Featured Roundtable: Educating for a change. How can internationalised education contribute toward a more just world?

Abstract

This roundtable aims to uncover the political dimension of learning. It will invite the participants to discuss power relations within society and to offer approaches, tools and skills to learning and teaching for social change. It will provide a floor for reflections on how to integrate learning and engagement as opposed to when one learns only for the sake of knowledge. The roundtable will pay particular attention to the issues of student diversity, internationalisation and peer learning as important vehicles of education for change. It aims to answer several central questions, including: – How to promote social, cultural and ethical discourse as part of teachers’ educational approach? – What are the best ways to equip students with the necessary knowledge, skills and confidence to begin their adult life as active citizens involved in society? – How to create spaces that enable students to deal with issues of identity and belonging? – How to design peer learning in a way that makes the best use of student diversity and student potential? – What are the possible ways to include elements of internationalisation into a course and even into a single class session? – How can teachers educating for a change use assessment to engage and empower learners? The roundtable will gather a group of social science teachers from various universities across Europe who teach courses with the ambition to inspire and educate students for social change. We will provide examples of innovative learning methods employed in undergraduate and graduate courses on social change and topics that are more generic. This will be a highly interactive roundtable and all participants will be encouraged to contribute. Our discussion is an outcome of a collaboration between five institutions partnering on the Erasmus+ project “IMPACT” where the ECPR is the lead partner responsible for dissemination. The roundtable is expected to result in a publication in the European Political Science journal or elsewhere.