Developing Global Citizenship Education Skills and Understanding among Students

Developing Global Citizenship Education Skills and Understanding among Students

Introduction

• Global citizenship (GC) is not typically mandated as a stand-alone subject.
• Educators recognize the value of fostering engaged global citizens.
• GC has a long history, and its importance has grown with globalization and the focus on social justice and sustainability.
• Educators integrate GC skills into various subjects, combining content with communication skills, critical thinking, and respect for difference.
• This chapter focuses on fostering GC skills through social justice-focused pedagogical choices in two programs.

Overview of the Programs

• The context and aims of each program are introduced, along with the specific pedagogies used to develop GC skills.
• The role of educators in facilitating experiences that allow students to develop GC skills and connect to the local and global is elaborated.
• Common threads and differences between the programs are highlighted with examples.
• Issues of privilege, situation, and general accessibility are discussed.
• The discussion is presented as a dialogue to highlight the potential and limitations of the pedagogical approaches.
• The significant influence of context on pedagogies involved in equitable global citizenship education (GCE) is recognized.
• Guiding questions:
  1. How do the two programs develop GC skills in the populations they serve through problem-based learning, experiential learning, and service learning?
  2. In what ways can teachers use problem-based learning, experiential learning, and service learning to develop GC skills in students?

Different Spaces and Contexts

• Focus is on two specific programs:
  • Project ExCEL-Ignite (E-Ignite) in the United States using problem-based learning.
  • Changemaker Education Program in the United Arab Emirates using experiential service learning.
• Both programs develop global citizens by teaching critical thinking about issues across boundaries and considering the impact on local communities and the wider world.

Project ExCEL-Ignite (E-Ignite)

• A Jacob K. Javits research project at George Mason University (Mason) in Fairfax, Virginia.
• Works with students in American grades 6–8 to improve critical thinking and problem-solving skills using problem-based learning (PBL).
• PBL is an inquiry-based pedagogy that allows students to learn through facilitated problem-solving, engage in self-directed learning, and apply knowledge to new contexts.
• The PBL units have ill-structured real-world problems and are transdisciplinary, engaging, and empowering, offering a means for exploring GC and other complex issues.
• Currently supports work with three U.S. school districts: Miami Dade County Public Schools (FL), Charleston County School District (SC), and Virginia City Beach Public Schools (VA).
• Many students are underserved, including African-American, Latinx, and English language learners, students who are economically disadvantaged and receive Free and Reduced Meals, and students with disabilities.
• Goals include identifying potential in students and promoting effective instruction in classrooms in high-poverty schools.

Changemaker Education

• Based at the American School of Dubai (ASD), an independent, K-12 international school with approximately 1,900 students.
• Features world-class facilities, experienced faculty and leadership, a college preparatory American curriculum, and an Advanced Placement program.
• Offers hundreds of extra-curricular and student activities, as well as an engaged community.
• Meets the needs of an international population, many looking toward tertiary education options in the United States or Canada.
• Uses experiential education and service learning to teach global citizenship and sustainability.
• Aims to cultivate students’ leadership capacity and provides opportunities for investigation into issues of local and global importance.

Project E-Ignite and Problem-Based Learning

• Uses PBL as a universal screening to find students with gifted potential.
• A scale-up of Project ExCEL, which impacted over 12,000 students.
• PBL emerged from Harold Barrows' work in medical education, where students began with exposure to patients and real-world problems.
• E-Ignite uses a model adapted for K-12 education by Stepien and Pyke (1997), including five phases:
  • (a) problem engagement
  • (b) inquiry and investigation
  • (c) problem definition
  • (d) problem resolution
  • (e) problem debriefing
• Seven units have won curriculum awards from the National Association of Gifted Children (United States).
• Although the original aims did not include intentionally fostering GC, many PBL units encourage students to develop GC skills as they debate topics including environmental concerns, gentrification, sustainability, and alternative energy, among others.
• Teachers foster critical thinking, communication, and respect for difference by facilitating self-directed learning effectively during the units.
• In PBL, the whole class works as a group to understand, define, and resolve the problem throughout each phase.
• The Learning Issues Board (LIB) is a collaborative graphic organizer that documents a class’s questions, research, and ideas for resolving the unit problem.
• Class starts and ends with the LIB.
• Students practice critical thinking skills, evaluate a range of points of view, and practice making reasoned choices, while considering responsible action at a local and global level and thinking about a shared humanity.

ASD and Service Learning and Experiential Pedagogies

• GCE-oriented pedagogical approaches are framed by the school’s overt dedication to GC and sustainability efforts including the following pieces: an overarching sustainability statement developed by students, ASD’s Student Profile, and the school’s mission statement.
• According to the students’ statement, the program “encourages sustainable habits and innovative change by spreading awareness and taking informed action to improve the present and future of our community”.
• This statement focuses on learning for the greater good, which encourages teachers to use pedagogies that promote authentic learning around community-based challenges.
• The school’s Student Profile also does so. To develop GC skills articulated in it, teachers are expected to use pedagogies that promote empathy, innovation, self-awareness, communication, and resilience.
• Furthermore, the school’s mission includes the word “contribute”.
• This all contextualizes the prominent pedagogies used at ASD to cultivate sustainable global citizens.
• One of the primary pedagogies adopted at ASD to promote GC is service learning.
• This pedagogy, guided by Berger Kaye (2010), supports the personal and collective growth of students by engaging them in activities that develop their GC capacity within the context of sustainability.
• Service learning includes curricular experiences, individual informed action projects, experiential education opportunities, volunteering, and other actions.
• It ranges from simple multi-hour volunteer sessions to highly structured long-term, student-initiated service learning projects.
• Regardless of form, each student receives guidance to undertake personal or collaborative action for a sustainable world.
• Changemaker Education operates through a conceptual approach to experiential and service learning.
• At the highest level, teachers develop projects based on curricular needs and interests of the students and also mentor individual students in self-directed projects.
• The United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) are used as a framework to develop curriculum connections and provide a means for students to participate in experiential learning experiences.
• There is considerable student voice and choice and teachers increasingly use inquiry to support students.
• For teachers who are interested in cultivating GC skills but may not know where to start, there is also an easier entry approach that focuses more on building GC knowledge, skills, and application.
• The simpler version of ASD’s service learning model allows teachers who might otherwise not be entirely comfortable to focus on smaller pedagogical chunks of work, making it an easier adjustment in their pedagogy.
• This approach has two essential parts—developing student understanding of their place in the world and their capacity to impact it (consciousness) and putting learning into practice through action.

Using PBL Units to Develop Global Citizens

• The PBL units are transdisciplinary and delivered through English Language Arts classes.
• The PBL unit Pity or Empower focuses on the issue of barriers to education and SDG 4—Quality Education.
• Teachers and students take on the stakeholder role of a web development team creating a website for a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ equal access to education.
• The class collaboratively researches education equality, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa.
• They learn about the power of language and consider whether to evoke pity or show how education will empower girls.
• Through the Learning Issues Board (LIB), teachers and students collaboratively explore the right to an education.
• Teachers build students’ critical thinking skills by taking on the role of a metacognitive coach and answering questions with questions.
• The LIB is used to capture student ideas, help students focus, and push students to explain their thinking.
• Students ask and debate questions about educating girls in sub-Saharan Africa and various barriers to education, thus building communication skills and understanding of global issues.
• Teachers facilitate activities, revoice ideas, check consensus, and provide resources as decided by the students.
• The unit concludes with mockups, presentations, and a debrief, allowing students to reflect on their learning and shared humanity.
• Limitations include teaching time and the specific PBL model used; teachers undergo professional learning to understand the strategies involved.
• If the units are not taught correctly, students may not develop the desired GC skills.

Using Experiential Approaches to Develop Global Citizens

• Changemaker Education engages students in a guided experiential education program.
• The Edible Education program cultivates global citizens through hands-on visits and authentic learning experiences focused on concepts concerning organic principles, circular economy, systems thinking, and sustainable choices.
• Students determine the amount of compost to use for a garden bed, check beehives, collect honey, and make vegetarian food with the guidance of a certified food educator.
• The program is integrated into curricular lessons and involves every student at ASD, focusing on supporting the community and planet with explicit connections to the SDGs.
• Changemaker Education also helps students grow their GC skills through a secondary self-directed project.
• This inquiry-based learning endeavor allows students to develop their own Changemaker experience that incorporates key elements from their studies—identifying a global issue, critical thinking, connecting it to a target of the SDGs, incorporating the service learning process (investigation, planning, action, reflection, demonstration), and developing and communicating an outcome that has an impact on the community.
• Examples have ranged from an online community resource related to the COVID-19 pandemic, to developing a curriculum for girls’ empowerment groups around the world, to the creation of a prototype artificial intelligence bot that would answer legal questions for underprivileged communities.
• The recurring theme is that students are connecting their capacity as global citizens to the vision of a sustainable world and utilizing service learning as a way to make positive change.
• A school needs to have a specific mindset in order to support a program like Changemaker Education with its service learning and experiential approaches.
• Some approaches are not costly but include rethinking the nature of learning and support the use of local resources.
• It may depend on school priorities though, and lower-income schools may have different needs.
• This speaks to a challenge of balancing the mindset for the school and the community it supports.
• While Changemaker Education is a whole-school program, sometimes, teachers have used it inconsistently.
• Like many international schools, ASD has a transient faculty and this makes onboarding and capacity building difficult.
• There are also educators in some disciplines that engage students with Changemaker Education quite frequently, as they see immediate curricular connections (e.g. social studies, science), while some in other disciplines find it harder to make curricular links.
• While the schools’ frameworks, thus, orient educators toward pedagogies that promote GC, there may be gaps in widespread usage of those approaches.

Putting Everything Together

• Despite being geographically distant, the two programs share pedagogical similarities that help us understand the pursuit of GC.
• Both teams effectively engage students in active learning through problem-based learning, experiential learning, and service learning.
• Students are immersed in real-world, authentic situations, investigating problems that affect the world.
• Teachers act as guides, facilitators, and coaches, while students take ownership of their learning.
• The goal is to provide relevant and long-lasting learning experiences.
• Students develop GC skills that can be used locally, nationally, or globally.
• Both students and teachers report long-term meaning and impact.
• Students become aware of their unique perspectives and privileges.
• These pedagogies all encourage students to develop critical thinking skills, understanding of global issues, communication skills, respect for difference, curiosity, and empathy.
• Activities require students to think deeply, work through problems, and seek consensus.

Pedagogical Skills and Examples

• The E-Ignite project fosters GC through singular PBL units which have a finite start and end while the other program is more flexible.
• The Changemaker Education program can adapt its framework to the needs of its teachers.
• The E-Ignite curriculum is very precise, and there are only 16 PBL units currently that follow our specific model.
• Each went through an extensive iterative development process that includes teacher peer review, a classroom pilot, and then an external peer review by subject experts.
• There is a specific arc that helps students not only understand the problem but also moves them toward understanding, developing solutions, and presenting their work.
• Not every school or district may be able to be that flexible.
• School systems that have a more fixed curriculum or focus heavily on examination results might not have flexibility.
• Organizational structure is another thing to consider.
• The U.S. federally funded grant project is housed at Mason, and limited in its work by its funding level.
• The school districts are the current partners in this funding.
• Always looking for others to pilot new units and can provide our curriculum open-access as schools and teachers contact the project.
• Also looking to connect with other schools too.
• Even though the Changemaker Education program is based in one school, it works across all divisions and with all grades PK-12.
• There is a degree of privilege associated with the pedagogies discussed.
• Even though the E-Ignite grant serves students who may experience poverty, food insecurity, or instability, as part of the project, they are being exposed to a pedagogy (PBL) that is not taught as often as it should be in schools.
• The schools and teachers are currently working with share in this privilege because of the funding.
• Additionally, teachers do not always have equitable access to the sort of professional learning we are providing.
• The Changemaker Education students come from higher-income, globally mobile families, and they benefit from the nature of the community.
• The school also reinvests all money earned into the school and its programs.
• Because of the privilege of our students, often focus on resiliency, empathy, and self-awareness.
• The students have a lot of opportunities at ASD for experiential and service learning, and this may not be the case in every school setting.
• Not all schools may have the freedom to develop extensive service learning programs—just as grant funding enables us to do some things but not others.
• Having the requirement that any curriculum we develop be open-access allows other schools and teachers to obtain our PBL units but the funding level currently doesn’t allow to scale up to the number of schools and students we would like to expose to PBL in general.
• Both are cultivating GC in students in different ways, through different pedagogies, finding ways to foster the next generation of global citizens by providing ways for students to contribute their own unique experiences and perspectives as they explore issues and formulate solutions.

Conclusion

• Incorporating pedagogies that focus on developing global citizenship can seem daunting.
• Pedagogies including problem-based learning, service learning, and experiential learning can be used to help students build GC skills and engage in active and meaningful learning.
• If students are exposed to multiple real-world opportunities to develop GC skills, they build competencies that are valuable for higher education, the workforce, and their future lives.
• Teachers should consider building GC skills as a vital part of their roles, a task as important as improving literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills.

Funding Disclosure

• George Mason University’s Project ExCEL (2014) ($S206A140022$) and Project E-Ignite (2019) ($S206A190025$) are U.S. Department of Education’s Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program funded projects. These grants are examples of funding that can enable specific educational projects.