Session Outline

This interactive workshop explores ways in which personal tutoring and academic advising practices can engage students in creating norms that address intersectional inequalities, support nonviolence, promote social responsibility, and foster equitable relationships. Based on completed mixed methods research, focused on the prevention of gender-based violence through formal education provision in India, Jamaica, Uganda, the UK and Brazil, it presents a participatory and collaborative approach to co-creating globally relevant and inclusive learning practices, in a distance learning global teacher education programme, that has served postgraduate students successfully across twenty-three countries. Situated in the principles of UN SDGs 4 (inclusive and equitable quality education),5 (gender equality) and 10 (reduced inequalities) the shared practices are rooted in the holistic development of students as competent and capable professionals, the enhancement of their skills, knowledge, attitude, and capability, incorporating their lived and living experiences. The design, developed through an iterative process of consultation, ensures that the approach to academic advising and personal tutoring, in online spaces, is sustainable, adaptable and maintains purposeful context relevance for students (McIntosh, Troxel, Grey, Van Den Wijngaard, Thomas, 2021). The shared research informed resources shaping students' learning are cost-effective and rooted in democratic and social justice principles that are centred on strengthening the voice, visibility and agency of students in an empowering and enabling process of learning. The design and content shaping students' learning, which will be presented and explored in the workshop, is informed by an interdisciplinary approach that draws on and combines critical pedagogy (Giroux, 2010; Hooks, 1994), creative and performing arts (Boal,1995), an ecological framework for human development (Johnson, 2008) and integrative and intercultural therapeutic practice (Ababio & Littlewood, 2019). Critical pedagogy is embedded in students' activities to develop critical awareness and enable reflection and action for change within self and others. Creative and performing arts are integrated to enhance self-expression, co-creation and multimodal ways of noticing, expressing and challenging lived realities and to build awareness, reflection and potential for transformation. Applying an ecological framework for human development to learning design creates space for the exploration of interconnections, interdependence and independence in challenging inequalities within the learning process. Integrative and intercultural therapeutic practice is drawn on to facilitate sustainable wellbeing and develop empathy, across diversity, to function and live in constructive and fulfilling ways within and beyond students' HE studies.

Learning Outcomes

Bibliography