In recent years, policies and initiatives that aim to build global awareness and citizenship have proliferated in the educational sector in the European context, calling educators to address issues related to social justice, interdependence, diversity, human rights, peace, and international and sustainable development in their teaching programmes. However, very often, approaches to this kind of education address the agenda for social and global justice and international development in a manner that leaves assumptions unexamined and ignores how these agendas are re-interpreted in other contexts. (Andreotti and Souza 2008). If such approaches do not take account of the complex and contingent nature of the issues and perspectives in global/local process, they may result in the uncritical  reinforcement of notions of the supremacy and universality of ‘our’ (‘Western’) ways of seeing and knowing, which can undervalue other knowledge systems and reinforce unequal relations of dialogue and power (see Zemach-Bersin,2007;Cook, 2008; Pashby, 2009).

Postcolonial and postructuralist frameworks in social sciences and cultural studies challenge (neo)colonial/Enlightment legacies that create inequalities in the worth attributed to different knowledges, cultures and subjectivities, as well as the effects of these inequalities in the distribution of wealth and labour in the world today (Gandhi, 1999). Although these frameworks have been widely used to critique educational policies and practices in the European context and beyond, their explicit application in pedagogical processes is still rare and undertheorised. (Andreotti, 2006; 2007). This paper offers an outline of a project that sought to put these theories to work in teacher education for social justice and presents a preliminary analysis of a sample of participant learning journals from various European and non-European countries. The preliminary analysis focused on the question: What threads can be identified in participants’ responses to course strategies that aimed to challenge epistemic privilege and objective knowledge?

The focus of this paper is the project ‘Learning to read the world through other eyes’ (TOE:www.throughothereyes.org.uk) funded by the Department for International Development (DFID). TOE is an online free teacher education programme highlighting indigenous understandings of the international development agenda. TOE was developed with the to equip learners to develop self-reflexivity by learning about how language and systems of belief, values and representation affect the way people interpret the world (including their own interpretations) and learning to ‘read’ the logic embedded in different interpretations.Drawing on poststructuralist strands of postcolonial theory (especially the works of Bhabha, 1994 and Spivak 1993;1999;2004), TOE’s pedagogical design is based on 4 dimensions: 1. learning to unlearn; 2. learning to listen; 3. learning to learn and 4.learning to reach out (or engage with the other).

The first part of this paper presents an outline of theoretical and methodological frameworks used in the project. The second part presents a brief summary of an analysis of a sample of participant responses from the project’s online database that was conducted as a pilot for an international research collaboration project that will start in 2011.

Andreotti, V. (2006). Soft versus critical global citizenship education. Development Education: Policy and Practice, 3 (Autumn): 83-98. Andreotti, V. (2007). An ethical engagement with the Other: Gayatri Spivak on education. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 1(1): 69-79. Andreotti, V., Souza, L. (2008). Translating theory into practice and walking minefileds: lessons from the project ‘Through Other Eyes’. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 1(1):23-36. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Gandhi, L. (1998). Postcolonial Theory: a Critical Introduction. New York : Columbia University Press. Spivak, G. (1990). The post-colonial critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues. New York & London: Routledge. Spivak, G. (1993). Outside in the teaching machine. London: Routledge. Spivak, G. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: toward a critique of the vanishing present. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, G. (2004). Righting wrongs. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3): 523-581.