Driving education for peace, human rights and sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific

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In the spirit of reconciliation I would like to acknowledge the custodians of the Darumbal peoples where we're both sitting and to pay our respects to those Elders past present and emerging and a small kiwi uh [Kiwi Welcome] which is a kind of a let's all bring our spirits together and and it kind of matches our topic Karena because we're going to be talking about uh yourself and your world of how you've got into policymaking but I'm getting ahead of myself so just tell me who are you okay so Karena Menzie-Ballentyne extended surname because of um getting married over the last few years um but yes I'm based on the Bundaberg campus and I've been here at CQU for about 10 years now working in education particularly in teacher education and and you've told me your last 10 years so how did you what's this kind of life story how did you end up there what have you been doing oh goodness um well the only constant is change that's a bit of a motto in our family um I must admit my undergraduate degree was in um Political Science and History so my first foray into a career was actually in public relations and government relations and um I worked in that area for oh a number of years you know good decade or more um and uh then uh I married during that period and um to give you the total story life took a bit of unexpected turning and uh found myself in a situation of coercive control and domestic violence which took the career off track for a number of years but the result of that was two gorgeous boys so um I then um stayed in that career moving up to Queensland but it was not working for me as a single parent and I was looking and looking what is the thing that really I have a passion about that I'm interested in and at that time um there was a course running for a Bachelor of Education (Middle Years) and I thought that was something very different that I could actually focus on adolescence which is a fascinating area for me so that's how I came into education and so I was working in middle years of schooling particularly in the humanities and social sciences so so what do you think um it's obviously a passion project working with the Next Generation how do you think this this space has changed over the years becoming a teacher I mean it gets quite a bad rap you know oh absolutely it does would you agree with that um it gets a terrible rap and I mean to the degree that I send practicum teachers out there to have their mentors say why are you doing this why are you coming into this field and I think part of that and this is where my adolescence focus comes into play is that we start looking at things from a deficit model from what these kids don't have what they don't do what they don't achieve instead of turning it around going with they're a different generation they have enormous potential they have really interesting perspectives and if we can take it from that more positive model um I find that I I can engage with students that sometimes people see as problematic so it sounds to me when when you're talking you sound very much like uh a teacher and your time in the classroom that you would be learning as much from them as they're learning from you is that a fair assessment all the time do you have some good examples of what you've learned from kids the years oh my goodness I mean you know I mean obviously technology is the one that jumps into your mind mostly but I think one of the things that I've really learned is from this generation is openness I think they are far more open than we ever were and ways of including have changed so you know we were talking just prior to filming this about social media and the way that they use that to include people in conversations um so I think they're the things that never get reported very interesting very interesting do do you think um you've worked in that middle years age which is that kind of they're they're not quite children and they're not quite adults um there's a phrase that I remember in when I used to live in Norway called Ves la voen which means little grown-ups yeah um do do you feel sometimes that we we tend to treat that middle years as if they are in this kind of in between phase or are they little grown-ups give some advice absolutely and I think um if I can veer into my area of expertise in terms of citizenship um one of our researchers calls citizens in waiting we treat them as citizens in waiting instead of acknowledging the fact that they're citizens now they're people with their own perspectives their cultural backgrounds all of the things they bring into the classroom which is so rich and but adolescence yes they're not fully grown the frontal cortex isn't fully developed they will make irrational decisions on occasion but if we go back to things like the UN Charter on the Rights of a Child it says that they should have a say in things that matter to them in an age appropriate way and I think that's what we forget to do with adolescence we forget to listen because they're not citizens in waiting they have things to say it's not always going to be informed but it's important important the the other thing that people often talk about now with adolescence is that they and that technology space that they're not getting exposed to let's call it rich culture long words reading books do you do you share that concern um I mean as a bibliofile the old physical book is is not to be denied but I think we have to face the fact that the world is changing I was having a conversation just the other day with somebody who was saying my children are already using an iPad they will never be able to write you know and and we used to when I first arrived at CQU our Dean at the time Helen Huntley was still judging the handwriting competition and that's within a decade it's like do we need a handwriting competition now so I think there's a balance between you know again applying a deficit model saying that they're not doing these things and looking at the world they're going to graduate into and say well do they actually need to be doing some of these things anymore in terms of the richness they have exposure to things I never did you know my generation didn't have exposure to the I mean that and we acknowledge both the good and bad of it but the information sources that they can access is enormous so you wouldn't share the the concerns um or I'm suppose I'm asking the expert here about do you feel they're not getting the right literacy training I mean there's we have this thing called The Literacy Wars about how to teach literacy I mean I know that's often about the younger kids but do do you feel that there is a danger that people aren't becoming as literate as we would like them to be well I think there's a definitional thing around literacy there I mean absolutely the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy you cannot engage with the world without it but I think the literacy wars comes back to the pedagogies of literacy and one of my absolute bug bears is the either or mentality and we find this quite often with things like global citizenship global competence that the school says oh but my school's low literacy school so we have to concentrate on that as if that's the only thing that's going to get the children forward in the world and I often feel we're replicating cycles of poverty cycles of in-education because we say those lows schools those low performing schools we have to concentrate on literacy and numeracy and we don't have time to do these other critical thinking global competence type things and I think we're doing those children a disservice you know I'm I'm looking forward to our next conversation where we're going to dig more deeply into this whole idea about what is global citizenship thank you

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in the spirit of reconciliation I would like to acknowledge the true custodians of the lands upon which we are the Darumbal and pay our respects to the past present and emerging
[Kiwi welcome]
that's a uh a key welcome in the Kiwi language and it just means let's bring our spirits to this conversation I'm really looking forward to talking to you and um letting the the viewer into this world about I call it citizenship or you know Global competence and it's nothing new really but we spend a lot of time teaching the let's call it the content for kids and the next generation but you are an expert in this world so what exactly is global citizenship competence what is it?  It's a huge question and I certainly would say I'm a learner in this world not an expert um but I think I often use a slide in my presentation 'a rose by any other name' because sometimes we talk about 21st century skills global citizenship global competence intercultural understanding education for sustainable development that is the field that I play in and I think it's really important that we don't get into definitional wars because I think that sometime gets in our way when what we're all trying to achieve is good humans and planetary flourishing so we might have different nuances different directions as to how we get there but the big picture is what's important so I I guess one of the best ways to explain it is that UNESCO in uh November last year released their recommendation 2023 yes correct so their recommendation which is the shortened version they calling human rights peace and sustainability but the long name for it is includes global citizenship intercultural understanding competence collaboration and I think it was UN's way of saying this is the big picture of what we're trying to achieve with education and as you say that's not content because yes we use the content and it's vitally important that we use the content but we need to develop students conceptual understanding we need to develop their skills we need to develop the values and attitudes that will enable them to engage with their community whether that's the local Bundaberg community where I come from or whether it's the global community so so I'm always going to have to retract my original question about not content because obviously it's a conversation about some kind of content yes and um let me take a step back a moment and ask you Karena so um is this a kind of a a debate for policy makers and are we trying to get the kids to understand global policy or is this something that happens in schools um it's something that does or should be happening in every type of education I think the important thing is and probably one of the reasons that I've ended up playing in the policy space is too often we put pressure on schools that schools have to achieve all of this and by the time they graduate from year 12 they're supposed to be these global citizens um these days we use that term education to be talking about the university space the VET space the informal education spaces the NGOs and not-for-profits that work in education because like the sustainable development goals this is a global thing this is something we've got to achieve together for all peoples of all ages this is not something we can put on the primary teachers and say get it done by year six so so is UNESCO with their plans are they saying we've got to do a certain thing or talk about a certain thing in a certain way uh no um none of this work is and it shouldn't be dogmatic because we know depending on the cultural context that we're working with depending on the religious context that we're working with global citizenship education we'll just use that term for the moment looks very different in every context but I think what is universal is the outcomes that we're looking for the knowledge skills values and attitudes that can allow people to engage gain employment in contribute to their communities no matter where they are and who they're working with so so is this going back to this um and and and and I I like this idea of it's It's almost like what's the flavor of the month or everything so is this about that old-fashioned ideal about learning to talk to everybody about important matters that are local call it statewide or global is it is it a form of talking uh I think it's beyond talking because it's got to be internalised one of the things that we do find is we can teach you the skills but if you don't have for example the motivations to engage in sustainable practices you can have all the skills in the world but you won't do it so we talk a lot about engaging the heart as well as the head and it's not a new expression um I mean if we go back to uh the treasures within UNESCO's original learning document back in 1996 it was talking about learning to know learning to do learning to be and uh the new newest one was learning to transform ourselves and our society so that's back in 1996 then policy documents have evolved and of course we have SDG4 and in particular Target 4.7 that talks about global citizenship education for sustainable development and now we have these new recommendations the recommendations are described as guiding principles even though all 194 countries signed up to it and adopted them they can't tell the country to do this and they should never tell a nation state how to educate their children they're just giving them some guiding principles as to the skills the knowledge those children might need to engage effectively so so it would be going back to that idea about let's call it global competence yes and um I'm thinking how would that look in let's say Australia compared to Japan is this is this part of what this work you're doing is bringing together these different actors and letting them all talk about how they would do it differently in a way absolutely that's in fact the actual project that we're working on in the moment that one of our consulting partners is is from a university in Japan and the perspective that comes into their classrooms is going to be it's these universal values but the way in which the pedagogical approaches that are used are going to be very different we work with um students in Indonesia for example where we know that the Islamic faith is shaping a lot of the work that they're doing but the values align so it's going to be very different in every context and the thing that's really important at the moment is we have pockets of excellence in schools in universities in certain countries what I guess we're trying to achieve with the latest recommendations is to make that systemic because unless you flag it at policy level and that's what we're doing we're trying to develop a road map to help guide countries to make it systemic so that brings me to that next thing one one of the things you do you're also a researcher yes in in global call it competence tell me what kind of things do you research um most of my work I really love to do evidence-based practically oriented evidence-based work so an example of that would be the work that we did with the Department of Education in Queensland where we worked with 22 schools to develop a framework of global competence as what does a whole school approach to educating for global competence look like at the beginning the developing embedding and leading stages and we divided that across things like uh um you know co-design teaching and learning whole school approaches um partnerships with schools and communities because all of those things have to come together for this to really work interesting interesting and did you find out anything you didn't expect to find out this is a question we always ask researchers they have these great plans and they're going to find out this and that is there anything that you felt mmm I didn't expect that I think it's not so much what was unexpected as we keep pushing it to the next level to give an example of that in developing this framework for example we talked a lot about safe spaces spaces where teachers students parents felt safe to bring their perspectives and discuss them we then took it to the next level or the next concept of brave spaces where where it was okay to challenge in respectful ways it's okay to challenge those perspectives if somebody feels uncomfortable with them or feels that they are not as inclusive as they could be so I think it's for me the exciting part of the research is the way that it's constantly involving as we learn new perspectives and we bring in new pedagogical approaches thank you that's very interesting thank you so much for that conversation and um it does remind me of those difficult conversations with adolescence who definitely want to push it to the next level thank you so much thank you thank you

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