Teaching and Learning Global Development: Rethinking Knowledge Construction and Navigating Complexity

About

"Teaching and Learning Global Development: Rethinking Knowledge Construction and Navigating Complexity", with Elisheva “Elly” Cohen, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Scholars and practitioners have spent many years interrogating the role of colonialism, power, inequality, and representation in the field global development. These debates have important implications for education, shaping not only what students learn about development, but whose knowledge they encounter, whose knowledge counts, and how they engage with contested ideas.

Drawing on the recently published book, Teaching Global Development: Practical Approaches for Inclusive, Critical, and Decolonized Pedagogy, this talk considers what happens when we bring the critiques of development into the ways we teach and learn in the field. The talk will review creative approaches to rethinking not only what enters the curriculum, but how learning is organized, whose knowledge is recognized and the roles of teachers and learners in producing knowledge about global development.

I then draw on my experience leading an international graduate reading group on refugee education to explore what a different kind of learning space can make possible. I highlight how sustained dialogue opened and reopened fundamental questions, brought different disciplinary, geographic, professional and lived forms of knowledge into conversation, and created space for ambiguity and increasingly complex understandings. Bringing these two projects into conversation, I ask what kinds of learning spaces can help students engage critically and collectively with complex global development questions, and what possibilities emerge when education makes room not only for answers, but also for uncertainty.

Elisheva Cohen is the Senior Associate Director of Experiential Learning and Professional Development at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. Her work focuses on providing innovative experiential and global learning opportunities that enhance global competencies, facilitate cross-cultural understanding and build career readiness.

Dr. Cohen’s research draws on qualitative methods to understand the experiences of teachers, students, and families in times of conflict and crisis. She has conducted research examining inclusive education of refugees in Jordan, teaching practices of American teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wellbeing of higher education instructors in Myanmar.

Dr. Cohen holds a PhD in Comparative and International Development Education from the University of Minnesota, an MA from Columbia University Teachers College in International Educational Development, and a BA in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University.