Assessing Global Citizenship

A central tenet of the UNSW approach to graduate capabilities is that all UNSW programs aspire to develop globally focused graduates who are rigorous scholars, capable of leadership and professional practice in an international community. Graduates of UNSW are expected to be “global citizens who are:

• capable of applying their discipline in local, national and international contexts;
• culturally aware and capable of respecting diversity and acting in socially just/responsible ways;
• capable of acting in environmentally responsible ways”.

The United Nations (n.d.) defines global citizenship as:

the umbrella term for social, political, environmental, and economic actions of globally minded individuals and communities on a worldwide scale. The term can refer to the belief that individuals are members of multiple, diverse, local and non-local networks rather than single actors affecting isolated societies. Promoting global citizenship in sustainable development will allow individuals to embrace their social responsibility to act for the benefit of all societies, not just their own.

Even if not explicitly defined as a learning outcome within a course, the development of global perspectives and a commitment to global citizenship are often unintended learning outcomes, particularly where group- and team-based learning, group discussion and oral communication skill development enable students to reflect on their own and others' cultures in the context of global diversity.  Providing an inclusive learning environment  is an essential pre-requisite for enabling students to engage in developing their global citizenship skills, and for demonstrating their growing capabilities through the design of assessment as learning.

Benefits

Incorporating the concepts that constitute global citizenship into learning and assessment activities can promote critical thinking about diversity, and the questioning of "eurocentric" or other dominant ideological viewpoints. Through focusing on social justice and community action, students can give greater shape and voice to applying their disciplinary knowledge with a global perspective and, with this, a stronger sense of agency and purpose to their studies.  Assessing the graduate capability of global citizenship enables the characteristics of a "global citizen" to be made more explicit and meaningful for students in the context of the disciplinary and professional learning outcomes of courses and programs.

The potential for encouraging more holistic and integrated thinking across domains of learning can be exploited in assessment designs that incorporate opportunities for students to examine their changing sense of ‘belongingness’, and the permeability of traditional borders (disciplinary, cultural, professional, political, and so on).

Challenges

A shift in assessment design shifts from an emphasis on disciplinary content knowledge towards a focus on the development of broader graduate capabilities can be challenging for both students and teachers.  In the context of a standards-based approach to assessment, the defining of standards related to global citizenship at different course levels, and at different levels of student performance within courses and particular assessment tasks, may be an unfamiliar exercise for many staff.  Criteria and standards should be established that reduce as much as possible the impact of subjectivity in interpreting and grading students’ work. For example, as a step toward development more-structured and more-objective frameworks for looking at global citizenship education, Thomas and Banki (2021) propose a 2x2 matrix where one axis runs from utilitarian understanding and actions to justice-driven, and the other from a local to a global perspective.

Fortune et al. (2022) point out other challenges: a fundamental lack of consensus on what global-citizenship education actually consists of and what its goals are; and the impossibility of actually reaching an understanding both broad and sophisticated enough to impart true global citizenship; they write, instead, of "an uneasy alliance with an imperfect ideal of global citizenship" (p. 1100).

Strategies

The following represent ways the design and conduct of assessment can highlight students’ development of the graduate capability of global citizenship.

Case study

MGMT 2106: Developing cultural literacy and positioning discipline knowledge in intercultural and international contexts

Ricardo Flores, ASB r.flores@unsw.edu.au

MGMT 2106--Comparative Management Systems is an introductory course surveying management systems across the world. The course builds upon a generic framework helping students to think about different relevant aspects of contexts (e.g., national level institutions) that affect how management is practised globally. In particular, it explores key differences among the practices of management in North America, Oceania, West Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa & some Muslim nations.

In addition to focusing on this discipline-specific knowledge, this course seeks to develop cosmopolitan perspectives and cross-cultural competences by focusing on the students' experiences. The opportunity for experiencing the foreign is created and reinforced weekly by a sole focus on tasks intensely linked to the work of each student in a (purposely created) culturally diverse group. Following precepts of action learning, students encounter:

1. First-hand experience with their own team (i.e., teams are required to reflect on their experiences) and a set of activities linked to those reflections with the objective of creating personal understandings on how to become a better cross-cultural teammate and/or leader;
2. Others’ experiences after observing and evaluating the performance of others (i.e., audience learns from seeing how others perform, including open discussion with the audience of the team leading the tutorial on what they have learned and what challenges they faced in working on the assigned task); and
3. Audience’s evaluations (via clickers) and personalised feedback on individual and team performance (that is, they experience the diversity of opinions and expectations from a culturally diverse audience).

Assessment example: Country Report

In most weekly tutorial classes (i.e., specifically tutorials classes from week 4 to week 10) an assigned team of students (please check the country assigned to your team) will present their application of the generic framework discussed in lectures to a specific country. A debate open to the whole audience will follow this team’s presentation. In preparing for this debate, those students who are not presenting are expected to prepare their own analysis of this country and compare their assessment with their home country (i.e., country chosen in the background form). You are required to submit ONE of these individual analyses in the form of a formal business report. This report must be submitted through Blackboard/Turnitin (due the week of your choice up to date TBN). Students are required to submit only one report (i.e., one country) for the whole semester. The length of the report CANNOT exceed two pages (font size 12). All other aspects of formatting the report should follow the format guidelines. In writing this report, I would recommend that, at minimum, you address the following issues:

1. What are the common and divergent aspects of the institutional environments of the two contexts (i.e., country under study vs. your country)? What are the unique and common functional aspects of the practice of management in the two contexts (i.e., country under study vs. your country)?
2. What would all of these mean for you as a manager if suddenly you had to move to the country under study to work? (At a minimum, you need to compare your management style and preferences with the specific knowledge you just uncovered about this foreign context; what kind of things would you do differently to what you would do in your country?