Chasing Encounters

Chilean born Marlen Mondaca describes her experiences within the nonprofit organization sector. She provides some useful information about what it means to work with international and development organizations such as Seeds of Hope, Save the Children, Plan International, and OXFAM. Rooted on a rights based approach, Marlen explains that some of the objectives of these organizations are alleviating poverty, supporting local organizations, providing formal and non-formal education programs on health, nutrition and child & family protection among others.

Marlen offers specific information about the necessary skills anyone needs to pursue a career in this sector: 1) Having a good theoretical and historical foundation of international issues, 2) being able to make management or technical decisions, 3) having some knowledge of statistics, and program evaluation, 4) having good communication skills to connect with donors, managers and program officers, 5) having some experience in areas such literacy, numeracy, health, nutrition or experience in the region, 6) having knowledge of languages from the communities and 7) becoming a volunteer or finding a placement in any of the organizations.

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Biography:

Marlen Mondaca, Special Advisor to the CEO on Strategy and Thought Leadership. She assumed her current position in May 2020 following nine years as Director of International Programs and Chief of Programs and Policy Officer. She is a champion of children’s rights and gender equality. She began her career working with refugees in Guatemala and Honduras and then went on to work as a Public Policy Advisor for Oxfam Great Britain and Oxfam Canada based out of Santiago, Chile. While at Oxfam, she helped expand programming in the areas of violence against women, women and trade, and food security. Marlen is known for her long-standing commitment to programs and policies that are rooted in social justice and are holistic and gender transformative. Marlen believes that the international aid sector needs to re-imagine itself using principles of social justice, political ecology and localization. Marlen holds Masters’ Degrees in Journalism.

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Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, January 27). CES5E2 – https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e2-international-aid-sector

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Sources:

https://www.savethechildren.ca/

https://www.oxfam.ca/

https://plan-international.org/

In today’s podcast, we have Yecid Ortega from the University of Toronto. He sees himself as a citizen of the world, and his work certainly reflects an international perspective to education and research. With a very marginalized background, he studied primary and secondary education in public schools and got interested in learning languages to understand the world. He tells the story of his life from poverty in Colombia, to working in the USA and to becoming a Canadian citizen. From a very young age, Yecid knew education was key to engage with communities and move socially. He noticed the idea of English as a symbol of power and has worked vigorously to dismantle it through critical education. His epistemological vision is engaged in a future of decolonial praxis in which educators, researchers and stakeholders work towards a better future for humanity.

*Biography:

Yecid Ortega is a Ph.D. candidate in the program of Language and Literacies Education (LLE) and the specialization program in Comparative International, and Development Education (CIDE) at OISE – University of Toronto, Canada. His general research interests are within decolonial critical ethnographic and case study approaches to research. Yecid explores how globalization, capitalism and neoliberalism influence language policy decision-making processes and their effects on classroom practices and students’ lived experiences.

*Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, January 13). CES5E1 – From critical education to decolonial praxis. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e1-from-critical-education-to-decolonial-praxis

*Sources:

Ortega, Y. (2020). “Rebeldes en acción”: A case study in English teaching in a marginalized Colombian high school. In L. M. Berger (Ed.), Social justice and international education: Research, practice, and perspectives (pp. 111–134). NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

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Coelho, D & Ortega, Y. (2020). Pluralistic approaches in early language education: shifting paradigms in language didactics. In S.M. Lau & S. Van Viegen (Eds.), Plurilingual pedagogies: Critical and creative endeavors for equitable language in education. (pp. 145-160).Taylor Francis.

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Ortega, Y. (2019). “Teacher, ¿Puedo hablar en Español?” A reflection on plurilingualism and translanguaging

In this metaepisode, we had a great conversation with El CafeciTO podcast produced by Latinx students at the University of Toronto, we learned about the challenges and the possibilities of creating and producing a podcast that supports the work of our communities.

More information:

https://www.elcafecitopodcast.ca/

With a Filipino background, Monica Batac and Hilary Naluz shared with us their work with the communities. They defy the idea that Filipinos do not go to post-secondary by demonstrating that both of them are pursuing graduate studies. With their community-oriented work, they hope to provide culturally responsive materials to youth as they engage with parents and other relatives to preserve the language and culture. One of their main goals is to help students maintain their heritage while working tirelessly towards their academic success and well-being by practicing self-care and appreciating where they are coming from.

*Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2020, December 10). CES4E7 – Filipino Community Engagement. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces4e7-filipino-community-engagement

Shakespeare said that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” Acting and performance are at the centre of this episode as Nae Hanashiro Avila, a PhD student here in Toronto, discusses how identity and performance relate. Of Peruvian-Japanese descent, her mixed ethnical background and her expertise in performing arts begin a conversation about how we can be true to who we are as our different identities collide: Are they performed according or in opposition to expectations? She argues that however we express our identities, we need to be aware of how those performances reproduce or resist power relations. Her experience with theatre and the performing arts inspired her current research focusing on exploring feminist public performances in the Latin American context to contest power in the form of neoliberalism and patriarchy.

*Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2020, November 25). CES4E6 – https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces4e6-performance-arts-reproducing-or-resisting-power

Growing up, reading was Adriana’s way to travel the world. The places, people, and cultures she read about motivated her to go and see it for herself. Finding beauty in every place she has visited, her experiences have inspired her research. Where does one experience the best of nature? Patagonia. History and architecture? Turkey. Night life? Hong Kong and Barcelona. Site-seeing aside, at the heart of her travels has been the opportunity to connect with people and learn from others about their cultures. While travelling to learn Chinese Mandarin in Taiwan, she serendipitously stumbled upon her current research focus. Listen to hear how this former computer programmer became impassioned about education and how the goal should be bringing together different languages and cultures, ultimately learning from each other.

*Biography:

Adriana Marroquin-Rodriguez is a Ph.D. student in Higher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto in Canada, specializing in Comparative and International Education. Her areas of interest include student mobility, international student experience, and critical internationalization studies. Adriana has travelled extensively and has developed a keen interest in East Asian culture and knowledge traditions. Through her thesis research, she seeks to promote reflection and conversations about the differences and commonalities among different cultures, knowledge traditions and about what we can learn from each other. Besides, under the direction of Professor Elizabeth Buckner, Adriana contributes to a research project team that is empirically examining how different higher education institutions in Canada and the world frame and practice internationalization.

*Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2020, November 11). CES4E5 – Travelling as inspiration for research. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces4e5-travelling-as-inspiration-for-research

*Sources:

Buckner, E., Clerk, S., Marroquin-Rodriguez, A., and Zhang, Y. (Accepted). Symbolic Commitments, Strategic Actions: How Canadian Colleges and Universities Frame Internationalization”. Journal article accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education.

Professor Elizabeth Buckner:

https://elizabethbuckner.com/

Professor Ruth Hayhoe: https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/lhae/Faculty/384/Ruth_Hayhoe.html

Drawing from her personal experiences and a critical lens, Dr. Ruth Hayhoe shares a brief history and background of the concepts of comparative, international and development research and education. She illustrates the complexity of this rich field, emphasizing that CIDE’s main goal should be about learning from others on equal terms. The paradigm that the south must learn from the north can and should be challenged. How does one begin to do this? Bidirectional listening. In this way, each country can choose its own political systems based on international cooperation rather than domination.

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Biography:

Dr. Ruth Hayhoe is a professor in the Department of Leadership and Higher Education at the University of Toronto (OISE). Dr. Hayhoe's research has mainly related to Chinese higher education and educational relations between East Asia and the West. She has been interested in the ways in which cultural values and epistemologies from Eastern civilizations may provide a resource for new thinking in global higher education development. She is also interested in the intersection between Asian ways of knowing and women's ways of knowing, and questions of gender in cross-cultural leadership, topics stimulated by her personal experience of institutional leadership in an Asian context

*Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2020, November 5). CES4E4 – Comparative, International, Development Education and Research. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces4e4-comparative-international-development-education-and-research

*Sources:

Hayhoe, R. (2014). China through the Lens of Comparative Education: The selected works of Ruth Hayhoe. Routledge.

Sivasubramaniam, M., & Hayhoe, R. (2018). Religion and Education: Comparative and international perspectives. Symposium Books Ltd.

Language and how we communicate with each other is at the centre of this conversation with multilingual and multinational, Dr. Uju Anya. With intelligence and good humour, she provides a healthy reality check: contemporary society is multilingual and we need to face it, accept it and educate with that framework in mind. For her, this necessitates changing up how language plays a role in the classroom to reflect interactions in everyday society. How do we do this? We need to reexamine the biases and purist notions we have internalized about language. Teachers, in particular, must move from being arbiters (police) of language and become the enablers of cultural and linguistic diversity.

*Biography:

Dr. Uju Anya is an assistant professor of second language learning in the Curriculum and Instruction Department and a research affiliate with the Center for the Study of Higher Education at The Pennsylvania State University. She specializes in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and second language learning with a particular focus on race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in the language classroom. She has expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion in educational policy and curriculum design, applied linguistics as a practice of social justice, intercultural communication, as well as service-learning and civic engagement in secondary and university-level language programs.

*Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2020, October 28). CES4E3 – Policing Language. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces4e2-policing-language

*Sources:

Anya, U. (2016). Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil. Taylor & Francis.

Anya, U. (2020). African Americans in World Language Study: The Forged Path and Future Directions. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 40, 97–112.

Norin Taj takes us on a journey from and back to Pakistan in this conversation. We start with growing up in her homeland, a place that contributed to her identities of being South Asian as well as Muslim - two complex and intricate entities that cannot be separated. Moreover, she shares stories of teacher training and teaching in Pakistan before immigrating to Canada, a move that provided her the opportunity to continue being an educator and a researcher. All of these experiences led her to return to Pakistan for her research that leaves us pondering two key questions: Should education focus on numbers/budgets or on actual education for the most marginalized? and how can girls’ education make use of better terms for empowerment?

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Biography:

Norin Taj is a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership and Policy with a specialization in Comparative, International and Development Education at OISE. Her research interests are in the global policy discourse on girls’ education and its understanding in the South Asian context, particularly in Pakistan. When not working, she enjoys painting and writing poetry.

*Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2020, September 30). CES4E2 – “Empowering” girls education in Pakistan. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces4e2-empowering-girls-education-in-pakistan

*Sources:

1.Monkman, K., & Hoffman, L. (2013). Girls’ education: The power of policy discourse. School Field, 11(1), 63-84.

2. Khoja-Moolji, S. (2015). Suturing together girls and education: An investigation into the social (re) production of girls’ education as a hegemonic ideology. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 9(2), 87-107.

3. Meyer, J. W., & Jepperson, R. L. (2000). The ‘actors’ of modern society: The cultural construction of social agency. Sociological theory, 18(1), 100-120.

Opening this season, Canadian Mexican JP Mathias teaches how if you follow the water, you can begin to understand abstract concepts such as development/underdevelopment or how political processes affect various groups differently within a community in a tangible way. Drawing from his educational background and from his work with different organizations, he discusses and questions water management in Indigenous territories (Pueblos Originarios) in Mexico illustrating how power relations and political processes affect marginalized communities by various stakeholders in the water question. He suggests that better education can potentially raise awareness of water inequalities, whether in Mexico or here in Canada, allowing for communities to imagine a new narrative that ensures equal access for all.

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Biography

Jon Paul Mathias is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the historical constitution of racial disparities in access to water in Mexico City. He has an MA in Political Science from the University of Toronto and a BA in International Relations from the Universidad Iberoamericana. He has worked as a researcher for the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Geografía (INEGI) and the Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI), both in Mexico City where he is originally from.

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*Suggested citation*

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2020, August 5). CES4E1 – Water Inequality in Mexico. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ce-s4e1-water-inequality-in-mexico

*Sources*

Delaney, D. (2002). The Space That Race Makes. Professional Geographer, 54(1), 6–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00309

Radcliffe, S. A. (2017). Decolonising geographical knowledges. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(3), 329–333. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12195

Swyngedouw, E., Kaïka, M., & Castro, E. (2002). Urban water: A political-ecology perspective. Built Environment, 28(2), 124–137. https://doi.org/10.2307/23288796

Watts, M. (2003). Development and Governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24(1), 6–34. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315258027-26

Vitz, M. (2018). A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://bit.ly/2EY0rJU