Restoring the Kinship Worldview: A Global Citizenship Education Program

INSTITUTO UNISERES

“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela

“The essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.” Desmond Tutu, Archbishop

CREATING THE BRAZILIAN PLURIVERSITY

INSTITUTIONAL STATEMENT UNISERES is a Brazil based educational NGO that acts, in partnership with national and international institutions of higher learning, as a social-educational laboratory focusing on experiments of new forms of existence in the planet based on the pluriversity of ways of knowing and being.

We emphasize three dimensions of international education focused on new possibilities for coexistence: 1. To learn from the past-teacher: about systemic violence that has been reproduced historically, and the mechanisms of linguistic, cognitive, political, economic and existential imperialism housed in our bodies.

2. To face the present teacher without fear: to learn from the paradoxes of the crisis about the desires that cause damage to other beings, and to listen to the invitation of the new that manifests itself through disillusionment with the empty promises that can lead to other forms of walking together.

3. Extend our hand to the future-teacher: to pluralize the future by disinvesting in the desires that structure the comforts and satisfactions with the current system.

Lived principles and Mission: 1)Walk differently together always: with open eyes, questioning, discovering and rediscovering, through living and reflection, new ways of loving and being in the world [this process happens outside the classroom, in contact with people with historical struggles for life and the planet, against systemic and institutionalized violence, and that deserve tremendous respect).

2) Walk differently manifesting ethical-ecological-socio-educational processes emphasizing the interdependence between local contexts and global forces and trends. [processes that generate analysis that respects and respond to the specificities of each context without losing the vision of political and historical connections between contexts - each local context is invited to add a differentiated understanding of what is ethical-ecological-socioeducative and add to the global understanding of UNISERES].

3) Walk differently, enabling the learning of responsibility and surrender in thier intellectual and existential dimensions, recognizing the systemic complicity in the processes of reproduction of exploitation and violence [with critical eyes, heart, guts, hands and open dreams].

4) Walk differently focusing on the direct relationship between material and spiritual poverty, committing to alleviate the effects of the two forms of poverty and to eliminate their causes. Also committed to identifying, valuing and communicating existential wealth, especially that which was devalued by the prioritization of capital and market value. [avoiding positions of punishment, guilt, alms, morality, dogmatism, evangelism, paternalism, elitism, appropriation, recognizing that we are all travelers on the same planet finite in crises generated by limitations in our ways of imagining, desiring and relating].

5) Walk differently by reorienting traditionally consensus-driven desires, ready-made solutions and success stories to the recognition of complexity, paradoxes and the importance of humility, generosity and compassion as we learn together through our differences and our mistakes, vulnerabilities, and limitations.

6) Walk differently towards a new recogntion that something radically new happens when we walk differently [beyond: hope (1) directed at the continuity of unsustainable current systems and paradigms; of hope (2) aimed at including the excluded in paradigms and unsustainable systems; and the hope (3) of escape, alienation, paralysis, and extinction of the present system.

BRAZIL: GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION OTHERWISE AFRO-INDIGENOUS GESTURES TOWARD DECOLONIZATION: RESTORING THE KINSHIP WORLDVIEW

INTRODUCTION: INTEGRATIVE (EARTH CARE) INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE The unique approach to international education This project is unique in its combination of six complementary approaches to justice and an ‘alternative approach to engagement with alternatives’ in its design. The six approaches to justice are: o ecological justice: focusing on social-ecological integration, food security, soil regeneration and “living well” as opposed to “living better”. o cognitive justice: identifying the limits of current paradigms and creating an interface for engagements with mainstream and alternative knowledge systems and technologies, without reactionary dogmatisms. o affective justice: recognizing our collective need for healing from historical and intergenerational trauma, prioritizing our collective well-being. o relational justice: dismantling walls of separation caused by inherited social, cultural and epistemological hierarchies that work as barriers to symmetrical relationships. o economic justice: analyzing and acting upon the systemic reproduction of inequalities through unjust systems of trade, governance and value production. o intergenerational justice: securing relationships and forms of organization that can uphold the health and well-being of contemporary and non-contemporary populations (present and future generations).

These approaches combined make up our pioneering concept of integrative (earth CARE) intergenerational justice. This concept grounds our vision for education that invites students, educators, activist, social innovators and entrepreneurs to imagine life beyond individualistic, consumerist and metropolitan ideals. The project aims to empower change makers, expand a global community of leaders, and open possibilities for not-yet-imagined futures for humanity in a finite planet facing multiple challenges.

THE COLLABORATIVE GLOBAL JUSTICE PROJECT AFRO-INDIGENOUS GESTURES TOWARD DECOLONIZATION: RESTORING THE KINSHIP WORLDVIEW Created in response to ethical concerns about the paternalism and ethnocentrism that characterize many approaches to community engagement and student mobility (e.g. study abroad, international service learning and ‘voluntourism'), this program offers international educational experiences that are rooted in a commitment to local and global social justice and responsibility. The program fosters intercultural encounters that aim to nurture participants' yearnings for change and connection while sensitizing them to different understandings of fairness, wellbeing and global change, and enabling them to delve into the complexities of thinking and acting beyond dominant paradigms.

UNISERES’s Pedagogy of Collaborative Global Justice Study and Work: Study Within (An Alternative to Study Abroad) We have created a program in which participants learn from innovative, communityfocused interventions (including, but not limited to, grassroots resistance and landcentered movements, indigenous, landless, peasant, spiritual communities of the African Matrix, and Quilombola struggles). We emphasize recognizing the knowledge of women; indigenous and African based systems of spirituality and healing; and community-based social and political projects (both NGOs and larger social movement) that respond to complicated social problems. The program facilitates an ‘alternative way to engage with alternatives', where participants learn from and within the discomfort of facing the complexities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and complicities involved in collaborative global justice work.

The program equips participants to navigate across complex ecologies of knowledge, learning to integrate the strengths of different knowledge systems and work relationally with diverse populations. Participants can engage intellectually and practically with individuals and organizations addressing global challenges affecting Brazil and the rest of Latin America such as, climate change, job precarity, over-consumption, resource depletion, expropriation, forced migration, gentrification, modern slavery, gender, racial, and sexual violence, language/knowledge/bio-diversity loss, and food and water crises. In the process, students develop inquiry skills, practice applying different strategies, and explore how communities maintain resilience and long-term commitment as they address complex problems without easy solutions.

We have partnered with social groups, movements and community-based initiatives that cultivate practices that gesture towards decolonial futures: where human existence is not defined by markets, states, the separation between humans and nature, individualism and a single monocultural rationality. These initiatives aim to challenge, transform and move society beyond what is currently imaginable within current socio-economic systems that neglect the bio-physical limits of the planet and the ecological and social costs of marketdriven modern development. Through immersion and participation in new and existing initiatives of African and indigenous ancestral knowledge and spirituality, projects of economic solidarity, Black feminism, rural worker settlements of land reform, and numerous other spaces of reinterpreting how humans are part of the natural universe, participants explore alternative ways of thinking and being in the world.

Our program is committed to challenging harmful patterns of being and knowing, which are rooted in material and epistemological hierarchies, to create spaces for the flourishing of an ecology of knowledges. Such an ecology, in which there is symmetry between different and intersecting ways of knowing and being, creates conditions of possibility for people from diverse positions and histories to engage critically with the contributions and limitations of every knowledge system (including the most novel ones, which are only just in the process of formation). In this way, the curriculum offers a framework that directly challenges some of the most fundamentally problematic practices that abound in social interventions, while offering alternatives to the practices of reactive dogmatism, essentialism, romanticization of alternatives, and/or absolute relativism that are presently creating intercultural paralyses and other barriers to collaborative approaches to justice.

Participants on this program will learn to: ● step back, look at the bigger picture and “dive deeper”; ● clarify, test and unpack assumptions and the implications of ideas without fear of judgment; ● acquire/develop languages/vocabularies/and frameworks of analysis to name the tensions, conflict, and paradoxes they encounter in Brazil; ● engage with difficult questions while protecting the integrity of relationships they form in Salvador, Fortaleza, and other sites--; ● become comfortable with the discomfort of facing fears, contradictions and projections; ● form relationships of solidarity not dependent on shared knowledge, identity or understanding; and ● find peace and strength in vulnerability and develop resilience and stamina for the “long-haul” of ‘hospicing’ a system in decline and assisting with the birth of something new, undefined and potentially (but not necessarily) wiser.

These goals are achieved through a dynamic, creative and multi-faceted program of interrelated courses (see course descriptions below) in which students deeply engage with collaborative justice learning and work. The courses include classroom-based learning with recognized faculty members from the University of Sã o Paulo (USP), the Federal University of Bahia, the Federal University of Ceara, UNILAB, the Federal University of Rio de Janiero, and the Federal University of Amazonas.

Each course also incorporates field-based experiential learning (visits to Fortaleza, Salvador, Manaus and Rio de Janeiro) and interaction with groups such as MST in rural communities, CUFA in urban favelas, communities of Candomble and Centers of Indigenous Medicine, Black Feminist organization, community-based mental health centers, among others.

Finally, each participant can conduct Collaborative Justice Work Project (CJWP) with an organization or social movement. Through these experiences in multiple sites, students will become collaborative justice practitioners with a keen understanding of both global

challenges and approaches to solutions and have gained critical skills related to alternative ways to engage with the alternative.

HOMESTAYS On this program, students will be staying in two, or possibly three, homestays. Most the time will be spent with the student’s urban homestay family in either Fortaleza or Salvador. This will be the primary homestay throughout the semester. Students are spread out in clusters throughout the city in homes of varying socioeconomic levels. The second homestay will be with an MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra) family. This short experience will allow students to gain insight into the realities of this movement and rural life in Brazil. Students may also have a homestay experience in an indigenous community in Manaus during our exploration of indigenous cosmologies, medicine, and healing.

Possible Curriculum: Participants can choose a combination of courses that can make up a program ranging from 3 to 16 credits) Course 1: Global Justice Literacies 1: “Facing Human Wrongs” online course (compulsory) (2 credits) https://continuingstudies.uvic.ca/teaching-learning-and-development/courses/facinghuman-wrongs-2-0-climate-complexity-and-relational-accountability/ This course offers the preparation for differentiated community engagement focusing on critical, transnational and relational literacies. Participants will engage with frames of analyses, questions, and dispositions that will be used in the design of the experiential learning courses. The course involves online lectures, readings, and guided assignments that: introduce participants to different genealogies of global justice and theories of social change; cultivate a familiarity with strategies to assess their gifts, limitations, and paradoxes; address the reciprocal relationship between theory and practice and propose protocols for community engagement.

Course 2: Global Injustice and Grass-Roots Resistance in Historical Perspective (3 credits) Global justice work addresses the unprecedented challenges that we face in an increasingly complex and globalized world. Ethical global justice engagements require deep learning about the social, cultural, political, economic and historical forces that shape peoples, places, spaces, and worldviews. It also requires that those seeking to make change develop complex and sophisticated understandings of the practical, ethical and epistemological difficulties of intervening in complex and dynamic systems, particularly when this work is collaborative and intercultural.

When this understanding is missing, learning and action tend to unintentionally reproduce unequal relationships between dominant and marginalized populations, simplistic

explanations of inequality, and ethnocentric and paternalistic ideals of justice, responsibility, and change. In this context, interventions tend to privilege simplistic solutions that alleviate the symptoms of problems rather than strategies that would transform the underlying economic, cultural, and behavioral root causes that underpin the systemic reproduction of inequalities.

This course responds directly to these challenges by offering participants from across the world the opportunity to become social catalysts who have the analyses, insight, and sensibility to walk alongside others in alleviating the effects and transforming the root causes of material and existential forms of poverty. This unique learning experience is based on an educational framework that integrates critical theory, deep self and collective reflection, a reciprocal relationship between theory and practice, and historical and systemic analyses of how inequalities are reproduced in theories and practices of social and global change.

The course is a classroom-based experience that focuses on examining the presumed superiority of modernist and Western-centric understandings of ‘development’, ‘success’, ‘impact’, ‘sustainability’, ‘accountability,’ and ‘productivity’ in social change efforts. This presumed superiority not only limits the potential power of diverse ways of knowing, but also fuels the expansion of a global cognitive injustice that severely limits our possibilities to understand others and exist together on the planet.

Course 3: Decolonization and Community Action in Brazil (3 credits)

This course upholds and integrates a unique vision of transformational learning centered on an integrative approach to justice. It was designed to support a diversity of deep learning processes that combine practical doing (together), the building of trust (in one another), deepening analyses (of self, systems, and social and ecological complexity), and dismantling walls (between peoples, knowledges, and cultures). In this vision, intellectual engagements, the arts, the environment, and relational and embodied practices are all understood as important conduits for learning. The course invites learners to explore the contributions, paradoxes, and limits of their current problem-posing and problem-solving paradigms, engage experientially with alternative practices that challenge the limits of their thinking and capabilities, and potentially contribute to the co-creation of new

paradigms of social change that open up not-yet-imaginable possibilities for co-existence in the future.

The course, ( both classroom and field-based), engages participants in experiential learning that focuses on alternatives to mainstream systems and strategies, including alternative economies, alternative ways of relating to ecology, Southern epistemologies, and initiatives that highlight the importance of teachings from grassroots resistance and land-centered movements, including Indigenous, Afro-Brazilian Spiritual communities and landless, peasant, and Quilombola struggles, with an emphasis on the knowledge of women and the reduction of gender, racial, and sexual violence and vulnerability, against intersectional systems of oppression.

The course seeks to support participants in their development of tools for 1) challenging narrow ideas of the public good, beyond market imperatives; 2) critically evaluating traditional practices and flows of knowledge production; 3) resisting paternalistic notions of progress and development; 4) cultivating an appreciation for the gifts of multiple epistemic traditions, especially indigenous knowledge systems; 5) fostering reflexivity through an awareness of the complexities, complicities, difficulties and paradoxes of doing this work; 6) cultivating, developing and sharing practices and skills that build various aspects of alternative presents and futures (e.g. around food, architecture, energy, media, waste, etc.); and, 7) building a global alliance of social catalysts with both the passion and wisdom to confront complex social crises by advancing integrative justice.

This course involves structured educational engagements with selected local initiatives and assignments focusing on self-reflexive analyses. This will be organized as intensive circuits of visits in Rio, Manaus, Salvador, and Fortaleza in Brazil. Through these engagements, accompanying reflexive practices, living journals and practical, lived experiences, students will deepen their understanding of their particular context and how this context relates to larger social problems and global challenges, and consider the complexities of their own position in relation to the project and orienting concerns.

Students develop critical essays that examine topics such colonialism, coloniality, settlers and settler privilege, race and white supremacy, gender and gender violence, and privilege. Through self-reflective essays, students critically analyze how coloniality continues to influence their lives and society.

Course 4: Collaborative Justice Work Project: Exploring Brazil’s Community Based Models of Global Justice (3-6 credits) This course involves an internship with a selected initiative combined with structured assignments with the duration of the internship ranging from 3 to 6 weeks. Each student now takes from broader knowledge gained in the courses above to engage in a deeper, individualized self-reflexive project in one site seeking to deepen their understanding of their particular context and how this context relates to larger social problems and global challenges, and consider the complexities of their own position in relation to the project.

Finally, the experience will also provide the opportunity to explore, examine and create new possibilities for direct, concrete collaborative justice work in their home context. This learning process will result in the production of either a self-reflexive autoethnography, a photo graphic essay, a video documentary, work on a project or project proposal with a community, a workshop, web site or a public event developed in conjunction with a community or NGO. Course 5: Global justice mobilizations ‘at home’ (1-3 credits) This course supports participants in the translation and mobilization of knowledge in their return home. It involves engagement with a local initiative where the learning, knowledge, and dispositions acquired in the program are put to use and where participants are connected with a network of program alumni. Students will critically analyze, propose and produce a concrete high impact practice, which responds to a specific life challenges in their home context. Participants will develop an appreciation for the complexities of translating and mobilizing insights from one context to another in ways that honor the gifts and specificities of each context, and account for the implications and responsibilities of one’s position as a ‘go-between.’

RESPONSIBLE FACULTY: Vanessa Oliveira Andreotti, PhD Professor, Dean; of the Faculty of Education: Curriculum and Instruction University of Victoria, ( https://www.uvic.ca/education/curriculum/faculty-staff/faculty/about/ experts/profiles/andreotti-vanessa.php ) My research examines historical and systemic patterns of reproduction of inequalities and how these limit or enable possibilities for collective existence and global change. My publications in this field include analyses of political economies of knowledge production, discussions of the ethics of international development, and critical comparisons of ideals of globalism and internationalization in education and in global activism, with an emphasis on representations of and relationships with marginalized communities. My work in teacher education conceptualizes education as an expansion of frames of reference and of fields of signification with a view to expanding possibilities for ethical solidarities. My academic work is committed to protecting the public role of the university as critic and conscience of society and as a space of independent, multi-voiced, critically informed and socially accountable debates about alternative futures.

Bill Calhoun, JD Director, UNISERES Bill has a Master's degree in Latin American Studies and a JD from the University of WisconsinMadison. His interest and work in Latin America arise from his student days at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he worked as a research assistant in the Center for Latin American under the guidance of the renown scholar in international law, Dr. Donald Shea. Bill also worked as an instructor with the Conference of Latin American Bishops Pastoral Team for Base Communities under the direction of Father José Marins in thirteen Latin American countries. It was through this experience that Bill initially came to visit Brazil in 1974 and 1975 during the military dictatorship in this country. His undergraduate studies at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee included studies at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro in 1976.

While studying law, Bill also undertook studies at the University of Havana in Cuba. During his master's degree and law degree studies, he returned to Brazil where he was involved with human rights groups and civil and political movements of the African-Brazilian population. In addition, Bill was a Fulbright scholar in Bahia, specializing in conflict resolution in the religious communities of West African origin. After completing his law degree, he worked as an instructor at the Law School of the University of Wisconsin. In 1991 he joined the faculty of SIT (School

for International Training) and moved to Brazil as Academic Director of Brazil: Social Innovation and Community Development study abroad program which since its inception has received hundreds of students from various parts of the world interested in social justice and global citizenship training. Since that time, Bill has served as director of SIT programs in Kenya, director of Ecology program in Belem, Para, Brazil, and was the first coordinator of the SIT program in Havana, Cuba. Bill was also, co-director of the SIT Social Justice program in Salvador, Bahia. From 2012 to 2018, Bill was Director General of World Learning and SIT programs in Brazil.

Since 2009, Bill has led the effort, together with representatives of the Brazilian State Government, NGOs, and social movements in Brazil, to foster education programs focused on global justice, racial and gender equity issues for Brazilian students.

Special Interest Besides working as program director, Bill is also involved with the support of numerous community-based associations and social movements such as the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers), and human rights groups in Fortaleza, Brazil. Bill is also a priest of Yoruba traditional religion with initiations in Cuba, Brazil, and Nigeria and is the father of two children, Luiza and David.