An ethos of care in a cross-cultural collaborative mentoring project with UNESCO Open Education for a Better World [O-074] Members : OER20

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Public Group Active 4 years ago

Thu, Apr 2 2020, 11:00am – 12:00pm

Authors: Helen DeWaard, and Dr. Rekha Chavan

Room: Pre-record

Theme: Wildcard submission

Type: Reflective practice presentations – 20mins

Description

Updated Session Description

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Original Session Description

Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) is a UNESCO funded, tuition-free, international online mentoring programme established to unlock the potential of open education in achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) through the use of open educational resources (OER). The presenters are two women faculty members, a Canadian teacher educator and a teacher educator in Mumbai, India. We purposefully explore our mentoring relationship with the goal of illuminating an ethos of care in our cross cultural experience. In this presentation we will share our OE4BW mentor/mentee journey in the development of an OER-enabled online course for teacher education faculty development in India. The story of this unique mentoring dyad reflects on ethics of care, cross cultural experiences, digital competencies, and the mentoring relationship that resulted from the development and delivery of a four week course [DCID-Designing Collaborative Instructional Design with OERs] for higher education in India. We reveal our distinct cross-cultural journey while uncovering a deeper appreciation for the importance of respect, understanding, and engaged dialog. The presentation will touch on foundations of care in an inclusive design when planning, recording, implementing, evaluating, and transferring tacit to explicit knowledge-building within an online course in global collaborative learning spaces. A critical analysis of the OE4BW mentoring process will be shared.

Ghosh (2018) suggests that diversified relationships are a “contested, but, a rich site for learning” (p. 159). This presentation reveals some of the emergent complexities and multifaceted cultural processes (Rogoff, 2003) we experienced in our OE4BW project. Participants will engage using Answer Garden to provide reflections on caring and ‘good mentoring’ (Rowley, 1999) and conduct a cross cultural conversation using an active Zoom link during this session. Presenters will touch on how developing digital competencies connects to foundations for care in online course design. We reflect on the seven principles of culturally integrated mentoring (Geber & Keane, 2017) focusing on awareness, time and commitment, respect, explicit cultural references, inclusion, care, and story. Ethical practices are also explored. We will relate our shared learning as we “counter-storied our experiences” (Guramatunhu-Mudiwa & Angel, 2017). This story will explore and reveal the attentive, reciprocal, reflective and connective acts of dialogue, listening, and emotional responses in our cross-cultural caring relationship (Noddings, 2012).

References

Crutcher, B. N. (2014) ‘Cross-cultural mentoring: A pathway to making excellence inclusive’, Liberal Education, pp. 26–32.

Geber, H. and Keane, M. (2017) ‘Ubuntu and transformational mentoring in South Africa: 7 principles of a culturally integrated mentoring response’, in Clutterbuck, D. A. (ed.) The Sage Handbook of Mentoring. Sage, p. Chapter 31. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315045829_Ubuntu_and_Transformational_Mentoring_in_South_Africa_7_Principles_of_a_Culturally_Integrated_Mentoring_Response.

Ghosh, R. (2018) ‘Diversified mentoring relationships: Contested space for mutual learning?’, Human Resource Development International, 21(3), pp. 159–162. doi: 10.1080/13678868.2018.1465670.

Guramatunhu-Mudiwa, P. and Angel, R. B. (2017) ‘Women mentoring in the academe: A faculty cross-racial and cross-cultural experience’, Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 25(1), pp. 97–118. doi: 10.1080/13611267.2017.1308095.

Noddings, N. (2012). The caring relation in teaching. Oxford Review of Education, 38(6), 771-781.

Rowley, J. B. (1999) The Good Mentor – Educational Leadership, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Available at: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may99/vol56/num08/The-Good-Mentor.aspx (Accessed: 24 November 2019).

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