Adult Education Through a Cosmopolitanism Lens: A Review of the Research Literature

761092 research-article2018

AEQXXX10.1177/0741713618761092Adult Education QuarterlyCoryell et al.

Article

Adult Education Through a Cosmopolitanism Lens: A Review of the Research Literature

Adult Education Quarterly 2018, Vol. 68(3) 179­–196 © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713618761092 DOI: 10.1177/0741713618761092 journals.sagepub.com/home/aeq

Joellen E. Coryell1, Oleksandra Sehin1, and Cindy Peña1

Abstract This review of the literature offers an analysis of ways in which the theory and pedagogical concepts of cosmopolitanism have been employed across research in adult education contexts. Twenty-nine research articles and dissertations on cosmopolitanism and adult education, conducted in various geographical locations and adult education contexts, were selected for the analysis. The article presents how researchers define and theorize cosmopolitanism, the purposes for using cosmopolitanism tenets in the studies, and conclusions that the findings proffer about cosmopolitanism for adult learning, teaching, and continuing and professional development. The review concludes with implications for practice and future research.

Keywords cosmopolitanism, literature review, international adult education, transnational, cross-cultural, research While not a new phenomenon, globalization in the current era is increasingly influenced by cross-national commerce, technology, political instability, migrations, and often human inequities. Gordon and English (2016), in their article on education in the current era of globalization, contend that globalization plays a significant role in the growing exposure of people to diverse histories, religions, and cultures; it has also contributed to the marginalization of workers and the displacement of many of our unifying principles such as neighborhoods and other local communities. . . .

These and other issues present us with new challenges to how we think about education. (p. 977) 1Texas

State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

Corresponding Author: Joellen E. Coryell, Texas State University, 601 University Drive, ASBS 326, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA. Email: coryell@txstate.edu

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In response to this state of global interdependence, in which people around the world encounter situations in which they must interact, solve problems, work, and live in informed and culturally sensitive ways, adult education organizations across a wide scope of contexts are incorporating internationalization and/or global perspectives into their missions, visions, and standards. As a result, adult educators are tasked to help their learners develop values, knowledge, and skills for collaboration and socially responsible interaction practices that span from the local to the global community. Values, skills, and behaviors that address some of these interactional competencies for work and living in an era of globalization are not new to the discipline of adult education philosophically or in practice. They have been addressed, at least in part, in various forms of multicultural education, including intercultural, critical, and comparative perspectives, across the adult education literature. However, we started noticing that researchers in adult education contexts around the world had been specifically employing cosmopolitanism as a theoretical lens in their work. We also observed that there were distinct aspects that cosmopolitanism offered these researchers that distinguished it conceptually from other forms of education and educational theories attending to multicultural principles and practices (Donald, 2007). Finally, we noted that there appeared to be some inconsistencies across the research literature about what cosmopolitanism was and how it was being employed. As such, we wanted to investigate further.

Cosmopolitanism has ancient origins and is discussed across the disciplines of ethics, philosophy, education, sociology, and anthropology. While there are variations of the term (Kleingeld & Brown, 2014), generally cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief in a shared global community, openness to different cultures and perspectives, and recognition of universal values across cultures and peoples. Appiah (2006) clarifies, We have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. . . .

We [also must] take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. . . . There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge. (p. xv)

Our curiosities about cosmopolitanism led us to search for the ways in which the theory and pedagogical concepts of cosmopolitanism were conceived in adult education research studies. To do so, we engaged in a review of the literature that we imagined could inform adult educators and researchers about cosmopolitan teaching, learning, and research trends from the past 10 years. The research questions guiding our review were as follows: In what contexts and for what purposes have educational researchers utilized cosmopolitanism tenets in their studies on adult learning, teaching, and continuing and professional development? What are the ways in which researchers define and theorize cosmopolitanism in their studies? What conclusions about cosmopolitanism and adult learning, teaching, and continuing and professional development have been drawn based on their research?

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Method We began by searching Education Source (EBSCO), dissertations and theses (ProQuest), and Google Scholar databases for research studies published from 2007 to 2017 with the broad yet focused key words cosmopolitan, education, and adult. We chose these initial terms to identify research studies in which cosmopolitanism was identified as a concept, theory, or approach and in which the researchers specifically designated the term, adult, when describing participants, educational programs, or instructional strategies. We chose not to include search terms such as multicultural or intercultural education because while these approaches and philosophies may sometimes be included in cosmopolitan research, they are not necessarily conceptualized nor theorized in the same ways as cosmopolitanism (Donald, 2007). Our initial search identified 102 articles and nine dissertations. In reviewing those texts, we narrowed the search to include only empirical studies that outlined their quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method designs in the following educational contexts: adult higher education, professional or vocational education/learning, adult citizenship education, adult basic and adult secondary education, adult language learning, lifelong education, and education policy related to adults. We decided to exclude K-12 educational research in this review as that literature has the aim of investigating/developing childhood education and often draws on contexts, theories, and bodies of research that are distinct from that of adult education literature. Within these criteria, we identified 29 texts consisting of 22 research articles in 19 different journals and seven doctoral dissertations. Our analysis focused on the contexts of the research, including who (setting and participants), what (what they were studying), why (research problem), and how (research methodology). We then identified and analyzed the definitions of cosmopolitanism articulated in each article and the conclusions drawn about cosmopolitanism and adult learning, teaching, and development. Finally, we examined any additional relevant information that would assist us further in answering our research questions. We employed constant-comparison and thematic analysis processes (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003) to analyze the data and organize our findings.

Findings Defining and Theorizing Cosmopolitanism In theorizing cosmopolitanism in current research, we begin by considering the philosophical underpinnings of its major forms used today. Most forms include the concept of belonging to a community that spans geographic, political, economic, and cultural borders; a focus on inclusivity while valuing diversity in a society of equals without discrimination; and an understanding that cosmopolitanism is an ideal, or identity, to be developed (Kleingeld & Brown, 2014; Papastephanou, 2007; Trujillo, 2015).

Kleingeld and Brown (2014) provide important philosophical considerations for understanding different types of cosmopolitanism. They contend that the most common form of cosmopolitanism is one embedded in morality and is either strict or

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moderate in perspective. Moral cosmopolitans have a duty to respect and value basic human rights for all humanity. Strict moral cosmopolitans are philosophically bound to assist others in need, which is not affected by whether those who are suffering are local, or not. Moderate moral cosmopolitans, on the other hand, “acknowledge the cosmopolitan scope of a duty to provide aid, but insist that we also have special duties to compatriots” (para. 37). Political cosmopolitanism is linked with moral cosmopolitanism, but its focus is on a centralized, international political state or institution whose purview attends to global concerns that include poverty, war crimes, and environmental issues. Within this form, attention is on individual and social institution justice worldwide and the methods of achieving such justice. The position of cultural cosmopolitanism is one that “rejects exclusive attachments to a particular culture . . . encourages cultural diversity and appreciates a multicultural mélange . . . [and] rejects a strong nationalism” (para. 40). Cultural cosmopolitans can recognize the importance of individual cultural attachments but refuse a singular, homogeneous identity (Appiah, 2006; Kleingeld & Brown, 2014). Conversely, an economic cosmopolitan philosophy asserts the importance of promoting “a single global economic market with free trade and minimal political involvement” (Kleingeld & Brown, 2014, para. 41). This approach is characterized as neoliberal and is endorsed more by economists and some politicians rather than by most philosophers. Indeed, many name neoliberal policies as valuing capitalism above all with “governance according to market criteria” (Brown, 2006, p. 690).

Research in the current review adds to this discussion in varying ways. Many of the researchers proposed forms of moderate moral cosmopolitanism and ways of operationalizing how cosmopolitanism is developed or enacted. They defined cosmopolitanism as a personal perspective that entails ethical and philosophical orientations to include worldviews, dispositions, or identity (Bakkabulindi & Ssempebwa, 2011; Bilecen, 2013; Coryell, Spencer, & Sehin, 2014; Guardado, 2010; McNiff, 2013; Williams, 2013). Characteristics of cosmopolitanism include an individual’s openness (Froese, Jommersbach, & Klautzsch, 2013; Schein, 2008), commitment to multicultural sensitivity (Anderson, 2011; Cloete, Dinesh, Hazou, & Matchett, 2015; Guardado, 2010; Starkey, 2007; Szelényi & Rhoads, 2013), awareness of difference (Bamber, 2015; Sidhu & Dalla’Alba, 2012), development of cultural competence (Nilep, 2009; Ye & Kelly, 2011), adaptability (Coryell et al., 2014; Guardado, 2010), utilization of intellectual devices (Cloete et al., 2015; Sobré, 2009), and employment of appropriate discourse tools (Amadasi & Holliday, 2017) These attributes were suggested as helping individuals interact sensitively and effectively across different cultures, linguistic settings, and political economies.

Others posited that cosmopolitanism articulates a sense of belonging in multiple communities (Gu & Schweisfurth, 2015; Khandekar, 2010), while Saito (2017) described cosmopolitanism as imagining a situation where world citizens belong to one community (through the common language of English). The emphasis for many researchers was on interactional experiences and commitment to a shared global community with a sense of “the vulnerabilities and commonalities that bind people together” (Sidhu & Dalla’Alba, 2012, p. 414).

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Others further argued for critical tenets of moral cosmopolitanism. These researchers asserted that cosmopolitanism requires a critical stance and personal cultural reflexology (Amadasi & Holliday, 2017; Bamber, 2015; Cloete et al., 2015; Schein, 2008). While Bamber’s (2015) understanding of cosmopolitanism calls for recognition of all people’s equal moral worth and agency, Schein (2008) clarified that cosmopolitanism in the United States necessitates “an openness to the world that is itself an affirmation of a rooted, immutable, and deeply raced, gendered, and classed national character” (p. 101).

There was some disagreement about the need for homogenization of cultures within a cultural cosmopolitan perspective. Lingard, Sellar, and Baroutsis (2015) called on concepts in Bourdieu’s work describing habitus (social norms that guide thinking and actions) as embodied practice, asserting that a cosmopolitan sensibility emphasizes a convergence of cultures and homogenization. Likewise, Sobré (2009) posited that cosmopolitanism should be used as “a tool to move beyond essentializing us/them dichotomies . . . [and] used as a theoretical framework through which to understand postmodern transition processes in an increasingly globalized world” (p. 116).

However, Cloete et al. (2015) and Amadasi and Holliday (2017) referred to Stuart Hall’s work to suggest that cosmopolitanism does not indeed lead to a homogenized society lacking culture but instead leads to one that provides influences of many cultural systems of which individuals can choose selectively from a diversity of discursive meaning.

Other researchers (Anderson, 2011; Gonzales, 2012; McNiff, 2013; Rhoades, Kiyama, McCormick, & Quiroz, 2008; Szelényi & Rhoads, 2013) offered understandings of cosmopolitan tenets that utilize dichotomous personal orientations as either cosmopolitan or local. For example, all of these studies, with the exception of McNiff’s (2013), employed Gouldner’s (1957, 1958) analysis of latent and social roles in organizations. Gouldner (1957) tested three variables for analyzing workplace identities: “loyalty to the organization; commitment to professional skills and values; and reference group orientations” (p. 281). He posited that cosmopolitans are those who indicate a low loyalty to the organization, maintain a high commitment to specialized role skills, and have an outer reference group orientation (p. 290). Locals, alternatively, are individuals who are highly loyal to the organization, have a low commitment to specialized role skills, and are likely to orient toward inner reference groups. Researchers used Gouldner’s theory to investigate university faculty members’, administrators’, and professionals’ orientations toward their work in higher education (Gonzales, 2012; Szelényi & Rhoads, 2013) and to study community college chief academic officers’ dispositions toward administration (Anderson, 2011). Finally, while McNiff (2013) did not cite Gouldner’s work specifically, she employed a somewhat more simplistic understanding of cosmopolitan versus local orientations. She suggested, Cosmopolitans . . . are those who develop outgoing perspectives and relationships with others, usually through engaging with other people’s cultures and forms of thinking, while locals are those who maintain a stay-at-home mentality, more comfortable in their own cultures and systems. (p. 502)

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Within these nuanced understandings of the concept of cosmopolitanism, numerous researchers offered additional variants that helped theoretically frame their studies. For example, Nilep (2009), Schein (2008), and Starkey (2007) all discussed cosmopolitan citizenship, a sense of self that connects with complex, multiple identities (Starkey, 2007) and with individuals of a global community that are “knowledgeable and competent to interact with others across the borders of the nation state” (Nilep, 2009, p. 231). Similarly, Coete et al. (2015) and Gu and Schweisfurth (2015) concentrated on the development of transnational cultural citizenship. Coete et al.

(2015) argued that this kind of citizenship requires a cosmopolitan lens shaped by an intellectual and aesthetic openness toward diverse cultural experiences. Gu and Schweisfurth (2015) further asserted that transnationalism is a particular type of subjectivity in which individuals can embrace both the “here” and the “there” (p. 950) and possess levels of cosmopolitan competence for interacting effectively with cultural diversity. Here, we can see cosmopolitan citizens intentionally learn about other cultures to move and interact easily among them.

Indeed, mobility surfaced as an underlying theme for the development of cosmopolitan mind-sets. Kirkpatrick (2015) added to these discussions by addressing cosmopolitanism as universal hospitality, which acknowledges responsibility to and the rights of strangers to be treated with respect. And, Sobré (2009) suggested that a traveler identity is a component of cosmopolitanism that includes “a willingness to live outside of one’s comfort zone, learn about new cultures, to study abroad, etc.” (p. 124).

Correspondingly, Kadiwal and Rind (2013) explained the nuances of the concept of selective cosmopolitans as individuals who, in order to advantageously position themselves in the contemporary globalized world, negotiate between different cultural influences pragmatically, while simultaneously experiencing ambivalence and tensions in terms of their sense of identity.

These individuals are inherently reflexive regarding the unavoidable complexity of their situation. (p. 690)

Additionally, Khandekar (2010) offered two very specific variations on the cosmopolitanism present in high-tech Indian workers who migrate to the United States. He asserted that differential cosmopolitanism includes the “reflections and practices of global belonging that are oriented by conceptions of difference rooted in particular understandings of Indianness” (p. 221), while global Indian cosmopolitanism is characterized by “a discourse that allows Indian technomigrants to simultaneously maintain a strong cultural-national Indian identity while also distancing themselves from the Indian state machinery, as well as carving a distinct, culturally isolated social space for themselves in the United States” (p. xiii).

Finally, six of the studies (Boni, MacDonald, & Peris, 2012; Cloete et al., 2015; Coryell et al., 2014; Herrera, 2008; Williams, 2013; Zepke, 2009) centered their attention on cosmopolitan education/pedagogy. These cosmopolitan educational approaches honor and respect nation and family learning/knowing while developing empathy with humanity more globally in a way that expands one’s thinking through local, national,

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and global dimensions (Coryell et al., 2014; Herrera, 2008). Generally, these researchers seem to concur with Williams’s (2013) explanation of cosmopolitan education from his investigation of academic and off-campus experiences that impact adult learners’ worldviews and develop a sense of responsibility toward others. He suggested that cosmopolitan education “needs to be empirically informed by globalization and normatively rooted with an ethical perspective and understanding of the new ways in which people and communities are converging and reimagining themselves” (p. 261). Likewise, Zepke (2009) contended that cosmopolitan pedagogy requires learning interactions in which “learners engage with the ‘other,’ ask critical questions, discover and construct knowledge and understandings, tap the power in quality learning and achieve desired and valued outcomes [so that] a more cosmopolitan pedagogy can emerge” (p. 755).

This review of the definitions and features of cosmopolitanism across the literature indicates varying notions and understanding of the concept. The differences exist largely based on philosophical underpinnings that are either morally, politically, culturally, or economically motivated (Kleingeld & Brown, 2014). While the basis for most researchers is a commitment to a shared sense of community across nations, cultures, and difference, there exists a debate, or at least a conversation, about notions of citizenship, loyalty to the local, and homogenous or multicultural system community orientations.

Contexts and Purposes of the Reviewed Literature Research on cosmopolitanism spans different educational settings, geographic contexts, and aims/objectives. We identified three overarching categories through the analysis of the contexts and purposes of the research texts that we reviewed. We organize this section starting with those studies that reported research on cosmopolitanism in education policies and philosophy. Second, we review the applications and outcomes of cosmopolitanism in the postsecondary institution. Third, we discuss research on cosmopolitanism in professions and organizations.

Education philosophy and policy. Six studies analyzed cosmopolitanism within the context of education philosophy, policy, or both. Herrera (2008), by conducting life history research with an Egyptian Muslim violin music educator, researched a humanistic philosophical pedagogy that led to the cultivation of a cosmopolitan polity in the Middle East during periods of political and economic conflict. Correspondingly, Sidhu and Dalla’Alba (2012) critically examined practices and philosophical representations that comprise international education by analyzing the marketing, branding, and academic discourse of the three main education-exporting brokers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia and how these countries’ national self-images foster particular kinds of geopolitical identities.

Regarding philosophical influences on educational policy, Starkey (2007) researched the tensions inherent in the procedures and practices of an intercultural approach to language teaching that stem from frustrations with materials, courses, and

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syllabi that were initially constructed on a bicultural, national model that “derives from an earlier age of constructed imagined cultural homogeneity” (p. 69). Also regarding language policy and education, Saito (2017) analyzed 32 Japanese study abroad students’ essays about a recent English-only language policy in higher education versus a national action plan to spread and enhance understanding of cultural heritage among non-Japanese. Saito utilized discursive psychological analyses to investigate the linkages among students’ attitudes, discourse, performativity, and agency with regard to cosmopolitan and national identity constructions. Zepke (2009) studied the likely future of adult lifelong education policy in New Zealand and whether it would be neoliberal or cosmopolitan. He did so by examining post–compulsory education policy over the previous 30 years. Finally, Lingard et al. (2015) explored how a shared habitus of global policy actors contributed to the creation of the global education policy field.

Applications and outcomes of cosmopolitanism in the postsecondary institution. We found that the majority of the research reviewed was set within formal adult higher education settings. Seven studies investigated adult learning in undergraduate programs. Of these, Boni et al. (2012) and Froese et al. (2013) researched curriculum and cosmopolitan learning outcomes. Boni et al. (2012) explored the potential of a curriculum designed in upper-level engineering curricula to develop cosmopolitan abilities through an elective course on development aid. The methodology was a pre–post questionnaire to 80 students analyzed with qualitative discourse analysis. Froese et al.

(2013) investigated the antecedents of cosmopolitanism and willingness to expatriate as a final outcome for young adults in business schools in Germany and Korea. They conducted a mixed-method study, including analyses of survey data and follow-up focus group interviews. Two studies offered findings about learning experiences in international, cross-cultural collaboration programs. Cloete et al. (2015) investigated the experiences and learning outcomes of young adults as they engaged in transnational conversations in applied theater and performance classrooms in India, New Zealand, and South Africa. They described applied theater as “encompass[ing] political and aesthetic interventions that engage issues of social justice with the potential of fostering community engagement, social belonging, and cultural citizenship” (p. 472).

Additionally, Sobré (2009) analyzed 45 interviews and listserv communication data collected from a social support group for international students. She aimed to identify tenets of a cosmopolitan third culture, defined as a “collectively determined communicative space that is created when individuals of different cultural backgrounds come together and form a relationship within a different cultural context” (p. iii).

Others researched learning and cosmopolitan development in undergraduate study abroad programs. Williams (2013) investigated cosmopolitanism and citizenship development of young adult students, namely millennials (born between 1980 and 2000), who were studying political science, international relations, or public affairs.

He researched the comparisons between study abroad and service-learning, volunteering, and internship experiences from pre- and posttest focus group interviews with 117 participants to examine their social communities and responsibilities as global citizens.

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Also focused on service-learning, Bamber (2015) analyzed interviews and focus groups with 27 students to identify transformative learning and becoming “otherwise” through nurturing cosmopolitanism in international service-learning programs in resource-poor countries (p. 26). Focused on the impact of studying abroad, Gu and Schweisfurth (2015) were interested in analyzing the experiences of 652 Chinese participants, aged between 20 and 66 years, who studied abroad and returned to China over the previous 25+ years. In their mixed-method design, they aimed to “make sense of the lives of this vast group of individuals who play an integral role in shaping the identity of the present and future workforce” in China (p. 948).

Other scholars concentrated their research in postgraduate contexts employing qualitative interview data analyses in international student mobility contexts. Amadasi and Holliday’s (2017) study examined the ways two newly arrived postgraduate students who were studying abroad discussed their experiences of living in the new culture. They also analyzed their own interventionist agenda as researchers acknowledging the requirement of caution and reflexivity necessary to engage in and analyze what are sometimes “competing narratives and discourses of culture” present in such interviews (p. 256). Likewise, Coryell et al. (2014) investigated the global citizenship development of 16 participants enrolled in a European itinerant graduate professional degree program designed with a cosmopolitan pedagogical approach. In an offshore postgraduate certificate program, Kadiwal and Rind (2013) analyzed ethnographic interviews and focus group data of 15 tutors and students about the influences affecting their cross-cultural interactions. And, Bilecen (2013) interviewed 35 international doctoral students to characterize their cosmopolitan identities through their perspectives on difference.

There were also postgraduate studies that did not include international mobility experiences. Rhoades et al. (2008) conducted a narrative inquiry of lower income Latino doctoral students’ professional choices, critical agency, and race-related service using a conceptual framework that categorized participants’ approaches as cosmopolitans or locals. Additionally, Bakkabulindi and Ssempebwa (2011) surveyed 85 master’s degree students to identify the relationship between cosmopolitanism and readiness to adopt information and communication technologies in their education.

Finally, four studies investigated cosmopolitan tenets among higher education professionals. Gonzales (2012) utilized a mixed-method design that included an online survey (N = 440) and follow-up interviews (N = 26). They studied how tenure-line faculty members, involved in complex institutional change toward Tier I research status, engaged in either cosmopolitan or local approaches to agency in their teaching, research, and service at the university. Szelényi and Rhoads (2013) also researched faculty orientations by utilizing multicase analysis of semistructured interviews with 46 faculty members at two universities. They examined cosmopolitan professional identity in faculty life by studying academic culture and citizenship in China and Hungary, both of which the authors suggest are transitioning from communist to market-driven social and economic national structures. Also within change processes, McNiff (2013) studied cosmopolitan orientations during university internationalization initiatives in Qatar and the Gulf States. In this action research, she examined critical reflective commentaries

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(accounts of teaching, learning, and interaction/communicative experiences), written documents, interviews, evaluations, meeting minutes, emails, and video data of over 150 educators, managers, and higher education administrators. In addition, Anderson (2011) conducted quantitative survey research with community college chief academic officers (N = 275). She analyzed cosmopolitan and local orientations, participants’ subsequent job satisfaction, intentions to leave the position, and desires to pursue a community college presidency.

Cosmopolitanism in professions and organizations. Six studies were situated within professions and organizations. Ye and Kelly (2011) endeavored to identify the ways in which practices of cosmopolitanism were evident in the workplace of Singapore’s financial sector. In this qualitative study, researchers conducted semistructured interviews with 25 Chinese financial sector professionals. In her research on U.S. Peace Corp workers, Schein (2008) examined the cultural practices and global citizenship development of volunteers in a document analysis of published memoirs, autobiographical fiction, and compilations of travel narratives, personal essays, and short stories. And, set within an Indian expatriate professional community in the United States, Khandekar’s (2010) dissertation research utilized ethnographic interviews to examine cosmopolitanism in technomigration. He investigated the experiences, perceptions, and structural conditions that shaped the mobility of 30 Indian engineers and professional engineering students based in various parts of the United States.

Last, researchers investigated cosmopolitanism within organizations. Within a transnational organization (The Hippo Family Club), Nilep (2009) conducted ethnographic field work over 4 years in several sites in Japan and the United States. He examined cosmopolitan citizenship as a form of personal identity that engages in community language and culture education. Likewise, Guardado (2010) researched Spanish language and culture maintenance also within a community education organization. He analyzed semistructured interviews to discern the relationship between heritage language development and the fostering of a cosmopolitan worldview in three Hispanic Canadian families. Finally, Kirkpatrick (2015) investigated the narratives of four elders’ experiences living in a Catholic assisted living facility. She examined their understandings and stories of hospitality, power, and agency through a blended conceptual framework that included cosmopolitanism, Catholic social teaching, and life cycle theory.

Research Findings About Cosmopolitanism Across the Literature An analysis of the research findings across the reviewed studies provides insights into cosmopolitanism and adult education within two overarching categories: methods for developing adult learners’ cosmopolitan values and skills and the ways in which adult educators’, researchers’, workers’, and students’ cosmopolitan orientations are manifested in work and learning.

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Developing cosmopolitan values and skills. The findings and implications for adult education that researchers reported in the development of cosmopolitan orientations, abilities, and perspectives offered insight for adult higher education, professional education, and language learning settings. First, research provides implications for mobility experiences such as international degree programs or study abroad in which learners are engaging with international peoples. Bamber (2015), Coryell et al. (2014), Gu and Schweisfurth (2015), Sobré (2009), and Williams (2013) all assert that learning through international mobility programs offers opportunities for learners to develop cosmopolitan perspectives because “it is only through others that a cosmopolitan disposition can be cultivated” (Bamber, 2015, p. 31). Sobré (2009) stated that “when members of multiple cultures come together in a group and engage in social support, cultural learning, adaptation, and third-culture building, they emerge with a cosmopolitan perspective, which they can then reapply to their future lives beyond the group” (p. 118). Williams’s (2013) findings about study abroad and service-learning added that his young adult student participants position their loyalties somewhere along a continuum between self and humanity at large, in a series of concentric circles . . . with the self at the core of the circles . . . [and] returning study abroad participants demonstrate their allegiances indeed gravitate further from the local and closer to the global. (pp. 276-277)

Similarly, Gu and Schweisfurth (2015) found that individuals who returned from studying abroad as either undergraduate or graduate students from 6 months to 27 years prior to participating in their research have what they term a “diaspora consciousness” with both a strong identity connection of being Chinese and “an emergent self-consciously international outlook” (p. 958). These adults, once back home and in the workforce, practiced what the authors term an “everyday transnationalism” embedded in a variety of networks that helped them develop cosmopolitan competence characterized by a broadened worldview; international awareness and skills of looking at, interacting, and communicating in the world; self-confidence; and intercultural empathy (p. 951).

Within adult higher education and professional learning settings, Rhoades et al.

(2008) also advocated that graduate student learning programs offer “alternative paths” for cosmopolitan development (p. 233). These paths include international and domestic mobility programs for developing a more balanced combination of local and cosmopolitan characteristics and values “that can encourage commitment and connection to local communities, and that enrich the professions and extend their benefits and influences beyond current boundaries” (p. 233). Researchers also asserted that graduate and professional program learners need opportunities to build diverse relationships that require cross-cultural problem solving, collaboration, self-reflection, and “personal identification negotiation” (Bilecen, 2013, p. 683) to develop cosmopolitan values and skills (Bilecen, 2013; Boni et al., 2012; Coryell et al., 2014; Kadiwal & Rind, 2013). And, Schein (2008) in her research on the Peace Corps, promoted learning experiences that develop “robust affective, experiential, identificatory affiliations

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beyond the nation, but which nonetheless remain accountable to the present realities of American power” (p. 234). She asserted that these are key characteristics of an American cosmopolitanism and suggested teaching strategies for deep, self-conscious reflection to help achieve this kind of perspective. Herrera (2008) similarly emphasized that in cosmopolitan education learners need to “confront polarizing ‘us-versusthem’ cultural politics evident around the globe” (p. 354) and to develop compassion and humanistic leadership.

Four studies provided implications for cosmopolitan development specifically for adult language learning settings that further our understandings about critical reflection and attending to both global and local perspectives. Cloete et al. (2015) contended that instructors must commit to continual and rigorous conversations about how language is used and understood when working across nations, cultures, and native languages. They championed the “importance of a critically self-reflexive framework that encourages ongoing reflection and debate about language, meaning-making, knowledge and power as constructed in and through the processes of [transnational pedagogical approaches and collaborative] projects” (p. 480). They also cautioned that the use of technology for student communications across different nations and cultures in various geopolitical locations, while having potential for cross-cultural learning and cosmopolitan development, often involves inequitable access and availability of resources. Guardado (2010) added that cosmopolitan stances may be necessary to maintain minority languages and cultures because individuals need to view themselves as citizens of a larger community, maintain strong affiliations with their nations or cultural groups, and enact more fluid, dynamic, and flexible cultural associations as cosmopolitan individuals. Starkey (2007) recommended the inclusion of cosmopolitanism to language education policy and practices to break out of a bicultural and nationalist paradigm of language learning. A shift to move the focus “from the primacy of the nation to a cosmopolitan perspective” is one based on human rights as universal principles, embraces the national and the patriotic, and uses “communication to make connections and comparisons between cultures and communities” (p. 69). Additionally, Saito’s (2017) findings lead to caution regarding national language policies that do not invite target populations into the dialogue to understand the intentions and implications of such policies.

Saito asserted that “issues of global concern not only are interconnected across boundaries but also transform the ontological status of the social and the political within nation-state societies” (p. 283).

Cosmopolitan orientations in practice. Many studies provide insight about cosmopolitan orientations in practice for work and life. Four studies offer findings of competing discourses between cosmopolitan and local/native orientations within higher education. Gonzales (2012) found that faculty members who were more cosmopolitan were willing to decontextualize their work/research and to break away from their university’s regional teaching and student-centered mission and history. They were “unwilling to see or explore the local context, culture, history . . . and consequences that might follow should [their university] take on the image of the prototypical research

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university” (p. 349). These cosmopolitan faculty members were characterized as seeking prestige and drawing boundaries between self and university and self and students. However, unlike Gonzales’s conclusions, Szelényi and Rhoads (2013) found that cosmopolitan faculty in China and Hungary actively used global influences in their approaches to their rights and responsibilities. As well, “although globally informed individualism was present among some faculty, many discussed the strong relevance of globally informed collectivism” (p. 436). The researchers emphasized that “globally engaged universities in transitional societies thus offer strong potential to give rise to the kinds of citizen engagement among faculty members that foreground the greater good, contributing to social and economic development” (p.

436).

McNiff (2013) added to these discussions by concluding that cultural cosmopolitanism may be developed in educators, regardless of global or local orientations, through intercultural dialogue. McNiff asserted, Achieving a dialogical commitment to recognising the validity of the other’s point of view and their right to hold that view depends largely on one’s own capacity to acknowledge and respect the cultural and historical situatedness of all participants in the encounter, including oneself. (p. 502)

Similarly, Amadasi and Holliday (2017) suggested that a researcher’s critical cosmopolitan disposition can influence data gathering processes and adult learning through “intercultural creativity [in an interview as] a discursive co-construction in which the researchers and the students are active in the production and reproduction of narratives” (p. 255). They posited that globalization impels explicitly intercultural interactions between people leading to new possibilities for cultural narrative blending and employment. They further asserted that researchers ultimately must reflect on their own responsibilities with regard to how they contribute ideas about the intercultural in their research and teaching practices.

Scholars who presented findings connected with individuals’ cosmopolitanism enacted in practice suggested that cosmopolitan orientations are played out as social identities and can be used as a coping mechanism for expatriates (Khandekar, 2010), but the meaning of cosmopolitan citizenship may be “reshaped by each member in each setting” (Nilep, 2009, p. 29). Cosmopolitanism was positively related with readiness for the use of information and communication technologies in master’s students in Uganda (Bakkabulindi & Ssempebwa, 2011), and it was found to be a predictor of expatriation willingness in professional education business contexts in Germany and Korea (Froese et al., 2013). Kirkpatrick’s (2015) findings add that cosmopolitanism is a dimension of hospitality in the Catholic assisted living environment she studied, which helped mitigate community building and engagement, relationships between staff and residents, boundary setting, and diversity among residents.

However, researchers were critical when identifying forms of economic cosmopolitanism at play in their studies. Ye and Kelly (2011) concluded in their assessment of the practice of cosmopolitanism in Singapore’s financial district that

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cosmopolitanism is demanded of employees, it is in fact an economically grounded cosmopolitanism that has more to do with a narrow but generic global business culture than it does with acceptance of diversity. The effect, ironically, is one of exclusion rather than inclusion—a requirement to conform to a narrow set of linguistic, ethnic, and bodily norms. (p. 704)

Similarly, Zepke (2009), Lingard et al. (2015), and Sidhu and Dalla’Alba (2012) call for concern in their conclusions about cosmopolitanism as practiced by policy actors in neoliberal economies. Zepke (2009) asserted that postcompulsory education policy in New Zealand indicates that “cosmopolitanism will not necessarily thrive in [the] future as work place democracy; questioning, dialogue and critique are more likely to focus on technological and economic developments than on issues of wider social justice” (p. 759). He suggested that “from a cosmopolitan perspective the future seems bleak” (p. 759). Sidhu and Dalla’Alba (2012) found that through the British Council’s Education Counselling Service, the U.S.-based Institute of International Education, and Australia’s IDP (International Development Program) Education practices of branding, “education-exporting nations seek to entrench corporate cosmopolitanism and institutionalise an attitude towards education by student and educator that creates the conditions for neoliberal globalisation” (p. 428) and “limits the space for more emancipatory expressions of cosmopolitanism” (p. 415). Similarly, Lingard et al.

(2015) reported in their research on high level policy actors that alignment and shared epistemological characteristics, presuppositions, and (economic) cosmopolitan styles underpin the logics of practice in the global policy education field. They contend that this alignment can homogenize global culture for the purposes of “commensuration and comparison” (p. 35), regardless of individual differences, nationality/nation, and positions of the participants they interviewed. The analysis of these findings offer the field much food for thought for future adult education research and practice.

Discussion As we consider the multifarious conceptions, uses, and implications of cosmopolitanism across the review of literature, we can discern that the variances are based in individual versus larger contexts of adult education/learning settings and philosophical orientations regarding a local versus global stance for serving adults, organizations, schools, communities, the workplace, and the global economy. On one hand, the majority of researchers employed the concept of cosmopolitanism as an important set of dispositions, worldviews, and interpersonal abilities necessary for coexistent living and working in today’s diverse world. Some of these researchers, though, cautioned that cosmopolitanism can be manipulated into economic and political forms that serve a neoliberal agenda in ways that are actually antithetical to the goals of cosmopolitanism, and adult education, that value “human dignity and globally relevant ethics” (Sidhu & Dalla’Alba, 2012, p. 428). A few also debated whether a global orientation can be beneficial or detrimental to organizational coherence and progress. Indeed, elements of moral, political, cultural, and economic cosmopolitanisms were found across

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the review. The differing views and political contestations involved with the term compel researchers and adult educators to consider these differences when reading about cosmopolitanism. The findings of this review also compel us to urge deep reflection on personal philosophical beliefs when conducting cosmopolitan research and implementing cosmopolitan educational practices with adults.

Discussion points include the implications for practice of developing cosmopolitanism in adult learner populations. Of the studies that examined the ways cosmopolitan orientations can be developed, research indicated that international mobility experiences, cross-cultural interactions (at home and abroad), collaboration and problem solving with diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and deep self-reflection on one’s local, regional, national, and global loyalties and viewpoints were imperative.

Future research is necessary as we continue to understand the nuances among the varying definitions and extensions of cosmopolitanism, the balance between local and cosmopolitan stances (if they indeed are different ways of being), and how we as educators can provide more access to experiences across diverse formal, nonformal, community, and workplace learning settings. We also hope that researchers will engage in new studies to investigate how education policy might be updated to incorporate cosmopolitan learning outcomes. These should focus on policies that support inclusive, equitable input and access across the scope of adult, professional, higher, and community education.

We can see that conceptions of cosmopolitanism have progressed over time, and what appears to have occurred is the inclusion of the local into what was once considered a primarily globally focused orientation. This conclusion invites researchers and practitioners into the reflections and discussions of what may be the optimal inclusion of the two in different contexts and learning outcomes. Further examinations of the continuum of local and global orientations and what the benefits and detriments to adult lives these orientations may have are warranted. Finally, further comparative studies of cosmopolitan approaches in both research and practice are necessary. We recommend that research in the field continue to gain an understanding of how, where, and why cosmopolitan tenets are being employed across international adult educational milieus. We also suggest an investigation across studies comparing multicultural, intercultural, and cosmopolitan approaches to adult education and research.

Ultimately, it is clear that there is still much that can be learned about the concept and variant theoretical principles of cosmopolitanism. As such, we suggest that adult education scholars will find it a rich and viable area of research and theory building that will greatly benefit the field of adult education in practice.

Authors’ Note Previous presentation/conference proceedings paper on preliminary study (review from 2004 to 2014): Coryell, J. E., & Sehin, O. (2014). Cosmopolitanism and adult education: A review of the research literature. Proceedings of the Commission of International Adult Education Pre Conference of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (pp. 32-44), Charleston, SC.

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Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biographies Joellen E. Coryell is Associate Professor and Director of the PhD program in Adult, Professional, and Community Education at Texas State University. She earned her PhD in educational human resource development with a concentration in adult education at Texas A&M University, and she holds an MA in curriculum and instruction (Texas State University) and a BA in international economics (University of Illinois). She researches and teaches courses on international, cross-cultural adult higher education including global perspectives on adult education, cross-national studies in higher education faculty development, learning and pedagogy in adult study abroad, and internationalization of higher education.

Oleksandra Sehin is the international affairs coordinator at Texas State University. Her research interests include international education, students’ mobility and cross-cultural experiences, international development projects, and program evaluation.

Cindy Peña is currently a PhD student in the Adult Professional and Community Education Program at Texas State University. Her research interests are Latinx and immigrant issues in adult education in southern Texas and Latinas in higher education.