Work Integrated Learning
Welcome to Interdependence: Global Solidarity and Local Actions. We’re glad you’re here. We created this online inquiry and action toolkit, because we – the people of this beautiful, complex, fractured and unequal world – often do not understand and embrace our interdependence well enough.
Embracing the truth of interdependence calls us toward new kinds of civic, ecological, and global understanding. This understanding begins from the foundational reality of interdependence as our human-ecological condition. It asks how we operate ethically within the communities and systems of which we are part and which support us. That question, rooted in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call “to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide,” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 42) must also influence how we think about our capacities to know and to do. The lens of interdependence concretises the global through the specificity of the local. Rather than first focusing attention on global governance structures that often seem far away and abstract, it invites learners to think from their own identities, experiences, and spaces of civic action and influence, drawing connections between those localised insights to then illuminate rooted understandings of global challenges, goals, and governance structures. It is a contribution to civic and global thinking aligned with John Cameron’s conception of “thick global citizenship” and Vanessa Andreotti’s approach to critical global citizenship, both of which invite learners and civic actors to consider their identities, assumptions, and critical roles at home rather than imagining solutions for others elsewhere around the world.
The separate modules and pages throughout the Toolkit all offer points of entry for educators and learners in an embrace of interdependence. Collectively, they are a calling-in to thinking and working with others who have dedicated themselves to building more just systems and approaches to being in community together, and an invitation to explore another way of thinking, learning, and being. These modules and pages demonstrate how exploring interdependence and behaving as an ethical and critical global citizen does not require going anywhere and can be done from anywhere.
Creators hail from around the world; we are educators and organisers who share a commitment to building communities that are more just, inclusive, and sustainable.
The creation of these pages highlight what can begin to happen when we work in community, with shared purpose, while recognising the diversity of expertise, backgrounds, identities and experiences of all people - particularly those members within communities who are silenced and marginalised.
As a teaching and learning resource, the Toolkit is deliberately structured as an evolving project, but it does embody several themes. These include:
A commitment to our planet and shared humanity, better understood through the lens of interdependence.
The pages deepen our thinking and skills in relation to those themes. The pages introduce key concepts and ask readers to engage in self-reflection and opportunities for growth in relation to those concepts. Some of the pages are more explicitly skills-oriented. The analysis across the pages ranges from our day-to-day choices and lives, to how our civic, personal, professional, and policy choices affect other people nearby and around the world.
The pages also prompt us to consider the roles of history, structural violence, ecology, local community organisations and actions, and intergovernmental organisations and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (knowledge-building). Large entities and ideas are intertwined with our individual capacities to listen well, see our own assumptions, challenge power and hold institutions accountable through cultural humility and intercultural praxis (skill-building).
Contact us if you would like to submit content for the toolkit.