysis and surveys to collect data. Afterwards, member-checks were utilised to ensure that the data was coded with a certain degree of reliability. Later on, he mentioned Freire’s work (1996) about pedagogy, in which the author proposed that dialogues could be used to reduce the disagreements and facilitate peace between the two parties.

 

In the findings, A/Prof Kester identified four barriers of peacebuilding in education, which are state-centricity, mind-body schism, Western-centricity and psychosocial forms. To be more specific, as quoted in A/Prof Kester’s slides, “curriculum easily slips into is state-based mediation and negotiation training, and conflict analysis exercises that focus on the state, such as MUN simulation.” As for the mind-body dualism, it honours rationality and is dominating the education nowadays; however, the education which also focuses on intuition or emotions is disadvantaged in this context. The third barrier is the scholarly possibilities. Simply put, it is about who you will quote in your academic articles and why? In their research, A/Porf Kester pointed out that Western scholars’ thoughts are dominant in today’s academia, whereas scholars from other regions, such as in the global south, found it more difficult to have their voices heard. The last barrier is people’s mindset. A/Prof Kester made the point that “changing minds to change the world” as what we act comes from what we think. Most importantly, changing people’s mind could possibly change the environment as a whole if the change can pan out in an incremental fashion.

 

In A/Prof Kester’s second talk, Decolonising Intercultural Education, firstly he gave the background that universities worldwide are facing the situation of decreasing student population. As a result, they need to recruit students overseas to fill out the seats. Take Keimyung University as an example, their international students are mainly from China, Japan, Vietnam, USA and Mongolia. In this fast-changing educational landscape, A/Prof Kester posed the question of how educators respond to this situation regarding how to interact with multicultural students and adapt the pedagogies and curricula.

 

Continued from the previous talk, A/Prof Kester introduced the concept of global north and global south. In a nutshell, countries in the global north in general are economically stronger whereas countries in the south are allocated with fewer resources. Under this situation, international students, coming from the south, when studying in the north, are facing the challenges of being taught the “canons” which actually are north-oriented, such as works of Descartes, Newton and Hobbes.

 

Continued from this thought, A/Prof Kester identified the so-called colonisation at three levels: materiality, epistemology and estate. To be more specific, at material level, the question comes to who posses what things? And at epistemic level, what is taught and what knowledge is regarded as important? And at the estatic level, who is in charge of what? And what is valued? Our student Syarif posed one question that in his country Indonesia, people value Scopus index journals which create the situation that some knowledge are regarded as “less valuable” if they were published in non-Scopus index journals.

 

A/Prof Kester furthered on by pointing out “coloniality” and “modernity” which in fact are two sides of the same coin. In other words, when the Western countries “modernised” other countries by introducing their science and elevated their life quality accordingly, they also “colonised” them through the benevolent process. As stated in A/Prof Kester’s slides, “epistemological pluralism is insufficient” and “different conceptions of life which leads to philosophical practices that canonical dictums in matters of thoughts” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 456).

 

As a response to such situation, A/Prof Kester proposed a couple of solutions that educators can take in the interculturally educational setting, which are curricular possibilities, pedagogic possibilities, methodological possibilities, institutional possibilities and scholarly possibilities. About curricular possibilities, teachers can engage the local by checking out the reading list and including diverse speakers as guest lecturers. For pedagogic possibilities, A/Prof Kester noted that teachers should not expect the least powerful to “teach” their peers and oppression. Moreover, transrational pedagogies* (note 1) are recommended to be utilised to engage diverse faculties, eg, drama, theatre, or storytelling. As for methodological possibilities, A/Prof Kester suggested to conduct research across and between languages, eg, literature reviews in more than one language. In addition, employing decolonised methodologies, eg, African and Indigenous proverbs, metaphors, PAR, indigenisation, democratisation, naming and sharing (Tuhiwai-Smoth, 1999). About institutional possibilities, librarians could be encouraged to sign up to journals published outside of the USA, Australia and Europe and students could be encouraged to study abroad in diverse locales. Lastly about scholarly possibilities, southern and eastern theories can be deployed (Connell, 2007) and mostly importantly – to “de-scholarise” by being humble and writing simply.

 

Additionally, A/Prof Kester pointed out the importance of being cautious and selective when choosing a conference to attend or a journal to submit your academic manuscript to as predatory publishers are looking for innocent scholars to spend money by promising them the publication or picking a very touristic area for conference. He provided a website called BEALL'S LIST (https://beallslist.net/) where we can find out the predatory publishers and stay away from them.

 

Last but not the least, A/Prof Kester also highlighted that the dominant countries might regress sometime in the future as progress does not go linearly. With this in mind, his remarks gave us a take-home message that being inclusive and staying humble to different communities should be the mindset for the educators nowadays when the educational landscape is becoming multicultural.

 

Note 1: as opposed to 'rationality,' which honours reasoning, 'transrationality' transcends the reasoning zone and focuses on intuitions and emotions. Simply put, transrationality is about your gut feeling.

 

References

 

Connell, R. (2007). The northern theory of globalization. Sociological theory25(4), 368-385.

Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Allen & Unwin.

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.

Tuhiwai, S. L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples.

Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural studies21(2-3), 449-514.

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