EDUCATIONAL AGENDA

What are the challenges for education in an interdependent, diverse and unequal world?

A possible response to this question involves building the life skills to deal with complexity, uncertainty and insecurity. In global citizenship education, critical literacy can help learners:

• to engage with complex local/global processes and diverse perspectives
• to examine the origins and implications of their own and other people’s assumptions
• to negotiate change, to transform relationships, to think independently and to make responsible and conscious choices about their own lives and how they affect the lives of others
• to live with and learn from difference and conflict and to prevent conflict from escalating to aggression and violence
• to establish ethical, responsible and caring relationships within and beyond their identity groups

However, any response to this question will depend on the respondent's assumptions about a number of things. In order to open the discussion, we invite you to use the activity below as a stimulus to clarify your own ideas and agenda.

 

Activity: Soft versus Critical Global Citizenship Education

  • Can you think of other sets of assumptions in relation to global citizenship education?
  • What affects your choice of approach in this area?
  • Can you think of circumstances that require a soft rather than a critical approach and vice-versa?
  • What would be the practical implications of adopting a soft or a critical approach to global citizenship education?
  • How do you imagine a ‘global citizen’ (it might be useful to think about it in terms of autonomy/conformity, self/other regardness,vertical/horizontal relationships, ideals/drives in life, notions of self/other).
 

Soft
Global Citizenship Education

Critical
Global Citizenship Education

Problem

Poverty, helplessness

Inequality, injustice

Nature of the problem

Lack of “development”, education, resources, skills, culture, technology, etc.

Complex structures, systems, assumptions, power relations and attitudes that create and maintain exploitation and enforced disempowerment and tend to eliminate difference.

Justification for positions of privilege

“Development”, “history”, education, harder work, better organisation, better use of resources, technology.

Benefit from and control over unjust and violent systems and structures.

Basis for caring

Common humanity/being good/sharing and caring.

Responsibility FOR the other (or to teach the other).

Justice/complicity in harm.

Responsibility TOWARDS the other (or to learn/decide with the other) — accountability.

Grounds for acting

Humanitarian/moral (based on normative principles for thought and action).

Political/ethical (based on normative principles for relationships).

What needs to change

Structures, institutions and individuals that are a barrier to development.

Structures, (belief) systems, institutions, assumptions, cultures, individuals, relationships.

What for

So that everyone achieves development, harmony, tolerance and equality.

So that injustices are addressed, more equal grounds for dialogue are created, and people can have more autonomy to define their own development.

What individuals can do

Support campaigns to change structures, donate time, expertise and resources.

Analyse own position/context and participate in changing structures, assumptions, identities, attitudes and power relations in their contexts.

How does change happen

From the outside to the inside (imposed change).

From the inside to the outside (negotiated change).

Goal of global citizenship education

Empower individuals to act (or become active citizens) according to what has been defined for them as a good life or ideal world.

Empower individuals: to reflect critically on the legacies and processes of their cultures and contexts, to imagine different futures and to take responsibility for their decisions and actions.

Potential benefits of Global Citizenship Education

Greater awareness of some of the problems, support for campaigns, greater motivation to help/do something, feel good factor.

Independent/critical thinking and more informed, responsible and ethical action.

Potential problems

Feeling of self-importance or self-righteousness and/or cultural supremacy, reinforcement of colonial assumptions and relations, reinforcement of privilege, partial alienation, uncritical action.

Guilt, internal conflict and paralysis, critical disengagement, feeling of helplessness.

Adapted from Andreotti, Vanessa (2006) “Soft versus Global Citizenship Education”.
Journal of Policy and Practice of Development Education (forthcoming)