Acts of willpower : developing cosmopolitan citizenship through student engagement in course design.

This paper presents some preliminary outcomes of a student engagement experience undertaken at an undergraduate college in the Netherlands. Six students and an alumna participated in a teacher-student partnership with the researcher to co-design a new course in critical intercultural communication. The teacher-student partnership was envisioned as a laboratory of democracy, aimed at offering students a site where the institutional educational objectives concerning global citizenship were examined by those to which they apply. Experimenting with democratic processes of co-creating learning environment and knowledge that matter to students is seen as a form of active community engagement. Preliminary analysis of the qualitative data collected show that engaging with theories of global citizenship in a setting of democratic pedagogy impacts on students’ perception of themselves as global citizens and as learners. In both cases, whilst challenging, student seemed to adopt a more active role