Evaluating the University of Cape Town's Global Citizenship Programme
Global citizenship programmes are proliferating around the globe, particularly in the higher education environment. The increase in such programmes has resulted from the need to produce socially - responsible graduates equipped to handle the increasingly global, complex and diverse future. Many global citizenship service learning programmes utilise the engaged and critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire. This pedagogy facilitates students in engaging critically with a variety of perspectives and encourages them to think independently. The University of Cape Town's (UCT's) Global Citizenship Programme: Leading for Social Justice was implemented through the Centre for Higher Education Development at the university from 2010 onwards. This programme utilises Freire's critical pedagogy and provides UCT students with a guided, reflective opportunity to think about themselves in the context of the world and about global issues within their local context. An iterative cycle of learning, action and reflection underpins the each of the programme's three modules. Modules can be taken individually or in any order while a student is registered at UCT. The UCT Global Citizenship Programme is the evaluand for this evaluation. The evaluation process consisted of four parts, namely: theory, design, service utilisation and short - term outcome e valuations. As the programme had not been evaluated previously, the programme stakeholders were interested in working with the evaluator to articulate the programme theory, assessing it for plausibility and determining what design and pedagogy is used in other global citizenship programmes. Service utilisation was also of interest to the stakeholders and a process evaluation focusing on whether the programme is targeting and reaching its intended recipients was also undertaken. In addition, the evaluator explored possible short - term outcomes achieved by the GC2 module, to shed light on whether the programme is producing proximal outcomes with its current approach and pedagogy. This evaluation provided an articulated theoretical grounding for the GC Programme. The theory and design evaluation produced an articulated programme theory, from the perspective of the programme stakeholders, which was modified through consultation with the social science literature. The programme was found to be comparable to the majority of other such programmes in terms of its overarching design and pedagogy. The blended - learning approach in the GC Programme was found to be a unique feature compared with other global citizenship programmes. The process evaluation of the service utilisation found that the programme reaches a small proportion of its envisioned target population, despite two of the three modules having reached their maximum class size (~100 students). This is due to the current broad definition of the target population used, which effectively includes all UCT students. Females and students from the Commerce and Humanities faculties are over - represented in the programme when compared to the general UCT student population. A word cloud analysis for the short - term outcome e valuation indicated that it is possible that the programme participants may be achieving the outcomes for GC2. Due to the fact that there is limited evaluation research in the area of global citizenship programmes, this study makes a contribution to this research and evaluation area. The recommendations suggested in this study provide workable improvements that the GC Programme staff could make to this largely sound and popular programme. By taking, in particular, the recommended steps to measure outcomes, the GC Programme could provide a much stronger case for the impact of this well - conceived programme on UCT's students.
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