Reshaping Social Relations in Educational Theory and Practice: A Global Teaching and Decolonizing Collaboration

Abstract:

In fall 2018, students from Adelphi University in Garden City, New York and from the University of South Africa in Pretoria embarked on a pilot collaboration to engage conversation and cross-experience exchange. The initiative was rooted in the Adelphi course entitled, “The Reshaping of Social Relations in the Modern World” and through a network of students connected with the University of South Africa (UNISA) Department of Anthropology and Archaeology and decolonizing studies and projects in South Africa. This article provides a theoretical framing for this collaboration and why it holds tremendous potential for engagement, heightened global awareness and developing kinship cross-borders as well as a discussion of the process and the content of this engagement and experience through the lens of student participants’ reflections. Intrinsic to this experience is an exploration of how a psychology of inequity can be challenged.