Context and background of the project: Global citizenship education (GCE) is a core part of many contemporary educational policies and is in line with UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals. It envisages an active, empowered role for citizens in sharing a sense of responsibility for global concerns. It strives towards “a common understanding of shared humanity on a fragile planet coupled with a commitment to addressing social problems through engaged public participation” (Gaudelli, 2016, p. 7). Numerous curricula across the world already include forms of global citizenship and it is typically situated within transversal competences which are the responsibility of every educator of every subject. Yet, training for GCE remains relatively scarce and it is rarely systematically part of educational programmes for teacher development. An often neglected aspect of global citizenship educational programmes is an explicit awareness of linguistic plurality and the integration of plurilingual pedagogies. Yet, as Torpsten (2011, p. 4) argues, “when skills increase in different languages, [people] become aware of their identities as multilingual persons [as well as] their possibilities of being active, multicultural, global citizens”. Therefore, one of our key innovative objectives is to explicitly integrate the multilingual perspective into a social justice informed notion of global citizenship. Objectives of the project: Our aim is to provide online teacher development resources to support secondary teachers of all subjects in learning ways to integrate GCE goals including plurlingualism into their daily practice in sustainable ways which will be motivating for them as educators and invaluable for their learners. Our project will create digital resources to help teachers to understand, gain knowledge about, practice, and integrate global citizenship goals through a plurilingual approach into their teaching practices. Participants: We seek to address a global population of teachers of all subjects working in primarily secondary, but also tertiary contexts through the website and professional development resources. An additional audience is teacher educators who may wish to utilize the toolkit in their own education programmes with secondary teachers. Activities: To meet these aims, we will develop three main forms of output. Firstly, we will gather examples of good practice in respect to GCE and plurilingual pedagogies. Based on these, we will create a framework for teachers to self-assess their competences. The examples of good practice will also form the input basis of our multimodal online course and toolkit for teacher professional development, which is our second major output. The website, which houses the course, will also facilitate community action by participants who can upload localizations and subject-specification adaptations and innovations. The final output is an accompanying manual for teacher educators who may wish to adapt the online course and toolkit for use in their teacher education programmes. Results and impact: We anticipate that the online course and toolkit will inspire a large number of teachers and teacher educators across the globe and in diverse subject areas to consider how they can contribute to the EDU2030 challenge of meeting the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals. One key way to do this is through Global Citizenship Education and increased respect for plurilingual and multicultural diversity. Helping educators to know how to make such goals part of their regular pedagogical practices without it feeling like an additional burden is key to the success of this vital educational innovation.
Our project had two key objectives. Firstly, we wanted to facilitate the implementation of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) into teachers’ regular teaching practices by offering self-study materials that help teachers raise their own awareness of GCE related topics and support them in bringing these topics into the classroom by providing teaching materials. As already mentioned, GCE can be found in the curricula of numerous countries, however, suitable materials to educate teachers about GCE related topics and to then teach students are often lacking which is why our project will provide the necessary materials. We aim to reach secondary teachers and teacher educators around the world who teach various subjects. Secondly, we aim to explicitly integrate multilingualism into GCE teaching practices. The multilingual angle and our aim to reach a global, multilingual audience is apparent throughout the project. We offer a short project overview in 12 languages, the interactive framework IO1 in 8 languages, and all handouts for all teaching units of IO2 in five languages.
The contemporary classroom is tasked with preparing students for the challenges of a globalised world. Numerous national curricula have thus adopted notions of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals of 2030 have also emphasised the importance of this topic. However, despite the shared conviction that GCE should be addressed at school, this is seldom the lived practice and teacher training courses rarely prepare teachers to tackle these issues. This project thus sets out to not only raise awareness of such topics, but also to encourage concrete actions and the engagement of schools, teachers, and students by providing ready-made teaching materials. In addition, this project acknowledges that identifying as a global citizen, who is curious about the world and its inherent diversity, is also often linked to curiosity about linguistic diversity. The project thus aims to explicitly integrate notions of multilingual competences (MC) into GCE.