ABSTRACT
Discourses of global education, citizenship and competence have been characterising the higher education literature in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic has both heightened the relevance of global citizenship education and presented new challenges as educators and students continue to grapple with the lasting impact and implications. This paper presents the findings of a research study which looked at the perceived learning outcomes of a ‘virtual exchange' project which addressed issues relevant to global citizenship, involving students in European and Southern Mediterranean countries in online dialogue programmes. The study used quantitative and qualitative approaches to the analysis of responses to open survey questions using the quantitative tool IRAMUTEQ (Sbalchiero & Tuzzi, 2016) and focus groups. Participants perceived that their learning was happening above all through their encounters and discussions with people from different backgrounds. They reported learning to listen actively and carefully, to accept and/or respect different opinions and experiences. The findings open up possibilities for how higher education institutions might engage students in online transnational and global learning experiences—which can contribute to thinking about renewing education and societies in a post-pandemic world. © 2023, The Author(s).
ABSTRACT
While COVID-19 has underlined many global interdependencies, it has also made clear the ways in which these globalised connections are structured by profound inequalities. Teaching in this context has been deeply challenging for many educators around the world. For related reasons, though, the pandemic has also created new provocations for global citizenship education (GCE) attuned specifically to the problems of health vulnerability and sub-citizenship caused by socio-economic inequalities. Describing one such educational opportunity, we examine the lessons learned from connecting two university courses across continents through a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) collaboration in the middle of the pandemic. Our courses brought together students from India and the US online to study how health vulnerabilities under COVID compared in the two countries. The collaborations of our Indian and American students helped them to develop practical skills in communication across a vast distance, while also offering cosmopolitical opportunities for learning ‘other-wise'. Based on their reflections on their learning in the course, we suggest that the COIL approach provided a useful set of lessons about how global citizenship education can be enhanced through transnational and collaborative, but also critical and comparative attention to sub-citizenship in the world at large. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
This article is aimed at addressing concepts, approaches and challenges that are both very characteristic of the era we are living in and that would also greatly benefit from being more and better integrated into our learning systems (both in the formal and non-formal educational systems and lifelong learning). Those issues and themes have emerged from, or have been exacerbated by, socio-economic systems in place since the middle of the 20th century, promoting amongst other things, a consumption society based on a linear over-exploitation of natural resources, the globalization of exchanges, a rapid urbanization process and not-always-harmonious mixes of cultures and communities. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have culminated in triggering reflections on what matters most and, conversely, on what makes our world so un-sustainable and non-resilient. From these, a new momentum has been generated on reviewing where our efforts on teaching and learning about ‘sustainability' got us to. Our focus here is on new approaches to education for sustainability at global, community and personal levels, as well as at levels that connect those. From linking the local to the global through ‘global citizenship,' to experiential learning generated through practical projects such as urban agriculture, to an emotional involvement into understanding sustainability issues through art forms, we re-visit sustainability through the eyes of the learners, questioning the boundaries of the ‘sustainability educational project' beyond the ones which, for (too) long, have paralleled those of neo-liberal reforms. Copyright © 2023 Simon, Vieira and Jecu.
ABSTRACT
This article explores the nexus between migration, citizenship, and curriculum, placing global citizenship education at the center of its discussion. Through a review of theoretical and empirical studies on global citizenship education, this article examines what theoretical discourses on citizenship education have emerged in the context of the escalation of global migration, and if and how global citizenship has been positioned in official curriculum across many parts of the world. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been accompanied by a dramatic change in the realities of human mobility and interactions in recent years, questions, challenges and complexities layered on the already contentious field of global citizenship education are addressed as future agenda. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
This article explores the nexus between migration, citizenship, and curriculum, placing global citizenship education at the center of its discussion. Through a review of theoretical and empirical studies on global citizenship education, this article examines what theoretical discourses on citizenship education have emerged in the context of the escalation of global migration, and if and how global citizenship has been positioned in official curriculum across many parts of the world. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been accompanied by a dramatic change in the realities of human mobility and interactions in recent years, questions, challenges and complexities layered on the already contentious field of global citizenship education are addressed as future agenda.
ABSTRACT
Global citizenship education is premised on the narrative of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. However, the rise in exclusive nationalistic response to the COVID-19 has indented the central tenets of global citizenship education. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the triumphalism of exclusive nationalistic responses to COVID-19 has manifested in an increase in nationalism rhetoric, border closure, reinforcement of border fences the repatriation of foreign nationals and evacuation of citizens. In some instances, foreign nationals have been denied COVID-19 state food handouts. Consequently, there has been a rise in xenophobia, sinophobia and other forms of racial discrimination, which have affected the higher education sector. Contrastingly, global citizenship education envisions a global collective response to a phenomenon, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores and analyses the complex challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed on global citizenship education. © 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the notion that our world is global and interdependent. Despite the ever-increasing connection of global with local, there continues to be formidable barriers in accessing information produced in different international contexts and languages. This Innovative Practices article details the redesign of an annotated bibliography assignment in an international studies course to support the inclusion of global perspectives into the information practices of undergraduate students. The redesign embedded explicit information literacy dispositions and global citizenship education competencies through the search and selection of global information sources. The authors discuss the instructional elements used, student outcomes, and the connection between information literacy and global citizenship pedagogies. The goal of this article is to support librarians in developing inclusive and global information literacy curriculum enabling students to connect to international voices.
ABSTRACT
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic struck globally and has affected higher education institutions (HEIs) and their operations, indirectly impacting the progress of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 achieved thus far. This article addresses HEIs achievements and challenges experienced in the wake of the pandemic. Online news media reports played a facilitative role in providing information to the HEI communities. A rapid review exploring online news media messages relating to higher education at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa was utilised. Narrative synthesis was used to analyse the data. The results highlight HEIs achievements, which aim to ensure that all students receive the same level of education and provision in terms of devices and mental health support. However, challenges were also experienced at HEIs and include students feeling uncertainty and fear regarding completing their education. Furthermore, the results also show that not all students received the same level of education due to contextual factors, thus deepening the existing social disparities in Africa. The pandemic provides an opportunity for HEIs to embed the components of global citizenship education into the curriculum and to work in an innovative way to promote Sustainable Development Goal 4.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Pandemics , Citizenship , Curriculum , Humans , Pandemics/prevention & control , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic was a reminder of the importance of increasing connectivity amidst the accelerated rate of changes and disruptive events of our era. The need and the rationale for global citizenship education (GCED) were ever more emphasized by many educational organizations, including UNESCO. This article reviews the GCED discourses conceptualizing global competence as instrumental action and a binary view of global-local relations. In turn, the article proposes the idea of curriculum-as-relations for GCED. Curriculum-as-relations conceptualizes competence as situated praxis and focuses on providing authentic critical-translocal learning. Authentic critical-translocal learning through the strategy of comparison offers an alternative view of global-local relations as "articulated moments created by situated praxis". This new understanding of global-local relations may help different stakeholders to imagine GCED curricula beyond a Tylerian instrumentalist, ends-means orientation of curriculum.