Navigating complexity, culture, collaboration, and emotion: student perspectives on global justice and global justice education

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen increasing scholarly attention to the ways in which colleges and universities might contribute to educating ‘global citizens’ who work toward addressing injustice and inequity. The present study examines the experiences and perspectives of students participating in an upper level ‘global justice inquiry’ course designed to help meet this goal. Drawing from interviews with students and reflections submitted as part of their course assessment, we explore participants’ developing understanding of global justice and their experiences of learning about this topic. This investigation reveals key issues that students highlight and with which they sometimes struggle, including the complexity of global challenges, the importance of collaboration in attempting to address such challenges, the significance of navigating cultural considerations, and the potential influence of emotion on understanding and action. Implications of these findings, including the potential value of considering these issues as threshold concepts in global justice education, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Global justice
• global citizenship
• inquiry-based learning
• student experience
• threshold concepts

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Dr. Jean Wilson and Dr. Gary Warner for their support of this research and their vision in developing and supporting the course described in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Elizabeth Marquis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7362-678X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the McMaster University Student Partners Program.