SUAS Educational Development: National Survey of Third Level Students on Global Development
Saloon, Provost's House, Trinity College
09.00, Friday, 14 December 2012
Ladies and Gentlemen,
You’re all very welcome to the Saloon of the Provost’s House on this rainy December morning. I’m delighted to see so many colleagues from higher education, as well as representatives from NGOs, the media, and government bodies. We welcome, in particular, representatives from SUAS Educational Development, which commissioned today’s survey, representatives from Amárach, which carried out the survey, and from Irish Aid, which funded it.
The presence of so many of you, from so many different sectors, is testament to the wide-ranging importance of the survey whose results we are launching today. It’s a national survey of attitudes, activism, and learning on global development among third level students in Ireland.
A thousand students were asked, through an online questionnaire, about their attitudes towards developing countries and Ireland’s development commitments; they were asked about their own roles and confidence to take action, and about their current engagement with development organisations.
The results are fascinating - sometimes unexpected, sometimes inspiring. Martin Tomlinson of Suas Educational Development and Mark Nolan of Amárach Research will shortly take you through the key results, methodology, and implications.
The survey is of great importance to the education and development sectors. As an educator, I’d like to say a few words now about my understanding of the survey’s importance.
International Development is a priority research area for Trinity. The Trinity International Development Initiative, or TIDI as we call it, was established five years ago to coordinate the College’s approach. More than a hundred Trinity staff members across eighteen Schools identify as having a research interest in Development, including researchers in biodiversity, environment, computer science, human rights, economics, and health. We currently have over seventy research projects on development, and over forty courses with development content on offer at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
International development has joined the growing number of areas which we, in Trinity, treat as multidisciplinary and cross-faculty. Other examples are neuroscience and ageing. Interdisciplinarity is one of our core education principles. We believe that problems are best solved, and inspiration best gained, by combining strengths across disciplines and levels of analysis.
Combining strengths means going beyond the college walls, so TIDI also facilitates and supports collaborations with development partners, both nationally and internationally. SUAS is an important partner with a long history of collaboration with Trinity, including the delivery of non-formal development programmes for our students.
Central to our approach is our recognition that international development is a research area of global importance, and one which students seek to engage with on many levels, both through academic learning and directly through extracurricular activity. But how exactly do they seek to engage? What is their current level of knowledge? When approaching global development issues, do they feel empowered or challenged?
If we don’t know the answers to such questions we can’t design the right courses, nor find the right ways to empower students through volunteering. Thanks to this survey, we can now begin to replace assumption and correlation with concrete data.
I suspect that anyone – in education or development – reading this survey is going to come up against surprises. That alone indicates its importance. Overall, the findings here are encouraging in that they confirm the appetite for development education among students, and the willingness to take action through volunteering. But there are causes for concern. Personally, I was concerned that while two thirds of students said they “wanted to learn more about development issues”, only 18 percent had actually taken a development course. Of those who hadn’t taken a course, 41 percent said that they weren’t aware of any.
So a student body with a large appetite for learning about development lacks information. Development, in Trinity and I’m sure in other universities, is multidisciplinary, so whether a student is studying medicine, IT, law, or economics, there are opportunities to incorporate development into the programme - but apparently students don’t know this. I’m going to ask the Dean of Undergraduate Studies here in Trinity to consider what action should be taken about this.
Insofar as it relates to volunteering, Development is not only academic but extracurricular. Students who never take a course on development will often familiarise themselves on key issues through volunteering.
Extracurricular is a core component of a Trinity education. We know, from employer surveys and from our own experience, that what goes on outside the classroom is crucial for the whole development of the student.
Volunteering is particularly valuable since it develops initiative, organisation skills, event management, altruism, and engagement with other cultures. Volunteering and fund-raising are potentially great ways for students to feel they can “make a difference” in the world.
I was delighted to find that 63 percent of students in this survey have volunteered at least once in the last year, and an impressive 19 percent volunteer every week. However the survey also found that students’ confidence in their ability to bring about change is relatively low. Only a third is confident about influencing decisions in their local area, and only 20 percent about influencing decisions in the rest of the world.
This is a wake-up-call finding. Such lack of confidence can lead to political, social and civic apathy, and when that happens, we have failed in our core duty as educators, which is to provide engaged and proactive citizens ready to effect change, confident that they have the knowledge and the skills to do so.
So I’m extremely grateful to SUAS, Amárach, and Irish aid for commissioning, conducting and funding this important survey. I look forward to the elucidation of the various findings, and I hope that all of us, within the education and development sectors, will use these findings to inform our approach, so that we can deliver improved services and genuinely inspire citizens with their ability to make a difference.
Thank you very much.
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