Singleton and Linton (2006) learned through facilitating conversations about race, that participants benefitted from basic guidelines for their engagement. The EIESL project has adapted Singleton and Linton’s community norms to support dialogue around international engagement and service-learning. Following these authors, EIESL maintains that there are four purposes to establishing community norms with a group:
- Engage, sustain and deepen conversation.
- Ensure safety even when participants may experience discomfort or disagreement.
- Support meaningful cross-cultural conversation.
- Act with deliberate and thoughtful intention
EIESL dialogues and workshops establish the following community norms:
Speak Your Truth
First and foremost, speaking your truth acknowledges that we are all teachers and learners. Each of us has a unique background and set of experiences that has shaped our perspectives on how we see and understand the world. The community norm of Speak Your Truth is an invitation to tell your story. This means that we speak from our own personal experience. We offer to others what is ours to share. We avoid broad generalizations or claims that everyone from a particular culture shares a particular perspective. This acknowledges that personal and cultural identities are multiple, complex and ever-changing. Speak your truth also means that we ought to share only what we feel comfortable sharing. It is important to know your own personal boundaries. Furthermore, there is no expectation that you must speak. Speaking is an invitation and not a requirement. If you choose to speak, the EIESL community will listen.
Ethics is Messy
EIESL assumes a reflective, rather than a directive approach to ethics. Asserting that ethics is messy means that there is no single blueprint for what is right, good, just or moral. As a community we embrace the complexities of lived experience. EIESL devises workshops in which participants can discuss and gain a more critical understanding of ethical issues by gathering multiple perspectives. This requires that participants are willing to consider approaches and perspectives that may not be their own. Rather than rejecting or contesting a different belief system, EIESL suggests that difference offers an opportunity to critically reflect on one’s own views. This community norm is an invitation to reflect on our own assumptions, convictions and actions, and not take them for granted.
Act for the Best
Normative principles are guideposts, yet in the end, there are no “best practices” that can tell us definitively how to act. In every decision we are weighing out circumstances, considering who is involved, what the costs and benefits might be, and we mobilize what we believe to be right into the decisions and actions that we take in any given moment. Hoggett, Mayo, and Miller (2009) remind us that because the work of global citizens often happens in the contested space between the state and civil society, and because of conflicting values in civil society, there is no certain, risk-free or unambiguous terrain on which one’s principles can be put to work. Sooner or later we must act, and these actions take place in a world that is inherently fraught with ethical dilemmas. “In a dilemmatic world, in such ambiguous settings it may be tempting to retreat into a world of certainty, one where principles become a rigid dogma” (Hoggett, Mayo & Miller, 2009, 30). Without a single blueprint for action, the best we can do is to proceed thoughtfully and carefully. “In such situations moral philosophers such as Williams (1973, 1981) suggest that all we can do is ‘act for the best’.” Dr. James Orbinski, former president of Médecins Sans Frontières, says that we can aim only to be ‘decent’, and to create ‘the space to be human’ (Orbinski, 2008).
Expect and Accept Lack of Closure
EIESL promotes continuous and evolving personal self-reflection. We encourage participants to pause from looking out into the world at the social problems we hope to mitigate through our international service and engagement, and turn our gaze inward. We prompt participants to consider such questions as: Who am I in relation to those that I serve? What do my multiple identities (for example: race, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, for example) have to do with this relationship? Am I engaging in a community that is my own, or is not my own? How does this impact my international work? These are ongoing and deeply personal questions without concrete answers. Expecting and accepting lack of closure is about embracing the limited answers to the complex issues in international service, and supporting our community members through their journey in pursuing human rights, social and environmental justice and a just and equitable global society.
References:
Hoggett, P., Mayo, M. & Miller, C. (2009). The dilemmas of development work: Ethical challenges in regeneration. Bristol: Policy Press.
Orbinski, James. Public Address. “The Space to be Human”. Terry Talk Series. November 7th, 2008. Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. University of British Columbia.
Singleton, G.E. & Linton, C. (2006). Courageous conversations about race: A field guide for achieving equity in schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Williams, B. (1973) Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. (1981) Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.