Pietro

Just a quick thought on your thoughts about presenting biased information
anticipating students' balanced. This pedagogy, its efficacy and assumed
reflective responses are not universal; I am currently experiencing this
first hand through teaching a Masters course in Global Governance to a range
of students from outside the West e.g. Qatar, Yemen, Libya. Whilst, in the
UK, the tradition, in my discipline, is very much about critical
reflexivity, in other parts of the world it is about transmission and
acceptance of facts, where challenges to the 'teacher' and 'authority' are
beyond the pale! Add to this the fact that what you say is framed in terms
of power relations at different levels, whether you as an individual might
like to challenge these or not. Who you are, where you are from, the ideas
you discussed, etc. will be heavily mediated. For example, America is the
most powerful country in the world, and most of the world has to do broadly
what the Americans want, despite the rhetoric of allies, partners against
terrorism, etc.; this will frame how you are perceived, how your ideas are
understood etc. I do not think it is easy or possible to escape this history
and context, meaning one has to accept the implications for the teaching,
despite what one might like.

I guess if you ultimately are going to go there and tell them things, then
perhaps getting all caught up in issues around bias, ethnocentrism,
tradition, etc. is irrelevant!

best

matt