Expanding the concept of globalization: a syllabus and commentary.

Kingsborough Community College is one of the City University of New York's colleges whose existence has depended on the policy of Open Admissions, that is, providing access to CUNY to all high school graduates. It serves a racially and ethnically diverse population who typically are first-generation college students. Currently, about two-fifths of KCC students are immigrants attempting college-level programs of study using English, their second language. After five years, about thirty percent of a cohort of KCC students graduates, and of this number about three-quarters continue on to four-year colleges. In other words, for well over two-thirds of the students, their community college education at KCC will constitute their formal higher education. Consequently, liberal arts education is particularly crucial as the means for familiarizing students with current discourses and their historical backgrounds, and challenging students to acquire critical thinking skills.

THE OPPORTUNITY

English department faculty devised a demanding final semester of required English that attempts to meet the objectives of introducing students to current significant discourses, while asking them to develop their capacities at comparison and evaluation. This course focuses on analytic reading and writing. The teacher selects a theme, and thus the sections of the course offered each semester vary as to focus. The content of the course consists of texts from at least three disciplines. Hopefully students will grasp that each discipline asks distinctive questions of its subject matter and that its use of language is affected by those questions and the kinds of material it uses to seek answers. Finally, the course asks students to demonstrate their critical understanding of the issues studied by writing a research paper pursuing a question raised during the multi-disciplinary exploration of the course's theme.

In the fall of 1998 I had the opportunity to teach the honors section of our English department's final required course. At KCC, full-time students with a grade point average of 3.2 or better who have taken no more than thirty-five credits are invited to join the Honors Program. Many students so invited decline because honors courses are more difficult than regular sections of the same courses, thus making maintaining a high grade point average more difficult. Consequently, the students who take honors courses not only are usually remarkably intelligent, but also highly motivated to learn. If anything, the majority of the group I had that semester was even more able and eager to learn than the usual honors dass.

BACKGROUND

Before I organized the syllabus for this course, I had been immersed in reading about environmental and international women's issues. In fact, I had taught this course focusing on environmental questions and proposed solutions, and, during another semester, I had taught it focusing on questions concerning gender equity and proposed solutions.

I had most recently been particularly impressed with the international level of cooperation and common purpose achieved by the multitudes of women who had attended the international conference in Beijing in 1995. I had purchased Beyond Beijing, a video that attempts to give some flavor of that complex event, as well as a copy of Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, Spring/Summer, 1996, that contains, in addition to reports on Women's Studies Programs in Asia, Europe, and Africa, not only excerpts, documents, and commentary about the Beijing Conference, but also an exact copy of the Platform for Action. What is most amazing about the concrete list of proposals in The Platform for Action is that its content was influenced by women from all over the world represented at Beijing by 30,000 women in the non-governmental organization (NGO) gathering, and that it was approved by consensus by 189 nations in the official United Nations gathering. Here, I thought, was an example of the possibilities of globalization e nvisioned as international cooperation arising from local experiences and aims.

When I had taught the course focusing on the environment, I had been repeatedly struck by my students' total vagueness when asked to account for the earth's existence, or for the existence of life. Apart from some Biblical explanations, usually not very accurate or detailed, most students simply had never considered questions of cosmology or of their personal relations to the earth. I had purchased The Planet Earth from PBS, a series of six videos, some of which address issues concerning the beginnings of the universe and of life. I also had gathered many newspaper articles reporting the connections between events far away and their consequences at home: for example, the return of pesticides we have sold to Latin Americans in the fruits and vegetables we import from them. Globalization in this context meant grasping that human beings everywhere are not only connected in terms of our common dependence upon the "globe," earth, but as well by the consequences of how each treats it.

Meanwhile, I had been attempting to educate myself about the economic meanings of globalization. The book I found most accessible and intelligible was David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World. I knew that when the term globalization is used, it normally refers to the system of economic absorption by the international corporate economy of local economies all over the world. This book helped make what that means concrete.

Thus, when I thought about how to approach the theme of globalization with this group of honors students, I decided to be shamelessly ambitious and approach the concept in terms of gender equity, the environment, and the international economy. I was hoping for students to come away from the course with a profound sense of the interconnectedness of life, knowledge of ways economic globalization subordinates life to profits, and the hope that international cooperation by ordinary people might work to preserve life and to further social justice.

COURSE CONTENT

The course depended on students continuously responding in writing to what they had read and on their leading class discussion in groups of two. Prior to the class in which the students presented, they were to distribute discussion questions for their classmates to think about as they read the assigned chapter. Before asking students to take on these tasks, I spent the first three weeks leading discussions based first, on readings about the Beijing Conference and viewing the video, Beyond Beijing; second, on readings about the global state of the environment and extracts from the Planet Earth series focusing on the origins of the universe and of life. The direction of the discussions was to a large degree determined by the questions students had formulated as part of their journal responses. By the time the students came to conducting the class, they were used to sitting in a circle and exchanging ideas. (1)

The great bulk of the semester was dedicated to reading and discussing most of the chapters in Korten's When Corporations Rule the World After finishing this book, we turned to chapters from Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, which reintroduced gender to discussions about economic, environmental, and political questions. Finally, we read a utopian novel, Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, which not only has suggestions about organizing relations to the earth and relations between the sexes, but also introduces questions concerning the unconscious, specifically by focusing on dreams and myths. We thus had looked at written texts from the fields of journalism, economics, political science, and literature. The students had had to articulate the questions the different authors had addressed concerning globalization. They also had needed to cope with the different varieties of prose found in the disciplines to which they had been exposed.

HOW IT WORKED

Although KCC honors students are typically academically excellent, two students were not prepared to attempt such a course. One refused to read and was used to offering opinions that did not relate to any text. She dropped the course once she discovered that her journals and the class discussions actually had to refer to the readings. The other had not been given sufficient education in writing. She improved during the semester, but was not up to writing a research paper and took an incomplete which she did not finish for another year. The rest of the students were up to the challenge. Almost all of them (there were twenty-one in the course, about one-third people of color and two-thirds white), remarked on how new to them the material studied was, a fact that seemed to help motivate two who had begun the course claiming in their self-introductions that school had always been and continued to be boring.

The process of the class was immensely helped by the presence of a brilliant, articulate Jewish woman whom I will call Mrs. Y. Mrs. Y, a member of a cohesive religious community, was married to a highly educated, conservative husband with whom, she told us, she discussed class readings. Through her journals and in-class discussion, she introduced sharp critiques of the ideas being studied, thus generating debates that encouraged students to marshall and evaluate evidence and conclusions. Our inquiries and explorations were also blessed by the presence of an amazingly open Jewish young man who apparently delighted in listening to other people's opinions, even if he disagreed with them. He affirmed the right of others to their perspectives and demonstrated what it means to reflect on ones own practice and find it wanting. The tone of non-ego-invested inquiry he brought to class discussions often transformed class resistance into exploration. For example, when the class read Lester R. Brown's sobering survey of global environmental conditions, "The Future of Growth," this young man began class discussion by saying how grateful he was to Brown for pulling together all that information, since he had had no idea of the extent of environmental problems, even though he had read a bit about them. He then asked what people could do. His response set the tone for the ensuing discussion. I've taught surveys similar to Brown's before, and the typical student response is to feel overwhelmed and helpless, averse to thinking about these matters. My student's willingness to know and his desire to participate in trying to make his world better acted like a magic potion for thinking in our discussions. The responses of other students also contributed to making this class work, so that the effectiveness of the class clearly resulted from an unusually fortunate chemistry of personalities.

Judging by the class discussions, the journals, and the research papers (one skeptical student's paper questioned and explored how statistics such as those published under the names of various groups working within the United Nations are obtained), the course succeeded in getting students to consider questions about globalization they had not previously thought about. It led them to think about how their own plans for life related to what they had learned. The Enloe book in particular, because it proposes that the personal is internationally political, challenged them to examine areas in their lives whose innocent normalcy they had taken for granted. Her chapter detailing how tourism exploits women as workers and as sex objects in the cultures being promoted shocked the American students and led to discussions seeking ways one might travel while contributing as little as possible to that exploitation. Her chapter on the lives of poorly paid women workers in countries producing clothes at inexpensive prices fo r Western consumers raised a spirited discussion, since no-one in the class, including me, had not benefitted from the suffering of those women. Only reluctantly did many students entertain the idea that as consumers we could exert power by boycotting companies whose women workers suffer inhuman conditions. Enloe's chapter describing how Chiquita had used Carmen Miranda to sell its bananas moved one Latin American student, usually silent during discussions, to understand and then condemn the ethnic stereotyping used by corporations to market their goods.

The readings led most students to speak of life changes they intended to make. One white girl, for example, the one who had most unequivocally asserted that school was boring, said her plan to marry and have a number of children remained unchanged, but that she now had quite different ideas about educating them. She planned to teach them about the environment and to continue reading so she could inform them about what was going on in their world. Almost all the students explored ways in their personal lives to help right the inequities and problems we had studied. Only a few--the woman who had traveled to other countries, one of the students from the Caribbean, and the open young man--advocated ideas from the readings concerning policy changes and political action.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK SO WELL--AND POSSIBLE PARTIAL SOLUTIONS

The most sensitive problem was the difference in social class among the students. The presence of Mrs. Y, her husband being engaged in the international import business, brought the issue of class differences into our discussions, although it primarily simmered just below the surface. The students' desire not to hurt one another's feelings reigned them in, but when one student did blurt out the idea that opinions were linked to how much money one possessed, the atmosphere became electric. I found negotiating these differences difficult because I believe the best way to deal with group differences is to allow space for each person's reality and experience to exist. Repression not only strengthens bigotry, that is, opinions that are not moved by evidence to the contrary, but it makes transformation of opinions almost impossible. I was interested both in relieving the repression of those who saw the class basis of opinion and in not repressing those who denied its significance. Allowing discursive space to each perspective, however, does not mean that values go unquestioned. As with most human beings, when students' values are questioned, they usually feel hurt and defensive. I tried to teach those criticizing one another's values not to be righteous (in the sense of assuming moral superiority) by clarifying the difference between moral righteousness and accuracy of analysis.

Given the sensitivity and vulnerability the students experienced with regard to differences, I think next time I might substitute James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" for The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You because of Baldwin's extraordinary portrayal of psychological shadow. I also would begin the course studying this work. I do not regret having used The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, a narrative of the psychological transformation of an immoral, self-serving egotist who awakes after a car accident in a utopian society that is dedicated to understanding and realizing its dreams. It's an excellent novel for raising questions about the social construction of gender, human relations to the earth, and the human capacity for evil, i.e., psychological shadow. Because it explores this concept through the character of a villain rather than through the character of a victim, however, it does not challenge assumptions underlying moral righteousness. Baldwin's short story explores psychological shadow through the character of Sonny, a young black man who after a lifetime of suffering racist oppression, acknowledges his own capacity to oppress others. This acknowledgment is freeing because it allows him to move from the position of victim to flawed, morally accountable agent. As a man who has suffered and who takes responsibility for his role in his suffering, he is able to play the blues in a way that is freeing also to his brother, an emotionally defended man caught in a psychological straitjacket of justified moral indignation. Sonny's self-knowledge enables him to play the blues in a way that turns the sufferings of his line, including his uncle's having been senselessly murdered by white men, into music, music that touches and opens the souls of his listeners. I believe Baldwin's rendition of psychological shadow in this short story might help create a context in which class discussions could occur with less moral posturing.

The most explosive moment during the semester should illustrate this effort. In response to Mrs. Y's assertion that jobs created by economic globalization help people, particularly women, in foreign countries by providing them with income, a woman student who had done volunteer work in other countries directly challenged her. She said that opinion was based upon her having money that came from hiring those women, and that the women had been better off when they didn't have to have jobs provided by corporations. The class period happened to end at that moment. Mrs. Y came to me in tears and told me, "I can't do this anymore." The student who had confronted her joined us and apologized for hurting her feelings. Once the feelings were acknowledged and somewhat quieted, we all talked. The students spoke of their regard for one another. Mrs. Y emphasized how hard it was to feel herself the outsider. I encouraged Mrs. Y not to withdraw and affirmed the importance of her viewpoint in our groups coming to grips with the material. I tried to explain that the moral requirement was not to begin with the most life-enhancing analysis, but to test one's analysis against the data, consider possible options to the status quo, and then to weigh the social, environmental, and psychological consequences of the different possible courses of action. I emphasized that becoming educated requires reflecting on the stands one most believes in, and realizing that beliefs might change as one learns more. The results of our interaction were mixed. Unfortunately, the critical student became more circumspect in voicing her opinions, usually confining her comments to generalitie s. She, however, did become friendly with Mrs. Y who remained in the class and continued to generate issue-oriented debates. Mrs. Y's continuing in the class eventually resulted in her adopting some of the ideas she originally opposed. As we were crossing paths on campus last year, Mrs. Y stopped me, and said, "your class got to me, Professor. I just handed in a paper on what changes need to be made to make the world a fairer place, and I found myself writing about economic changes and environmental policies."

People possessing differing amounts of privilege thinking together about matters of moral consequence requires that they experience themselves as moral equals in the sense that they all acknowledge the possibility of their own misuse of others. In such a psychological context, the discussants' worth as persons is relatively protected, and judgmental righteousness does not turn the conversation from understanding the issue to evaluating persons. The concept of psychological shadow permits distinguishing between the truth value of ideas and the moral status of the thinkers.

Beginning the semester by exploring the concept of psychological shadow in Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," I would hope to help create a classroom atmosphere in which analysis of social forces such as classism, racism, and sexism could be broached without demonizing any of the discussants. That was part of the inestimable value of the young man's openness. I remember a class during which he began listing some of the privileges he had enjoyed as a white man. He acknowledged that not only was he not naturally entitled to those privileges, but that they were destructive to himself and to others. Beginning an inquiry into how to conceive of more just societies with this kind of self-analysis opens the way for others to participate with less denial and defensiveness, and ultimately makes examination of the influence of class position on one's ideas a possibility. In fact, the students were eventually able to discuss with one another, gingerly, the idea that differences in evaluating policy proposals were related to how much money one has. In response to this idea, one of the women of color said she intended to have lots of money soon. Another, from the Caribbean, a woman who supported political activism, countered that getting rich wasn't the purpose of life. Almost all the students then contributed an opinion about the purpose of life, most emphasizing personal fulfillment, but nearly all voicing some sense of social responsibility. They clearly were wondering about their own relation to money, and thus to class.

In the case of this class, I have no evidence that students internalized the idea that globalization could be conceived of as the disenfranchised of the earth joining forces to gain political power. Many did seem to grasp, however, that it could be conceived of in terms of environmental interrelated-ness. Mostly they came away with a much more informed grasp of economic globalization. That was largely due to my having given over most of the reading and class time to economic issues. The complexity of economic globalization and the lack of familiarity my students had with any of the issues involved seemed to me to require this emphasis. I suspect that conclusion partially resulted from my own lack of command of this subject matter. Certainly, economic globalization was the area in which I was least well read. If I were to offer the course again, I would try to divide the time more equally between the three areas of gender, economics, and environment, and possibly even introduce a fourth area for study--technol ogical global developments. If I really want students not merely to think about globalization in terms of economics, I have to ask them to spend more time on the other areas, giving assignments that make them focus more on connections between economics, gender, technology and environmental integrity. For example, this class was so exemplary in doing the readings that I gave them almost no reading quizzes. Reading quizzes, however, can ask students to make the connections I'm hoping for, e.g., that globalization has immense political possibilities for those seeking social justice, as illustrated by grass roots groups cooperating internationally to create common policy objectives in the Platform for Action endorsed at Beijing.

I also want to point to an interaction that occurred on the last day of class. Students had asked for a party and brought home-made delicacies for sharing. There was more food than people could eat. At the end of the party, I asked students to please take the remnants of what they had brought home with them, and to take the plastic containers most of them had used. I'll never forget the response of the student who had been most exact in her understanding of the texts, particularly the details of those on the environment. She said to throw it all away since it would only be a bother to everyone. No doubt it would have been. Significantly, only two students stayed to help me carry the leftover food to offices where others could eat it and to help me clean up. Both of them were women from islands in the Caribbean where issues of waste accumulation are not hidden behind city garbage pickup routines. Clearly, the gap between cognition and understanding with regard to the issues of consumption and waste, that is be tween intellectual knowledge and internalized transformation, had not been bridged.

I don't know how to build this bridge, except to introduce students to the: idea That there is. a distinction between knowledge and understanding, that knowledge can be as superficial as facility in citing facts, but that understanding requires integration of knowledge with feeling and thus with values, that it often requires integration into one's body, and That it results in changed behavior leading to transformed patterns of action. I think I would use the above anecdote as an illustration.

SYLLABUS FOR ANALYTIC READING AND WRITING

Theme: Globalization: Gender, Economics, and the Environment

TEXTS

"Beyond Beijing, After the Promises of the UN Conference on Women", Issues Quarterly, Vol. II, No 1, fall/winter, 1996

Dorothy Bryant, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You--a novel

Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics

David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

Steve Weidenborner and Dominick Caruso, eds. Writing Research Papers, 5th edition

Class handouts

VIDEOS

Beyond Beijing The International Women's Movement, produced and directed by Salome Chasnoff. Distributed by beyondmedia

The Miracle Planet, volumes one and three of six. Distributed by Ambrose Video Publishing, Inc.

JOURNAL

Your journal will be a major component of your work in this class.

Each entry should be at least one page.

Each entry should have:

a) the date of entry and title of reading;

b) a question for discussion, one that you believe will help illuminate and focus class discussion;

c) a use of the text in developing your own thought.

If possible, entries should draw connections between readings. If you choose to disagree with what you have read, include the evidence upon which your disagreement is based. If you choose to agree with a text, apply one of its ideas in explaining same aspect of your world or life. If you want to express feelings the text has aroused, do so and then try to explain why those feelings have been aroused in you. If a text spurs you to want to change some situation, explain in detail the kind of change you would like to make and how you might go about it. If you wish to compare two texts, make your point fully enough so that a reader can understand the comparison and its significance.

Some classes will begin by students sharing their journal entries. Your journal will be collected daily and graded. Please keep your entries in a folder. Your journal grade will constitute one-third of the term's grade.

PRESENTATIONS

You will be expected to collaborate with other students in leading class discussion of a chapter of one of the texts being studied this semester. Before the presentation, your group will be expected to distribute to the class six to nine study questions you as a group have created. On the day of the presentation, each presenter is to submit to me (typed) the questions s/he contributed, an explanation of why each question chosen seemed important, and a brief summary of the chapter. Your presentation grade will constitute one-eighth of the term's grade.

PAPERS

One research paper about five pages (typed) in length is required. As we read, topics will arise in discussion, and you may volunteer for one that interests you, or you may find your own topic and consult me about using it. The research paper grade will constitute one-third of the term's grade.

QUIZZES

Quizzes on the readings will periodically be given. The sum of these grades will constitute one-eighth of your course grade.

EXAMINATIONS

There will be a final examination. You will be asked to cite texts studied in this course in order to support a thesis you create concerning a topic given in the examination. Your final examination grade will constitute one-rwelfth of the term's grade.

COURSE GRADE

The course grade will be based on the grades of the journals, the presentation, the quizzes, the research paper, and the final examination. Borderline grades (e.g., A- vs. B+) will be decided on the basis of classroom participation.

1. Perhaps this dynamic was enhanced by my sharing with them the story of the time I discovered what it was like to have an intellectual conversation that was not a matter of scoring points. After confessing that I had spent years in school raising my hand in order to have the teacher know I knew the answer, hoping I would have the opportunity to give it before any other student did, I told them of my having attended a conference during which a group of us went into a room at about midnight and brainstormed about ways of organizing against the Vietnam War. I had never before heard people who weren't close friends exchanging ideas with a purpose greater than themselves. (The only other people I had ever heard talk about ideas greater than themselves were preachers of various sorts, and exchange of ideas was clearly not the point.) These anti-war activists appeared to me more engaged in trying to figure out what to do to help end a collective horror than in competing, controlling, or showing off. I was mesmeriz ed and simply listened until the group dispersed at about 4:00 a.m. after having come up with specific goals and a plan of action. I use this anecdote to counter learned habits of performance in the classroom so that students might take advantage of the opportunity for thoughtful conversation that the classroom presents.

Inez Martinez is a professor of English and Co-Director of Women's Studies at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has long been involved n faculty development through College Now, a program that hires high school teachers as college adjuncts to teach college level courses to high school seniors. She is currently completing a manuscript, Can Literature Make You Free? which explores ways reading imaginative literature can contribute to relative psychological freedom.