Reconstruction 9.1 (2009)
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Searching for Conscientização: Mentoring Fieldwork in International Service-learning / Lauren Ila Jones and Jonathan Arries
Abstract: The article discusses the methodology of the College of William and Mary's Modern Language and Literature's Summer Institute in Nicaragua, a service-learning course designed for current and prospective teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language. The leaders of the course were a doctoral student in Social Sciences and Comparative Education and an associate professor in Hispanic Studies with a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction. The multidisciplinary training of the course leaders and Paulo Freire's concept of conscientização informed both the academic content of the three-week course and their process approach to mentoring students' independence as they conducted their fieldwork in Nicaraguan schools. The authors analyze the trajectory of the students' thinking about their field experience and participatory action research as revealed in reflection essays, academic papers, and through post-experience interviews. Implications for the expanding interest in international service-learning in higher education are clear; brief reflection exercises that are common in service-learning are an insufficient method of ensuring deep learning. We conclude that only with careful mentoring can students in international service-learning courses acquire the necessary knowledge base to theorize about problem-solving with subaltern communities, hone their intercultural communication skills, and develop the confidence to engage in collaborative and ongoing action research projects abroad.
Freirean pedagogy reinvented for the challenges of teacher mentoring
The reality of the non-poor is so complex, so difficult to be understood, so hard for us to perceive in the ways to touch reality…the so-called middle class does not have control of the means of production of society and is obviously not the dominant class. And for this reason they can go back and forth between the dominant class and the oppressed. And because they have this freedom to make little journeys back and forth, like tourists, then they feel themselves free. And truly they are not. We have to invent ways to challenge the participants. [1]
Introduction
<1> In her most recent work on critical pedagogy, Lilia Bartolomé points to the teacher education curriculum as a site where prospective teachers [2] should learn to use the tools of critical pedagogy so that they can recognize ideological postures and biases--including their own--and act to counter injustice and inequality in schools (281). She refers to the exemplary critical teachers that inform her study as "cultural border crossers" (274) and laments the pre-service curriculum that leaves teachers-in-training "to their own devices when making sense of cross-cultural and cross-socioeconomic class experiences" (281). Our experience of teaching an international service-learning (henceforth ISL) course for U.S. teachers in Nicaragua in the summer of 2007 confirms Bartolomé's insightful critique. Teachers and prospective teachers, particularly those who work with immigrant children, simply must have access to carefully mentored field experiences that go beyond traditional study abroad programs that Chisolm cites as "academic tourism." We believe that ISL is one method that can help educators to gain a personal and potentially transformative experience with oppression, albeit a brief one, and this possibility of transformation constitutes a valid response to Freire's exhortation to challenge the non-poor to engage in their own liberation. Freire saw liberation as a praxis, "the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it" (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 79). The essence of liberatory education "lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students" (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 72); it is in this spirit that we created the course that served as a sort of laboratory where we have gained insights into our students' process of critical consciousnes [3].
<2> In order to contextualize our conclusions about learning and mentoring in this essay, we first define service-learning, describe our course and the participants, and also discuss the model for mentoring pre-service teachers that we have adapted for our course in Nicaragua. We then analyze three sources of data about student learning in this ISL course and discuss what we as mentors have learned about their process of conscientização (critical consciousness) [4] both during their fieldwork and after. We hope that our conclusion will be useful to teacher educators like us who seek to "re-invent" Freirean pedagogy so their First World students can work collaboratively and in solidarity to construct democratic communities in the United States and in the Third World.
Definition of service-learning and the origins of our course
<3> Barbara Jacoby defines service-learning as “a form of experiential education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote student learning and development. Reflection and reciprocity are key concepts of service-learning” (5). Service-learning can be thought of as a method of instruction that differs in three ways from other types of experiential education such as traditional study abroad, volunteerism, or internships. First, by way of contrast to foreign study programs, in a service-learning course there is an instructor who assists students in the critical analysis of the experience as a learning tool, as if the learning experience itself were a text. Second, the students’ experience informs and may expand the content of the course; in other words there is a synthesis of academic content and the application of that content in the context of a community that invites interdisciplinarity. Third, in service-learning courses the service is a response to a specific request for assistance made by a community representative, group or agency. This is very different than an internship in which the primary goal is to credential a student for a career; when a community initiates the interaction in service-learning it establishes a foundation for university-community research collaboration (e.g., see Nyden 218).<4> Our course, "Summer Institute for Foreign Language and English Language Teachers: Service-Learning in Nicaragua," was designed as a response to a request made in 2004 on behalf of Nicaraguan teachers by a former student of one of the authors of this article. She had been living in Nicaragua for many years and in her position with the American Nicaragua Foundation had worked extensively with teachers in under-resourced schools who expressed a desire for collaboration with US teachers. The course evolved as an advanced elective for university students who seeking an academic minor in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) or Second Language (TESL) and was first offered in 2006 with the alumna's assistance in arranging school placements and housing in poor neighborhoods in the city of Masaya and the capital of Managua. From the outset there were two implications of this project. One, direct service in schools serving impoverished communities in Nicaragua meant that the students needed to speak Spanish as well as know how to structure a lesson to teach English language. A second implication was that a strictly rationalist approach to TEFL--simply learning the tricks of the lesson planning--would be ludicrous given the poverty that characterized the school communities. As a result we opted for a theoretical orientation to teaching known as critical pedagogy with pre-course films and readings from multiple disciplines and with service-learning as a method of teaching and learning .
Liberatory Education and Critical Pedagogy
<5> The Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire first became known through his writings based on his work in adult literacy campaigns in the 1960s; his work was based on dialogue and themes generated from the lives of the students. In his lifetime, he wrote over 30 books; many of them, such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), have been translated into multiple languages. He was forced into exile in 1964 and worked with educators on over four continents. After his return to Brazil in 1980, he served in many roles, including in the late 80s as the Minister of Education of São Paulo. His philosophy continues to inspire popular and progressive education worldwide and is propagated by Paulo Freire Institutes in over 20 countries.
<6> It is important to acknowledge at the outset that there are profound and obvious differences between the poor in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the five middle-class university students from the US who were our students in the service-learning course in Nicaragua. It is because of those differences that we selected as the central text for our students a chapter titled "Traveling for Transformation" in F. Evans, R. Evans, and W. Kennedy's volume Pedagogies for the Non-Poor rather than Paulo Freire's seminal work. Pedagogies for the Non-Poor, as the name suggests, was inspired by the work of Freire. The book is a collection of case studies about concrete experiences with dominant groups. This experiential education is designed to help people who benefit from unequal structures understand their positions of privilege so that ultimately they can transform their actions. The chapter's focus on transformation, and particularly the topic of participant learning in the Plowshares Institute's Latin American Seminar in Nicaragua (168-169), made it seem very relevant to our students' fieldwork and the ideal framework on which our First World students might construct their own liberatory learning experience [5].
The participants: Students and Mentors
Students
<7> Student A, female, early twenties, white, is a master's student in applied linguistics. She lived as a child and young adolescent in Ecuador, where she spoke Spanish regularly. Student B, female, early twenties, white, is a undergraduate majoring in Government and minoring in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL). She has taught community ESL and is active in a student-led Latino organization. She lived for four months in Costa Rica in a study-abroad experience during which she taught tin an elementary school. She has completed intermediate level courses taught in Spanish at her university. Student C, female, mid-thirties, white, is an ESL teacher who holds a Master of Arts degree in Bilingual and ESL Education. She lived in Honduras for a year-and-a-half. She regularly speaks Spanish with her students' parents. Student D, male, mid-thirties, white, is a candidate for a Masters of Arts in Applied Linguistics who previous had advanced to doctoral candidacy in Anthropology; he had conducted fieldwork in Guatemala before deciding to change fields. Student E, female, early twenties, white, is a student majoring in Hispanic Studies and also American Studies. She has more than five years of experience in teaching English to adult immigrants under the tutelage of Mentor B. She writes lesson plans for advanced learners of English who attend free classes that are sponsored by a student-run organization on her campus. She has participated in ethnographic research projects related to health in Central America and the Caribbean. She had studied in Mexico prior to taking our course and was planning to study for a semester in Argentina afterward. She is pursuing undergraduate majors in both Hispanic Studies and American Studies major and takes advanced cultural studies courses that taught in Spanish.Mentors
<8> The authors of this article were the participants' mentors. The instructor of record holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, a specialization in Foreign Language Education, and has many years of experience in training prospective teachers in that field. He has established and directed a summer study program in Mexico, co-directed a similar program in Spain, and has many years of experience in the design and implementation of domestic service-learning courses. The lead author is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Los Angeles who lived in Nicaragua for more than a year where she worked with two non-governmental organizations prior to beginning her graduate work in International Education. As an undergraduate she was a teaching assistant in charge of mentoring freshman college students in a service-learning course about immigration and English language outreach in elementary schools in Virginia.<9> The mentoring model for this course is an adaptation of Morris Cogan's and Robert Goldhammer's "clinical supervision" model for training teachers. It consists of five stages of observation that over time produces teachers who are both skilled and reflective practitioners of their craft: 1) a pre-observation meeting or conference, 2) close observation of the teaching act, 3) data analysis and strategy identification, 4) a post-observation conference, and 5) post-conference analysis by both the supervisor and the prospective teacher (Pajak 6-7). However, because the mentors either shared housing with the student participants or lived in close proximity to them, the traditional pre- and post-conference meetings of clinical supervision were virtually a daily routine rather than the formal weekly or bi-weekly conference that is typical in clinical supervision This research product itself can be considered an elaboration of the post-conference analysis stage in Coogan's and Goldhammer's clinical supervision model.
The sites
<10> The intensive nature of our mentoring of the students while they were in the field cannot be overstated. The critical stance we took toward our own role as mentors to the students as they conducted their fieldwork inside their assigned schools and in their interactions with Nicaraguans in the community was an ongoing component of our praxis. Simultaneously, we were challenged to help our students to adapt quickly to unexpected events related to the students' host families and school placements. What follows is a description of our work as mentors in those venues.<11> Each of us worked with teams of two students so that we could provide the close supervision of their fieldwork in the first half of the course that we anticipated the students would need in order to conduct a needs analysis and design a hypothetical action research plan by the end of the course. [6] According to Allison Titcomb, a needs analysis is essentially a five-step information-gathering process in which problems and possible solutions are identified by the researcher: 1) identification of audience and purpose for the analysis; 2) description of the population of interest and the local environment; 3) need identification; 4) needs assessment, including prioritizing of the identified needs; and 5) communication of information to the audience identified in step one. This aspect of the course contributes directly to two goals of the course listed on the syllabus: to prepare teachers and prospective teachers to engage deeply in service-learning through reflection and research either in the U.S. or abroad, the latter being training for what Wilfred David calls "humanitarian development." Although the Plowshares Institute requires its participants to commit to a formal plan of action upon their return to the U.S., the authors of this article have neither the means nor the desire to compel participants to engage in humanitarian development or "voluntary" service – in fact, the notion of compulsory service seems contradictory to us.
<12> For that reason we call the action plan through which we as mentors guide the participants a thorough "hypothetical action plan" that they or others are free to carry out if they wish to do so. It is important to understand also that the audience of our participants' needs analysis is not limited to the authors of this article, but is rather what Cammarota and Fine refer to as a "collective" of researchers that is typical of participatory action research (5). In other words, the participants' hypothetical action plans (and the graduate students' research projects) are archived on Blackboard and are available to former and future students whom we consider a collective or a network for collaborative projects with teachers and parents in our partner schools in Nicaragua that will grow each year we offer the course.
<13> Students A and D were assigned to the same elementary school in a working-class neighborhood of Managua and resided in the same residence as the course instructor. The school was located approximately three blocks from their school. Students B and C were assigned to a school in Masaya, a town located twenty miles from the capital. They and the teaching assistant lived near each other - with Nicaraguan families - for the first week, after which all three moved to a family-owned pension in order to facilitate collaboration during the remainder of the course. Student E arranged her own placement in a rural school in the Nueva Segovia Mountains about four hours from Managua by bus. She resided in a small town in a pension with three other students and acted as one of the interpreters for an undergraduate team that was conducting demographic research in preparation for a future medical mission. The considerable distance from the capital meant that the instructor supervised that student's fieldwork almost exclusively via email; as her arrival and departure were linked to the schedule of the demographic research project, the one supervisory visit he made to her site occurred on the last two days of her fieldwork.
<14> The participant teams worked in a public primary school in each city for one five hour shift each day, although each school served approximately 700-800 pupils in two shifts. During the latter half of each day, the participants worked with Nicaraguan teachers on various collaborative projects, taught English to Nicaraguan teachers after school hours, and/or worked on such course assignments as interviews in other parts of the cities.
The research
<15> This research is based on a series of essays written in Nicaragua by the participants--both the current and prospective EFL teachers, final papers written by the graduate students, and a lengthy interview between December 2007 and January 2008 of all five students that was conducted by a trained interviewer. All five students gave their consent and agreed to participate in this study. They were informed that their interviews would be recorded and that their professor and teaching assistant would transcribe the recordings. Two limitations exist in this research that are important to mention as we discuss our conclusions: the self-selection of students interested in this type of work and, due to their close relationships with us, the risk of students not identifying or omitting parts of their experience when interviewed.
<16> From our analysis of group sizes in past Nicaraguan courses and in domestic service-learning courses that we have taught, we conclude that eight students would be the maximum number of participants that we could take at one time to Nicaragua. Therefore, we will never strive to have a high sample size simply for the purposes of research because our work naturally lends itself towards case studies of each group's particular experience, which may or may not be comparable from year to year. With all of the factors that lead to the recruitment of the students for the course, the group self-selects itself; because of this, and because of the small sample size, we cannot argue that these students' experiences can be necessarily generalized.
<17> Secondly, two separate limitations arose in the participant interviews. On one hand, because we were around them 24/7 and they saw us as a part of their daily lives, when asked how we as mentors intervened to help them, they often overlooked details that they saw us do as "friends" more than mentors. For example, in the first week and a half, the teaching assistant often had to wake up Student B because, as what we believe is a common manifestation of culture shock, she overslept each morning. This example was not mentioned when she was asked how we helped her during the course. On the other hand, because the students recognized our ability to help them with future endeavors---such as scholarship applications and recommendation letters---we feel that even though we contracted an interviewer that neither we nor they knew personally beforehand, this power dynamic that exists between us and them may have held them back when they answered the interview questions. In fact, the students asked the teaching assistant for letters of recommendation and a student asked the professor for a scholarship recommendation while we were still in Nicaragua. We acknowledge that our position as the course instructors may have limited the extent to which the participants felt free to express themselves, yet we will show that they appeared to be very open about both positive and negative aspects of the course during the interviews.
Problem-solving essays as resistance strategy: Analyzing the role of essay writing during fieldwork with fundamental elements of social work
<18> As mentors in international service learning, we sought to help students move from what Freire calls a naïve consciousness"--seeing "causality as a static established fact"--to a "critical consciousness"---"the ability to submit causality to analysis" (Freire, Critical Consciousness, 40). We would apply, therefore, the following description of Freire's intention in his literacy work to our service learning experience in Nicaragua in thatWe wanted to offer the people the means by which they could supersede their magic or naïve perception of reality by one that was predominantly critical, so that they could assume positions appropriate to the dynamic climate of the transition (Freire, Critical Consciousness, 40).
Essay writing was the strategy we chose to help students supersede fatalistic impressions of the Nicaraguan reality, which they confronted during their service-learning experience.
<19> Over the course of the three weeks, the students were asked to write three essays that required them to reflect about problems they were seeing in the field. The writing prompts were progressively more complex and demanding in terms of requiring evidence in order to move their thinking towards conceptualizing possible solutions to school problems; our objective was to challenge the determinism of neoliberal education by encouraging the students to see alternatives to the status quo at both the micro level of the classroom and the more macro levels of the school, the community, and the country. In doing this, we as mentors "abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world" (Freire, Pedagogy of Oppressed,79)
<20> In their first week in Nicaragua, the students were asked to describe the school at which they were working (in English). They were asked to begin with the physical surroundings (north, east, south, and west) and continue with a description of the physical structure of the school -- buildings, grounds, etc. We asked them to be sure to explain the typical school day, to ask teachers and principals about the length of the school year, when major holidays/vacations take place, number of teachers and principals, and to identify any affiliated parent organizations.
<21> The first essay was in our opinion the first documented step in the process of conscientização as all the students were forced to cope with power outages and some with their host families' concern for their personal safety. As this exercise was due at the end of the first week that they had lived with a Nicaraguan family and had just begun their observations and/or teaching in a school, it could have been assigned as the students' first opportunity to reflect on the effects of the change in environment that they were experiencing. The topic of their personal experience, however, was one that we intentionally deferred; their first essay assignment was to write about the school in purely descriptive terms rather than to write an anecdotal, analytical or even a critical reflection.
<22> We contend that this initial, very focused and limited exercise---one that seemingly required them to ignore their new surroundings--- actually forced students to think critically about their immediate environment because they had to adapt to it in order to complete the assignment; the process of submitting the essay was an awakening for the students on a very practical level, as power outages during the day made the task of emailing their essays to the professor from nearby internet cafes difficult. Since the students weren't responsible for gathering water or cooking food at their home stays, the temporary but always inconvenient closures of the internet café provided for some the first experience of contending with an effect of poverty. That lack of a constant, taken-for-granted source of electricity had direct implications for their academic success; it enabled them to experience personally what it means to live without the political power to demand access to public services, although the instructor was flexible and accepted essays that were turned in slightly late [7].
<23> The fact that conscientização is a process and not a sudden flash of enlightenment is clear from the graduate students who were not always able to adapt to their environment, particularly if it required a change in personal behaviors that they perceived as an infringement of a right. For example, Students A and D's host family lived in an economically depressed working class neighborhood. The family always managed to arrange for them to go accompanied to the school, the local store, or to the internet café - all two blocks away from the house - be it day or night and in the company of a young child. Even five months after the course was over the graduate students revealed in an interview that they chafed at the requirement to be chaperoned and considered it to be an annoying and probably unnecessary restriction on their right to move about as they pleased. Such feelings are perhaps not atypical for middle-class Americans abroad, but they also reveal an ideological position that assumes personal entitlement to safety anywhere. Their position, in turn, seemed odd if not downright risky to the Nicaraguan host family who believed that some caution was warranted for an American walking around a poor neighborhood in Managua even during daylight.
<24> An analysis of the second essay assignment through the lens of social work theory would reveal that we encouraged students to cultivate creativity, an important element in the practice of social work (Compton and Galaway 246). We asked the students to describe two or three needs of their partner schools based on their experiences and observations over the previous eight or nine working days and also to rank the list in terms of what they would prioritize. Their ability to categorize the needs that they observed, as seen in the following excerpt from Student E's second essay, showed that they were quickly developing the ability to move from simple description to a deeper level of reflection: "There are two sets of needs that the school has: the need to address the issues that prevent students from attending school regularly and the tangible needs of the students and teachers once they are in school." This particular student comment demonstrates an understanding of both macro- and micro-level forces at play in her community.
<25> That evolution in her understanding about complex and interrelated problems in homes and schools would have been impossible if the American students hadn't experienced the challenges of daily life in Nicaragua with a host family. Even the home stay that lasted only one week for the two undergraduates in Masaya (a brief amount of time compared to the three-week stay of the two graduate students in Managua) provided Students B and C with insights into the living conditions of their Nicaraguan pupils that later yielded genuine improvements in their assigned school. It was the pit latrine in use in one home and the standing water present in the other homes - and in the school - that led to this observation in the second essay: "The most dangerous problem is the large puddle of standing water on the floor in the bathrooms. Although I am not positive, I can reasonably assume that the large puddles are a mixture of urine and leaky toilet water. This is clearly unsanitary." As our American students themselves used these bathrooms multiple times each day, the problem was made real.
<26> In the months that followed, Student C was able to raise funds at her school in Virginia that she sent to the Nicaraguan school's parent group that then used them to pay for the construction of new bathrooms at the school. Her teammate later coordinated a smaller fundraising effort at her college in support of the same project. The requirement to identify a school problem through this second essay, and the opportunity provided by the homestay to contextualize that same problem, was the second step in our problem-posing process. Later on that same process enabled the undergraduates to present clearly a Third World problem to a First World audience and to collaborate to offer a solution to the school.
<27> Before writing the third essay, an action research plan, all the American students (except Student E studying four hours away) had an opportunity for a group dialogue. The dialogue, which occurred during a weekend excursion to a nearby town popular with tourists, began with an opportunity to reflect on the first two weeks. We then discussed the requirements for the action research plan that consisted of two components: First, they had to describe what they had discovered to be the primary need of their partner school as defined by the principal, teachers, and/or parents; second, they were asked to create a hypothetical but detailed action research plan that they personally could implement once they returned to the U.S. to help alleviate that primary need. The students were told to feel free to include in their hypothetical plan the data and ideas of the students who had participated in the same course at their partner school the previous year, and we provided them with the contact information of those former students. After informing the students that they would be responsible for intricate details such as hotel phone numbers, names of reliable taxi cab drivers, and community contacts' email addresses, we received essays that proposed hypothetical projects that differed significantly according to the school location.
Writing Upon Return to the First World: Freirean Praxis Reflected in Graduate Essays
<28> In addition to the needs analysis essays, we required each of the graduate students (Students A and D) to create a paper that synthesized an investigative topic of their choice. We encouraged them to explore topics and to submit them to the instructor for approval prior to departing for Nicaragua in July, and they did so. They began writing the papers in August while still in Nicaragua and turned in final drafts in November 2007. The two topics were an analysis of various educational institutions, but focused primarily on teaching strategies, Nicaraguan students´ motives for learning English, and the training of EFL teachers in Nicaragua. An analysis of these papers suggests that students were trapped in a model of writing "value neutral" academic papers---in striving to be simultaneously abstract and objective their arguments fell short of critical analysis that would have been enhanced if they had better reflected on their own role in the research. We agree with Parker Palmer's critique of faux objectivism:
Objective, analytic, experimental. Very quickly this seemingly abstract way of knowing, this seemingly bloodless epistemology, becomes an ethic. It is an ethic of competitive individualism, in the midst of a world fragmented and made exploitable by that very mode of knowing. The mode of knowing itself breeds intellectual habits, indeed spiritual instincts, that destroy community. We make objects of each other and the world to be manipulated for our own private ends (cf. Zlotkowski 42).
As mentors in critical service learning, we hope that by highlighting specific examples of this objectivism we can demonstrate the challenges of writing papers about the service-learning experience.
<29> Certain elements of the papers showed shallow understanding of the politics of education in Nicaragua. We observed that Student D avoided staking a political position when he discussed neoliberal reforms in the public schools, stating, "I am not trying to take a stance one way or another regarding this ideology, [sic] what I am most interested in is the repercussions for schools and students at the local level." The student "objectively" determined that in his school decentralization was welcome, citing interviews with two administrators. Yet he failed to cite parents or multiple teachers in this section of the paper. This example shows the challenge of critical mentors in service-learning in the face of what Kincheloe calls the "phenomenon of depoliticization" (Kincheloe, 31). The next step in the transformation of this student through the service-learning process would be to encourage him to recognize and reflect on the power structures that may influence these administrators' comments and to underscore why it is important to interview a diverse group of stakeholders. Ideally we could help him to critique his own statement that "the trend of the most talented teachers working or moving into the private sector ‘will only benefit the wealthy'," as the statement suggested a superficial understanding of the forces of neoliberal economic globalization and, ultimately, the politics of education.
<30> Failure to discuss problems of linguistic hegemony are also obvious from the first sentence of Student A's paper in which she asserted without evidence that "in a world where English is the language of business and economic development, the importance of speaking English becomes more apparent each day." Her paper, like that of her classmate, could have been strengthened methodologically if she had situated herself in the paper and discussed how being a native speaker of English may have affected the interviews that she conducted in order to obtain her data. This practice of situating oneself helps to move research beyond "attempts to achieve value neutrality" (Harding 85). As well, by concluding in the final paragraph that learning English is "becoming a means for escaping poverty for those who can actually find opportunities to learn the language" she failed to associate Nicaragua's poverty with destructive US interventions in spite of the assigned reading on the economic toll of neoliberal economic policies in Nicaragua. This, therefore, weakened her overall analysis of individual motives for learning English in that country.
<31> We conclude that the graduate students' previous academic training positioned them as writers ideologically; by this we mean to say that they seemed unable to envision themselves writing a research paper that could legitimately include a defense - or a critique - of the grounds for the Sandinista policy of centralizing school budgets, for one example, or to consider the possibility of an "experimenter effect" as a source of bias in their interview data, for another. In other words, in spite of their fluency in Spanish, the interviews that were arranged for them with Nicaraguans from across the political spectrum, and an unusually close and pleasant working relationship with their instructor, it was simply too much to expect these graduate students to reflect on their own research as either hegemonic or anti-hegemonic. Not to be overlooked is the fact that their own upbringings, for the most part in the US, have served as a life-long "cultural training"; because of this, dominant US ideologies are reflected in their writing. We therefore expected that an inability (or unwillingness) to see their own voices as a factor in their research would translate into a similar inability to envision their direct and active participation in developing the modest and hypothetical action research projects that they proposed in their final essays. However, as the following discussion of our post-course interviews illustrates, that expectation turned out to be unfounded. Contrary to our expectations, most of the undergraduates and one of the graduate students proved to be surprisingly able to articulate a vision of self in the process of conscientização.
Five Months Later: Conscientização post-fieldwork?
<32> The third and final element of our research is based on interviews conducted with each of the participants in December 2007 and January 2008. The interview protocol consisted of questions designed to elicit students' perceptions of the structure of the course, changes in their autonomy in their work over the course of the fieldwork, ability to recreate a similar project in the future, and evidence of personal transformation during and following the course. How did students view the work that they had done through the in-country essays? How did the graduate students view the post-fieldwork paper two months after receiving our critiques?
Service-learning as step in a life-long conscientização
<33> Our findings suggest that participants saw the field-work experience as a useful step in their own personal development, but we argue that the perceived "expertise" they felt that they had acquired through previous experience in Latin America may have made it difficult for them to have been fully open to deeper transformation. In other words, their previous experiences both helped and hindered them during the fieldwork. While past experiences helped them in the sense that they could speak Spanish and move beyond the initial "exoticizing" of their surroundings, the past models through which they engaged in Latin America consistently served as points of reference that we argue may have made it more difficult for them to fully trust the service-learning process. Experiencing the tension of the uncertainty of the fieldwork experience, learning to connect personally to "the Other," becoming more autonomous as subjects of their own work, and engaging in cultural brokering upon return to the United States are all elements of international service-learning that can ultimately lead to participant transformation. As we will discuss in the following section, in our efforts to guide students in this process, we were challenged by their misunderstanding of what "service learning" actually meant in the context of Nicaragua.Mentoring students: Correcting misconceptions about the goals of fieldwork, service-learning, and the challenge of culture shock
<34> Prior to our analysis of the student transcripts we were confident that our preparatory readings, pre-departure meetings, and on-site mentoring had either prevented such thorny problems as culture shock and misunderstanding about the course goals and the meaning of service-learnig -– all basic elements of the course. Our confidence proved to be unfounded, however. For example, while we were in Nicaragua Student A expressed disappointment that she hadn't progressed from observing in her assigned school to actually teaching English as she had expected, and she felt quite misguided about the goals of this course. It wasn't initially clear to us how this misconception about the fieldwork occurred, as only one of the seven stated goals on the course summary is "Practical experience teaching English," but in our role as mentors we first sought to encourage her to resolve the dilemma on her own. However, she seemed surprised that the instructor would expect her, as a graduate student, to take the initiative and express her desire for more instructional time directly to the EFL teacher in her assigned school. The instructor attributed her passivity to simple inexperience in fieldwork and interceded on her behalf to arrange more instructional time for her. Ultimately, with some effort, she was able to teach several lessons. Unfortunately the three-week course was nearly over by the time she actually began to teach, but we considered this to be a reasonably positive outcome – given her somewhat late notice to us-- because we felt that we had also successfully communicated our goal that she develop as an independent researcher. It was clear in the interview, however, that for her the outcome was less positive than we had thought, so we searched the transcript for an explanation for this misunderstanding.<35> The interview transcript seemed -– on our first analysis--to reveal that the source of the problem was that the student did not understand the meaning of the term "service-learning" or its goals, as she expressed the belief that the course should either focus on teaching English or on an action research project, but not both. We were again initially perplexed at her comment, as the following definition on the course summary sheet seemed clear and was distributed in April and available online even earlier:
Service-learning [means] daily team teaching and planning with teacher partners who have expressed a strong interest in this collaboration. Our presence in Nicaragua is a response to a specific request from teachers there. Our purpose is not to bestow our knowledge of teaching language, much less impose our opinions, but rather to work with Nicaraguan teachers to seek solutions to problems they identify as important.
As we continued to analyze the interview, however, we found the key to what we at first had thought were her misinterpretations of the course goals or of the meaning of service-learning. At various points in the interview she describes her abbreviated but intense culture shock while in Nicaragua, her sense of relief upon returning to the US with all its opportunity for economic advancement, and the high value she ascribed to the positive effect of teaching as an individual as opposed to her devaluation of government actions to resolve conflictive issues such as immigration. We interpret those comments as evidence that in our attempts to mentor what we thought was an unconfident student in her initial fieldwork period, who simply misunderstood course goals, we were overlooking a fundamental problem: the student was experiencing culture shock as a reaction to the poverty that she saw all around her in her barrio and that affected directly the working class Nicaraguans with whom she was living. We "mentors" hadn't considered the possibility that the student who was the most fluent speaker of Spanish, who had lived in South America as a child, and who was residing with two other Americans in a very welcoming home could suffer culture shock. It is a lesson that we have learned and that will inform our preparation of students in future courses.
<36> It is important to point out, however, that simple misunderstandings do indeed occur in fieldwork and that firm but supportive mentoring can be crucial for a successful service-learning experience. For example, an undergraduate was nonplussed when she discovered that the teachers in the rural school where she had arranged her fieldwork did not consider English language instruction a high priority subject as she had assumed they would. Her concern over this unanticipated response to the service she proposed for the community led her to request permission to withdraw from the course – which was denied. As Student E said, "I was trying to figure out what to do. So I repeatedly asked them like, ‘Could I do something? I can teach classes in English if you'd like…And they were really hesitant to tell me that they needed anything. And then people spoke to me about doing health workshops…" It required a minimum amount of mentoring, clarification of course goals, and expressions of confidence to convince her that a response to the teachers' request to teach the children basic hygiene – rather than basic English - was completely appropriate in a service-learning course and acceptable to the instructor. Once she received that assurance, she quickly located materials on hygiene from a Peace Corps volunteer and adapted them for the classroom. Her instructor observed her deliver one of the presentations; it was well-received by the students, and the teachers in the school expressed their appreciation for her flexibility and skills. In this case the mentoring we provided enabled a student to complete a course and an action research proposal, both of which she otherwise would have abandoned.
Perception of changes in autonomy and possibilities for future independent work
<37> Over the course of the service-learning experience we progressively decreased our mentoring presence in the Nicaraguan schools in order to foster the students’ sense of autonomy and help them to develop the necessary confidence to gather data and write a hypothetical action research project as their last essay assignment. During the first week, for example, we accompanied the students nearly every day to and from the school, introducing them to the teachers and the principal, helping them with their initial lesson plans, discussing the first essay or the graduate students’ research papers, etc. By the second week we began to spend less and less time in the school setting, but we remained in contact with the school principals by making short visits to the schools and communicating with the principals by cell phone. As we lived either in the same house with the students or in close proximity, we spent after-school hours with them, advising them on essays, helping them plan research interviews, excursions with their classmates, and informally debriefing them daily. During the third and final week in Nicaragua, students worked independently in the schools. Outside of the space of the school, we debriefed the Nicaraguan teachers and principals. We advised the students on their action research plans and final research papers while informally dialoging with them to help them process their final days in their schools and in the country.
<38> In order to understand how they perceived these gradual changes, the interviewer whom we contracted asked the students to reflect on the frequency and nature of the mentoring they received during the course. Types of mentoring that the students identified were help with Spanish vocabulary/grammar, pre-course conversations regarding the project that they were going to undertake, and help with composing in Spanish the interview questions that they would need to ask for their final essay. Student A expressed contradicting views of the mentoring she received: she felt, on one hand, a sense that the mentoring was at times overbearing, yet, on the other hand, she very much appreciated the help in setting up interviews. Student B expressed that she would have liked more help negotiating entrance to the Nicaraguan classrooms, but she recognized that the gradual withdrawal of assistance was purposeful. When asked if they felt able to conduct an international school improvement project on their own - a primary goal of the course - all of the students told the interviewer that they believed they could indeed do so. We believe that confidence is a result of the progressive reduction of our presence as mentors. The interviewer asked four of the five students if their confidence was a result of this course or other experiences; they all answered that it was a result of our course. We contend that this is good evidence that teacher educators who wish to "challenge the participants" – as Freire stated in our epigraph – can indeed mentor students to enhance their autonomy and develop the requisite confidence to carry out action research projects in education, be they in the Third or First World. We believe the confidence that results from such projects is a "critical transformative tool," one that must necessarily underlie the courage that Bartolomé (284) says teachers must have to help students learn to see themselves as historical actors - rather than complacent and helpless victims – who are able to combat discrimination and injustice when necessary.
Freirean humanization: A pedagogy of personal connections
<39> In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire states that it is our vocation, regardless of which "World" we inhabit, to become more fully human (85). Drawing inspiration from that philosophical position, we encouraged our students to prepare to tell others in the First World about the human connections they had made in Nicaragua. We suggested as an example the sort of personal vignettes in Pedagogies for the Non-Poor in which participants in Plowshares seminars describe their relationships with the people with whom they had worked and lived. The transcripts of the interviews show that although none of the students had known any Nicaraguans personally before the course, all of the students commented extensively – and with profound respect - about a "most memorable" Nicaraguan they had met. Several were still in communication with Nicaraguans three months after the course had ended, and their interest in the people they had met translated as well into an abiding interest about current events in Nicaragua. However, the narratives show that for some students the close relationships they had developed also caused personal discomfort.
<40> In reflecting on their own reaction to the differences in daily life in Nicaragua, for example, Student A revealed an internal contradiction of seeing/but not wanting to see poverty first hand, stating, "I wasn't really surprised. It wasn't anything that I hadn't seen. As I said, I hadn't lived in poverty and that's what made the situation difficult for me, but seeing and being around it was not surprising because I have seen it and I have experienced it and I am very aware that a large portion of the world lives like that." The difficulty of "living in" poverty in comparison to "seeing it" and "experiencing it" is a statement that this student buries in the middle of the sentence, between two statements that express previous knowledge of poverty. We see the expression of the differences between living in and seeing and experiencing poverty as an acknowledgment that her awareness of poverty changed due to the service-learning experience. Confronting the discomfort of how the ‘Other' lives was painful, however, led her to contradict herself and also overstate her prior "knowledge" about poverty as "experience." To further understand Student A's reaction, we call on Jones, Gilbride-Brown, and Gasiorski's insightful analysis of the "underside" of service-learning courses or the complexities that emerge in which "previously held assumptions, stereotypes, and privileges are uncovered" (4). Arguing for an incorporation of the lenses of cognitive-development and critical whiteness, the authors would place Student A's experience both as a developmental step as well as part of a larger social context, since, "for white students, service-learning often places them in an unfamiliar borderland that proves very threatening to the unearned advantages of being white" (Jones, Gilbride-Brown, and Gasiorski 9). By understanding these two sides of the struggles that students face in the field we can better understand why, clearly, for this student, learning about humanity in Nicaragua constituted a personal and ideological dilemma.
Students as cross-cultural cultural brokers
<41> This is not to say that other students did not also experience dilemmas. The comments of three students in particular recalled a sense of displacement after they resumed their lives in the US. The language they used to describe daily life in Nicaragua to family and friends and to explain their interest in working in poor communities abroad is evidence that upon their return they found themselves engaged as cultural brokers between the First and Third Worlds. Their interactions in the First World varied between emotional and intellectual statements about neoliberalism, the fetish of consumption in our lived culture in the US, and the importance of engagement with Third World communities even in the absence of any guarantees of success. For example, Student B explained her politics by recounting a protest against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in Costa Rica in which she participated:I really kind of pride myself on showing people that, although I'm an American, I'm not what they might think of an American…There was this thing with CAFTA when I was in Costa Rica where I wound up in this anti-[war] march…and they were saying, ‘your government supports this, it's good for America.' And I said, ‘But it's not good for you and we don't all want things because they're just good for us.' So I mean, I love that part, you know, ‘debunking stereotypes.'Her anecdote was an attempt to explain how her transformative journeys in the Third World have made her aware of Others' generalizations about what it means to be an American. She makes it clear that those journeys have fostered a strong desire to engage personally with the Other to communicate that the significance of the word "American" is polyvalent and unfixed.
<42> Student D echoes those feelings of displacement after his return to the U.S. and marks a change in his thinking about what previously was mundane consumption: Something that surprised me [was that] it was actually very difficult in some ways just to get right back into the normal daily life here. That may have something to do with things [that] have been changed in my thinking…To come back and suddenly say, ‘we’re going out and blowing $20 on coffee and donuts, how can we be doing this?’ His self-directed question about coffee reveals that his is not merely a tourist’s emotional response to poverty; he has seen where that coffee is produced and has internalized the recognition of the injustice of the unequal distribution of wealth between the Global North and the Global South.
<43> Student E's cultural brokering took place in a conversation with a friend who was pessimistic about the benefits of service by First World students in Third World communities, but she used his criticism as a scaffold on which to construct an intellectual argument that is her own pedagogy of hope [8]
I...place a lot of importance on being critical on the sort of service that I want to engage in…and so then to hear that echoed in someone else is sort of, I guess is probably good because it makes me think about it more, too, but also it's very frustrating cause I'm like, ‘No, you don't understand,['] like it's really difficult to start do ing] something meaningful before you…lay groundwork first. A lot of times it's not going to be successful, but that doesn't mean that… the effort itself won't grow into something that can be effective.
This student is not merely expressing self-confidence; her fieldwork has allowed her to develop a philosophical position that committed, long-term action in collaboration with people in the Third World is justified, even if individual projects are not immediately successful. We believe that ultimately it is through confronting dilemmas like these – with proper mentoring - that students can develop the confidence to engage with others in the First World to overcome complacency and a fear of failure among their peers that can only help to perpetuate oppression in the Third World.
"There are possibilities": One student's transformation through dialogue
<44> While the graduate student papers may not have shown a strong development of a critical ontology or a socioindividual imagination (Kincheloe 33, 36), the expression of this social consciousness and individual agency in the interviews four to five months after the fieldwork confirmed for us the importance of long-term critical dialogue with the students. A few months after writing the paper, Student D reflected on his experience on a much deeper level saying,I don't know why I've been reluctant to get involved. I usually claim I'm too busy but isn't that what everyone says? I think that one thing that just occurred to me, one thing that came out of this was, well, if you want to bring [overhead] projectors to this school, you can do it. You don't have to find, you know, some multinational organization to do it, so, I think that's actually a really important lesson. Who knew?The interviewer continues to probe for the meaning behind this statement, and asks him: "So, I got some wheels turning--people are sometimes transformed. Has your worldview changed?" A deeper level of reflection is shown in the following paragraph, as the student mapped his own transformation:
This last comment that just kinda came out made me realize that maybe I have changed in more ways [than] I recognized….I think the change in the worldview might [be] for me personally more of a realization that [these kind of projects] might not change the world but where else can change start? [There is a] tendency to say screw it...There's no point in trying. And I think I saw both through the people on the local level and the fact that we were, even just being around there, you know, being able to initiate. There are possibilities.
This quote reflects the student's recognition of the development of his own critical consciousness and a transition from accepting fatalism to critically analyzing the status quo. It exhibits a First World transformation away from the "screw it" mentality that he expressed in the quote above. When he finally acknowledged the fatalistic attitude that had held him back in the past, he was able to recognize and articulate the possibility of solidarity with those in the Third World.
Implications and Conclusions
<45> The students' experience post-fieldwork show varying degrees of connection with both their home communities and the Nicaraguan communities in which they lived. Student A volunteers in nursing home and began teaching at a community college following the completion of her master's degree. Student B, while finishing her undergraduate degrees, works in a variety of activities, including adult ESL, legal aid volunteer, housing partnership, and, as previously mentioned in this article, fundraising for a Nicaraguan bathroom project organized by Student C. Student C returned to her job as an ESL teacher and successfully coordinated the fundraising effort to re-do the bathrooms at the school at which she taught through our course. Student D completed his master's degree and has begun to implement his action research plan of providing overhead projectors to Nicaraguan schools. Student E, in her final year of undergraduate work, continues to tutor and interprets for a social worker. Because both of the efforts in Nicaragua are responses to the needs of parents, teachers, and administrators, as expressed to the US participants in parent-teacher meetings and interviews during their time in the country, we see the projects as steps towards the creation of more democratic communities.
<46> We cannot guarantee when, how, or even if students will experience transformation through an international service-learning experience, yet we believe that certain factors contribute to the possibility for transformation through this process. Deep learning in liberatory education, along with the confidence to act, derives from the following three aspects of service-learning: close mentoring, the context of the experience, and student research.
<47> Although taken for granted (and on occasion resented), there were multiple instances in which the instructor and the teaching assistant were able to leverage very positive outcomes for the students because as mentors we were physically present nearly every day and available to answer questions and discuss issues at all hours. The context in which the mentors and the students work--the relationships that they build with their mentors and the Nicaraguan community and educators through service-learning--plays an important role in the identity that students will form while living between the First and Third World. For deep learning to occur in this space, students have to be mentored to become border crossers, re-negotiating their identity in light of new experiences and insights[9]. When students can live in the tension of their identity, they are capable of producing meaningful student research like our students' needs analysis essays and the third essay that was an action research plan.
<48> Through our analysis of this fieldwork experience, we conclude that international service-learning is one way to challenge First World students to rethink their positionality as both oppressed and oppressor. The students' action research essay in our course is not a binding statement of commitment that the participants of the Plowshares Institute compose, for example, but the act of writing an action research plan seems nevertheless to be a crucial step in conscientização. The assignment challenges them to construct a space "between the dominant class and the oppressed" – not a tourist site as Freire stated in the epigraph to this essay, but an area in their lives where they can be actors freely working in solidarity. We see this challenge, and the service-learning context that makes it possible, as an important corrective methodology in teacher education. We agree with the critique offered by Bartolomé:
Most teacher preparation programs do not offer courses and practicum experiences that will enable students to identify and understand the role of ideology (hegemonic and counterhegemonic) in teaching… [in which] programs are rarely deliberately designed to ensure that prospective teachers study what structurally produces such oppressed communities and engage in generating alternative ideological positions regarding the low social status and academic achievement of subordinated populations (282).<49> Therefore, we argue that the process of conscientização of students can be facilitated by a critical mentorship that responds to the unique context of each international service learning course. We have interwoven action and reflection with our students through a series of readings, needs analyses, action research plans, and in-depth interviews over the course of the last seven months. Through this essay, we hope to have revealed our struggle to help students understand the goals of fieldwork and service learning, confront culture shock, connect with Nicaraguans, develop autonomy, and become cross-cultural brokers upon their return. In our opinion, neither traditional study abroad, nor international or domestic service experiences--- in the absence of the deep reflection that is required in the conduct of research--- are sufficient means by which students can consider alternative ideological positions and then gain the confidence that is necessary to engage in praxis in the Third or the First World. We recognize that our course and the intense mentoring in which we engaged is perhaps not easily replicable; however, we argue that the evidence in this essay suggests that this model is one that can truly bring about student conscientização.
Works Cited
Bartolomé, Lilia. "Critical Pedagogy and Teacher Education: Radicalizing Prospective Teachers." Critical Pedagogy, Where are We Now? Eds. Joe L. and Peter McLaren. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 263-286.
Cammarota, Julio and Michelle Fine. Revolutionizing Education, Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion. NY: Routledge, 2008.
Chisolm, Linda A. "Partnerships for International Service-Learning." Building Partnerships for Service-Learning. Ed. Barbara Jacoby. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. 259-288.
David, Wilfred L. The Humanitarian Development Paradigm, Search for Global Justice. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2004.
Compton, Beulah R. and Galaway, Burt. Social Work Processes, Third Edition. Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey, 1984.
Evans, Alice F., Evans, Robert A., and Kennedy, William B. Pedagogies for the Non-Poor. Maryknoll, MD: Orbis Books, 1987.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970.
---. Pedagogy of the City. New York: Continuum, 1993.
---. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1994.
---. Teachers as Cultural Workers: letters to those who dare teach. Boulder: Westview P, 1998.
---. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 2005.
--- and Ira Shor. Pedagogy of Liberation: Dialogues for Transforming Education. MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1987.
Harding, Sandra. Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006.
Jacoby, Barbara. Service-Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series). Ed. Barbara Jacoby and Associates. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1996. 5-25.
Jones, S., Gilbride-Brown, J., and Gasiorski, A. "Getting Inside the ‘Underside' of Service-Learning: Student Resistance and Possibilities." Service Learning and Higher Education: Where Are We Now? Ed. Dan W. Butin. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 3-24.
Kincheloe, Joe L. "Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-first Century: Evolution for Survival." Critical Pedagogy, Where are We Now? Eds. Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 9-42.
Lange, Elizabeth, "Fragmented Ethics of Justice: Freire, Liberation Theology, and Pedagogy for the Non-Poor." Convergence: A Tribute to Paulo Freire 31 (1998): 81-94.
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Jacoby. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2003. 213-233.
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Notes
[1] Freire cf. Lange 87. [^]
[2] We have attempted to distinguish between the US participants (university students who are also “prospective teachers”), the Nicaraguan teachers, and the Nicaraguan children in the schools throughout this work by using “participant” or “student” to refer to our course participants and “pupil” to refer to the Nicaraguan children. One of our participants was already a teacher; she is the only participant to whom we refer to as a “teacher.” The Nicaraguan teachers are referred to as such, with their nationality used to clarify in cases in which this might be unclear. [^]
[3] For more information about our international service-learning course, please see http://jfarri.people.wm.edu/2007syllabus.doc. [^]
[4] In moving from an application of a “pedagogy for the non-poor” in religious contexts, as is the case in F. Evans, R. Evans, and W. Kennedy, to the secular environment in which our class was conducted, we use the term conscientização cautiously, knowing that Freire himself refrained from using the word in his later works because it was being misinterpreted by some as a method—a “magical pill,” in his words-- instead of a guiding educational philosophy (Freire Pedagogy of City, 110-111). [^]
[5] Harding argues that while “First/Third World” is problematic, “Progressive science movements in the developing world, such as the Third World Network, have named themselves with such a term. All of the proposed substitutes for this terminology have their own problems. ‘Developed’ vs. ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing countries fails to question the imperial rationale of modernization embedded in the language of development” (Harding, 11). Following this analysis, we employ the terms “First/Third World” for the purposes of this paper, acknowledging the difficulty in working with binary terms to describe the groups of people with whom we work. [^]
[6] Placing students in pairs during an international service learning course provides them with essential support and opportunities for growth. The following quote is an excerpt of one of the student’s essays from week two: My partner and I held a meeting with the parents of the students in the morning shift at [the school]. Although my partner was the one who prepared for and conducted the meeting, I took notes and the parents´ comments confirmed the concerns I have about the school. As the student’s partner was the current teacher, this student had the ability to gain both pedagogical and vocabulary unique to the setting during the event; she watched the current teacher, accustomed to working with parents, conduct the meeting in Spanish. Because she was taking notes on the meeting, this collaboration also gave her time out of the spotlight. In this sense, the experience served as one of reflection--she realized her concerns about the school were confirmed by the parents. This incidence reveals that successful collaboration in pairs during the fieldwork experience encourages both participants’ community participation. [^]
[7] Power outages took place because of a lack of fuel and because the privatized power grid promised by the Spanish business that purchased it in 2002 (just after the structural adjustment period (SAP) initiated during the 1990s) had not been developed. Students should have been aware of this, as they were assigned to read William Robinson´s essay on SAP in Nicaragua Without Illusions before arriving in Nicaragua.
See Nicaragua Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility Economic Policy Framework Paper for 1999–2001. Prepared by the Nicaraguan Authorities in Collaboration with the Staffs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. August 23, 1999. http://www.imf.org/external/np/pfp/1999/nicarag/index.
htm.
See also a sample profile of Nicaragua from the UDI International Electric Power Sourcebook http://www.platts.com/Analytic%20Solutions/UDI%20Data%20&%20Directories/Electricity%20Bookmarks/countryprofile.html.
[^]
[8] For further discussion of hope grounded in practice, see Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope, 2-3. [^]
[9] “A border crosser” refers to an individual who is able and willing to develop empathy with the cultural ‘Other’ and to authentically view as equal the values of the ‘Other’ while conscious of the cultural group’s subordinated social status in the greater society” (Bartolomé 274). [^]
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