Abstract
How can university work experiences contribute to reframing International Development from expert saviourism rooted in colonial legacies into a project of social justice and global solidarity? In this article, I propose the design of work-experiential pedagogies that integrate practical work experiences with critical theoretical teaching and an emphasis on students’ experiential knowledge. Such pedagogies call for an expansion of the forms of university work experiences, challenging students to reflect on their manifold personal and institutional locations, to explore the diverse spaces in which work experiences can take place and to experiment with multiple pathways for change. My proposal draws on teaching examples and student journeys at my home university in the UK.
Keywords
In a recent special issue in this journal, Kamna Patel and Amy North invite us to rethink the ‘powerful and entrenched perceptions of development as a vocation’ that has taken hold in the UK’s neoliberal universities (2022: 215). This perception translates into a close relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge in International Development (ID) programmes, 1 which has grown even closer with changes in the ID labour market due to the increasing professionalization of ID organizations. Universities are educating the next generation of ID practitioners, policymakers and researchers, and those in the UK are often seen, and position themselves, as leading providers of ID expert knowledge (Patel and North, 2022). This reality has resulted in particular challenges for those university programmes that pursue critical development studies, which have historically questioned neoliberal development institutions and their practices.
Patel and North (2022) map different responses to these pressures, from some programmes adopting an explicitly radical stance by drawing on post-development and decolonial approaches (cf Harcourt, 2017), to others aligning themselves closer with ID’s vocational element. This is not an either/or situation, however; in my home university, where I conducted empirical research for this article, a critical approach centred on social justice alternatives to development is at the heart of our academic and pedagogical identity, but we are increasingly drawn into the practical side of the field, not least because of our students’ concerns about work after university and ever-growing employability-related demands from senior management. Indeed, this article has been motivated by my own thinking about potential ways forward. I have found that a good place is university work experiences and argue that they have the potential to deepen students’ critical understanding of ID while also imparting necessary practical and professional skills.
To achieve this potential, I propose designing work-experiential pedagogies, which aim to bring together theoretical, practical and experiential knowledge through an expansion of the locations, spaces and pathways of work experience programmes. Such pedagogies call for full integration of work experiences into the ID curriculum, where all classes provide an intellectual scaffolding for students to develop the necessary theoretical knowledge and self-reflexivity to undertake ‘critical’ work experiences. I argue that such an integration of knowledge and expansion of work experience locations, spaces and pathways can contribute to
Work-experiential pedagogies therefore combine critical in-class teaching with practical work experiences, defined as the various extra-mural activities such as placements, internships, service learning, field trips and volunteering (abroad) opportunities offered to students as part of their studies. I recognize that these programmes are not equivalent, but for the purposes of this article bring them together in their shared emphasis on the intellectual, practical and emotional labour students undertake during work experiences, whose immersive environments connect them directly to the phenomena being studied in a form of experiential learning. This multifaceted labour in turn supports the integration of different knowledge.
This integration is accompanied by expanding forms of work experience programmes. This entails asking students to think about the
The empirical data for this article comes from a larger research project at the University of Sussex, where I have been based for the past nine years. The university is a leading academic institution in the field of ID, with a large community of researchers and educators, including at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), which is co-located on campus. Data collection for the larger project, which focused on more creative ways of teaching global challenges, took place between 2016 and 2019, consisting of in-depth interviews with 10 staff and 25 students, informal conversations, a systematic review of departmental teaching materials and in-class observations during three modules taught by my colleagues. 2 I also conducted action research in my own classroom, designing various learning activities for a third-year undergraduate module on Urban Futures and an MA-level module on Activism for Development and Justice. The three student journeys I present here were purposely selected from the 25 student interviews to provide detailed empirical evidence for what work-experiential pedagogies could look like, including from students’ own perspectives. Once the students agreed for their original interview material to be used for this article, I conducted a follow-up interview with them in 2021. That they are the journeys of three young women reflects the predominance of female students in our classrooms. Rather than representativeness, the small sample provides examples of students’ learning from expanded locations, spaces and pathways of ID work experience programmes.
In the next section of this article, I situate my arguments within the literature on neoliberal universities, their employability agenda and work experience programmes, paying particular attention to the contours these take in ID studies. I then draw on teaching from my home university and the three student journeys into post-university work to show how work-experiential pedagogies can contribute to reframing ID.
I. Neoliberal Universities and Their Work Experiences
In this literature review I briefly map the neoliberal HE landscape in the UK and then focus on its accompanying employability agenda. Within this broader context, ID programmes often frame ID as a vocational field and market themselves as teaching the key skills that will lead to employment in the sector. This functionalist positioning stands in tension with the ongoing need for critical teaching that interrogates ID’s historical, epistemological and political foundations, and these tensions are reproduced in the design and implementation of ID work experience programmes.
HE’s Neoliberal and Employability Agendas
ID studies are firmly situated within the neoliberal regime that governs HE in many countries, including the UK (Amsler, 2014). As a result, many students attend university to better access jobs by obtaining the necessary qualifications and skills. In tandem, employability—defined as ‘a set of achievements, skills, understandings and personal attributes that make individuals more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupation’—has become an increasingly prominent discourse and practice in universities (UUK & CBI, 2009, cited in Arora, 2015: 637). Demand for employability is also driven by the perceived failure of universities to produce graduates with the right skills, which results in pressure to expand employability initiatives by institutionalizing dedicated staff and services, alumni mentoring networks, employability days and the teaching of ‘transferable’ skills. According to the UUK&CBI report, these skills include ‘self-management, positive attitude, enterprise and entrepreneurship, team-working, business and customer awareness and numeracy’ (Arora, 2015). These attributes are a far cry from the analytical questioning, critical self-reflection and social engagement that characterize transformative university teaching, which is being displaced and discredited. When situated within broader value-for-money discourses, employability also contributes to students’ perceptions of themselves as customers and of staff as service providers, which reinforces transactional modes of education to the detriment of emancipatory ones (Giroux, 2014).
Neoliberalization and employability have led to the ‘professionalization’ of ID studies, which increasingly aim to ‘align curricula with employers’ demands’ (Denskus and Esser, 2015: 73). According to the World Bank’s Woolcock (2007), the teaching of key skills should include developing core competencies in data analysis, econometric methods, monitoring and evaluation, productive group work, as well as brokering, translation and communication aimed at diverse audiences. Others have proposed a broader set of capabilities, including knowledge of development theory, technical skills and the development of interpersonal and cross-cultural relationship abilities (Spratt, 2015). In addition, critical engagement with diverse development theories can help ID students become reflexive ID practitioners (Engel and Simpson Reese, 2018). 3 The definition of these skills is shaped by industry and labour market requirements that make a university degree increasingly necessary for employment. The resulting vocalization of ID teaching manifests in the proliferation of technical training and practical skills modules as well as career planning sessions and employability workshops. All of this takes place in privatized universities financed by student fees; having to service that debt can force students to become ‘agents of the very system that reproduces the challenges they had set out to overcome in thefirst place’ (Denskus and Esser, 2015: 79). The implications of these dynamics go far beyond skills-focused modules.
They also shape the ongoing tension between theoretical teaching that critically interrogates ID and the imparting of practical competencies to make graduates competitive and work-ready. While for some scholars these two aims are non-compatible (Rutazibwa, 2018), others ask whether and how the gap between them can be bridged (White and Devereux, 2018). Importantly, North et al. (2022) remind us that students are not a homogeneous group but have different interests and expectations as well as learning and career trajectories. If we ‘acknowledge the responsibility of educators to prepare students for gainful employment while remaining true to the field’s epistemological and ontological roots’ and transformative political commitments (Denskus and Esser, 2015: 75), then how can we design work-experiential pedagogies that articulate critical theoretical teaching with the imparting of reflexive capabilities to help students interrogate the very skills they are learning about? To begin to answer this question, a closer look at the literature on university work experiences in general, and in ID in particular, is in order.
Work Experiences in ID: From Saviourism to Solidarity
Over the years, four broad approaches to university work experiences have emerged (Weil and McGill, 1989). The first focuses on their connection to employment, the second examines how they shape education programmes, the third sees their potential for emancipatory change and the final approach emphasizes learners’ personal growth. While many programmes might start with the middle two orientations, increasingly it is the first and last approaches that dominate university initiatives (Langdon and Agyeyomah, 2014). Furthermore, because work experiences are located within the institutional requirements of universities, where administrators prefer large, established organizations that are easier to verify for insurance and risk reduction purposes, the good intentions of educators who design them are often subsumed by bureaucratic calculations (Cameron et al., 2018). As programmes are usually set up to benefit students first, they can place extra burdens on hosts, in extreme cases exploiting marginalized communities as resources to teach affluent students (Huish, 2015). 4
These dynamics take on particular contours in ID education, where some students enter their studies with an ‘underscrutinized moral compulsion to help’ (Cameron et al., 2013: 356). In my own research, one student summarized it as ‘working for the UN and saving the world’, where ‘the world’ often means ‘poor people in Africa’. These imaginings are based on problematic stereotypes that students have been exposed to in the media, NGO fundraising adverts and global anti-poverty campaigns (Baillie Smith, 2013). They are then reinforced by the marketing materials of university ID programmes that ‘frame [ID] as an altruistic field of study, practical and grounded in developing key skills for equity and social justice in the twenty-first century’ (Patel and North, 2022: 216). While critics have called such idealistic desires to help and develop ‘white saviourism’ (Teju, 2012), in this article I use the term ‘expert saviourism’ to signal the intersectional nature of these ambitions, which are not only informed by race but also by gender (Mostafanezhad, 2013), class (Harcourt, 2017) as well as regional and national belonging (Bornstein, 2012). Students’ saviourism also leads to particular geographical and institutional locations of ID work experiences that map to traditional development dynamics.
Most often, Northern students travel to Global South countries, although this has slowed down following the COVID-19 pandemic and students’ increasing concerns about the ecological impacts of international travel (Huish, 2021; Steckley, 2021). In their most extreme form, work experiences can imitate voluntourism, which legitimizes unskilled young people from the Global North ‘to take up responsibilities overseas that we would never give them at home, let alone to visitors who do not speak our language’ (Rutazibwa, 2018: 175). Voluntouristic work experiences set up hierarchies that can reinforce students’ feelings of superiority and replicate development’s coloniality of power and knowledge, while also undermining local efforts and livelihoods (Simpson, 2004).
In addition, the short-term nature of many international work experiences means that meaningful relationships that could lead to deeper learning cannot be established. This can result in further marginalization, when local immersion, however superficial, becomes a source of authority for students who feel that they have been there and can now speak for locals who are silenced in the process (Pedwell, 2012). The results are inappropriate ‘quick moves that students (and teachers) will often make from observation to narratives that claim knowledge or expertise’ and from there to action (MacDonald, 2014: 218). A related risk is that international work experiences can remain ‘inherently colonial with their impetus to know and encounter difference and to experience the other’, which calls for students to understand the historical legacies that might connect their home and host countries (Cameron et al., 2018: 10). To counter these dangers, students must practice ‘hyper-self-reflexivity’, which entails examining their personal and academic positions, becoming aware of the intellectual, ideological and institutional baggage they might carry and interrogating their own privileges and complicities (Kapoor, 2004).
When it comes to the institutions where ID work experiences take place, it is easy to fall into a binary between two types: mainstream organizations such as multilateral organizations, government agencies, international charities or large, established NGOs that perpetuate the status quo of the neoliberal development industry on one side, and alternative organizations such as smaller or local ones that question this status quo on the other. However, neither group is static and homogeneous. Mainstream organizations are forever adapting their ways of working (Leslie et al., 2018) and are made up of individuals who can pursue different agendas from within their institutional locations (while always being constrained by institutional anti-politics that domesticate radical agendas). Small, grassroots or local organizations are not necessarily sites of resistance, as they can fall prey to local politics of patronage or capture, operate counter to their professed social justice objectives and reinforce capitalist agendas and colonial relations (Kamat, 2002; Kapoor, 2005). Most importantly, this dichotomy excludes more radical institutions such as activist collectives or social movements that actively work to destabilize the status quo and to reframe ID as global justice work focusing on redistribution and reparation (Rutazibwa, 2018). It is, therefore, more appropriate to posit a spectrum of ID institutional practices, along which ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ or ‘critical’ organizations are located. 5
An integral part of work-experiential pedagogies is the theoretical teaching that accompanies practical work experiences. Most directly, students’ work experiences are supported by faculty supervision, which should go beyond virtual check-ins to ensure that students are safe and indeed working to more substantial engagements using diaries or reflective journals that students keep during their placements. During group-based programmes, participating faculty members provide crucial logistical, emotional and intellectual support, which is circumscribed by their own personal and academic positionalities (Schofield, 2022). Then there are the before and after provisions consisting of preparatory modules and return debriefs. Even when these contribute to students using their work experiences to interrogate expert saviourism, such bookend teaching runs the danger of treating work experiences as ‘a sort of vacuum chamber one must prepare for and decompress after’, or assumes that the work experience ‘in and of itself does the teaching’ (Langdon and Agyeyomah, 2014: 56, 57).
Replacing such a disjointed approach with an ongoing reflection-action-reflection cycle ensures that students’ learning is cumulative and continuous (Ash and Clayton, 2009). This is akin to Freire’s notion of praxis, as practice is informed by theory and discussion (Schwittay, 2021). Such learning can best be supported through the full integration of work experiences into the ID curriculum and for all theoretical teaching to contribute to students critically framing their work experiences. In this way, even classes that do not explicitly mention or link to work experiences will help students develop the theoretical knowledge and hyper-self-reflexivity they need to undertake work experiences that contribute to reframing ID. In the remainder of this article, I present ID teaching at Sussex as one attempt to begin developing such work-experiential pedagogies.
II. Exploring Diverse Locations for Change
In this section, I examine how the critical teaching of development skills and tools in classroom simulations constitutes one instance of work-experiential pedagogies developing students’ critical thinking about ID and about their own locations vis-à-vis expert saviourism. It also helps students to consider whether and how this work be done from inside the ID industry. Denskus and Esser (2015) question to what extent ID skills teaching can address the root causes of exclusion and inequality, and I agree that the mere imparting of functionalist skills perpetuates rather than challenges traditional ID practices. Instead, skills teaching needs to sit alongside critical theory modules, but more importantly, must include the critical interrogation of these skills and their limitations in its own right. Together, these shifts can challenge students to think about how change might be instigated from within. As Grace’s student journey shows, there is no guarantee of this succeeding, which does not invalidate the importance of working from a manifold, including insider locations.
Critical Tools and Skills
At Sussex, a specialist undergraduate module called Development Tools and Skills is taught by a lecturer who is also a consultant working on gender and inclusion, gender-based violence and children and youth. The module is focused on students learning about different approaches used in the development sector to identify, design and evaluate programmes, including theories of change, stakeholder analysis, log frames and risk assessments. The teaching style aims to approximate a professional work environment through an intense hands-on and group work approach and assignments that mirror professional activities. However, even in such practice-based classes, it is important that ‘the managerial procedures of the mainstream development industry are [not] offered up as constitutive of what it means to practice development’ (Cameron et al., 2013: 356). In this regard, the Tools and Skills module handbook explains that
many of the methods and approaches we will address in this course are euro-centric and intellectually problematic [and one of the] objectives is to start to unpack these epistemological and ontological problems [and] critique their relationship to a particular view of what ‘development’ is
The module thereby asks students to question who is involved in development work and included in the design of programmes, whose knowledge counts and how power relations shape ID practice. This does not only include exploring insider/outsider locations but also moves students away from ambitions of being expert saviours. This exploration of manifold locations can be modelled and nurtured in classroom settings, through collective work that joins critical analysis and learning-by-doing. The latter enables students to interrogate the very development tools they are using by applying them to example development scenarios. Students thus learn about the usefulness and challenges of approaches through their deployment, rather than just thinking about them in the abstract or reading about their shortcomings.
This also pushes students to think about the locations from which change can be enacted. As one student commented, ‘without this module we would not understand what needs to change’. Another liked that the module asked them to also think about alternative approaches: ‘if this tool is not effective, what do you propose, including looking at tools from other countries’. For a third student, it was important that they could explore different methods and their limitations in a safe and supportive classroom space, ‘otherwise it could be soul-crushing in the workplace if we were not prepared for [these challenges]’. She liked that these explorations were guided by an educator who is a practising consultant and ‘real and honest about [her] struggles of working with mainstream organizations’. The module therefore gives students an understanding of the language, logic and tools of the ID industry, which they first need to know about to then be able to challenge and work to transform. In this way, the module asks students to consider the complexities of becoming change-makers from within mainstream ID institutions. The experience of Grace shows both the potential and pitfalls of this approach.
Grace: Struggling Within the ID Sector
Grace had entered her studies hoping to ‘come out with a toolkit to save the world’, but quickly realized that she was getting anything but. What she obtained instead was a deeper understanding of the ID field that she hoped would enable her ‘to make the right decisions when embarking on a career’. Having learned that even NGOs and charities are not the benevolent development organizations she, like many students, assumed to be when she first came to university, she began to look for ‘a more systematic approach’ to enacting change by focusing on business organizations. This focus was greatly shaped by her studies, as besides Tools and Skills another of her favourite modules was a third-year specialist option on the role of business in development, for which she had written an essay on social audits in the garment industry. Researching that essay made her realize the financial linkages and resulting conflicts of interest between auditors and corporations (LeBaron and Lister, 2015).
Grace took this module after returning from a self-organized placement year in India, where she had worked with a leading non-profit research organization, conducting primary and secondary research, participating in the development of a technical intervention and writing academic papers. Grace explained that the placement.
was integral to me really figuring out what I want to do after my degree. I realized that working in research was not for me … also because of learning how politically and financially influenced research can be. I think gaining experience in the field is so important in order to contextualize learnings from the course … and has allowed me to think more critically and with more conviction than just by studying.
Her work experience had shown Grace first-hand the donor-driven practical, ethical and political conundrums that shape ID work in an actual organization. Having seen power relations operating on the ground, Grace’s interest in the role of corporate actors and financial practices in development was deepened and then given critical substance and focus through her specialist classes.
During her final year of study, Grace applied for a graduate programme with one of the big four professional services firms, to become an auditor and work in the sustainability field with companies reporting on international social and environmental standards. When I first interviewed her shortly after finishing university, she reflected that ‘I am still very, very apprehensive about the graduate programme I’ll be taking on. I think I have realized though that for me it will be the best way to ever have a chance of making change in the corporate sphere, in terms of big businesses’ role in development’. Wanting to ‘introduce new ideas and approaches to the growing business-development field’, she thought that it was by working in the belly of the beast where she could make a difference. As White and Devereux (2018) have argued, university graduates can indeed import new, including critical, perspectives from their studies to their workplaces and in this way stimulate change from within. Mainstream ID organizations are not static and homogeneous and encompass practitioners with differing degrees of conventional or critical understanding of the field. However, Grace also realized that there was no guarantee of internal transformation being realized and found out that it can be next to impossible, especially in large profit-driven organizations with entrenched hierarchies.
When I talked to her again a year into her graduate programme, she had just handed in her notice. It was not only the stressful, demoralizing and money-oriented work environment at the company, where she often felt reduced to a number but also the practical confirmation of her critical university knowledge that had brought on that decision. Participating in auditing the sustainability and restoration-focused report of a large multinational mining company, for example, she rejected the purely financial focus of restoration work 6 that did not take human needs into account. She was also highly critical of the box-ticking nature of the exercise, which for her amounted to ‘a performance of sustainability’. Having now experienced first-hand the inherent conflicts of interest of social audits that she had first learned about while writing her university essay, she realized that it was not possible to bring about meaningful changes in this particular institutional environment, at least not from an entry-level position. As a result, she is now working for a smaller company that audits charities and NGOs.
Returning to the argument that new concepts arising from academic work will only make ID discourse and interventions more ‘sophisticated’ rather than addressing or changing underlying power inequalities (Denskus and Esser, 2015), Grace’s journey seems to reinforce that critique. However, for post-colonial scholars like Spivak (1988), negotiating and critiquing from within can be an effective way to unsettle dominant representations and challenge entrenched practices. Organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, for example, ‘are too important and powerful to turn our backs on; instead, we can engage them unrelentingly from all sides to try and make them accountable to the subaltern’ (Kapoor, 2004: 641). Grace’s struggles do not foreclose the possibility that ID students can leave their university education with a desire to critically engage the ID industry as insiders, even if they then realize the difficulties of doing so.
Indeed, Grace did not abandon a systems-internal trajectory and instead is trying to find possibilities for change in smaller organizations. She still wants to carve out critical spaces within the ‘mainstream’ development industry, while being very aware of the limitations and contradictions of these spaces. This awareness was created during her university studies, deepened in the course of her work experience and then confirmed in post-university work. Her journey is thus one example of how work-experiential pedagogies can challenge students to critically explore the manifold locations from which development work can take place. In the next section, I show how diversifying the spaces of these pedagogies can lead to transformative change that is not enacted from inside locations but from finding or even creating alternative spaces.
III. Expanding Spaces for Praxis
One way to work towards reframing ID is to trouble students’ desire to work in mainstream institutions. This can happen through critical classroom teaching about the problems with many of these institutions, which often leads to students questioning their original aspirations to work there. Some then begin to look for alternative spaces through which to engage, and work-experiential pedagogies can help them discover such spaces. This section considers how decolonial teaching can contribute to this reorientation and then presents a second student journey that combines ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ work experiences into a post-university trajectory of creating a novel space for transformative action.
Decolonial Teaching
At Sussex, several modules introduce students to the coloniality of ID practices, which is ‘complicit in reproducing, invisibilizing and legitimizing the ills of poverty, conflict, deprivation, diseases, environmental degradation and exploitation of the colonial project’ (Rutazibwa, 2018: 160). To understand these colonial legacies, all first-year ID students have to take a compulsory module on
Another module on
Students also have the option of taking a third-year module on
As a result of these critical classroom engagements, students often begin to question their professional ambitions; as one student explained, ‘you learn where not to engage, where to draw the line’. They also start to decentre themselves, which another student described as ‘not wanting to put myself up front and centre’, while a third talked about rethinking their own location as an ally rather than an expert or helper. Becoming disillusioned with the development industry often goes along with becoming more interested in smaller, local organizations and wanting to work in the UK. This does not mean that students adopt an inward-looking ‘home is best’ attitude, which can turn into isolationism and parochialism if taken to its extreme. But when grounded in hyper-self-reflexivity and an acute awareness of the global nature of contemporary challenges in an interconnected world, affecting change from and at home, wherever that may be, takes on particular weight in light of ID’ colonial legacies and traditional hierarchies that posited Global South problems solved by Global North experts.
Then, instead of ‘feeding the rapacious coloniality of the development industry with new blood’, ID teaching can contribute to reframing its practices as a ‘global quest for social, gender, racial and ecological justice … as relevant to the people sleeping on the streets of Brighton as to the abject child portrayed in NGO marketing campaigns’ (Cornwall, 2020: 40, 45). Students begin to rethink ID from an interventionist approach to helping the distant poor to one that focuses on solidarity, at home and abroad. This reframing of ID can be supported by work experiences that engage students in diverse spaces.
Karen: Finding Spaces to Rekindle Passion for Transformation
Karen’s journey shows that undertaking work experiences can remind students of why they decided to study in the first place and rekindle their passion for change work. Karen told me that after studying for several years she had come to feel detached from what had brought her initially to studying ID. Prior to university, she had been working for a local NGO in Nicaragua and realized that ‘I needed to learn more about ID before completely plunging into it’. For Karen, the teaching at Sussex challenged students’ ‘idealistic ideas about development’, which was important because ‘otherwise they would reproduce harmful stereotypes and practices. You also learn to question your own positionality’. While she appreciated this critical teaching, it also left her ‘feeling worn down, losing my passion and becoming distracted and demotivated’. This feeling of alienation had only been compounded by a summer placement with a local women-focused development consultancy, where she came to understand more about ‘development being done from a business perspective’. It showed her first-hand the financial and corporate values of some development organizations, which were at odds with her own beliefs in social justice. In addition, learning about gender and development at university made her very critical of the lack of intersectionality in the organization’s work.
Karen’s long-standing passion has been advocating for refugee rights and well-being. Building on the volunteer work she was doing with a local refugee organization and a campus refugee student advocacy group, she decided after much soul searching to volunteer in a refugee camp on a Greek island, although this went against her beliefs that she should work for refugee rights in the UK. Such ‘stationary global connectivity’ sees more and more students supporting social struggles from their campus locations (Huish, 2015: 2), even more so after the COVID-19 pandemic forced a rethinking of virtual teaching and engagement possibilities (Huish, 2021).
However, when the opportunity arose to work with a small, local organization, Karen went to see for herself the conditions of refugees in Greece. She reflected that ‘going to Greece pushed me back into wanting to be as active as I can be’. Only by going abroad could she gain a better understanding of the situations that refugees face during their hazardous journeys to the UK, which in turn reanimated her work with refugees’ mental health back in the UK. In this way, her volunteer work abroad, from a position of hyper-self-reflexivity, nurtured her ongoing studies and advocacy work in the UK. In other words, it was her work experiences in diverse spaces—a campus group, an organization in Brighton and a grassroots organization in Greece—that reinforced Karen’s engagement with refugee advocacy.
After finishing her undergraduate degree, Karen completed a one-year MA that combined further theoretical learning about social change with gaining practical skills in media production. Around the time of her graduation, she was put on furlough during the first COVID-19 lockdown and used that time to set up a small initiative connecting asylum seekers and refugees with volunteer tutors for English classes. In addition to building human connections, her aim has been to change the conversation about refugees, through enabling refugees to create and share their stories in order to challenge mainstream media stereotypes and sensationalism. This explicit focus on introducing alternative perspectives attempts to dislodge dominant narratives that often map onto colonially rooted racist stereotypes. A year after graduating, Karen talked about how the initiative had grown into a community-interest corporation (CIC) and she had started to receive funding, making it a viable work option for her and a small number of paid staff.
Looking back at her journey, Karen reflected that ‘I would never do what I do now had it not been for my studies at Sussex’ and the understanding she gained about larger historically-rooted systems of power, for example. This knowledge was enriched by her various work experiences, the critical pedagogical scaffolding in which they were embedded and the practical skills she gained during her MA. While placement at a conventional development organization reinforced her critical take on mainstream development, it was volunteer work with local and advocacy organizations on campus, in Brighton and in Greece that showed her the possibilities of doing development differently. These diverse spaces of work experience programmes eventually led to Karen setting up her own social enterprise to advocate for refugee inclusion. Finding or even creating alternative spaces also allows students to experiment with different pathways of action, which the next section explores in greater detail.
IV. Discovering Pathways of Activist Action
Huish (2013) characterizes ID teaching that focuses on activist practices as imparting ‘dangerous knowledge’ to help students confront exclusions and inequalities. In this section, I draw on my own activist teaching, which defines activism as ‘a process of challenges and moral dilemmas more than as an experience that brings clear answers and solutions to social problems’ (Huish, 2015: 10) to show how such knowledge can be taught in theoretical, practical and experiential ways. A third student journey then explores the role that experimenting with multiple pathways of change can play in work-experiential pedagogies reframing ID as activist work.
Teaching Activism
For the past eight years, I have been teaching an MA-level class on Activism for Development and Social Justice, which introduces students to different ways of theorizing activism alongside past and present activist movements, and challenges them to critically explore activist identities. Each year, students from widely different geographical, professional and political backgrounds contribute their own experiential knowledge of or engagement with activist struggles to ground the module empirically, as examples of what has been done and what can be done. By learning about pluriversal and prefigurative politics, the students also explore their own forms of agency to engage with structures of power (Escobar, 2021, Maeckelbergh, 2011). They then experiment with how they might enact this agency, by applying their theoretical knowledge to the development of an activist campaign. For this, students work in groups and are supported by a series of workshops that introduce them to various campaign tools, following the model of the Tools and Skills module described above. Students decide on their own campaign targets, design the campaigns and write a final campaign report as well as a personal essay reflecting on the pedagogical, methodological and interpersonal aspects of the campaign work.
Most campaigns are located on Sussex campus or in Brighton, showing that students often want to ‘dig where they stand’ (Gebrial, 2018: 34). The examples below give an idea of the multiplicity of pathways students experiment within their campaigns. 8 Many involve lobbying local or national politicians for a range of issues, from the UK banning plastic waste exports to changing the country’s inhumane asylum system. Campus-based campaigns often involve gathering testimonies from students to make the case for the better provision of mental health or sexual violence services to management, and plan escalation tactics including protests, disruption of recruitment events or building occupations if necessary. Invariably, all campaigns now have a social media component that engages target audiences across multiple online platforms for awareness raising, petition signing or other calls to action. Some campaigns involve more creative methods, such as the design of a participatory game to facilitate conversations between homeless people and the larger population in Brighton, the joint cooking of meals to combat food waste, loneliness and exclusion, and the organization of art exhibitions that harness creativity, testimony and empathy as pathways of change. Rhian’s journey shows how such pathways can be further expanded.
Rhian: Recognizing ID as Activism
Rhian’s student journey followed an emerging activist trajectory instigated by engagements with student-led initiatives. Hesitant to join university after a period of travel upon finishing high school, Rhian was able to access government funding and decided to give Sussex a go, ultimately finding that her studies here ‘changed her view of the world’. Having already been sceptical of mainstream development organizations, she became even more critical of the aid and charity sector and found herself drawn to smaller-scale initiatives. Rhian became a founding member of the first student housing cooperative in the UK’s South East, which introduced her to different change-making strategies:
as part of the SEASALT housing co-operative, I received training in, and participated in, community engagement and consensus decision making. I feel that this practical, hands-on involvement has given me some tools to implement and visualise how participatory development approaches could be enacted, but this is closely entwined with the knowledge and understanding gained from the lecture theatre and readings. In fact, my interest in participatory development and autonomous grassroots organizations sparked from academic study may be why the co-operative sector particularly caught my curiosity in the first place.
Exemplary of work-experiential pedagogies, it was a mutually reinforcing relationship between academic learning and practical work with a student cooperative that fostered experiential knowledge and enabled Rhian to experiment with different pathways of change.
Rhian also became involved with a student campaign that raised awareness about workers’ rights abuses in the electronics industry. The group successfully lobbied Sussex leadership to become an affiliate of Electronics Watch, an industry organization supporting worker-led monitoring and accountability. This entailed working with different stakeholders across campus and led her to find some surprising supporters, for example in the university procurement team. As she recounted, ‘pre-university me would have probably got on board with a campaign for workers’ rights without really thinking about the impacts or complexities of the issue [while] student and graduate me sees these issues with a more nuanced and critical mindset’. Asking reflexive questions about her own change work resulted in Rhian’s enriched understanding of what advocating for workers’ rights means and the different pathways through which that could be achieved. Importantly, after conversations with one of her lecturers who is herself a trade union activist, Rhian recognized the endless emails she sent to Sussex managers and the subsequent meetings as a form of activism. This shows that campus student groups can provide valuable work experiences and contribute to reframing ID practice as activist engagement, especially when their activities are joined up with theoretical learning, in this case about alternative economic models and organizations.
Upon graduating, Rhian joined a UK-based advocacy organization that campaigns to influence political decisions towards ending global poverty, through providing in-depth research, political expertise and campaigning training. As part of this, she has continued to challenge mainstream development narratives of expert saviourism, instead reframing development work as activist practices that include using her own power and privilege to advocate for anti-oppressive social justice issues.
V. Conclusion
The journeys of Grace, Karen and Rhian show how an expansion of locations, spaces and pathways of university work experiences can lead to reframing ID as a project of social justice and global solidarity. Starting from emerging critical positions vis-a-vis ‘mainstream’ development organizations that were reinforced by classroom teaching, and for Grace and Karen by their work experiences, all three students gained practical experiences in diverse spaces that best fit their values and visions of ID. These work experiences gave rise to hyper-self-reflexivity, evident in Grace’s querying her own location in a Global South research organization funded by international donors, in Karen’s support for refugee rights and activist grassroots organizations in the UK and in Rhian’s careful involvement in an international workers’ rights campaign. In this way, these three journeys are exemplary of work-experiential pedagogies that integrate theoretical, practical and experiential knowledge, which opens up how students think about ID and their own manifold locations within it, from possible sector-internal transformation to building alternative spaces to activist work.
In sum, then, work-experiential pedagogies are modes of learning ‘that engage students with the complexity of the contemporary world … [Students] are confronted with a world that will bear the consequences of their actions and with which they need to negotiate and collaborate to create ethical futures’ (Facer, 2018: 15). I have shown that these pedagogies have the potential to contribute to reframing ID from expert saviourism to a process of just and equitable social change, if they are embedded in critical classroom teaching, foster students’ hyper-self-reflexivity, encourage a sense of critical hope and enable them to carry out expanded forms of work experiences. Critical classroom teaching can counter ID’s colonial amnesia and decentre Eurocentric knowledge domination with a more multi-polar relational global development approach that validates marginalized practitioners and knowledge. It can also complicate professional development tools and skills through learning-by-doing that equips students with the ability and confidence to query and change these approaches when they encounter them in the workplace.
University work experiences taking place in diverse spaces that combine conventional and alternative development organizations can provide students with opportunities to reflect on their own manifold locations and experiment with multiple pathways to transformative change, including alliance building, advocacy campaigning and activist work, which are recognized as integral aspects of global development. These experiments can happen across the spectrum of development organizations, but also during student campaigns and volunteering with local social movement organizations, which should be recognized as valid spaces for work experiences. When this expansion of locations, spaces and pathways results in students working post-graduation in professional firms, political advocacy organizations and social enterprises, this in turn enlarges the institutional spaces of ID practice. Such broadening can then feed back into classroom teaching and into the design of work experiences and even employability programmes, removing them from their neoliberal clutch and ensuring that they contribute to reframing ID studies as a project of global solidarity and justice.
Olivia Rutazibwa’s baby and bathwater metaphor is a powerful conclusion to this proposal for the design of work-experiential pedagogies to reframe ID: the bathwater is mainstream ID’s system of ideologies, studies, institutions and practices that maintain global inequalities, while the baby is ‘the ideas, desires and energies … pertaining to global justice, solidarity and reparations, as in righting past and present wrongs, and contribute to the “good life in the pluriverse”’ (2018: 162). Work-experiential pedagogies, with their expanded vision of the locations, spaces and pathways of ID studies inside and outside university classrooms, can ensure that ID educators do not throw out the global justice baby with the employability and expert saviourism bathwater, but instead make sure that students nurture and grow the former.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.