By Lisa Mauro, Former DC Senior Strategist, #TeachSDGs Advocate “It is necessary and urgent that teachers prepare students to understand the world in which they live, in all its complexity, to recognize the way in which global and local affairs are intertwined, to understand globalization and its consequences, including global risks, and to have the skills and the desire to contribute to improving the world.” --Dr. Fernando Reimers, Harvard Graduate School of Education We are Global Citizens. The world in which we live is both interconnected and interdependent. As Educators, we must prepare our students for future success by collaborating with citizens from across the world through a commitment to a wide-range of initiatives. These initiatives should aim to foster habits of mind that embrace cultural empathy, a commitment to cooperation, an appreciation of our common humanity, and a sense of global responsibility. The United Nations Division of Sustainable Development (UN-DESA), in collaboration with the United Nations Department of Public Information (UN-DPI) have partnered with schools across the world to educate our school communities and the wider local community about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Proposed in September 2015 by the UN, the SDGs have been approved unanimously by the Member States, who pledged a concrete engagement in the realization of the goals. The goals aim to ensure a life of dignity for everyone worldwide and protection of our common home, the Earth. Many schools have begun offering “Cultural Competency and Global Engagement” leadership courses, which center around what it means to be a global citizen. Courses are thematically organized to follow the UN model of presentation and debate - meaning it uses technologies best suited to reach a global audience. These experiential and elective courses aim to provide students with the knowledge, tools, and skills to address the challenges of a global community. Highlights of such elective courses include:
In 2015, Ranney School (Tinton Falls, NJ) partnered with Monmouth University faculty members to use project-based learning to develop global citizenship skills, focused on one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. This year, students focused on Peace and Justice (SDG #16) as well as Quality Education (SDG #4). Global Citizens Program students and Art students installed original artwork in the campus buildings as part of the Peace & Justice Project. Students collaborated on this cross-disciplinary project to raise awareness of UN SDG #16, Global Peace and Justice. The primary focus of the project was to understand the discrepancies in access to education faced by girls throughout the world. Students worked together to research, craft, and present to the school community a variety of projects that raise awareness of this key global challenge. The project was divided into two phases to allow a broader thought process to inspire their art creations. Phase I of the project included brainstorming and Phase II involved photography students who created images that express their visions of peace. Teens and adolescents are an important catalyst for change, as they possess innovative ideas and a large influence in our small spheres. Students found the collaborative phases of the Peace & Justice project to be inspiring! The art installations allowed them to creatively participate as members of a global discussion and provided them with a better understanding and background of the SDGs discussed in class. They could see first-hand how many of the SDGs are interconnected, specifically regarding the importance of educating individuals to bring them out of poverty. I find that this type of experiential learning is crucial in developing a more well-rounded education and understanding the abstract ideas within our Global Citizens community. Ultimately, the ability to contribute ideas beyond the classroom is truly beneficial and allows students to develop their skills in incredible ways. Looking to do something similar in your school? Art installations are a creative way to speak of the need for Quality Education for People and Planet; the education obstacles that specific groups around the world face, specifically minorities in underdeveloped countries. Students can review the UNESCO GEM Report (Global Education Monitoring), taking special note of what has been achieved and what still must be done. The report outlines significant disparities continue to exist between gender in receiving education. Students can brainstorm ideas that would create sustainable futures for all, and develop achievable action plans for local communities centered around addressing work deficits and labor market inequalities among global youth. Focused on youth employment, students will embrace the fundamental social policies for an inclusive and sustainable society. They will learn that education, the SDGs, are interconnected with poverty in many ways, and proper schooling and training would ultimately help unemployed youth penetrate the labor market and join the workforce. As Educators, we must employ a design thinking process. Schools should group together to assess resources and the actions needed to promote change in our global education community. We must be committed to offering a wide-range of initiatives to enable our students to become globally proficient, so they may successfully fulfill their roles as Global Citizens with an appreciation of our common humanity. We must aim to foster habits of mind, and a sense of global responsibility. This includes stepping out of traditional learning zones and comfort zones, to build skills necessary for cultural empathy, interaction, and future cross collaboration. ![]() Lisa Mauro is a former DC Senior Strategist who spent the majority of her successful career working in the Nation’s public interest to make a positive difference. She is Ivy League educated, holding a dual Bachelor of Arts in International Studies/International Business, with minor in English, History, and Economics from Notre Dame; multiple Harvard Graduate Degrees in Strategy, Negotiation, and Communications, and a Master of Education-General Education from Liberty University. Mauro is an active Member of Kappa Delta Pi (KDP) International Honor Society in Education, founded to foster excellence in education and promote fellowship among those dedicated to teaching. KDP is affiliated with the United Nations as a non-governmental organization (NGO), with dedicated focus on Education including children, youth, women, families, conflict resolution, social development, poverty, and human rights. She is an Activist, a UNICEF USA Congressional Team Member, UN Messenger of Humanity and #TeachSDGs Member. You can connect with Lisa on Twitter at @CasperMomNJ. On 28 June, a High-Level Event on Education will be convened in partnership with key SDG 4 stakeholders to drive a new push for inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. Sustainable Development Goal 4, education, is at the heart of the UN’s 2030 Agenda and essential for the success of all Sustainable Development Goals."
By Fran Siracusa
As we examine Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, the first target is access to any form of both primary and secondary education, including books, classrooms and teachers. Second, quality education must be stressed, as well as eliminating gender disparities and equal access for vulnerable peoples. UN Ambassador Dessima Williams from Grenada expressed that in global education, “there is inequality remaining still,” and be it through a foundation, a global project, or 21st century innovations, students ought to understand “the concept of solidarity and connectedness with each other.” To bring this message to students and educators is imperative; students and other global education stakeholders need to see the relevance of connection, and be enabled to work with others, while promoting and experiencing intercultural understanding. All students worldwide ought to be asked to impact the world through social good by means of campaigns or innovations, in their educational spheres. As Unicef articulates, in order to realize the Global Goals by the year 2030, “everyone, however young they are, needs to take part. So join our movement, teach young people about the Goals and encourage them to become the generation that changed the world.” For those of you educators who would like to help champion the Global Goals, a great place to start is a simple introduction of the SDGs to the students in your classroom. Ask the students to draw a connection between the Global Goals and their personal lives. Invite the students to create a personal campaign to help meet at least one of the Global Goals through digital artifact creation. In collaboration between myself, Nic Clayton and Amy Rosenstein, a project and lesson plan concept was created to easily introduce the Global Goals, and also to model the digital campaign. See our lesson and “Model Sways” for project instructions as well as student examples. We hope they can serve the global educator community as starting points, prompts, guides, models and more. Our lesson is published here in the Microsoft Educator Community lesson plans collection: https://education.microsoft.com/Story/Lesson?token=vrlb4 Amy also created another similar lesson, which includes a Skype Collaboration: https://education.microsoft.com/Story/SkypeCollaboration?token=Yxkm9 Please view both lessons and share with colleagues! Don’t forget to share on social media using our hashtag: #TeachSDGs Finally, to learn more about the Global Goals within Microsoft materials, please refer to: https://education.microsoft.com/courses-and-resources/courses/sdg Again, please join us in our initiative to #TeachSDGs!
By Dr Phil Bamber, Associate Director of the Teacher Education for Equity and Sustainability Network E: [email protected] This blog provides a summary of published researchavailable HEREor HERE. Great expectations! There are great expectations for Global Citizenship Education (GCE)! According to UNESCO, GCE is pivotal not only for meeting Target 4.7 of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but also for ensuring quality education that promotes the knowledge, skills, and values to meet the challenges identified across the SDGs. We increasingly hear calls for ‘transformative approaches’ to education (for instance within the 2015 Incheon Declaration) and manifestos have emerged for ‘transformative pedagogy for global citizenship.’ Examples of the latter include UNESCO’s 2014 publication ‘GCE: Preparing learners for the challenges of the 21st century’ and DEEEPs work on ‘Monitoring Education for Global Citizenship’ published in 2015. However, limited attention has been paid to the theoretical foundations underpinning transformative pedagogy for global citizenship, and there remains limited evidence of what this looks like in practice. The research project Given this renewed interest in GCE, it is important to develop theoretically informed and practically proven approaches for what we call ‘transformative GCE.’ This blog outlines a research project that attempted to do just that. It investigated the activities and experiences of a group of higher education tutors and students as they undertook a curriculum development project titled ‘International Experience for Engaged Global Citizens in Education.' Our starting point was that international travel was not required to nurture global citizenship (see my previous research on this available HERE or HERE). The initial phase of the project sought to develop understanding of the value of international experience in relation to notions of global citizenship, as experienced by undergraduates. This led to the development of a ‘framework for engaged global citizens in education’ and the subsequent development of interventions to internationalize the curriculum for all students at home. Students as ‘co-producers’ The project brought together eight academics from a range of disciplines and cultural backgrounds. They were joined by 11 undergraduate students to form a ‘conceptual steering group’ (CSG) for the project. The marketization of higher education has encouraged us to simply view the student as consumer: this project instead involved students as ‘co-producers,' with a particular focus on how relational aspects of learning amongst staff and students can help develop curricula that to re-orientates higher education towards a public good. The student involvement in the project went way beyond simplistic notions of student voice. Students were included as co-inquirers through an innovative model of staff-student partnership.The CSG underwent a process of constructing and reviewing conceptual frameworks and curriculum interventions as a committed community of practice. Theory in practice Following the review of data analysis completed in Phase 1, the CSG agreed that values and attitudes must lie at the heart of our framework for engaged global citizenship. Furthermore, we agreed that these values necessarily emerge through lived experience. The values that we found to be significant in our Phase 1 research included openness (to difference, others, diversity), self-respect, an ease with uncertainty, and a commitment to social change. Our understanding of how these values were nurtured drew upon theoretical notions of disorienting dilemmas/perspective transformation (Mezirow), distanciation (Gadamer/Ricoeur), existential homelessness (Heidegger), and liminality/threshold concepts (Meyer and Land). Our framework for engaged global citizenship is shared in the diagram below. Framework for engaged global citizenship The poverty of pre-specifying learning objectives It is our view that this framework can only be fully appreciated when instantiated in specific learning contexts. At the heart of this approach to GCE are processes such as shared reflection, immersion, deliberation, and exchange. Nurturing values requires a learning process that interrupts conventional educational processes that are overly staged or structured. This can be contrasted with pedagogy and curriculum that pre-specify learning outcomes. For example, the curriculum objective of encountering the other may predispose the learner to simply confirm previously held suppositions. The problem with educational frameworks Our research highlights the problematic nature of educational frameworks (such as the Teaching Excellence Framework in the UK and the framework for ‘global competence’ in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment). Educational phenomena and processes (such as particular knowledge, skills, and values) that are made explicit in such frameworks can easily become perverse ends in themselves. Locating the transformative dimension of GCE The main output of our project was supposed to be a framework for engaged global citizenship. However, we found that the transformative dimension of GCE was in fact located within the ongoing conversations between staff and students on the nature of GCE itself. Developing this framework enabled the project team (tutors and students) to consider their own relation to such frameworks. A process of doing and undoing; learning and unlearning was in fact the very process of learning that the framework sought to capture. Our experience on this project illustrates how education in general, and GCE in particular, must keep inquiry alive and remain open to new perspectives. Notes The full article ‘(Dis-) Locating the transformative dimension of global citizenship education’ is published in the Journal of Curriculum Studies and is available HEREor HERE. ![]() Phil Bamber is Associate Professor in the Department of Education Studies at Liverpool Hope University, England. He is Associate-Director of the UK Network for Teacher Education for Equity and Sustainability (TEESNet). His research is concerned with transformative pedagogy, (global) citizenship, and values education. He was awarded the International Association of University Presidents International Education Award in 2013 for leadership in research and teaching in global citizenship. His latest book is 'Transformative Education through International Service-Learning: Realising an Ethical Ecology of Learning. |
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