The Global Education Office coordinates an international exchange program between Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Education and TU Dortmund University’s Department of Educational Sciences and Psychology. For more details on the 2023 edition of the international exchange, as well as an overview of the workshop, please refer to the following report by Associate Professor Yuzo HIROSE, who oversaw the event.
International exchange activities:
5th edition of the research workshop between the Department of Educational Sciences and Psychology, TU Dortmund University, and the Graduate School and Faculty of Education, Kyoto University.
The 5th research workshop between the Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology, TU Dortmund University, and the Graduate School and Faculty of Education, Kyoto University
- Organization: Graduate School and Faculty of Education, Kyoto University.
- Professor responsible: Yuzo HIROSE (Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education, Education and Human Sciences Chair)
- Place: Conference room at the Kyoto University Clock Tower Memorial Hall
- Type of event: In-person workshop (along with online participation)
- Date of the event: March 25th to 26th, 2024.
- Number of participants: 36
- A summary of the activities can be found here.
Overview of the exchange activities:
This workshop, themed “Cosmopolitan and Global Citizenship Education in Times of Crisis,” featured eight scholars from TU Dortmund University, each delivering a 40-minute lecture. After the lectures, participants were divided in small groups for a 25-minute discussion, followed by a Q&A section designed to further deepen the conversation. Six graduate students from Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Education acted as moderators for the event. The topics covered in the lectures included, among others, considerations over the potential of travel experiences for global citizenship education, viewed from the perspective of German pedagogical anthropology, where travel experience are seen as an embodied, unique mimetic act; empirical research on nurturing global citizenship consciousness through the drawing of images, themselves based on testimonies of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb survivors; as well as the cultivation of global citizenship through interspecies relations. Each presentation went beyond stereotypical global citizenship and cosmopolitan education, which generally aims at forming global human resources and sharing of universal values, to emphasize the sensitivity and richness of a human formation in global citizenship education that may become a guiding light to the future of humanity in the face of crisis. During the small and whole group discussion, lively debate ensued on the positive value and feasibility of this vision.
In addition to members of our graduate school and researchers from the TU Dortmund University, among the participants there were also faculty and graduate students from other graduate schools at Kyoto University, as well as external researchers with an interest in the topic. Besides lively discussion in small groups, engaging conversation continued throughout breaks and lunch times. The arguments and discussion on Cosmopolitan and Global Citizenship Education presented by researchers from TU Dortmund University, coming from a place and condition so different from Japan, were particularly thought-provoking. It opened our thinking from its very foundations – often unconsciously closed-off and self-contained – towards the world: in that sense, it was truly world-citizenship educational. The workshop raised a variety of invaluable questions and themes, becoming a place for rich learning and inquiry, as well as prompting continued thinking long after the event was concluded.
(Yuzo HIROSE)
