The EIESL Project

Baraza, our first student event, was a great success. Thank you to all the students and faculty who came out and participated. Below is a summary of the event.

Event Summary

Event started 5:10 in the International House Upper Lounge.

Introduction: the goal of Baraza is to go over the operationalization of the TLEF grant. What does that look like? How do we involve the larger student body?

YouTube clip: “A vision of students today” → How can this be relevant to what we seek to do? How does it relate to our project?

• There is a disconnect between the students and the university system. Similar to the disconnect between people in developed countries and developing countries.

What struck you about what education means?

• Learning is never going back to seeing the world in the same way and never being in the world the same way.
• So much learning occurs outside of the confines of the classroom. Learning needs to be more than passively receiving information from a lecture.
• Role of technology: how can it be used to connect with the campus and engage students?
• Responsibilities of the student to be engaged & respect the education environment

“Poverty porn” and its effects illustrate the importance of ethics.

• Images of suffering and messages about ‘saving the world’ are pervasive in the media. Extreme situations are used to elicit emotional reactions from the public and garner support for causes.
• The Face of Poverty example: A student came back from Africa after working in a clinic and brought back pictures of visibly suffering patients, many of whom died. The student used the images in an emotionally moving presentation. It was a great learning experience surrounding the disparities in health and wealth over the world, and had profoundly affected the student. However, the student did not have ethics approval or permission to take these pictures or present them. Imagine being very sick and someone coming in to take a picture of you, or asking your permission when you are in a very vulnerable state. How do we begin to think about this?
• These normative images also create a welfarist approach to development and service. These images perpetuate the aid or charity attitude of service learning. We are all here to learn from and with each other and to explore our own ways of critical thinking.
• Our moral imperative should be respect for human dignity (slide content)
• The key part of a moral objection is that the use of another human being as a means to an end or even a legitimate end is unacceptable.
• What about using the photo for a good cause, a good campaign? Would it be more ethical to use the photo if we paid the subject? Even if that campaign raised funds and was good, would the individual in the picture benefit?
• Our efforts are not only for us to look at the world and see it differently, but to be in it differently.
• We need creative ways to engage people. We need to demystify the notion of ethics → it’s not about seeking permission. Obtaining permission from an ethics board should not be the last time ethics are considered, because ethics is a sense of responsibility.

The point: We need to create teams that will explore different areas of our project.
Reactions to the current division of planning teams included:

• Best Practices team: if we are to take an appreciative approach to each of the teams, we won’t need a best practices team. We should integrate the ethics and best practices element into each of the teams. Appreciative inquiry can inform how each of these groups work.
• Developing best practices for the ethics of ISL should not be framed in terms of what outcomes are “the best”, but rather in terms of approaches to, and processes within ISL.
• What are the advantages/disadvantages of a problem-based approach as opposed to an appreciative inquiry approach? The Ritz-Carlton model of problem solving was used as an example.
• We need to integrate our community partners in to all of the committees, and/or have a community partner committee developed. We need to look at what we mean by “we” in our statements. The “we” should include the community partners in this project.
• A great majority of the students are not going to have access to international service learning and going overseas. “Engagement” is a very important concept because student groups on campus who are engaged in fundraising and discussing international issues must have an ethics base to act on as well as those who are going internationally. This is why the project changed names from the Ethics of ISL to the Ethics of International Engagement and Service-Learning (EIESL).
• Where are some of the gaps for our student groups and our students going overseas?
• How do we cope with the demand on students to do ISL in order to achieve their dreams and weigh it against the ethical approaches to service learning?
• How do we engage our faculty and administrators on this problem? How do we change our system to accommodate the demands on students and future researchers?
• Pizza and the Peter Brock video: “They Come in the Name of Helping”.
• Reflection and networking.

Event closed at 6:35pm.