How do school students experience global citizenship and how can we support teachers?

Caroline is an internationally experienced teacher educator, History and English teacher, and PhD graduate from the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is interested in comparative and international education focusing on student experience and young people exercising their rights as active citizens.

When I conducted interviews in schools for my PhD research into the expressions and practices of global citizenship education in schools, some participants groaned and said they were dreading the question “what is global citizenship?”. Admittedly, global citizenship is a complex, malleable idea that is not easy to summarise. So often it can be used as an educational buzz word that can refer to everything and nothing at the same time. I wanted to find out a complexity of views on what global citizenship education means and especially how young people experience global citizenship in their lives.

The schools that I investigated made global citizenship an explicit aim, but I found that there was still a lot of confusion about what it means and how it plays out. I was compelled to do this research because despite being a big part of global education policy and a target of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, we still don’t know a lot about how global citizenship education is being practiced in schools. We know even less about how students experience it and I believe that matters because young people are active citizens and social agents. Let’s look at few selected findings from my research.

Firstly, it’s important to note that schools operate in a wide variety of contexts. Research conducted in one school doesn’t necessarily show what is going on in other institutions. What’s more, students and teachers represent a diverse group of people. This is especially relevant in our globalised world. And this is why more educational research to look at specific contexts is a very good thing.

My research took place in three secondary international schools in Finland, The Netherlands and Australia which had diverse student and staff populations. The schools all followed the International Baccalaureate curriculum. All teachers had some experience of global mobility. Some of the students had grown up moving around and felt at home in multiple places. These schools could be seen as elite institutions preparing to give students the edge in a competitive global economy. This is also interesting to look at in relation to ideas of who can be a global citizen and what does that look like in privileged educational settings. Furthermore, it is interesting to ask how privileged students can be educated for more transformative social justice-oriented global citizenship.

My research found that students interpret global citizenship primarily as personal relational experiences with people from diverse backgrounds. Students reported that they really enjoy interacting and understanding how people live and think through communicating together face to face. They said that this dialogue is how they primarily learn global citizenship, but it doesn’t only happen in the classroom. The learning happens between students in their free time too.

Teachers and school leaders also understand global citizenship as intercultural exchange. They valued being open and curious to interact across cultures. The teachers and school leaders said that they demonstrated their own global citizenship through being culturally flexible, adapting to different places and communicating with people. However, their responses usually attached cultures to nationality and culture tended to be described in simplistic, essentialist ways. Intercultural problems were reported as being barriers to global citizenship and when a tense situation arises, not all teachers and school leaders felt equipped to deal with it.

I also found that teachers and school leaders struggle to conceptualise global citizenship. They relied on textbooks or curriculum documents to help them express some ideas. Data showed that teachers felt pressed for time and have a lot of tasks to get through, which can be a substantial barrier to teaching explicitly for global citizenship. I found that global citizenship education can easily be demoted on the list of priorities. Teachers reported that they need strong GCE commitment from the school leaders.

Both students and teachers think that global citizenship means taking some kind of action. Action was most likely to be interpreted as charity. However, some students understood action as activism. Students referenced youth-led protests, urging governments to respond to climate change, as a global citizenship action. The students in Finland reported that their teachers supported this activism. However, in Australia, it was not encouraged by schools.

The implications of these specific findings suggests that schools need global citizenship support. School leadership could carve out more time for global citizenship education to allow teachers the space to contemplate different approaches. With limited time and heavy workload, teachers need support to prioritise education for global citizenship. The results suggest that resources are useful tools for educators, and they can assist in developing their ideas. A range of resources could help teachers to nurture deeper understandings of global citizenship.

Offering the opportunity for reflexivity to interrogate some simplistic ideas about intercultural understanding could also be useful for school leaders and teachers. Intercultural education is important, but culture is more complex than nationality and categorising cultures can lead to stereotyping. This critical engagement could expand ideas around ways of being in the world and ways of knowing.

The results showed that students can have some meaningful ideas about global citizenship education especially as a relational experience. They also indicated a willingness for more active and critical approaches. The charity framework of global citizenship education could be accompanied by targeted reflection, teaching and learning to look deeper at causes of issues. This strategy could also avoid reinforcing harmful unequal relationships which position students as fundraisers for deficient others. Implementing a human rights education framework is a good way to address many of these issues. Overall, schools could provide more investigation into the complexity of global citizenship and different perspectives of our experiences in the world.