Project's website:
https://studact.technion.ac.il/(opens in new window)As a project, students’ understanding and appropriation of Global Citizenship Education (STUDACT) aims to provide a definitive and theoretically robust framework for the delivery of meaningful Global Citizenship Education (GCE) to a generation of students whose education has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before COVID, GCE had emerged as a vital educational tool to shape opportunities for the next generation: a digitally native generation, in whose world borders will be reconsidered, ‘nationality’ will be more fluid, and people will become increasingly mobile – both by choice, or involuntarily as a result of conflict, scarcity, or climate.
UNESCO is the leading advocate for widespread implementation of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and claims that “GCE empowers learners of all ages to assume active roles, both locally and globally, in building more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive and secure societies”. GCE instils learners with “a sense of belonging to a broader community and common humanity, which emphasises political, economic, social and cultural interdependence and interconnectedness between the local, the national and the global” (UNESCO 2015, p.14).
GCE is a major education target for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4.7).
Yet despite widespread implementation and broad acceptance, GCE has been subject to severe criticism in both academia and public sphere (Engel & Siczek, 2018; Yemini, 2021). Emerging critical scholarship of GCE argues that within youth GCE related agency (like volunteerism and activism), implicitly privileged, cultural and class biases of Global North world views are widespread (Andreotti, 2021; Andreotti et al., 2012; Pashby et al., 2020). Further, GCE stands accused of various failures: being an empty signifier, a sign of Global North privilege and neo-colonialism, a concept that is inapplicable in practise, decoupled and decontextualised from real-life teaching/learning opportunities (Yemini, 2021b). Most fundamentally, GCE is typically conceptualised very differently at policy levels and in the classroom. Therefore, questions have arisen concerning the possibilities of successfully engaging youth in GCE for several reasons, including – for example – a globally widespread low level of youth engagement in political issues (Goren & Yemini, 2017; Yemini et al., 2019).
Responding to a crisis of youth disengagement from formal politics, scholars often suggest a need for adults to socialise young people to become active, responsible (global) citizens, using schools or other adults as agents of socialisation. Traditional discussions around elections, globalisation, national symbols etc., were found to cause apathy and indifference among young people (Benedicto, 2013). This is especially true for young people who experienced migration, forming their civic identity outside their home culture and also for local youth in areas with large influx of migrants and in places where past hegemonies are challenged by changing population and conditions.
Extant published GCE studies have largely documented and addressed challenges in developing GCE related discourses, examining issues like capacity building (teachers’ readiness to teach GCE) (UNESCO, 2021), and addressing inconsistencies in the ways different governments implement GCE (Pashby, et al., 2020), but almost none of the studies systematically focus on students as equal partners and active participants in GCE (Wood, 2014).
STUDACT begins from a new framing: students are not mere passive recipients of learning contents – they differ in their willingness to engage with GCE topics, depending on personal characteristics and contextual variables. Moreover, they have the right to participate in conceptualisation and implementation of GCE as they are also expected to learn proactively, and appropriate GCE in their daily (and digital) lives. STUDACT will collect data in six countries (Poland, the US, Italy, Australia, Germany, and the UK), all of which have undergone large migrant influxes in the 21st century (UN, 2020). Migration is fundamental to the appropriation of GCE and in students’ agency towards it, since they (local students and newcomers) have authentic and common encounters in schools. Such encounters demand high and efficient appropriation of GCE and related topics.
