EDUCATION, RESEARCH, AND GLOBALIZATION: TEACHER IDENTITY AND A GLOBAL CURRICULUM IN TERTIARY EDUCATION

Globalization has enormous proven economic and political benefits for developing nations through “…the flow of technology, economy, knowledge, people, …across borders…”, (Knight, 1997), however, it comes with a significant disadvantage in terms of its tendency to mesh diverse cultures together and thus eroding their inherent uniqueness. Thus while aspiring individuals and nations gain materialistically they lose their essential identity to secularism and westernization. Threatened by a loss of one’s language to the hegemony of English in all walks of life such as social interaction, education, and business, coupled with a sense of loss of one’s culture to westernization, students feel disoriented in American universities. Their love-hate relationship with globalization reflects adversely on their academic and social achievement preventing them from fully utilizing their potentials. The whole globalization syndrome consequently, has major ramifications for tertiary education: it calls for a revision of curricula not only at the macro-level of designing new courses that incorporate intercultural communication and emotional intelligence in order to successfully interact with foreigners, but also at the micro-level of classroom interaction where teachers and students enact a dialogic curriculum to appreciate diversity but at the same time preserve their own cultural identity.

This paper argues that by engaging in a Self-study research a teacher can provide students with a discursive “third-space” (Bhaba, 1994) in class research projects and discussions where they negotiate their identities away from the conflicting pressures of the Anglo-centric cultural text, the ethnic home culture of the students, as well as the underlying market-oriented global issues. The paper further postulates that the “third-country faculty” (Dedoussis, 2007) teaching in transplanted American universities around the world, are best suited to develop in undergraduate students “a transnational mentality” (Bartlett, Ghoshal, & Birkinshaw, 2004) characterized by flexibility, critical awareness, and creativity, crucial for adapting to global challenges.