Didactic or Dialogical ? The shifting nature of INGO development education programming in England and Canada

This paper looks at the changing nature of international development nongovernmental organizations’ development education programming in England and Canada. A documentary analysis of the changes in Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK’s development education materials illuminates the shift in international development agencies’ education programmes since the late 1990s. A review of a selection of materials produced by Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada between 1999 and 2007 illustrates the trend of international development agencies moving away from programming that is longer-term, participatory, and dialogical with an emphasis on collective social change towards programming that is shorter-term, individualistic, and didactic, and which reinforces the status quo.


Introduction
International development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in England 1 and Canada have been producing development education programming for domestic audiences since the late 1950s and late 1960s, respectively.The purpose of this programming is twofold and interrelated: to increase understanding of the issues that create conditions of inequality globally, and for people to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to make informed decisions and take actions that will positively transform society.This education work from the international development sector is important because it has contributed to the creation of learning paradigms that have facilitated awareness and understanding of global themes and issues, both in the formal education sector (through programming at schools, colleges, and universities) and the informal sector (through community-based programming) for over 50 years.Through their education programming, INGOs, with their connections to people and organizations in the global South, have been able to facilitate learning relationships between people living in different global contexts.Furthermore, INGOs in England and Canada have connected the ethical imperative to address global poverty with learning frameworks that articulate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to carry out this work.
This paper explores the shift in the nature of INGO development education programming from a sustained dialogical focus of learning towards programming that emphasizes the shorter-term outcomes of fund-raising and advocacy campaigns.England and Canada were chosen as study sites because of their historical relationship with INGO development education programming.Both countries have, during certain periods, valued the educational contributions of INGOs highly.Development education support from the state, foundations, and within the sector itself has encouraged longer-term participatory learning.England and Canada also provide interesting contextual settings for this study due to the differences in their historical relationships with INGO development education.Comparatively, England has a history of relatively well-integrated INGO development education programming rooted in the formal education sector, while Canada has had a fractured history of INGO development education marked by periods of both international recognition for its programming and a dearth of programming due to scarcity of resources.Despite the different contexts of support, INGOs in these two countries have similarly shifted away from models of dialogically focused development education programming.One of the few INGOs still offering education programming in Canada, Free the Children's Me to We, has a popular brand that recruits school-aged children and youths as fund-raising and campaign leaders.In England, while Oxfam and UNICEF still offer INGO development education, most of the others have withdrawn from education programming in order to focus on campaigns and fund-raising.Curiously, many of the English INGOs downsized or eliminated their education programming between 2008 and 2009, a time when government support for INGO development education programming was abundant.
To illuminate the changes in recent INGO development education programming, this paper examined development education documents produced by two sister organizations -Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada -between 1999 and 2010.These organizations were chosen because they each differ in terms of their funding contexts and levels of funding dependency.Save the Children Canada is heavily dependent on government funding while Save the Children UK has a wide range of funding sources besides government funding (Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada's 2010 Annual Reports).Save the Children was established in the UK in 1919, while its Canadian sister committee was formed in 1921.The nature of the relationship between Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada is indicative of the relationships between the large founding INGOs from England (for instance, Oxfam and Plan International) and the United States (such as CARE and World Vision) and their smaller Canadian counterparts.Exploring sister organizations that have similar missions and mandates provides an opportunity to understand how the organizations' experiences within different country contexts relates to decisions regarding their development education programming.This paper briefly explores INGO development education programming over the past five decades, then focuses on how these shifts have unfolded since the late 1990s through a documentary analysis of education materials from Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada.The changes that these two sister organizations, with vastly different capacities and from different contexts, have made to their education programming provides a revealing look at how individual organizations' conceptualizations of development education have been modified to suit organizational interests.

The shifting nature of INGO development education programming in England and Canada
This section looks at a few of the key areas that have most influenced INGO development education in Canada and England, starting with the recognition both countries have received from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC) for being -or in Canada's case, having been -key supporters of development education programming (McDonnell et al., 2008;Smillie, 1985: 132).England's foundation for development education began with a strong INGO sector that is rooted in its history with solidarity movements, such as the anti-slavery movement dating back to 1839, and with early incarnations of development work and campaigns and advocacy, including the work of Save the Children circa 1919.Organizations such as Oxfam and Save the Children have founding offices in England and international operations with sister organizations around the world, giving them a powerful global reach.Domestic public support provides these organizations with a large, committed donor base that enables the sector to be relatively autonomous.Public support makes the INGO sector an important ally to the government's international cooperation department and the foreign office, guaranteeing the larger INGOs ongoing funding regardless of the political party in office.This political strength has allowed English INGOs to support development education programming even when the ruling government does not, as was the case for many years when the Conservatives were in office and INGOs funded the development education centres (DECs).
Canada's INGO sector grew out of the sister organizations and committees of the larger founding organizations in England.Civic engagement with international issues took place in a more ad hoc fashion, with women's groups and church committees across urban and rural Canada (Mundy et al., 2007;Cook, 1995;Compton-Brouwer, 2010) that were neither large enough nor coordinated enough to garner the sustained attention of the public or the government.Canada's international solidarity movement was activated in the late 1960s with the first cohort of volunteers who had returned from living overseas in developing countries.The volunteer-sending programmes -CUSO, SUCO, and WUSC 2 -were the first international development programmes to pique the interest of the Canadian government and the returned volunteers initiated Canada's first development education programmes (Smillie, 1985;Morrison, 1998).
Government support and dependency on government funding are two interrelated areas that have greatly influenced the autonomy of  (Smillie, 1985;Smillie and Helmich, 1999).During that period, the Canadian government supported learning centres (DECs) across the country.Canadian INGOs in the 1970s helped support the centres, but as government funding for the centres increased, INGO support declined.Similarly, when government funding became available for English development education in the mid-1990s, INGO financial support for the DECs dried up.Despite Canada's own partisan flipflopping between the Conservative and Liberal parties, in the end neither of the parties supported development education.The Liberal party that had for decades funded development education was the same party that cut all of its funding during a massive budget slash across all public sectors.The INGO sector, highly dependent on government funding, also suffered deep budgetary cuts at that time and was unable to save the learning centres.
The English INGO sector's financial autonomy and its ability to do advocacy work have historically prevented any government-initiated development education die-offs.In 1969, INGOs formed an arms-length, independently funded advocacy organization, the World Development Movement, to carry out longer-term advocacy work.The INGOs' large, dedicated constituencies also allowed them to campaign on fair trade, with little worry over losing government support.Canadian INGOs that do not align their policies and ideological stance with the government, or are financially dependent, have difficulties gaining a strong position of partnerships with the government.In 2010, Canadian INGOs with strong advocacy positions saw their long-term partnerships with CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) terminated, underscoring the government's intolerance of dissenting voices. 3

INGO and development education networks as spaces for citizen engagement
The strength of England's INGO sector lies in its capacity to provide citizens with a mechanism for voicing their support for social transformation.In the early 1990s the network of DECs, the Development Education Association (DEA), had grown to over 250 affiliated organizational members from INGO, community (CCIC) and later the Provincial and Regional Councils to increase civic engagement with international cooperation issues.Their role as liaisons between the INGO sector and the government is unfortunately compromised by fears of de-funding that were not unfounded.In 2010, two long-term partners of CIDA, KAIROS and CCIC, lost their funding.Unlike England, Canadian INGOs do not have a wider network of support, a strong constituency base that extends throughout the continent, or a network dedicated to development education practice and policy.

Development education in the formal education sector
One of the central debates about development education is in regards to who should be responsible for producing development education (Bourn, 2008;2012).Is development education the responsibility of schools, INGOs, or both?England's long history of teaching about international issues in schools (Stephans, 1986: 121) has contributed to the ability of English INGOs to successfully advocate for development education programming in schools.With the support of DfID, development education became somewhat mainstreamed through the addition of the global dimension in the curriculum in 2003.Even so, development educators have been noting that as schools in England have introduced more global themes into the curriculum, INGOs have responded by withdrawing from education programming to focus on campaigns and fund-raising (McCloskey, 2011: 38).Canadian schools had relatively little exposure to an international curriculum prior to the 1970s (Evans et al., 2009: 25).An added barrier for Canadians is that international development is a federal concern and education is under provincial jurisdiction.To forward an agenda of development education in schools, CIDA would have to align with 13 provincial ministries of education.While we are seeing more international and global themes introduced in the provincial curriculum, the role of INGOs and CIDA in Canadian schools is less clear.
With the push to get development education into schools and the overall professionalization of the INGO sector, in the late 1980s it became the norm to hire people with formal teacher training in order to make better connections with schools.This trend of professionalization curbed other INGO staff members from working on development education projects in an unstructured way, as was more common in the 1970s and early to mid-1980s.The result of these changes was that development educators became increasingly isolated within their organizations.As education, or learning for the sake of learning, moved further away from the organization's bottom line, INGO development educators faced more pressures to gain tangible results from their work.This translated into schools becoming arenas for intense competition among INGOs.Children and young people became a coveted target market (Norris, 2011) for INGOs looking to recruit campaign supporters, to establish their brand, and to increase fund-raising potential.

Local to global issues and the marginalization of development education
Both countries struggled with the local-to-global issues concerning refugees and domestic populations of people whose countries of origin fall in the global South category.Addressing Canada's colonizing past, its abuse of Canada's First Peoples, is seen as a local issue by federal funders.England's colonizer past also causes conflict for development educators.While there is technically a geographical division between the 'subjects' of development education and the 'learners' that allows for an international allocation, the reality is that since the 1950s formerly colonized peoples have become English citizens, landed immigrants, or refugees, which has created a much more complex 'local' development context.The tendency to marginalize development education into a category that addresses only international contexts pushes educators further away from related areas such as critical multiculturalism and anti-racism that assist students in understanding the more complex localto-global context that exists.Furthermore, federal budget cuts, in Canada and in England during the Thatcher regime, placed a heavy burden on poor and racialized communities.At a point when development education as part of a solidarity movement could have brought equity-seeking groups closer together, the budget cuts, the formalization of development education within INGOs, and the focus on overseas programme delivery succeeded in setting these groups even further apart.

Motivations and methods for INGO development education programming
In order to understand the nature and implications of INGOs' choices for development education programming, two conceptual areas were explored: the societal purposes of education and humanitarian ethics.The first set of concepts, from the work of Susan Askew and Eileen Carnell (1998), provides a framework for assessing the underlying beliefs about the collective purpose of education that are embedded within INGOs' choices of method of development education programming.The second set of concepts, drawn from the work of Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (2008), provides a typology of humanitarian ethical positionings used to investigate the motivations behind INGOs' choices for development education programming.Askew and Carnell's (1998) research identifies four primary types of education: liberatory (educating for social change emphasizing the individual), social justice (educating for social change emphasizing the collective), client-centred (educating to maintain status quo emphasizing individual achievement), and functionalist (educating to maintain status quo through reinforcement of social and cultural norms).These types are located on a social regulation-social transformation continuum.Client-centred and functionalist methods can be used as tools for social regulation, and liberatory and social justice methods for social transformation (Askew and Carnell, 1998: 83-96; see Figure 1).Although their educational typology is not specifically a development education model, it offers a range of educational practices and approaches that are found within and applied to development education programming.Askew and Carnell draw on a range of literature on models of education, including, but not limited to, Criticos's (1993) work on experiential learning and social transformation, Grundy's (1987) work on education as a dialogical and emancipatory practice, and UNESCO's (1996) report on life-long learning.(Barnett & Weiss, 2008: 43-8).These ethical frameworks that INGOs might use to determine the rationale behind their primary relief and development programming can be similarly applied to their development education programming as it is directly or indirectly related to their mandate of poverty alleviation.Barnett and Weiss argue that humanitarian organizations claim authority based on their expertise and moral positioning and that it is through their moral authority that they are most apt to demonstrate their 'power' .The 'normative techniques' used in their advocacy, campaigns, and communications are an attempt to influence the attitudes and behaviours of corporations, governments, and individuals in order to 'improve the lives of the world's poor and victimized' (ibid.: 40).

Educational models
Through these ethical positionings, Barnett and Weiss interrogate the power relations between the comparatively wealthy INGOs and their Southern counterparts.Deontological or duty-based ethics are based on the Kantian notion of an obligation to help humanity and the fact that some actions are 'good' regardless of their overall consequences, for instance, giving to charity, but not addressing root causes of poverty.Humanity and 'others' are often dichotomized abstractions (distant, impoverished, racialized, and in need).In a consequential ethical position, one feels morally obligated to act to bring about the best possible outcome.The end justifies the means, often with no co-determination by the recipients of the action.This focus on outcome and taking the shortest/fastest route to an achievable goal may or may not cause harm along the way.Work in conflict regions and in emergency situations would influence an INGO's inclination towards this ethical positioning.A virtuebased ethical positioning is one centred on an individual's desire or moral imperative to do 'good' , to satisfy personal intentions and demonstrate 'heroism, compassion, and courage' (Barnett and Weiss, 2008: 45).The wider perception of humanitarian workers is that they are virtuous in nature.Finally, in contrast to the other three positionings, situated ethics is generated in collaboration with Southern partners and is contextual and dialogical in nature.The underlying premise of situated ethics is that conditions must be assessed with regard to their 'historical specificity' and 'all those who might be affected by the decision' must be 'actively involved' .Decisionmaking through this positioning is by necessity carried out within a longer time frame than the other ethical positions.Humanitarian programming that is based on a situated ethical positioning is inclusive and participatory, collaborative, complex, dialogical, and determined by the specific rather than a generalized context of humanitarian need (Barnett and Weiss, 2008: 44-5).

Methods: How do INGOs conceptualize development education?
While the educational models and ethical positionings address the question of what INGOs' learning goals and motivations are, the choice of methods responds to how these learning goals and motivations are manifested within INGO development education programming.The following are six types of approaches to INGO development education considered through the conceptual framework of motivations and methods: fund-raising, communications/public relations, campaigns, advocacy, public engagement/civic engagement, and education (Krause, 2010).
1.The purpose of fund-raising is to generate financial support for a charity.
Since people need to be convinced to donate to a charity, communications, campaigns, advocacy, or education methods are used to forefront the 'ask' for funds.INGO development education programming that is produced for the primary purpose of fund-raising is most likely to be liberatory, didactic, shortterm, deontological, and/or consequential in nature.
2. Communications and/or public relations function to relay direct messages to the public about global issues and the work of the organization or agency.Public relations are communications with a distinctly positive spin on the organization or agency meant to either build constituency or to increase the public's confidence in the organization or agency.The indirect outcome of communications or public relations is support for the organization, agency, or issue.There is no 'direct ask' for any particular kind of support.INGO development education programming in the form of communications is often functionalist, didactic, short-term, deontological, and/or consequential in nature.
3. The function of campaigns is to achieve a specific outcome related to the goals of the INGO.The information/messaging is typically direct and uncomplicated.Campaigns have finite timelines in which support is requested in the form of sharing information, buying products, fund-raising, or donating.Campaigns often have mixed purposes of raising awareness and/or funds, and influencing policy change through advocacy.INGO development education programming in the form of campaigns is most likely to be functionalist, socially regulatory, didactic, short-term, deontological, consequential, and/ or virtue-based in nature, but depending on the context, campaigns can also display the characteristics of being socially transformative.For example, Oxfam America's Right to Know, Right to Decide campaign advocates for extractive industries (Oxfam America, 2011).This is an example of a longterm, socially transformative approach; however, it is also still somewhat didactic.Even if there is dialogue happening between the INGO and the people in the global South, it is not an open, participatory dialogue among campaign supporters, the INGO, and Southern participants.The campaign also appears to be deontological, and/or consequential in nature.
4. Advocacy activities have a specific desired outcome of policy change.
Advocacy (often referred to as advocacy campaigns) imparts a direct message that is sometimes more complex than a straightforward campaign.There is typically a finite timeline during which INGOs ask for support in the form of sharing information, signing petitions, writing letters to officials, and other means that may influence officials to change policies.Like campaigns, INGO development education programming in the form of advocacy is likely to be didactic, short-term, deontological, consequential, and/or virtue-based in nature, but also typically has a goal of social transformation and can be longer-term in nature.
5. Public engagement and civic engagement have a range of related learning goals and outcomes.The typical paradigm for engagement is moving the learners from awareness to understanding to action.Activities related to public engagement and civic engagement can involve providing information to the learner through awareness-raising initiatives along with opportunities to interact in a learner-facilitator dialogue.The learners' increased knowledge and skills lead to potential partnership and participation in decision-making with the organization or agency.The longer-term goals are to create an engaged, participatory citizenry.INGO development education programming in the form of public engagement/civic engagement could be functionalist, didactic, short-term, deontological, and/or consequential in nature if it does not move beyond an awareness paradigm.Considerable commitment and effort need to be made in order to engage the learner with the longerterm, dialogical, situated, and socially transformative practices involved in achieving an informed, participatory citizenship.
6. Education programming provides complex, multi-perspective information, without asking for any kind of support.The programming goals are to provide learners with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes to enable them to address issues related to global inequities.The longer-term and dialogical goals are to prepare learners to engage in multi-perspective learning and dialogue.The indirect outcome may be learners self-determining how and when they would like to take action.'Softer' forms of development education programming are comprised chiefly of attributes that are functionalist, didactic, short-term, deontological, and/or consequential in nature.The characteristics of 'critical' development education programming are longer-term, dialogical, situated, and socially transformative practices that involve engaging in multiple perspectives and critical reflection.
If looked at in the form of a continuum, one end would represent educational models and ethical positionings that are the most short-term, didactic, and socially regulatory and the other end would represent those that are the most long-term, dialogical, and socially transformative.Analysing INGO development education programming through these lenses assists in developing an understanding of the power relations that are present within the determining of 'why' this programming is produced and 'how' it is enacted.

Shifts in Save the Children's education programming: a documentary analysis
To gain an understanding of how the shifts in INGO development education are realized within individual INGOs, an analysis of a selection of development education documents from Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK produced between 1999 and 2007 was completed.The resources were selected based on the following criteria: the resource was promoted as teaching material, had international development content, and was reasonably accessible.Eight of the teaching packs from Save the Children UK had to be ordered online and were costly.
The other documents were free to download from Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada's websites.The documents were critically examined to identify any trends, patterns, and consistency among the learning materials and analysed against the conceptual framework of methods and motivations based on the work of Askew and Carnell (1998) and Barnett and Weiss (2008).The drawbacks to this method are that the perspectives are limited to those represented in the documents and the information may not be complete.

Organizational profiles
The Unlike Save the Children's global campaigns, which are determined collectively by the Alliance with some flexibility in approach at the regional organization level, education programming has been under the purview of each individual sister organization.There had not been a unified approach to education programming across the sister organizations in the Save the Children Alliance until recently.The latest trend is campaign themes guiding education materials and the inclusion of campaigning and fund-raising activities within resources produced for schools.
During the data-collection period for the documentary analysis, the Save the Children Alliance had launched its first Alliance-wide campaign, Rewrite the Future.This campaign focuses on children gaining access to education in areas experiencing conflict or emergencies.
To better understand how Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada's development education programming reflected the shifting nature of INGO development education programming, education resources from 1999 to 2007 were selected for analysis.They were examined in relation to the conceptual framework of beliefs in societal purposes behind the methods (social regulation to social transformation) and the motivations related to ethical positionings (longer-term contextual, dialogical to shorter-term didactic).This study looked at 11 of Save the Children UK's education resources:

Save the Children UK's education programming
1. Families Pack: Stories, activities and photographs for approaching citizenship through the theme of families (1999).and Vietnam (2007).

Partners in
Eight of the eleven (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9) global Save the Children UK resources reviewed in this study were produced prior to 2007 and had five distinct qualities: 1.There was infrequent mention of the Save the Children organization and projects.
2. If fund-raising and/or campaigning was mentioned it was not an emphasized activity and was generic (that is, the Save the Children brand was not mentioned).
3. Children's lives were conscientiously and respectfully represented through the illumination of the multifaceted nature of a child's life when affected by poverty, conflict, and/or natural disasters.
4. If a comparative country study was undertaken, then the UK was also included and looked at in terms of relative poverty.
5. Two of the resources (Time for Rights and Get Global!) were produced in collaboration with other UK INGOs (UNICEF, ActionAid, CAFOD, Christian Aid, and Oxfam), demonstrating less concern with branding and more interest in producing quality education materials.
These qualities are reflective of programming that is promoting a longer-term learning journey through an equitable relationship between student learners in varying country contexts.The Save the Children UK education team and its partners had facilitated authentic portrayals of children in developing countries that encouraged children in the UK to focus more on relating to, rather than empathizing with, children experiencing poverty.This approach invites children to learn how to explore reciprocal, intellectual, and respectful relationships with children in global and local contexts.
Two resources deviated from the approach of most of Save the Children UK's other education materials: Emergency Darfur Appeal: Teacher resource (2003) and Rewrite the Future -Learning about Children Affected by Conflict in Sudan and Southern Sudan (2006c).These teaching resources were focused on current and ongoing emergency situations, rather than broader understandings about children's rights, and they blurred the lines between fund-raising campaigns and education materials.The Emergency Darfur Appeal resource was a quick response to teachers' requests for materials about international emergencies.Rewrite the Future, however, was the beginning of a shift in direction for development education programming.
In the Rewrite the Future resource, a clear background message is given about the affected regions and the emergency situation itself.Pages 2-9 outline the Rewrite the Future campaign's goals, give statistics on Save the Children's work, suggest that students raise awareness (informal lessons, campaigns, writing stories) and fundraise, provide a brief outline of the background and current crisis in the Sudan, and outline four rights-related obstacles that need to be overcome along with a list of solutions.Within these first few pages it is evident that while this is a lesson plan, it is about an emergency situation and action needs to be taken quickly.Through a deontological approach, the answers to the problems are provided and the students' virtuous/heroic tendencies are appealed to in asking for their assistance.
The lessons ranged from gaining a better understanding of the geographical area, to imagining oneself as a humanitarian aid worker in the affected region, to fundraising.These resources explicitly highlight the work of Save the Children UK.
Children are encouraged to empathize with children and families in emergency situations and to imagine themselves as potential humanitarian aid workers, supporting the efforts of Save the Children UK by campaigning and fund-raising within their schools and communities.Once again this uses a didactic appeal to the virtuous/heroic inclinations of students not to know the other, but to save the other, through short-term solutions.One of the activities, Activity 4: Create a board game, is introduced with the following scenario: A wealthy person with a big heart has challenged different international organizations, including Save the Children, to embark on a cross-country trek from the UK to Sudan.Any organization that gets a group of people to complete the trek It is interesting to note that Save the Children Canada, with no comparable history of developing well-regarded education materials or campaigns, took the lead on creating the latest model of education materials.Their education/campaigns/fund-raising hybrid smoothly transitions the organizations away from socially transformative educational activities towards socially regulatory activities that will help reach Save the Children's advocacy and fund-raising campaign goals.Campaigns and advocacy, particularly in Save the Children UK's office, have always been a priority of domestic programming, but they have recently extended their reach by finally being able to completely take over the space in schools that was once protected by the education team.After 25 years of firmly grounding Save the Children UK's programming in learner-centred pedagogy from a child's rights approach, with lesson plans that prompted children to investigate global issues related to the rights of children and encouraged equitable learning relationships between children around the world, the learning now appears to be peripheral and incidental to the short-term, didactic, socially regulatory action component of fund-raising and campaigns.

Discussion
The  (Andreotti, 2006;Reimer et al., 1993;Askew and Carnell, 1998).INGO education programming is trending towards a socially regulatory style of learning, which seeks to ameliorate global poverty through charity, rather than to engage in the more difficult liberatory and social justice education that has the goal of social transformation.This softer, charity-focused approach highlights the learner as the virtuous hero, potentially a future humanitarian aid worker, who can help the poor, misfortunate other in the global South through fund-raising.
The message to learners is that the global poor need our help.In this socially regulatory type of development education programming, children, youths, and adults globally are not represented as equals.The INGOs that foreground this type of education programming are unintentionally assisting in maintaining the global status quo.Thus, the global poverty market that is important to the growth of the INGO industry remains unimpeded by social transformation.

Concluding remarks
Does it matter whether or not international development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) engage in longer-term dialogical education programming?Historically, it has mattered to INGOs.The commitment to social transformation, eradicating poverty, and contributing to global social justice have been and are the underlying principles for INGOs, but how can these idealistic goals be met without practising the foundational work of collective, participatory, and equitable dialogue?
Is it ethical for INGOs not to contribute as fully as they are capable to these longer-term discussions?INGOs and civil society organizations are some of the primary connections between the global South and North.They are the ones with partnerships in the global South, regularly making connections with people who are on the receiving end not only of the donations, projects, and other sources of aid from the North, but also the misperceptions about their contexts.INGOs have the potential to facilitate the dialogical relationships that can open up possibilities for the collective and participatory communications that could lead to changes in the power structures and dynamics of the dichotomized world of North and South and rich and poor.
For those opposed to the practice, development education programming is insignificant compared to the direct need of people in humanitarian emergencies and, furthermore, a waste of development dollars.Time and money are the deciding factors.Although people may agree in principle to the importance of the long-term learning journey as a foundational piece for making change in the world order and for changing people's minds and attitudes, it does not have the short-term tangible outcome of, for example, giving families in malarial areas mosquito nets.The urgency of addressing immediate concerns with practical solutions is indisputably justified, but how and by whom will the long-term foundational work be done?Should it be left to the global governance institutions?Or could it be worthwhile to invest in facilitating equitable learning relationships that could lead to positive changes in global and local interactions, rather than focus on short-term, didactic communications that encourage people to donate, to volunteer, or to fix a situation?
Those working within INGOs often find it difficult to justify domestic education programmes, which, unless based on fund-raising and/or campaigning, do not make immediate contributions to the organization's mandate.Any future informed actions regarding international development that may be related to development education programming are difficult to track and an ongoing source of frustration for development educators (Höck and Wegimont, 2003;Krause, 2010).The push for accountability within the international development sector often holds INGOs to a narrowly conceived idea of education programming, one that is based more on messaging or public relations that highlight the work of the INGO, the donor, and/or the donor country.Furthermore, since the global dimension was added to the UK curriculum, organizations who have led the way for INGO development education programming for the past three decades (such as Christian Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children) are now withdrawing from education programming to focus on campaigns and advocacy.The question the INGO sector must ask itself is whether or not withdrawing from education to focus on programming with limited critical interaction and reflection will ultimately benefit or detract from their longer-term goal of global poverty alleviation.
Nadya Weber is an educational consultant with a PhD from OISE, University of Toronto, in adult education and community development with a specialization in comparative, international, and development education.Her research interests include: educating for a global perspective and popular theatre.
Contact details: oisenod@gmail.comNotes The paper outlines the key areas influencing the take-up ofINGO  development education programming in Canada and England then presents a conceptual framework based on principles of humanitarian ideals as they connect to institutional conceptions of development education.The framework is then used to interrogate the questions of 'why' and 'how' INGOs are enacting development education programming at the individual organizational level through an analysis of a selection of education materials produced by Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada between 1999 and 2007.The intention of this paper is not to place undue emphasis on Save the Children Canada or Save the Children UK's programming choices in particular, but rather to highlight INGO development education programming trends as witnessed more broadly within the wider INGO sector.My connection to the subject is not as an insider; I have no formal relationship with Save the Children UK or Save the Children Canada.My inherent biases towards this subject stem from my background as a middle-class, white, Canadian woman, and my experiences of working with global and equity education and educators in Canadian INGOs and schools from the late 1980s onwards.
Within the histories of Canada and England's INGOs, areas of convergence and variation have emerged that give insight into the shifts occurring more recently in development education programming.In both countries: (a) a vibrant development education centre community has or does exist; (b) competition among INGOs for brand share has increased; (c) professionalized INGO development educators have experienced isolation within their organizations; and (d) local issues involving racism and refugees have been in tension with global issues.The major differences between INGO development education in England and Canada are: (a) the historical roles (colonizers, solidarity movements) and global status; (b) the power of England's INGO sector; (c) the continued support English INGOs and development education have received from the Labour Party throughout the years; (d) the size, capacity, and reach of the UK and European INGO and development education networks as spaces for citizen engagement; (e) the long history of development education within England's school system; and (f ) the English INGO sector's ability to do advocacy work.This partial picture of the broader context of INGO development education in England and Canada situates the Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada case studies.To gain a deeper understanding of 'why' and 'how' INGOs, within these broader contexts, are enacting development education programming, an analytical framework that considered the INGO programming's ethical motivations and educational methods was employed.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Askew and Carnell's typology of models of education

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Motivations and methods for INGO development education programming: Why and how INGOs educate organizational profiles of Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK were compiled using information from 2008-2009 annual reports.The profiles illustrate that enormous variations can exist between sister organizations operating within different national contexts.Both organizations operate within the constellation of the Save the Children Alliance's sister organizations: 29 countries as of 2009.The sister organizations share the same mission, that of the Alliance formed in 1977, based on upholding the rights of the child.The Save the Children profiles are characteristic of the Canadian and English INGO playing field: they present a fairly typical picture of an INGO with a founding office in England and a sister organization in Canada.Save the Children Canada is a tenth of the size of Save the Children UK and relies heavily on a single institutional source, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).Both raise a similar percentage of donations -Save the Children UK 26 per cent and Save the Children Canada 22per cent -but those amounts translate into $102.9 million and $4.5 million (Cdn 2009 currency), respectively.The disparity in resources and programming capacities is vast, with Save the Children UK drawing on a long history of relationships with the royal family, celebrities, and major corporate donors, and over the past decade the strong strategic direction of a CEO with expertise in marketing and public relations.In contrast, Save the Children Canada, while a respected organization in Canada, has not managed to become an indelible part of the Canadian INGO landscape.
Save the Children UK has a 25-year history of producing education programming.Its resources are all from a child's rights-based perspective.A common format for the resources is media (print, video, photos) that invites students to look at the lives of children from different regions around the world and from different socio-economic contexts (working and working-class children) within the UK.Their education materials fall under two broad categories: global children's rights education and local/domestic children's rights.Materials produced for the global category include discussions about the lives and living conditions of children in different parts of the world.Through the learning materials, students explore their understanding of children's rights and responsibilities at the individual, local, national, and global levels.Between 1999 and 2008, Save the Children UK published a new global education teaching pack almost every year.
INGOs and their ability to provide development education programming.England's Labour governments have consistently supported INGO development education and the Conservative governments consistently cut development education programming.The large INGOs with block grants were able to fund development education to the point that development education centres actually proliferated without government assistance.Under the New Labour government, the Department for International Development (DfID) was formed and INGO development education programming remained a key priority from 1997 to 2010.
, and education sectors and worked closely with DfID to shape development education programming and policy.English INGOs have additional levels of network support from the British Overseas NGO for Development (BOND) network and the European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development (CONCORD).Both membership networks advocate for development education.
Time for Rights (by UNICEF and Save the Children UK): Activities for citizenship and PSHE for 9-13 year olds (2002).Welcome to My World, Exploring the Lives of Children in Ethiopia, India, Peru Rights: Creative activities exploring rights and citizenship for 7-14 year olds(2000).3.

Save the Children Canada's education programming
Save the Children Canada has a history and reputation for work in child and youth engagement, but its experience with development education programming is limited.Its related programming was in training youths to be peer-to-peer facilitators who used children's rights-based methods for health promotion and community development.Save the Children Canada's engagement with development education has been much more recent, beginning in 2005.Ironically, despite the lack of organizational experience in this area, Save the Children Canada has provided leadership in development education programming design for the Save the Children Alliance.In 2005, two major disasters, the South Asian tsunami and later the earthquake in Pakistan, rallied Save the Children Canada to produce resources for teachers.Earlier in 2005 they developed the Tsunami Disaster in South Asia: Education kit (2005a), from which a template for the Rewrite the Future campaign-based resources began to take shape.Eventually elements of the design of this resource were used by Save the Children Canada to create Rewrite the Future -Learning about Children Affected by Conflict in Sudan and Southern Sudan, also used by Save the Children UK.The activities in Tsunami Disaster in South Asia: Education kit move from short lessons on the geography (for instance, the people, climate, physical area, and the qualities of natural disasters) to activities that appeal to students' virtuous/heroic inclinations, such as asking them to imagine their role as humanitarian aid workersmedical teams, teachers, psychologists, logistics workers, and engineers -and finally to short-term, socially regulatory fund-raising activities.Throughout the resource there is a strong emphasis on Save the Children's contributions and brand.There are a few critical thinking activities that might aid in offsetting the domination of branded and fund-raising activities.For example, students are asked to question or compare Canada's contributions to relief efforts to other areas of the world and to question or compare Canada's media coverage of the disaster to other areas of the world.These types of activities, if expanded upon, could move into more socially transformative, longer-term learning experiences.Also in 2005, Save the Children Canada produced the Earthquake in South Asia: Teaching tools resource (2005b).It follows a similar template to the tsunami resource, moving students' learning from geography to humanitarian aid (more specifically, to Save the Children's work) to fund-raising.This resource provides an abridged version of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child to work with and eight pages of curriculum links for each province and territory in Canada.The other education resource produced by Save the Children Canada is the Rewrite the Future, Children Affected by Armed Conflict: Colombia, South America, a teacher's resource.The resource was placed on the Save the Children Canada website for free download and advertised to teachers through Save the Children Canada's school networks.It was described as providing 'educators with curriculum-relevant, factual, easy-to-facilitate activities to engage children and young people on this issue' and offering Canadian children 'concrete opportunities to contribute to improved access to education for children affected by armed conflict' (Save the Children Canada, 2006: 3).The emphasis in this resource is on philanthropy, humanitarian efforts, and Save the Children's short-term, didactic, socially regulatory responses to global issues.Many of the activities are similar or the same as those in the South Asian earthquake and tsunami resources, including imagining that the student is a humanitarian aid worker and fund-raising activities, but more is offered in the way of instructions and connections to the provincial curriculum.Some new activities link directly to the Rewrite the Future campaign's mandate to provide education to children in conflict zones, including The Pencil Game, which attempts to demonstrate the way that conflict disrupts children's potential to get an education.The resource also includes a Build a Board Game activity from the Sudan resource that introduces students to the philanthropic challenge of a 'wealthy businessman with a big heart' who offers to give $10 million to the first INGO to reach Colombia from Canada.This engaging game succeeds in highlighting the distance and vast inequality between the students who are potentially the heroes and the unknowable children in Colombia (or Sudan) who need rescuing.As taking action becomes a more important goal of the development education programming, learning that emphasizes getting to know those who are other to oneself in an authentic and equitable partnership becomes a hindrance to INGOs' short-term goals.
lengthy process and commitment necessary to produce education programming typically does not produce any immediate benefit to an INGO and any long-term benefits of educational programming are difficult to assess.Without a campaign, advocacy, or fund-raising piece connected to education programming, an INGO may get little out of the effort to produce the programming beyond possible brand awareness.Conversely, schools may not be as interested in engaging with INGO materials if they do not have a learning component and an imperative from the curriculum.While producing education materials may not be of immediate benefit to INGOs, gaining access to schools is of great value.One of the most compelling markets for industries in general, not just INGOs, is that of children and youths.Thus schools have become a coveted site for marketing.INGOs, pressured to perform, have developed programming for children and youths that emphasize the INGO's brand and more blatantly recruits children and youths as campaign supporters and fund-raisers.The organizations are looking for immediate results from their school-based programming.INGOs have retreated from longer-term commitments to a curriculum that privileges equitable learning partnerships with children around the globe as this type of programming does not guarantee an immediate (or any) outcome for the organization.There has been a distinct movement away from critical development education towards softer forms of development education