Global Citizenship Education

An effective global citizenship education programme in a school environment is not an ‘add on’. It is a must and needs to be carefully structured, scaffolded and embedded across all learning areas in all year groups.

In an increasingly interdependent global environment, schools, now more than ever before, have a responsibility to prepare their students for the opportunities and challenges they will face in the future. Globalisation permeates every aspect of life: environmentally, economically through trade, culturally through an increasingly transient employment sector, socially through the media, politically, and from a peace-keeping perspective.

Global Citizenship Education (GCE) should function as a framework in which a school’s existing curriculum serves as the foundation to develop the knowledge, skills, values andattitudes learners consider and debate in striving to create a world that is more sustainable, inclusive, peaceful and just.

Within the safe space of a classroom, students need to be given the opportunity to think about and discuss complex global issues. Through this, children have the opportunity to listen and consider others’ experiences and viewpoints, and develop and express their own opinions.

Development for the future

GCE is essential to develop the future custodians of our planet. Continued use and abuse of our planet’s finite resources is not only unsustainable, but inequitable too. Our students need to develop a deep knowledge of global issues and universal values, such as respect, justice, equality and dignity.

Cognitive skills, such as critical and creative thinking, are well entrenched in many of our schools. But the question of how these skills are intentionally being used to adopt multiple perspectives in order to identify and recognise different dynamics and inter-cultural awareness, is something we should be asking all our curriculum development leaders to consider. Social skills, such as empathy, and communication skills, such as conflict resolution, need to be embedded too.

Former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon captured this idea succinctly when he said:

We must foster global citizenship. Education is about more than literacy and numeracy. It is also about citizenry. Education must fully assume its essential role in helping people to forge more just, peaceful and tolerant societies.

So where does one start? An interesting exercise would be to workshop with staff a definition of Global Citizenship. Oxfam International and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) provide good stimuli.

For Oxfam, global citizenship is all about encouraging young people to develop the knowledge, skills and values they need to engage with the world. It’s also about the belief that we can all make a difference.

According to UNESCO, GCE aims to empower learners of all ages to assume active roles, both locally and globally, in building more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive and secure societies.
GCE is based on the three domains of learning – cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural. We can consider each one in the following way:

  • The cognitive domain: The learner develops knowledge and thinking skills necessary to better understand the world and its complexities.
  • The socio-emotional domain: The learner develops values, attitudes and social skills that enable learners to develop affectively, psychosocially, and physically and to enable them to live together with others respectfully and peacefully.
  • The behavioural domain: The learner becomes able to use practical application and engagement.

Embedding GCE into a curriculum requires a whole-school approach. It could look something like this:

Sample topic for Global Citizenship Education
Figure 1: Adapted from the International School of Bangkok

A more simplified approach, as an initial starting point, could be to train staff in GCE and have them integrate on an ad-hoc basis aspects of real world relevance. As mentioned in Figure 1, discussing the current situation on the Russian/Ukrainian border is a great current affairs topic for discussion in a history lesson.

Climate change and the impact of this on glacial melting and the 50 000 Peruvians who live downstream from Lake Huaraz, or the recent earthquakes in Syria and Turkey, would be a powerful link to the topic of glaciers in geography.

Easy for the teachers of humanities to integrate GCE into their curricula, I hear the mathematics teachers saying! Well, it’s a cinch to do the same in mathematics. Just think of using ratios and fractions to explore economic inequality or using data to compare Fairtrade versus regular coffee bean prices over the past 20 years!

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Figure 2: The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals

A simple and visually powerful means to spark GCE curiosity and debate amongst students is to install posters of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals around the campus and refer to these in various elements of the curriculum.

An abundance of resources for Global Citizenship Education

For those whose interest might have been sparked by this article, there is an abundance of material to guide and stimulate GCE thinking. The following organisations are most certainly worth referring to, including the Council of International Schools, Global Dimension, and Classroom Connections.

Integrating Global Citizenship Education should not be seen as a burden. Time constraints and demanding curricula are inescapable, but we owe it to our students to help them understand their world, their place in it, and their potential to make a difference, locally, nationally, or globally.