This study explores the extent of environmental awareness and eco-friendly practices among high school students in the Johannesburg Central District, South Africa. The study adopted a qualitative research approach, case study design where four schools were classified as cases, and it purposively sampled 26 Grade 11 and 24 Grade 8 high school students. Using qualitative methods such as interviews, observations and questionnaires, the research focuses on key environmental activities, including waste management, energy conservation and participation in environmental projects. The findings reveal differing levels of engagement with sustainable practices across different schools, with some schools demonstrating more inclusive environmental initiatives. Students showed a strong understanding of how waste reduction, recycling and energy conservation contribute to climate change mitigation. However, challenges were noted between knowledge and long-term behavioural changes. The study emphasises the important role that experiential learning plays in environmental education. Through participation in hands-on activities such as school gardening and recycling projects, students not only acquire environmental knowledge but also develop a deeper sense of environmental stewardship. The study calls for increased integration of environmental education into school curricula, with an emphasis on the concept of climate change and greater community involvement to promote sustainable behaviours. The research further advocates the need for schools to become central agents of environmental change, empowering students to take on active roles as environmental stewards. This research aims to guide teachers and policymakers in enhancing environmental education to foster a more environmentally responsible future generation.
This article uses English as a Foreign Language education as a lens to bring a post-colonial perspective to the conceptualisation and application of global citizenship education in Global South contexts. To achieve this objective, four standardised English as a Foreign Language textbooks that are currently used in public middle schools in Algeria are analysed. Multimodal critical discourse analysis is used as an analytical framework to deconstruct the linguistic and visual structures of the textbooks. The findings indicate that despite the inclusion of the neoliberal and liberal dimensions of global citizenship education, there is a set of conundrums which validates the complexity of global citizenship education in post-colonial contexts. This set of conundrums, which centres on the themes of colonialism, nationalism, neoconservatism and patriotism, adds to the ongoing discussion and critique of the Western-centric discourses on global citizenship education and complicates its implementation in post-colonial contexts with strong nationalism.
This article investigates the cooperation between schools and development-oriented non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the context of education for sustainable development and global learning. It focuses on the potential and challenges of such partnerships for fostering meaningful social learning in a global context. It also draws on two empirical studies based on the documentary method: one analysing the orientations of NGO professionals involved in school cooperation; the other examining student learning outcomes in charity-based NGO–school settings. The findings highlight how different orientations among NGO professionals shape their approaches to school cooperation, ranging from normative messaging to action-based engagement. On the student side, charity-based learning settings often foster personalised or generalised understandings of global inequalities, which may reproduce asymmetries and hinder reflective engagement with complex global issues. Three key tensions are identified and discussed: the challenge of balancing authenticity with abstraction, the influence of NGO positionality on educational content and the risk of reinforcing simplified, rather than reflective and complex, understandings of global challenges. Based on these findings, the article argues for learning settings that critically contextualise NGO contributions, support abstraction and reflexivity and address power asymmetries to enable more nuanced global social learning. Implications for cooperation practice and future research are discussed.
This article conducts a content analysis of the National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education from a critical global learning perspective. The deductive analysis results show that the definition of global learning is not directly addressed in the National English Curriculum Standards, but that it includes content similar to global learning concepts. This article transfers Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti’s theoretical framework of soft and critical global citizenship education to the field of global learning. It discusses the extent to which the National English Curriculum Standards is connected to global learning and analyses the impact of introducing global learning into Chinese education based on China’s international understanding education. In addition, this article advocates for the National English Curriculum Standards to more clearly integrate the concept of global learning and be critical of global citizenship education. Finally, it suggests that the National English Curriculum Standards should pay more attention to the development of students’ critical thinking while increasing the reflection of global social equity and justice.
This article analyses the educational proposals of extreme right-wing parties that had significant representation in the European elections of June 2024. It seeks to investigate the parties’ educational project and its impact on global citizenship education. The methodology used is critical discourse analysis. The sample analysed focuses on the electoral programmes, campaign documents and public statements on education made by the leaders of these European extreme right-wing parties. The results show that their educational model follows similar patterns, replicated with different emphases on certain aspects though under the same general parameters. These include not only recovering traditional and xenophobic approaches, but also defending radical neoliberal educational policies, thus deepening the threat to the liberal order from extreme postulates. The conclusions point to the existence and progress of a common political agenda of the far right in education, albeit with different nuances and emphases. Discussions arise as to whether public education and education policy can still be configured as a space of debate to defend global citizenship education in a Europe shipwrecked by the rise of the extreme right. Thus, the questioning of the basic assumptions of education for development, human rights, sustainability, peace and intercultural education should be studied.
This article addresses the underexplored role of education intergovernmental organisations in navigating crises of the liberal international order, focusing on how cosmopolitanism, nationalism and universalism shape OECD and UNESCO policies and strategies. Our critical analysis of these ideological influences traces continuities and transformations within evolving liberal international order in these organisations’ activities. While the global education agenda of Sustainable Development Goal 4 aligns the OECD and UNESCO, their differing priorities and approaches offer a valuable opportunity for comparative analysis. Drawing on archival research and historical publications, the article identifies two key dimensions of the liberal international order crisis: legitimacy and ideology. The legitimacy crisis is seen in shifting educational reforms promoted by intergovernmental organisations, which now emphasise soft skills and metrics to assess educational outcomes within the Sustainable Development Goal 4 framework. Tensions among globalisation, nationalism and cosmopolitanism mark the ideological crisis. An exemplary response is global citizenship education, which emerged as a key intergovernmental organisation strategy, legitimising more flexible national interpretations while maintaining globalist ideals traditionally upheld by intergovernmental organisations. The article deepens understanding of how education intergovernmental organisations have historically functioned and continue to operate within the context of liberal international order crises, elucidating the complexities of global education governance amid shifting ideological and legitimacy challenges.
The many universities across the world that promote internationalisation together with global citizenship education overtly or covertly orient their students around particular global citizenship values. Neoliberal and liberal humanist perspectives on global citizenship have historically dominated global citizenship education. The neoliberal ‘global competitiveness’ model promotes the values Achievement and Power, and the humanist ‘global rights and responsibilities’ model promotes the values Benevolence and Universalism. The critical perspective has emerged to challenge these dominant approaches. Inter alia, the critical perspective has argued against the prescription of certain values (or homogeneity of values) and for value pluralism that is open-ended. We investigated the extent to which these different perspectives on global citizenship values correspond with patterns in the value priorities among students from across the world. With data from the World Values Survey, we tested for homogeneity of values among students and assessed whether either global rights and responsibilities or global competitiveness values are dominant. There is no clear evidence of students’ values converging as either global rights and responsibilities or global competitiveness. These findings suggest that a critical perspective on global citizenship education, which acknowledges value pluralism, is better suited to work with differences in student value priorities by creating opportunities in dialogical non-prescriptive ways for the conceptualisation of multiple global citizen selves.
The power of sport to affect social change is widely acknowledged. However, little empirical research has explored the use of sport in engaging young people in global education. This article fills the gap by exploring the role of sport using experiential learning tools as delivery methodology for global education in the context of Central Europe (Czechia). The study focuses on the experiential learning process of the study participants, a mixed intercultural team of Czech and Kenyan youth ambassadors participating in a Football for Development project with the aim of engendering cultural understanding, respecting diversity as positive and valuing differences as beneficial to society. The study benefited from a newly developed non-conventional data collection tool enhancing the research methodology and allowing for the facilitation of the participants’ ability to discover and process the experience-related learning through reflexivity. By showing the changes in knowledge, skills, values and attitudes, our findings indicate how the sport for development programme contributes to creating a semi-conscious learning environment for global education.
In 2015, Pakistan committed to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4’s provision of quality education for all. Target 4.7 of this Goal acknowledges that delivering quality education means ensuring that students develop a set of attributes characterised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in terms of global citizenship, and by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development using the nomenclature of global competence. There is ongoing debate regarding the agendas of the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; however, from a pragmatic perspective, both are already influencing domestic education policies. This article explores the extent to which this is the case in Punjab, Pakistan. A deductive thematic analysis of relevant education policies was undertaken to identify language reflective of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Programme of International Student Assessment Global Competence Framework. The analysis, based on meta themes identified by Vaccari and Gardinier, revealed the inclusion of language from these international agendas, as well as the reflections of local culture. Although this research was specific to Punjab, the findings may provide insights into how countries are adopting and/or contextualising these international agendas.
In this article, we examine the potential of collaborative online international learning as a borderland third space for global citizenship education. Border thinking is used as a mode of critical questioning and reflection of ways of relating to the world, of feeling, acting, living and inhabiting the world that emanates from plural knowledges disrupting modernity and repositioning alternative knowledge traditions. After discussing the central concepts of collaborative online international learning and global citizenship education, and unpacking border thinking and third space as a lens, we provide four illustrative autoethnographic vignettes from which we then discuss collaborative online international learning and global citizenship education critically. We conclude that by bringing together students to engage in a collaborative learning task that they would be unable to complete on their own, participants have a personal and collective opportunity to appreciate each other’s microsocial realities better. We argue that the potential for becoming in the collective borderlands of collaborative online international learning can deepen students’ learning and understanding of global citizenship education as inclusive, decolonising, Indigenising, critical and transformative. However, collaborative online international learning for global citizenship education should not be deployed uncritically as an online pedagogy, assuming inclusivity. Rather, it can be a core component of holistic learning practice, if it is deliberately used as a borderland third space where valuable learning through reflection and openness to discomfort advances a global mindset.
In this article, we aim to contribute to the theoretical conceptualisation and praxis of development education and global learning by engaging with recent discussions in the areas of ecocriticism, ecological literacy and posthumanism. Employing a pedagogical approach that is learner-centred and participatory, and that prepares learners to question dominant, globally relevant social norms, development education and global learning empower learners to be active global citizens. In congruence with this approach, we discuss the transformative pedagogical strategies employed in an innovative transdisciplinary course on the climate crisis jointly offered online by two institutions of higher learning in the US and Germany. We explore the philosophical and pedagogical stakes of this process-oriented, inquiry-based and immersive teaching intervention, and its logistical and organisational parameters, educational goals, course content and methodology, as well as some course specifics and impact. Adopting a critical pedagogical approach to climate change as a central global issue, our conceptualisation blends a focus on critical media skills (ecocriticism) with a posthumanist critique of dominant anthropocentric views of the more-than-human world. Centrally linking ontological, cultural and linguistic diversity in both curriculum design and pedagogy, this approach encourages learners to develop the transcultural skills needed to effect positive change on a local and global scale.
The book Global Citizenship Education in the Global South: Educators' perceptions and practices, edited by Emiliano Bosio and Yusef Waghid, engages with the current academic discourse surrounding global citizenship education (GCE
Knowledge systems and social philosophies from Indigenous communities in the Global South have long promoted non-violence through a sense of shared humanity and community building, and as such are valid counter-hegemonic alternatives to the existing colonial, Eurocentric model of knowledge production in use. This article details the contributions made by two specific Indigenous wisdom traditions – ubuntu and Buen Vivir – to a non-violence education teacher training programme in Chile framed within decolonial epistemologies. Using participatory workshops as a method, this study sought to offer Chilean trainee teachers a set of tools to explore issues of discrimination and exclusion and to deal with tensions arising from these issues informed by non-violent approaches. Participants read and reflected on how these wisdom traditions could contribute to their own teaching practice and later planned and facilitated a session with their peers to help them develop awareness on the principles of ubuntu and Buen Vivir. Results show paradigm shifts in three areas: individual versus collective action; their perception of human interconnectedness and of our interconnectedness with the environment; and how these perspectives could inform their teaching practice to foster greater inclusiveness.
Expertise in the Global South: Theory, research and evidence sets out to shed light on a particular and -according to the author -hitherto under-researched subject, suggested by its very title: teacher expertise in the Global South.With this focus, the book aims to contribute to a long-standing debate on quality education, especially in the
Target 4.7 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals can provide an opportunity for a more transformative approach to education. To consider this requires a new approach to learning that moves beyond subjects and disciplines to recognise intersectionality as being central to providing a radical rethinking of the purpose of education. Evidence from initiatives by civil society organisations in England shows that there are examples of these practices. At an international level, the Dublin Declaration on Global Education to 2050 provides an additional boost to calling for a major transformation in education.
