Conference Agenda

This paper reflects on approaches to decolonial Global Citizenship Education (GCED) and their implementation in educational exchange programs. In particular, it draws on the work of Vanessa Andreotti, whose concept of Global Citizenship Education otherwise advances a holistic approach that, alongside (queer-)feminist and decolonial perspectives, explicitly includes nature as an integral part of coexistence. GCED otherwise thus addresses global and social inequalities as part of a transformative educational approach.

The target groups of educational exchange programs in both the Global South and the Global North are affected by intersecting and interrelated dimensions of disadvantage, including social status, gender, financial circumstances, and mobility opportunities. For organizations running such exchange programs, these initiatives function as mechanisms for shaping relationships with project partners in the Global South on more equal terms.

Accordingly, this paper opens up the following questions: What might Global Citizenship Education look like in practice when approached from a decolonial perspective? How can intersectional positionalities be taken into account and critically discussed? Which specific dispositions and attitudes need to be developed in the sense of convivial forms of living together? Under what conditions is it possible—or impossible—to speak? And how do these approaches contribute to transformative learning processes?

In today’s highly interconnected world, it is essential that education systems prepare students with knowledge to understand complex global challenges and issues (Bourn, 2016). Thus, Global Education (GE) has been one of the major aspects of many curricula across the world to promote values of global citizenship, sustainability, and intercultural understanding (Lantz & Davies, 2015). Attempts to incorporate and implement GE in schools converge at the intersection between curriculum, teachers, and their students, and it depends on teachers as mediators between policy frameworks and classroom realities (Biesta et al., 2014). Hence, the successful implementation of GE in schools largely depends on teachers’ competencies (including their knowledge, pedagogical skills, intercultural sensitivity, and reflective practices).

Extant literature on GCE implementation stresses teachers’ perceptions of not being well prepared to handle GCE-related issues and tending to avoid them in their classroom activities (Neins et al., 2013). Therefore, it is important to explore teacher competencies (knowledge, skills, and abilities) as not only what is required to teach and improve students’ learning, but also as the requisites to facilitate GE implementation in schools and classrooms. Against this background, this paper presents part of a doctoral research project on the intended curriculum and teacher competencies in GE implementation in secondary schools in Kenya and Germany. Focusing on teachers and teacher competencies (including three aspects: (1) knowledge of global issues, (2) pedagogical skills for engaging students in global learning, and (3) intercultural and reflective dispositions), the study aims to address three questions:

1. How do teachers understand GCE in Kenya and Germany?

2. What skills and dispositions do the teachers require to implement GE in their schools and classrooms?

3. Are these competencies and understanding of GE context dependent?

This research reformulates the notion of the global citizen and global citizenship education from the global south perspectives. The notion of global citizen is currently emerging as an important topic across the world both in global north and global south countries. There are some driving issues that have ignited this classic idea to be hotly debated among scholars across the world. Understanding global problems, supporting political movements, creating global ethic, addressing environmental issues, gender inequality, learning global competences, or even just traveling abroad (Andreotti, 2014; Bates, 2012; Dill, 2014; Dower, 2003). However, I would argue that in the current post-truth era where there are a wide range of information and the fake news are easily spread among people, being global citizen means that people are required to have a fair-minded critical thinking (Brown, 2014), in other words, people are able to have a global consciousness to survive in this globalised world (Dill, 2014). By having those global skills, students are expected able to live in a wider community without boundaries. In order to be able to put a fair-minded critical thinking and global mindedness, there are a variety of ways to educate students to be a global citizen. Global citizenship education is one of the way because it can be integrated towards the schools subjects and activities to teach students to be a global citizen (Al-Maamari, 2022; Bamber et al., 2018; Goren & Yemini, 2016). In addition, being a global citizen also posed some threats for some local culture. Some of them argue that it might affect and losing local culture due to the wide range of penetration from outsider (Abdul-Jabbar, 2023).

Currently global citizen can be defined by different purposes. In the United States, Dill (2014) has argued that it consists of global consciousness and global competences. Global consciousness is believed that people need to have some awareness and understanding towards different groups of people, including their opinion (Dill, 2014). In contrast, global competences, it is believed that people need to have some skills that would enable them surviving in current globalised world (Dill, 2014). Andreotti (2014) differentiates between soft and critical approach towards global citizenship education. The soft approach means that global citizens can be developed through some sort of activities such as student exchange, while the critical approach means that it needs to address a deep roots of thinking towards others (Andreotti, 2014). Oxley and Morris (2013) provide more comprehensive frame of references in defining global citizens. They argued that global citizens have been categorised towards cosmopolitan and advocacy based model. Most of these typologies have been developed in the context of the Global North. It is increasingly important to develop our understanding of global citizenship education in a Global South context, in order to sharpen the framework through which we understand this global phenomenon. This research contributes an insight into the Indonesian context, where I argue that global citizenship is important because it shapes students to have fair-minded critical thinking skills, fostering global consciousness, and therefore the relevant skills to survive in a post-truth era.

According to these current debates and the importance of being a global citizen, the main objectives of this research was to identify teachers and pre-service teachers perspectives towards the notion of global citizenship. Understanding teachers perspectives from Indonesian context would support the current debates among scholars and contributes to the global citizenship education research literature among scholars over the world and in particular in the field of intercultural education research. The research question for this study was “what are the Indonesian teachers and pre-service teachers view towards global citizenship education?”

This proposal reports on a doctoral research, previously presented at ECER, that was guided by the following research question: How can Global Citizenship Education through Intercomprehension be integrated into the Portuguese curriculum? The study examines the intersection of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and Intercomprehension (IC) within the Portuguese educational system, with a particular focus on the first cycle of basic education, corresponding to the early years of schooling, i.e. children aged between 5 and 10 years old.

The main objective of the research is to develop a theoretical framework capable of interpreting the curricular potential of GCE through Intercomprehension in Portugal. Drawing on a Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) methodology, the study seeks to build a comprehensive understanding of how these educational concepts intersect and interact within the specific socio-cultural context of the Portuguese education system, and how such interactions may be translated into curricular and pedagogical terms.

At the core of the conceptual framework lies a critical approach to GCE and an understanding of IC as a multifaceted construct. Since receiving particular attention through the Global Education First Initiative (United Nations, 2012), GCE has occupied a prominent place in international and national educational agendas worldwide. Nevertheless, it remains a complex and chameleonic construct, serving and/or being mobilized for multiple purposes and ends (Pashby et al., 2020; Stein, 2015; Tarrozi & Torres, 2018; Torres, 2017). In this sense, to speak about global citizenship education today is to engage with “multiple ideological constellations overlapping and even contradicting one another” (Pashby et al., 2020, p. 1).

A critical approach to GCE (Andreotti, 2006), as one of those ideological constellations, enables a rigorous examination of GCE’s potential to engage with historical legacies—such as Portugal’s colonial past—in connection with contemporary challenges, thereby orienting educational action towards a more sustainable and socially-justice based society. From an ontological perspective, critical GCE also opens space for IC to emerge as an educational goal aimed at preparing citizens for plural interactions of both cultural and linguistic nature (Andrade, 2003; Doyé, 2005; Parrança-da-Silva & Andrade, 2018; Parrança-da-Silva, 2024). This convergence between GCE and IC appears particularly promising insofar as it offers a possible response to requirements articulated in Portuguese curricular orientations that emphasize students’ personal and social development during this stage of schooling—encompassing purposes of qualification, socialization, and subjectification (Biesta, 2009, 2020).

For some time, IC has been described as “One of the most remarkable and challenging ideas for the realization of a plurilingual education” (Doyé, 2005, p. 7). Emerging from didactics debates in the last decade of the twentieth century, IC came to be understood as a communicative situation in which each citizen uses their own language while understanding that of the other. Importantly, since its origins, IC has carried an intention towards inclusion and social justice, insofar as it affords equitable space and voice to one’s identity. This orientation contributed to the development of IC’s multifaceted identity, increasingly recognized not only as a form of communication or a pedagogical approach, but also as a means to foster inclusive educational environments conducive to social justice, as well as equitable and responsible participation.

By exploring and discussing these theoretical underpinnings alongside Portuguese curricular references and the empirical data collected and analyzed during the research process, this study aims to propose a framework that highlights the synergistic relationship between GCE and IC. In doing so, it seeks to offer grounded insights into how educators—particularly teachers in the first cycle of basic education—may effectively integrate these concepts into both the curriculum and their pedagogical practice.