Kathleen Nolan is Professor of Mathematics Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematics teacher education, curriculum development, and educational research methodologies. During her twenty-two years as an education faculty member, Kathleen’s teaching and research has featured theories of social justice and critical and culturally responsive pedagogies in mathematics teacher education. As well, Kathleen has been active for many years in international development and solidarity work through her personal volunteer experiences.

Since 2018, she has extended her research program into areas of global citizenship, justice education, and international development through a previous HRI Fellowship award (2020-2022) and several publications which offer a deeper understanding and critique of child sponsorship. Kathleen’s passion for justice, coupled with that for learning, researching, and writing, sets the context for continuing her work on child sponsorship by highlighting what the North can learn from South-South relations; that is, her current research proposes that a focus on South-South relations and, more importantly, including voices from the South is a promising way forward in decolonizing our actions and our thinking in the North.

Problematizing child sponsorship: 
Shifting from deficiencies in the Global South to decolonization in the Global North

Child sponsorship (CS) does little to educate the public on global poverty and inequity. As it stands, CS programs (re)produce problematic perceptions of the North ‘helping’ to address the ‘deficiencies’ in the South. Through the lens of decolonization, and taking Ecuador as a case study, this project analyses how South-South relations can serve to educate those in the North about global justice. The research question guiding this study is: How can South-South perspectives move North-South relations toward a decolonizing of minds?