HOW THIS ADVENTURE BEGAN
The Editorial Board that founded this journal met for the first time in El Escorial (Spain) in April 2011. Almost a year earlier, the first contact between FERE-CECA, Intered and Intermón-Oxfam was initiated to promote the dawning of this long-term project on education research in Development Education.
For two days, we discussed and defined the issues we had already considered and suggested during the months prior to that time by email, video conference and other means. But 21st-century advanced communication technology could not surpass the excitement and delicate tension of our first face-to-face meeting between people from different countries, with diverse backgrounds and personal experiences.
With all this, the people present, sent and supported by our organisations, and their rich, complex history and accompanying identities, we got down to work. Our mission was actually to create a Town Square, rather than a Wall, which is what we feel existed previously.
WHO IS IT FOR?
To study how this learning process takes place, professionals who are passionate about everything occurring in relation to education and its tremendous possibilities for dreaming up different worlds got together. But we are also people who never stop questioning and wondering what it means to create different worlds and their relationship with justice and human dignity. For this reason, when starting our project we decided to bring representatives from three types of organisations together to foster the project, while remaining open to the possibility of other perspectives and social realities contributing to it in the future.
This detail defines the identity of the primary recipients of the project, who are represented on the Founding Editorial Board:
- Universities or higher education venues.
- Centres for primary and secondary education and other educational spaces.
- NGODs and other social organisations.
As mentioned before, in all these places there are people specifically devoted to education, and we feel that they not only need to teach but also must pay special attention to how learning processes occur, how they come about, how they finish, how they remain in place and how the processes related to education for utopia are expressed. In the end, this is what abounds in Development Education.
- In this mission, universities, and especially teaching schools, social institutions and similar entities shall play a significant role as regards the research and the quality thereof.
- Primary and secondary schools and youth organisations, to name a few, are fundamental as the territory for practice and experimentation in cultivating and caring for this utopian seed within all the dimensions and among all the members of educational communities, from formal and non-formal viewpoints.
- NGODs around the world aim to become fundamental beacons for reflecting on utopia through a daily commitment to social reality and how this reality takes faltering steps in constructing History. These and other social organisations should act as reagents, like certain chemical substances, for defining the lines of commitment and political involvement.
However, with a quick glance at our profiles and the trajectories of these three actors, we can see that this breakdown into research, laboratory and reagents ends up being artificial because, with their capacity and initiative, each party already has many characteristics of the others.
OUR OUTLOOK
Thus, the mission that has led us to take on this project has three initial aims:
- Promoting university quality educational research in Development Education within numerous spaces and educational contexts.
- Creating a space for publishing research results on Development Education, in order to strengthen the latter’s role in early teacher training.
- Generating a global learning community among different educational players on research and action in Development Education.
The means for this mission are primarily:
- Creating a work group to foster and encourage these objectives globally.
- Creating an electronic university journal on educational research on Development Education.
- Creating an Editorial Board to guarantee the quality and accuracy of the journal.
- Creating a social network representing the research community in Development Education.
- Generating a space, along with the electronic journal, to expand the university research stage, allowing for participation at other times and in other research formats.
These resources are currently implemented:
- In the work group, presently composed of FERE-CECA and Intered.
- In the electronic journal you are reading: The International Journal for Global and Development Education Research.
- The founding Editorial Board, which is composed of representatives of the University P. Comillas (Madrid, Spain), Newman University College (Birmingham, United Kingdom), Tecnológico de Monterrey (Monterrey, Mexico), FERE-CECA (Spain), Intered (Spain), Intermón-Oxfam (Spain), the Latin American Council for Adult Education, or CEAAL (280 organisations based in Panama) , Hagley Primary School (United Kingdom), Nuestra Señora de Fátima School (Madrid, Spain) and López Neyra Secondary School (Cordoba, Spain).
- The network and space will have the same email address as the Journal in the section called Ágora. Further information on this subject can be found on the website.
THE GLOBAL PROJECT
The Journal and Ágora projects are grouped into a project funded by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development, which we are calling
This name coincides with the website domain we have chosen: www.educacionglobalresearch.net
These choices coincide with diverse basic features of the project, some of which we have discussed, while others remain unnamed.
- For example, one thing we have not mentioned comes from the analysis of the great wall existing between knowledge groups in development education in Spanish and in English. Interesting progress is being made in this regard in both groups, but the language restrictions keep the information from spreading. For this reason, we have decided to make the journal and part of Ágora into a bilingual English/Spanish proposal. Thus, our project title has one word in Spanish (educación), another in English (research) and another that is common to both (global).
- Furthermore, we have used an expression in a universal language such as mathematics. F(x) is an expression that can be understood, regardless or your language and culture. F(x) also refers to the scientific nature of our project and the substantial quality and accuracy we want to accomplish.
- It is, perhaps, appropriate to clarify a few points here:
- The road to the most precise aspects of university-related quality and accuracy is a medium-term goal. In this project, we have noted that these aspects are occasionally a short-coming in this sector, and we propose the Journal as a means of developing them. However, the Editorial Board has stressed the importance of resources for quality and accuracy from the outset.
- Language is not the only barrier in the transfer of knowledge and research in Development Education. Therefore, we aim to unite perspectives and focuses within the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds. Thus, we can see that the Spanish Educación para el Desarrollo and Ciudadanía Global still have few connections (or not as many as it could have) with Freire’s Educación Popular. Likewise, the British Global Education, Education for Sustainable Development, World Studies and Education for the Future have few connections with Civic Engagement or Community Engagement from the United States. It is interesting to note that none of them are the same, but they all have connections, meeting points in which learning is incredibly enriching.
- As we have asserted before, all of these approaches are views of a common goal regarding research on utopian competence, although we must clarify that not everything is Development Education in the sense of a transformational Global Education. In our approaches, we must exclude those that are more closely related to communication for development, accountability or education on development, all of which are interesting, complementary and necessary, but which move beyond our area of study.
- Here, we frequently use the term Global, and we even use it in our name. However, our view of what is global does not match with the economic globalisation process we are currently experiencing. Perhaps our stance would be closer to what is presently known as Glocalization and its view of interdependence, although the real key to the debate on what global is construed as, and its relationship with Development Education, has to do with overcoming banking thinking- in Freire’s words – and focusing on generative thought that overcomes hegemonic thinking or pensée unique.
- In this regard, the debate on interdependence is one of the highways and a test of generative thinking toward our utopian competence, particularly because not just any interdependence is positive or just – one clear example of this is today’s globalisation model. And the ability to have an active, critical view in this regard is one of the most important exercises in Development Education. Back in the seventies international players began to highlight this.
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
Miguel Ardanaz (FERE-CECA. Madrid – España) Journal Director
Pilar García (FERE-CECA. Madrid – España) Project Coordinator
Mª del Mar Palacios (INTERED. Madrid – España)
Guillermo Aguado (INTERED. Madrid – España)
Oscar Jara (CEAAL. San José – Costa Rica)
Raquel León (INTERMÓN-OXFAM. Barcelona – España)
Jorge Torres (UNIVERSIDAD PONTIFICIA COMILLAS. Madrid – España)
Ernesto Benavides (TECNOLÓGICO de MONTERREY. Monterrey -México)
Mark Chidler (NEWMAN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE. Birmingham – Inglaterra)
Manuel Vega (I.E.S. LÓPEZ NEYRA. Córdoba – España)
Paloma Montero (Colegio NTRA. SEÑORA DE FÁTIMA Madrid – España)
Kevin Bailey (HAGLEY PRIMARY SCHOOL. Stourbridge. Birmingham – Inglaterra)
OUR BASIC IDEAS
The following list is a summary of our stance on how we, the Editorial Board for this project, view research about Global Development Education:
MAIN POINTS
I. Global Development Education, as we at the Journal understand it, has diverse focuses and approaches, within its differing philosophies and names, and we consider this diversity enriching. It can and should be a source of debate based on mutual respect, as well as an opportunity for enrichment and group learning.
II. Any of the approaches implicitly or explicitly leads to the creation of a utopian responsibility, from a perspective of ethics and citizenship that activates our capacity for creative commitment to improving our world based on equality, social justice, human dignity, civic participation, democratic culture, the rule of law and comprehensive sustainability.
III. Global Development Education, construed as a basic competence is a fundamental teaching, as is competence in linguistic communication and mathematics.
IV. The results arising from educational research – reflecting on how we learn – is a structural dimension in the development of individuals and social groups, and it is one of the essential elements in empowerment and emancipation for individuals and societies.
V. Educational research has many levels, from the simplest to the most specialised, but on any level it provides a basic, characteristic feature of our view of Global Development Education.
VI. We view educational research as part of an open, shared, participatory network through various organisations, cultures and places around the world.
VII. Educational research can focus on different features and stages, depending on how it is conducted, and by whom. At some points, the focus is the act of research itself, at others, it is the quality and accuracy of the work. More important yet is the focus on simple and highly practical applications. At the Journal, this issue is essential.
VIII. Likewise, occasionally, researching about how we learn in our utopian dimension – competence in learning to learn – may be an objective in and of itself. At other times, it may be oriented towards a purely instrumental objective of one very specific aspect of the teachings related to Global Development Education. Pure research and applied research are two focuses that interest us.
IX. Through all of this, we endeavour to make quality, rigorous applied educational research in Global Development Education a force for the practice of holistic educational models that aid in performing actions with the greatest possibilities for meeting learning objectives, though aware of the complexities involved.
X. Although we believe that we are all potential global researchers, this project focuses especially on educators and their training and practice venues: teaching colleges, schools and training centres, social organisations, and so on, to foster change at the roots.
