Educating for Global Citizenship: A Youth-Led Approach to Learning through Partnerships

By Melbourne University Publishing Ltd

This book explores educating for global citizenship in three parts. The first part identifies the field of global citizenship. The second part identifies a youth-led learning approach to global citizenship. It provides an in-depth and original analysis of the Global Connections program introduced into Australian schools and Indonesian communities over the last decade by Plan International Australia, through a case-study approach. Drawing on data from this project and further analysis, the third part outlines the principles behind learning for global citizenship.
Finally, these principles are woven together in a model of inter-agency collaboration between schools, higher education institutions, and non-government agencies. We invite you to explore this fascinating terrain with us.
This book is the work of a team. It reflects a long-term partnership between one international NGO, young people, and two universities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522861013

Book preview

people.

Introduction

Educating for global citizenship

Ani Wierenga

In the context of global change, there is an increasing recognition that young people need to learn about the world around them and respond to the need to become a generation of educated, informed and active ‘global citizens’. During the first decade of the new millenium, the subject of global citizenship has received increasing interest.¹ In a rapidly changing world, the topic of education for global citizenship is being recognised as increasingly important in its own right.

Global citizenship is ultimately about recognition of interconnectedness. That is, the interconnectedness of human lives, beyond traditional national borders, but also ultimately the recognition of the interconnectedness of all life on this planet. Not a legal status, like national citizenship, but an ontological, moral and social status, interconnectedness is about how, as individuals, we identify ourselves, how we engage, how we relate to each other and how we act.

In many countries, as in Australia, both state-based and national curricula aspire to address young people’s global citizenship by means of action and leadership. There has been significant interest in the challenge facing education departments about how to actually do this through formal curriculum.² With policy systems essentially defining young people as economic units and productive workers, increasingly in OECD countries studies have tracked a narrowing rather than a broadening of the educational inputs that young people are being offered.³ In the midst of increased testing along narrow instrumental lines, what gets measured gets done. In this context, young people can leave education saying they feel equipped to get a job but not to be citizens in their communities or the world.⁴ In the next few decades, curriculum reform will be important, to address the important issues of the twenty-first century and to better support and equip young people for their own roles in creating shared futures.

Working on the front line, schools are engaged in creative work. However, we find that schools themselves are often poorly resourced for their work in education for global citizenship. In this context, working with non-government organisations (NGOs) is becoming increasingly important.⁵ Because of the nature of their work, international development non-government organisations (INGOs) are in a unique position to work with young people—in this instance in schools—to inform curriculum content, especially in the areas of global and citizenship education.⁶

Given the prominence of global citizenship in national and state education policies (and aspirational statements) during the early 2000s, surprisingly few models of effective programs for global citizenship education are being published for educators to draw on. Creative work is happening at many sites within communities, but this gap might reflect the challenge of actually documenting and creating an evidence base when the key individuals are deeply engaged within said practice.

Significant collections of curriculum resources are also being offered by NGOs, but there are far fewer published models—and still a thin evidence base—about how sustained partnerships between educators, schools and NGOs, and young people themselves, can be sustained.

For young people the message about their own role as an agent of social change, capable of self-directed learning, sits at odds with many of the other messages they receive.⁷ Many are deeply concerned about the things they see happening around them, but are not sure how to respond or how to position themselves in acting for change.⁸ What is particularly needed in this century are new ways of scaffolding this type of learning.

And this, of course, is directly linked with new professional development needs of educators in the twenty-first century.

Partnerships in education for global citizenship

Partnerships are central to education for global citizenship. However, although it might sound like a solution, this point is really the start of the hard work. Effective partnerships are probably the most challenging thing to do well. The chapters in the third and final section of this book explore the complex dynamics, and insights from several different sets of partnerships that are centrally implicated in education for global citizenship. These include:

global and local partnerships, seeking spaces where ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds might meaningfully connect

cross-generational partnerships, where young and old discover the need to work together in new ways, in a changing world

NGO and school partnerships, where systems with completely different ways of functioning aim to work together towards new learning goals.

Each of these needs the other—and their different expertise—in order to do the important work of education for global citizenship. However, each relationship—that is, each group-to-group connection, staff-to-student relationship or organisation-to-organisation partnership—brings with it background knowledge, shared knowledge, necessary assumptions and distinguishable ways of ‘working as normal’. In each of these relationships, there is also a deep power imbalance.

Although he focused on some setting quite different from the ones being discussed here, one theorist who has looked at social practices through a useful conceptual lens is sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In his work Bourdieu examines how the everyday actions of ordinary people create familiar social structures (institutions, ways of relating, power imbalances and so on) and also at how these structures, in turn, create the conditions that seem to support only familiar ways of relating.⁹ Bourdieu explains these in terms of a ‘field’ of practice where each group will function in familiar ways, with its background knowledge, shared dispositions and habits.

Johanna Wyn, in her recent seminar reflection on education for global citizenship,¹⁰ has highlighted the potential usefulness of this concept of ‘field’ to the way we might think about partnerships in global education. Building on this thinking, once actors become aware, recognise and articulate familiar institutional patterns in action, we can also identify the importance of intentionally working towards a new field of practice. In grounding these insights, such a field might be identified in the institutional and program space between the groups of actors. In this space each can recognise the need for habits and assumptions to be examined and for new knowledge to be co-created.

In looking at the dimensions of group-to-group connections across developed and developing settings, the cross-generational dimensions and the NGO–school dimensions, each of the latter chapters in this book highlights some all-too-familiar patterns. The status quo—the way people normally interact with each other—is easy to recognise but harder to change. Yet if educators and activists accept that education for global citizenship is, above all, transformational work, this will be the day-to-day challenge that faces us.

This is why each of the chapters in the latter sections of this book point us towards thinking about the different design elements for a new field of practice. Drawing on the case study of Plan International Australia’s¹¹ Global Connections program and on data that has emerged from research funded by the Australian Research Council surrounding the program, each of the chapters highlights both promise and problems. In so doing each chapter articulates elements of design for a space that involves all groups of actors in new learning. In pursuing new models of education for global citizenship, these are the spaces where more work is needed.

About this book

In this book we respond to the following research agendas:

an identified need to explore how young people relate—and can relate—to the idea of global citizenship

an identified need to generate and document models of education for global citizenship, where young people play active and meaningful roles

an identified need to develop and document evidence from effective elements of school NGO partnerships, in order to create tools and understandings for this type of work.

This book covers new ground in an emerging field. It is the result of a series of NGO, school, community and university partnerships around one global education program. On the basis of seven years of development, research and observation, the book offers a theoretical basis, case study, principles and model for contemporary approach to learning for global citizenship. It also speaks directly to the commitments that promote effective partnerships which can support this type of learning. Drawing on insights generated by this one research partnership between non-government organisation, school, young people, community and universities, the various authors—drawn from or drawing on data from each of these spaces—work towards an integrated treatment of some of the most complex issues of our time.

In 2005, Plan International Australia implemented a pilot program called Global Connections. The program aimed to explore an active learning approach to development education that involved middle-school students in Melbourne communicating with children’s or youth groups in Indonesia to learn about each other.¹² As part of the youth-led learning research project, an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP0882156), researchers from the University of Melbourne and RMIT University worked in partnership with Plan International Australia to investigate the possibilities of NGOs informing school practice and to develop a model of education for global citizenship based on the insights identified from the implementation of the Global Connections program.¹³ This book is a result of that collaboration.

We build this work on an educational sociology tradition. Our approach is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on thinking from global education, environmental education, social sciences and international development. This work also sits in the context of an established youth research tradition and complements recent contributions about young people’s role in learning partnerships.

The book is tightly constructed in three parts. The first part identifies the contexts of global citizenship and chapters address the question: why education for global citizenship? The chapters in part 1 indicate how this new area of learning is important to communities, NGOs, education systems for young people and for individuals in the twenty-first century.

Part 2 identifies a specific example of a youth-led learning approach to global citizenship. It provides an in-depth and original analysis of the Global Connections program introduced into Australian schools and Indonesian communities during the early 2000s by Plan International (Australia), through a case-study approach. The chapters in part 2 explore the practical and methodological foundations for the development of a new model of global citizenship education that is characterised by a high level of participation by young people. Drawing on data from this project and further analysis, chapters in part 2 explore the elements and the dynamics of partnership on several fronts. In so doing, it begins to outline the principles behind learning for global citizenship.

Finally, in part 3 these principles are brought together in a model and a framework of inter-agency collaboration between schools and non-government agencies for global citizenship.

We invite you to explore this fascinating terrain with us. As educators, we are not preparing young people for the future, but partnering with them to co-create the future.

Notes

1 Delanty, G., Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics , Open University Press, 2000; Carter, A., The Political Theory of Global Citizenship , Routledge, 2001; Dower, N. & Williams, J., Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction , Routledge, 2002; O’Byrne, D., The Dimensions of Global Citizenship: Political Identity Beyond the Nation-State , Routledge, 2003.

2 Wierenga, A., Evaluation of the Global Connections Pilot , report prepared for Plan Australia, Youth Research Centre, Melbourne, 2006; Wyn, J., Touching the Future: Building Skills for Life and Work , ACER, Melbourne, 2009; Hess, D., Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion , Routledge, 2009.

3 Wyn, J., Touching the Future: Building Skills for Life and Work , ACER, Melbourne, 2009; Guevara, R.J., chapter 6 in this volume.

4 Wyn, J., ‘Learning to be Somebody Well: Challenges for educational policy’, Australian Educational Researcher , vol. 34, no. 3, 2007, pp. 35–52.

5 Eckersley, R., Cahill, H., Wierenga, A. et al., Generations in Dialogue About the Future: The Hopes and Fears of Young Australians , Australia 21 Ltd & Australian Youth Research Centre, Melbourne, 2007.

6 Wierenga, A., Wyn, J., Guevara, J. R. et al., Youth-led Learning: Local Connections and Global Citizenship , Youth Research Centre, Melbourne, 2008.

7 Holdsworth, R., Real Learning Real Futures , Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne & Dusseldorp Skills Forum, Melbourne, 2004; Eckersley, R., Cahill, H., Wierenga, A. et al., Generations in Dialogue About the Future ; Wyn, J., Touching the Future: Building Skills for Life and Work , ACER, Melbourne, 2009; Guevara, R. J., chapter 6 in this volume; Wierenga, A. & Ratnam, S., ‘Young People and the Future’, in S. Beadle, R. Holdsworth & J. Wyn (eds), ‘ For we are young and … ’, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2011.

8 ibid.; Woodman, D. & Threadgold, S., ‘The Future of the Sociology of Youth’, Youth Studies Australia , vol. 30, no. 3, 2001, pp. 8–12.

9 Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1977.

10 Wyn, J., ‘Reflections’, paper prepared for AAER Conference, Melbourne, December 2010.

11 In some chapters in this book, ‘Plan International Australia’ is also referred to by the informal name ‘Plan in Australia’. The term ‘Plan International’ refers to the global organisation of which Plan International Australia is a part. The name ‘Plan’ is used as a shorter way to identify either of these organisations, dependent on the substantive context in which this abbreviated name is being used.

12 Kahla, V., ‘International Youth Connections’, unpublished paper prepared for 2010 Program review, Plan International Australia, 2010; Riley, J., Wierenga, A., Bond, G. et al., unpublished notes from the Global Citizenship and NGOs Workshop, Plan International Australia, 2010; Schultz, L., Wierenga, A., Guevara, J. R. et al., ‘Global Connections: A tool for active citizenship’, Development in Practice , vol. 19, no. 8, 2009, pp. 1023–34.

13 Wierenga, A., Wyn, J., Guevara, J. R., et al., Youth-led Learning .

Part 1

Contexts of global citizenship

This book has three parts. Each part introduces a new layer to an operational model of education for global citizenship, which is shown in the diagram below.

Why education for global citizenship? This is the question that the chapters in this first part attempt to examine, each from a particular contextual perspective as identified by the four corners of the model. Each chapter elaborates on a rationale for an education for global citizenship program and identifies the key elements that could be considered in designing such a program. Furthermore, each chapter provides an overview of theoretical frameworks that can inform the design, implementation and evaluation of such education for global citizenship programs.

In chapter 1, Annette Gough outlines the key historical milestones that have shaped the educational context and the current curriculum challenges of global citizenship education. In chapter 2, Glenn Bond from Plan International Australia introduces the context and tensions within international aid and development work in addressing the vision of global citizenship and how non-governmental development organisations are attempting to address these as part of their community engagement strategies. In chapter 3, highlighting the youth context, Johanna Wyn reflects on the weaknesses of the current educational approaches to citizenship and social inclusion and argues for a new paradigm that better serves the needs of young people in rapidly changing times. In chapter 4, Samantha Ratnam focuses on the context of the individual young person and argues how the notion of citizenship is changing the ways young people shape their own identities and correspondingly how they engage with civic life and what this may mean for contemporary citizenship education.

Chapter 1

Global citizenship as a contemporary

curriculum challenge

Annette Gough

This chapter provides an educational context for the importance of global citizenship as we move through the twenty-first century and, as such, provides a grounding for the other chapters in this volume. It also outlines the history of the field in order to understand where it has come from, its frequently changing nomenclature and its convergences with other significant social and educational movements, such as environmental education and education for sustainable development.

‘Global citizenship education’ is a new term for a field that has been around for nigh on forty years. Development education emerged in the 1970s because of concerns about human rights, social justice and inequities in development. At around the same time the field known as environmental education also emerged, with concerns about the state of the environment and the quality of human life. These two areas have progressed both together, through notions of global education and education for sustainable development and separately for the past two decades.

As discussed later in this chapter, both areas are subject to contestations and challenges around their place in the school curriculum, and both areas benefit from the involvement of and contributions from NGOs in their implementation in schools. In recent times, notions of both global citizenship and sustainable development have been incorporated into the formal school curriculum in several countries and significant efforts have been made to develop suitable frameworks, guidelines and resources to assist with implementation in schools. These initiatives provide hope and guidance for the future of both areas in the curriculum while acknowledging that there are also contemporary challenges.

From development education to global citizenship

The area of learning and understanding about the world that is currently called ‘global citizenship’, ‘global learning’ or ‘global education’ traces its origins to the field of ‘development education’ that emerged during the 1970s.

The field of development education has a long history in the United Kingdom where it can be traced to the 1970s when, for example, the then Labour government created an advisory committee on development education and the World Studies Project (WSP), which was set up by the One World Trust in 1973.¹ One of the earliest definitions of development education comes from the United Nations (1975):

Development education is concerned with issues of human rights, dignity, self-reliance and social justice in both developed and developing countries. It is concerned with the causes of under-development and the promotion of an understanding of what is involved in development, of how different countries go about undertaking development, and of the reasons for and ways of achieving a new international economic and social order.²

Development education grew in Europe during the 1990s, and in 2002 the European Commission released the Maastricht Global Education Declaration, which has helped shape developments in the field in Europe. This declaration recognised that ‘[a]ll citizens need knowledge and skills to understand, participate in and interact critically with our global society as empowered global citizens’ and that: ‘The methodology of Global Education focuses on supporting active learning and encouraging reflection with active participation of learners and educators. It celebrates and promotes diversity and respect for others and encourages learners to make their choices in their own context in relation to the global context.’³

An agreed definition for development education from the UK became an underlying framework for NGOs working in the field across Europe. Development education is about:

enabling people to understand the links between their own lives and those of people throughout the world;

increasing understanding of the global economic, social and political environmental forces which shape our lives;

developing the skills, attitudes and values which enable people to work together to bring about change and to take control of their own lives;

working to achieve a more just and sustainable world in which power and resources are equitably shared.⁴

That development education has morphed into being called global education or global learning is clearly demonstrated by David Hicks,⁵ who used the same dot points as those above (with a different verb tense) to describe ‘global learning’.

Consistent in these definitions is that development education is very much seen as a process of learning about global inequality and promoting action for change. For example, the Development Education Exchange in Europe Project (DEEEP) describes development education as: ‘an active learning process, founded on values of solidarity, equality, inclusion and cooperation. It enables people to move from basic awareness of international development priorities and sustainable human development, through understanding of the causes and effects of global issues, to personal involvement and informed action.’⁶

Development education and environmental education

Development education has, for many decades, also been strongly linked with environmental education, a movement which developed in a similar time frame.⁷ Both areas share a focus on human action to improve the environment and achieve a new social and economic order. For example, the goals and objectives of environmental education recommended at the UNESCO–UNEP Tbilisi intergovernmental conference on environmental education were the following:

1. The goals of environmental education are:

(a)    to foster clear awareness of, and concern about, economic, social, political and ecological interdependence in urban and rural areas;

(b)    to provide every person with opportunities to acquire the knowledge, values, attitudes, commitment and skills needed to protect and improve the environment;

(c)    to create new patterns of behaviour of individuals, groups and society as a whole towards the environment.

2. The categories of environmental education objectives are:

Awareness: to help social groups and individuals acquire an awareness of and sensitivity to the total environment and its allied problems.

Knowledge: to help social groups and individuals gain a variety of experience in, and acquire a basic understanding of, the environment and its associate problems.

Attitudes: to help social groups and individuals acquire a set of values and feelings of concern for the environment, and the motivation for actively participating in environmental improvement and protection.

Skills: to help social groups and individuals acquire the skills for identifying and solving environmental problems.

Participation: to provide social groups and individuals with an opportunity to be actively involved at all levels in working toward resolution of environmental problems.⁸

The interdependence of environmental and development issues was also recognised by the World Commission on Environment and Development when it noted that:

Until recently, the planet was a large world in which human activities and their effects were neatly compartmentalized within nations … and within broad areas of concern (environmental, economic, social). These compartments have begun to dissolve. This applies in particular to the various global ‘crises’ that have seized public concern, particularly over the last decade. These are not separate crises: an environmental crisis, a development crisis, an energy crisis. They are all one.⁹

The commission concluded that humankind requires new, more ecologically sustainable and socially just, approaches to development. Since the publication of the World Commission’s report in 1987, the area known as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has emerged and, although it developed significantly from environmental movements and continues to have strong environmental associations, it has evolved to incorporate explicit interactions between society, economy, culture and the environment. This is clear in UNESCO’s (2005)¹⁰ eight Key Action Themes for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–14), which include both environmental and development-related foci:

overcoming poverty

gender equality

health promotion

environment

rural development

cultural diversity

peace and human security

sustainable urbanisation.

An early example of global education that combined aspects of development and environmental education, formulated in the 1980s, comes from Pike and Selby who, in Global Teacher, Global Learner, argued for a model based on ‘four dimensions of globality’:

the spatial dimension—the nature of local/global interdependence

the temporal dimension—exploring alternative futures

the issues dimension—the range of global issues that requires attention

the human potential dimension—exploring issues of holistic learning.¹¹

They saw these four dimensions as encapsulating the essence of global education, which complemented their five aims for global education:

systems consciousness—the ability to think in a systemic and holistic way

perspective consciousness—recognise that different worldviews are not universally shared

health of planet awareness—developing an understanding of the state of the planet

involvement consciousness and preparedness—awareness of choices and appropriate action

process mindedness—understanding that learning and personal journeys are continuous and with no fixed destination.¹²

However, for others, the links between development education and education for sustainable development are in tension, ‘based upon a perceived environmental bias in the latter and, perhaps, a concern that a stronger alliance with ESD may diminish or dilute the primary social agenda of development education’.¹³ In addition, while there does seem to be some consensus in definitions of development education, at least that ‘the emphasis is on a process of