In every training course, there is one morning where you wake up with a terrible headache.

While trying to orient yourself – Where am I? Where is my head? Is this my room? Who are you?! – you vaguely remember the previous night, and the enlightenment hits you right there and then: it was the Polish Vodka.

During the next training, you stay away from the vodka, but the Armenian Brandy is just the same… In fact, you can easily recognise regular training course participants – they are the ones who stay away from most of the drinks during the infamous, obligatory, intercultural night.

A night of drinks and snacks, songs and dances.

A night that is rightfully confronted with some fundamental questions: How to make sure that intercultural evenings do not become a parody of what intercultural learning is about? How to avoid the nationalization of culture in an international environment?

These are just two questions asked in the introduction to the seminar on

«Intercultural Learning – which ways forward?»

organised by the Directorate of Youth of the Council of Europe at the end of November 2007 in the European Youth Centre Budapest.

And it seems as if such questions are not asked very often: most intercultural evenings indeed are a parody of what intercultural learning is about.

They have little to do with the people,
they reinforce stereotypes,
they have no educational meaning.

As Laimonas writes in an article for Coyote
to be published in the beginning of next year:

«Recently hardly anyone takes into consideration whether or why such an evening is really needed.»

Laimonas uses the widely known – and also widely disputed – iceberg concept of culture to make his point in saying that

«the majority of intercultural evenings are keeping people just on top of the iceberg. The underwater parts of the iceberg simply remain undiscovered.»

You can dislike the iceberg concept as much as you want, Laimonas does have a point.

So we ask you: how can we do better?

Fire away with ideas – and in January, hold them against Laimonas ideas and experiences on how to get from floating on top of the iceberg to diving into the depth of the cold water underneath.

We can’t say no more but this: it is worth the wait (and we will obviously link to the article once it has appeared in print)!

Happily co-written by Laimonas Ragauskas, Bastian Küntzel and Andreas Karsten.

In his article «A White Paper on what?», Bastian Küntzel looked into intercultural dialogue and asked whether it is a solution, a problem, or mission impossible. In November 2006, international non-governmental organisations teamed up with local youth workers from Alsace and Baden to look at these questions — and many more — in their «Forum on Intercultural Dialogue».

Based on the work of the forum, a discussion document has now been produced by Andreas Karsten and Bastian Küntzel that has received great interest from the INGO Assembly of the Council of Europe, the convener of the forum.

In their first 2007 meeting, the representatives of civil society considered the document to be one of their prime contributions to the discussions of the Council of Europe on the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue. But even beyond the context of the white paper, the text has something to offer for other discourses as well — not the least in relation to the European Union’s «Year of Intercultural Dialogue» in 2008.

Be warned that the INGO’s discussion document possibly is, in some ways, an unusual document — it was written by a general rapporteur with the invitation to be subjectively opiniated and critically reflective and is meant to be more of a recollection of ideas and discussions than a typical report. With that approach, it aims to bring together the thinking and ideas that lead to the forum with the experiences expressed and discussions held at the forum itself.

The paper looks at culture and dialogue, at intercultural dialogue, at anti-racism and at intercultural learning. It criticises the limited approach of the Council of Europe’s White Paper in seeing culture merely to

«include everything relating to ways of life, customs, beliefs and other things that have been passed on to us for generations, as well as the various forms of artistic creations,»

a perspective which ignores that culture not only determines who we are, but also how we judge others. Because of that, the notion of culture has well disguised, yet highly political implications. The paper argues that

«the notion of culture can therefore not only be considered as ‘our different ways of life’, but also has to entail the varying and often biased modes of framing and assessing these ways of living.»

The document also presents, among other things, a range of suggestions (based on the forum’s participants’ experience from practice) how intercultural dialogue needs to be conditioned to be successful.

Going beyond that, the text also identifies some questions for further discussion in the spirit of Jostein Gaarder, who said once that

«an answer is always the part of the road that is behind you; only questions point to the future.»

These questions, which are meant as the paper’s contribution to the discussion on intercultural dialogue which is only just beginning, we share with you here for thinking and discussion:

• Is dialogue enough to evolve from multi-cultural co-existence to intercultural co-production?
• Are discrimination and racism only a question of culture? Would such a claim not delude questions of power, power relations and structural issues?
• Does the current practice of intercultural learning support such delusion? Are we the fog of racism revealed by speaking of culture?
• Is the use of the notion ‘intercultural dialogue’ and in particular the connotations of the concepts of ‘culture’ so problematic that one should disengage and withdraw from this dialogue altogether?
• How could we reclaim the terms – if at all?
• What can we do to bridge the gap between community work and mainstream public discourses on intercultural dialogue?
• How can we bring together conceptual, educational, political discourses and controversies on intercultural dialogue – on all levels; practice, policy, media and academia?
• How can the imminent culturalisation of minorities be broken up – also in our own educational, political and/or scientific work?
• How is it possible to engage in intercultural dialogue and avoid cultural relativism? Is it possible at all?
• What are the limits of local level intercultural dialogue, and what are the limits of a European approach? How can local and international levels be brought together best, i.e. in complementary and informing ways?

To read further about all sorts of issues related to culture and intercultural dialogue, the Council of Europe’s book «Resituating Culture» may be a good starting point. It is currently out of print in the Council’s bookstore, but you can download the pdf-version (1.3 MB) here.

«The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing.Albert Einstein»

Download the discussion document here or here.

Marc Prensky started it here at «Educause Review», Dennis Fermoyle over at «In the Trenches of Public Education» picks it up here, and Chris Lehmann of «Practical Theory» puts his two cents in here.

Quite interesting discussion, really.

Does learning always have to be fun?
Can it all be done by playful exploration?

I wonder.

Sometimes, let’s be honest, learning stinks and sucks. Doesn’t it?

And despite all the sweet stereotypes about non-formal education being all games and fun, learning also stinks and sucks in any experiential learning activity – no matter how funny it might be to watch.

Chris brings the discourse a little closer to non-formal education and learner-centredness:

«What we have to gain from Prensky’s argument isn’t that we should use games to teach, even if that is what he suggests. What we have to gain from the argument is this — what is it that our hobbies have in common that engage us? What is it that causes us to fall in love with doing something such that we can do it for hours?»

And he adds elsewhere that

«in all the writing we do about 21st Century tools and new ways of learning, it’s important to remember that, in the end, it’s still about the personal connections we make. It’s about connecting with our students, sharing our passion for learning with them, and sharing their energy and their ideas.»

Something which is indeed forgotten far too often.

The wonderful place this came from.

But world leaders do not deserve the credit, says Ehsan Masood of openDemocracy.

It is an annual ritual, and no less important for that. The publication of the United Nations’s scorecard on efforts to tackle poverty in developing countries is designed to remind world leaders that their ambitious promises to halve global poverty through the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by 2015 are unlikely to be met – this despite significant increases in development aid.

In contrast to previous years, however, there was no fanfare surrounding the 2006 report. It was announced on 3 July in a small paragraph from the UN’s statistics division. Two weeks since that announcement, the report has yet to make it onto the UN’s official MDG website – a sure sign, if one were needed, that the organisation’s flagship scheme to end world poverty is in trouble.

The 2005 report was signed by Kofi Annan. This year’s signatory is a senior official though one less well-known than the UN’s secretary-general: José Antonio Ocampo – a case perhaps of the senior doctor delegating the task of conveying news of terminal illness to his more junior colleague? Ocampo says that the “challenges the goals represent are staggering”, though he is able to find “clear signs of hope”.

Later, Ocampo admits that there are vast disparities in progress and that the poorest are being left behind. His report ends with a phrase much favoured by international policymakers to signify that a cause is all but lost: “Much more can and must be done.”

I don’t envy Ocampo. He wants to give his readers a dose of reality, but at the same time remind them that a world without extreme poverty is possible as well as desirable – though not necessarily in the time-frame they have set themselves.

The parent factor

Among José Antonio Ocampo’s readers will be the very leaders of rich and poor nations who met in September 2000 at the United Nations in New York and agreed to do what it takes to reach the eight Millennium Development Goals in reducing poverty before a target date of 2015. These goals are:

• eliminate extreme poverty and hunger, by lifting the living standards of the very poorest
• achieve universal primary education
• promote gender equality and empower women, especially in education
• reduce child mortality among under-fives by two-thirds
• improve maternal health, including reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters
• combat HIV/Aids, malaria, and other diseases
• improve environmental sustainability, including the guaranteed access to safe drinking water
• develop a global partnership for development.

All the data in the 2006 edition of the Millennium Development Goals report suggest that none of the goals are likely to be met. Only one will come close: this is the target to achieve universal primary education. Thanks more to circumstance than design, by 2015, nearly nine out of every ten children are on course to have a primary-school place.

But on every other indicator, progress is either patchy or non-existent. The numbers of people who go to bed hungry in the developing world, for example, is rising, and stands at some 824 million people. Nearly half a million children die from measles annually. The list of failures is long and depressing.

So why is the single goal of universal primary education potentially within reach? The answer has little to do with the promises made at the 2000 millennium summit, and everything to do with the hard work and innovative thinking on the part of a host of actors (governments, civil society and parents), who decided long ago that getting children into schools has to be a major priority for the developing world.

This is the conclusion of research published by the World Bank that examines the world of primary education in developing countries. The bank knows a thing or two about schools and schooling; it is the largest non-governmental donor in this field, having granted or lent some $36 billion for education for developing countries over the past four decades. At present, its lending portfolio in education amounts to $8.4 billion in some eighty-eight countries.

As might be expected, the components of success in primary-school education amount to a mixed bag, and depend very much on what countries and regions need, and how much they can afford to pay. In the poorest regions, for example, a priority is often to create schools from scratch. Equally important is the provision of incentives for parents who have never been to school to let their children go, and to reassure them that schooling will not automatically lead to their children rejecting traditions and traditional values.

There are additional dynamics at work in relatively higher-income countries, where primary-education enrolment may already be high. Here, a priority might be to improve the curriculum, improve standards of attainment as well as school attendance, and to experiment with new models of school management and governance.

Taken together, what the World Bank researchers’ data shows is that there is no magic bullet: more a collection of variable interventions. What some of these tend to have in common, however, is that they are schemes that have a good record of success in the developed world, or among elite, fee-paying schools in developing countries.

Some successes have come through spending vast sums of money on school buildings, equipment and teacher training. Mexico, for example, has invested heavily in its primary and secondary education – some $625 million over the past fifteen years. Its policies have specifically targeted some of the country’s most deprived states, as well as regions with large numbers of indigenous peoples. In addition to infrastructure spending and introducing performance-related teachers pay, a key plank in Mexico’s policies has been to focus on the role of parents.

Worldwide it is children from the poorest families who do not go to school. Where they do, they tend to underperform significantly, compared with the national average in their countries. Often, this is because parents have little or no involvement in a child’s school life. This can be because parents themselves never went to school and lack the confidence to interact with teachers; or it might be because of a lack of trust between parents and school authorities – something that is also a factor in the underperformance of children from minority communities in the developed world.

In Mexico, the government decided to improve parents’ participation through a nationwide scheme (known as AGEs), which trains parents to take part in school management. Empowering parents – encouraging, training, and even paying them small sums of money – to play a formal role in school activities, has had a significant effect in improving education in rural Mexico, according to World Bank researcher Paul Gertler and his colleagues. Drop-out rates have fallen and standards are on the rise.

AGEs is relatively cheap – it costs $6 per student per year, or $27 million for all of Mexico’s 4.5 million children of primary-school age. And it shows what you can do with a small amount of money allocated wisely. A similar example comes from Ecuador, a poorer country compared with Mexico with average incomes at $1,500 per year. Ecuador’s policymakers have for many years been aware of the fact that while primary-school enrolment is high at 90%, this drops to 45% when pupils make the transition to secondary school.

There are several reasons for this, including the higher costs of secondary schooling, as well as the need for parents to place children in work so they can begin contributing to the household budget. One solution to enable more children to stay on in post-11 education was to pay mothers a $15 monthly child voucher to help with the increased costs of secondary schooling. And the system appears to be working. Both, the numbers of children in work, as well as school drop-out rates have been falling since the scheme was introduced, according to Norbert Schady and Maria Caridad Araujo of the World Bank’s research staff.

People, not aid

But development aid isn’t the whole story. It is possible to boost primary-school enrolment with very little involvement from donors or the government, as a case study from Pakistan has shown. One in four of Pakistan’s rural households include a parent (usually a male) who works far from home, and who regularly sends money in the form of remittances. World Bank researcher Ghazala Mansuri decided to explore what happens to the schooling of children from these households in all four of Pakistan’s provinces. Does it improve because of a family’s more favourable finances? Or does it decline, in part because children are needed to do the work of the absent parent.

Mansuri found that not only were the children from migrant households more likely to attend school (especially girls), but she found that they were more likely to study to a higher level compared with their counterparts from settled households in rural areas. Girls in particular completed more than two extra years of schooling compared with those from non-migrant households.

What can we learn from these examples? There is the obvious: that primary schooling has to be free to all regardless of ability to pay. There are two further lessons: that parental involvement in management and governance, as well as small financial incentives, can make a big difference to a child’s school attendance; and that (as the Pakistan example shows) if parents were able to earn a living wage, they wouldn’t need recourse to external support.

Equally important is the issue of time, and of deadlines, such as the 2015 target to reach the Millennium Development Goals. None of these improvements happened overnight, and their genesis predates the MDG project – in most cases by at least a decade. The fact that we stand at the threshold of universal primary education will happen despite the MDG initiative, and not because of it.

This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net
under a Creative Commons license.

To view the original article, please click here.

“Education is a gateway to employment and in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels continue to rise, with many countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications in particular, according to data in the 2006 edition of the OECD’s annual publication “Education at a Glance”.

[For your convenience: Direct Links to 2006 - Main Site and Tables of Indicators]

But while more than one third of students across OECD countries – and around 50% in some countries — now obtain university degrees – a persistently large share of young people do not complete secondary school, today’s baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

On average across OECD countries, only 56% of adults without upper secondary qualifications are in employment. Of those who are, 26% earn one-half or less than one-half of the national median earnings. While many countries have seen steeply rising benefits from university education, including some of those where university education has expanded most, people who have not completed upper secondary school, and particularly women, continue to face serious labour-market penalties.

To address this, OECD analysts say, countries will need to scale back inherently class-biased and often regressive ways of funding educational opportunities, the effects of which often show up in educational attainment measurements. On average across OECD countries, for example, students from the most socio-economically disadvantaged quartile of the population are 3.5 times more likely than their peers to be in the bottom quartile of mathematics performers, and in no country is this less than twice as likely to be the case.

A compendium of national education statistics on indicators ranging from class sizes to teacher salaries, Education at a Glance provides governments and education specialists with internationally comparable data as a basis for policy debate and decisions. Among other things, this year’s edition shows that:

• On average in OECD countries, 84% of people who have achieved a tertiary education qualification are in employment. By contrast, only 56% of people without even an upper secondary qualification have jobs.
• Public funding of education remains a social priority, even in OECD countries with relatively little public involvement in other areas: between 1995 and 2003, education took a growing share of total public expenditure in most countries, with Denmark, Greece, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic and Sweden showing particularly significant shifts in public funding in favour of education.
• At the tertiary level, however, the proportion of public expenditure as a share of total spending has fallen from an average of 81.2% in OECD countries in 1995 to an average 76.2% in 2003, with only the Czech Republic, Ireland, Norway and Spain showing an increase. The proportion of tertiary education funded privately varies from more than 50% in Australia, Japan, Korea and the United States as well as the partner country Chile to less than 5% in Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway and Turkey. Most of private funding comes from households, notably through tuition fees which are charged in three-quarters of OECD countries, though at widely varying levels.
• Rapidly growing numbers of students are enrolling in tertiary education outside their home country. In 2004, they comprised 2.7 million students worldwide, an 8% increase on the previous year and more than twice as many as in 1995. More than half of these students are enrolled in four OECD countries – the United States (22%), the United Kingdom (11%), Germany (10%), and France (9%).
• Annual salaries of teachers with at least 15 years experience at lower secondary level range from around USD 10,000 in Poland to USD48 000 or more in Germany, Korea and Switzerland and more than USD 80,000 in Luxembourg.
• Gender differences in educational qualification rates are shifting in favour of women. For 55-to-64-year-olds, average duration of formal study favours women in only three countries, but for 25-to-34-year-olds, the average number of years of study completed is higher among women in 20 out of 30 OECD countries, and of the remaining 10 countries only Switzerland and Turkey register differences of more than six months in favour of men.

Education at a Glance 2006 can be purchased in paper or electronic form through the OECD’s Online Bookshop.

Further information on Education at a Glance 2006 can be found directly at the OECD’s website here http://www.oecd.org/edu/eag2006, as can country chapters on Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.”

Source: Low educational attainments continue to penalise people in many OECD countries, Copyright OECD 2006.

Read more!

“The European Portfolio for Youth Workers and Youth Leaders aims to increase the recognition of non-formal education and youth work.”

If the Portfolio fails, nobody will be able to claim it wasn’t ambitious enough I’d say…

But let’s answer some basic questions first, such as: what is the portfolio, why was it designed, who designed it, for whom was it designed, what can be done with it, what’s happening right now and how can you get involved?

The portfolio is a tool to enable its users to assess and describe their competences on the basis of a core set of European quality standards.

At least that’s what the Council of Europe describe it as on their website, although you won’t find mention of quality standards in the portfolio itself…

The portfolio understands itself as an instrument, a tool, a book of presently 52 pages which wants to help youth workers and youth leaders working in non-formal learning environments to

• identify, assess and record their competences,
• describe their competences to others, and to
• set their own learning and development goals.

This is what the portfolio has been designed for — against a political backdrop which increasingly supports and recognises non-formal education and, at the same time, calls for a more structured and transparent approach towards quality assurance and quality control.

In the context of the Council of Europe, this political background was expressed by the Committee of Ministers in its recommendation N° 2003 (8) on the promotion and the recognition of non-formal education / learning of young people, where it says:

“The Committee of Ministers, (…) convinced that non-formal learning can contribute to secure all the knowledge and capacities which young people need to succeed in contemporary societies (…), recommends that the governments of member states (…) support the creation and use of a European portfolio as a description tool aiming to record experiences, skills and knowledge (learning outcomes) acquired through non-formal education/learning (…)”

Based on this high-level substantial and constitutive political decision, the Council of Europe invited an expert group to look at the feasibility of producing such an instrument for all young people. After looking at the options, they came to the conclusion that it would be more effective as a first step to concentrate on youth workers and leaders. This led to a new group being formed which defined then the more detailed aims of the portfolio:

The group performed a functional analysis of what youth workers and leaders should be and do and from this drew up a framework of competences which individuals are invited to a) use as a self-assessment tool and then b) to gain feedback from their peers and colleagues.

The portfolio is intended for the use of youth leaders and youth workers. The expert group understands youth leaders as young adults holding a responsibility in a youth organisation, network or any other youth structure, mainly on a voluntary basis. Youth workers are, then, holding the same kind of responsibility mainly on a professional basis.

So what do these youth leaders and youth workers find inside the portfolio — and any other interested human being as a matter of fact? Let me show you another graphic to illustrate the contents:

Quite a few people were consulted during the development of the portfolio, bringing in expertise and perspectives from a wider range than the (small to be operational) expert group could provide. Whether or not this has led to something useful and practical, remains to be seen in practice.

Which is why, essentially, a test phase has been put in place which runs until July 2006. During this time you all — whether or not you are a youth leader or youth worker in the understanding described above — are warmly invited to have a go at using the portfolio — completing the competence tables, getting feedback from others and making a plan for the future — and, most importantly, take the time to provide some qualified feedback to the expert group. What they are looking for are people who really have a go at USING the portfolio – they have enough feedback from those who have just read it!

Are the aims relevant? Are they relevant for European level only or applicable in local contexts? Is the portfolio meeting any demand from practice – or is it just a political tool? Is motivation out there amongst practitioners to use it? Is the context understandable? Are the contents approachable? Is the competence framework both generic and specific enough to be universal but precise? Is the investment of time and thought adequate? Are peers able to understand your self-assessment? Is the framework for their feedback useful? What should be changed about the portfolio, both in general terms and in relation to specific parts of its contents?

These are but some of the questions for which the expert group is seeking answers. To give some based on your experience of using the portfolio, you are happily invited to use the extra-for-this-purpose-developed evaluation form which you find here either in pdf-format or here in doc-format — as you wish. Just send the form by email to youthportfolio@coe.int.

Obviously, any comments and thoughts you have can also come in here on Nonformality as a comment to this article which will be passed on.

Either way: Thanks a million!

Related links and documents

The Portfolio (pdf, 4 MB)

Evaluation Form (pdf)
Evaluation Form (doc)

COE Youth Portfolio Website (www.coe.int/youthportfolio)

Note:

Obviously, you will also find all the documents at this website of the Council of Europe, where they are freely available for download. It is against our ethical standards as bloggers to steal bandwidth from other people without them knowing it, which is why we offer you the download directly from our site.

Independent of that, ownership of and credit for the Portfolio belong solely to the Youth and Sport Directorate of the Council of Europe — which has a long tradition in sharing its knowledge with the wider community, a tradition we honour, respect and welcome.

Written by Andreas Karsten (andreas@nonformality.org) with assistance from Mark Taylor, consultant for the portfolio (brazavil.training@yahoo.com).

Then I read the report called “Informality and Formality in Learning” and it shook up my world. By giving me a much more differentiated view of what we are trying to do. What Helen Colley and her colleagues from the Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Leeds make quite clear to me is that we are too anxious to separate the different forms of learning into little boxes. The temptation is obvious: if we put them in boxes then we can easily say one form of learning is better than the other; then we can put up arguments for more resources and funding and recognition.

It is difficult, if not dangerous, to try to summarise the report in this small space and the authors are very careful in framing their conclusions.

Nevertheless, it seems useful to highlight some of the points which made me put my thoughts into question, in the hope that you might go and have a closer look:

1. One of the major findings of the research was that it may well be more sensible to see attributes of informality and formality as present in all learning situations. Attributes can be looked at in four clusters: process; location and setting; purposes; and content.
2. Those attributes and their interrelationships influence the nature and effectiveness of learning. Changing the balance between formal and informal attributes changes the nature of the learning.
3. All forms of learning have the potential to be either emancipatory or oppressive. This depends partly upon the balance and interrelationships between attributes of in/formality. However, the wider contexts in which that learning takes place are crucial in determining its emancipatory potential.

So, we need to look very carefully at the aims of the learning we are encouraging, look at the context and reflect more on the balance between the different attributes present in our planning. The report can help us to analyse what we do and be more explicit about what we are combining – and the authors are currently busy designing an analytical tool to give us further assistance. If we go deeper into this analysis, it helps to see that, for example, when we add attributes of formal learning to non-formal learning (such as certification) we change the nature of the learning.

Even though I have read the report a few times and thought about it a lot, I’m still not completely clear about all of the consequences of looking at different attributes of learning in this way. But it sure is liberating to break open the box I had constructed for myself! Discussing these ideas with a friend as I wrote the draft of this article, we thought it could be helpful to think of learning as a stream. A stream whose flow also depends on the conditions surrounding it. Maybe we can find some nice ways to extend the metaphor in the future… Or, like Bob Dylan, just sit here and watch the river flow.

Read more about the report Mark refers to here at the UK National Guidance Research Forum; or simply download the entire report (660 kb) or its summary (120 kb), both in pdf, directly from our site.

Enjoy discussing!