Making the Most of Good Intentions: Evaluating Global “Development” Work Critically
University of Washington, Department of Geography
Spring 2012
About the course
This course, which I designed and taught at the University of Washington, grew out of my work with the Critical Development Forum (CDF), which was an organization dedicated to re-politicizing "development” and engaging students in critical reflection on their global engagement work. I co-founded the CDF alongside two colleagues I had worked with in Engineers Without Borders on humanitarian engineering projects in Bolivia who had, like me, become disillusioned with the paternalistic and often unethical forms of “voluntourism” that had been growing in popularity at the UW and around the country. Taking inspiration in part from the Relational Poverty Network, our goal was to promote forms of global engagement based on solidarity that recognized that global poverty was inextricably linked to the wealth, power, and militarism of countries like our own. At the same time, drawing from Critical Development Studies more broadly, we sought to challenge hegemonic conceptions of “development” that assumed a single, teleological path of “progress” ending in Western capitalist modernity. While the CDF ran frequent workshops and organized events that drew hundreds of students, the class was an attempt to deepen student learning around these topics and drew heavily on popular education techniques and approaches.
Course Description
When are good intentions not enough? When are they harmful? How can we best use our good intentions to make a difference in issues of poverty, injustice, and inequality? This seminar is intended as a forum for students with good intentions — those of us who serve and advocate for the poor and marginalized locally and globally — to pause from the ongoing momentum of our work for self-reflection. The seminar provides an academic space to complement the student-driven Critical Development Forum.
Throughout the course, we will challenge ourselves to reflect critically and honestly on our motivations and explore the contradictions of our past, current, or future work and advocacy. Readings will unpack the historical, social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental context of our engagement in development and global (in)justice.
This course aims to inspire students to overcome the fear of questioning good intentions in order to deepen the impact of their work and bring about structural social change. At the culmination of the course, students will have the option of partnering with the Critical Development Forum to design activities to engage the University and local community in the themes of the course.
Syllabus available here. The full course curriculum is available upon request for educators. It has details of activities and prep, though incompletely documented as the experimental course was constantly tweaked week by week.
Pedagogical approach and evaluations
Inspired by the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, the course was designed to encourage students to reassess their position within the interwoven systems of development and oppression. Pre- and post-class surveys showed that students became more reflexive about their privilege and unintentional complicity in oppression, more conscious of the pervasive problems of the “developed” world, more confident that we have much to learn from the global South, and ultimately more critical of the idea of development itself. Members of the class also became more interested in political advocacy, and more critical of the global aid industry. The course’s syllabus and pedagogical methods introduced the rich ideas of critical development theory, while simultaneously avoiding the pervasive emotional detachment common when students learn about global injustice through conventional courses.