Renaissance, Sharing, and Belonging: A Messy Language of Hope

Abstract

Background/Context This essay is a part of a special issue that emerges from a year-long faculty seminar at Teachers College, Columbia University. The seminar's purpose has been to examine in fresh terms the nexus of globalization, education, and citizenship. Participants come from diverse fields of research and practice, among them art education, comparative education, curriculum and teaching, language studies, philosophy of education, social studies, and technology. They bring to the table different scholarly frameworks drawn from the social sciences and humanities. They accepted invitations to participate because of their respective research interests, all of which touch on education in a globalized world. They were also intrigued by an all-too-rare opportunity to study in seminar conditions with colleagues from different fields, with whom they might otherwise never interact given the harried conditions of university life today. Participants found the seminar generative in terms of ideas about globalization, education, and citizenship. Participants also appreciated what, for them, became a novel and rich occasion for professional and personal growth. Purpose/Objective Torres-Guzman encourages the reader to consider globalization as a “renaissance” and to embark on the task of rescuing the debris left by modernity to construct a language of hope. Using the rescued concept of hybridity, she foreshadows what might be an intergenerational offering as she reflects on education as sharing and citizenship as belonging. Conclusions/Recommendations Torres-Guzman proposes that a fresh look at hybridity can render a rich concept for constructing resistance to conformity and uniformity, and for renewing a commitment to a multicultural, multilingual, egalitarian, ecologically-sound, and democratic world.