BEING THERE

One such initiative is EDFX 490: Global Citizenship Field Experience in Ghana, a credit/non-credit special sessions course delivered by the University of Alberta's (U of A) Faculty of Education and supported by its institutional partner, the University of Ghana (U Ghana). The course developed as a collaborative venture between the two institutions and is co-taught by U of A and U Ghana faculty. The program has been offered every year since 2007 and will be offered again in May and June 2010. A unique feature of the course is that scholarships are available for two Ghanaian teachers to take EDFX 490 as full, fee-paying students. EDFX 490 links classroom activities with field experiences to bridge theory and practice of global citizenship education. The classroom component consists of seminars, workshops, reflective activities and discussion at the U of A and U Ghana. The formal field component consists of four weeks of classroom observation and assistance in schools in Accra and in Atwima Apemanim village, a rural Ashanti community of 300 people located in central Ghana, where students spend 10 days living in the community and helping classroom teachers in the village's elementary school. As a crucial aspect of the transformative intent of the course, reflection is an important component. Student reflection facilitated before, during and after the field experience in Ghana helps students to situate and make sense of their coursework and experiences. Broadly speaking, EDFX 490 and other similar initiatives are representative of a growing awareness in postsecondary institutions of the importance of including global citizenship education in teacher education programs (Noddings 2005; Peters, Blee and [A. Britton] 2008). Much of the scholarship currently available on such programs and initiatives has focused on how global citizenship education acts as a counter-narrative to existing neoliberal discourses- discourses that structure global citizenship education as little more than an initiation into the competitive skill set that students need to be successful in the global marketplace ([Abdi, A.A.] and [L. Shultz] 2008; Abdi and Richardson 2008).