Promoting and critiquing global citizenship education: Mobilising reflexive approaches

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Sustainable Development Goal 4, target 7 asserts by 2030 all learners will acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others, through education for sustainable development (ESD), global citizenship (GCE), and appreciation of cultural diversity.

Yet, both ESD and GCE, when being practiced in ‘global North’ contexts, have been critiqued for reproducing colonial relations of power through assuming an ‘us’ who learns about and solves global problems and a ‘them’ who have the problems and need help (Sund & Pashby, 2020; Pashby & Sund, 2019).

Global competency has been one way to try to ‘measure’ action towards SDG 4.7 (e.g., by OECD), and it inherits this concern. How can researchers and practioners mobilise work towards engaging with ethical global issues in education in ways that respond to rather than reproducing deep inequalities?

In this talk, Professor Karen Pashby will draw on critiques of global competence to raise the ‘diversity dilemma’ at the heart of work towards SDG 4.7. Researchers have raised concerns about the OECD’s global competencies framework for its eurocentrism and reproduction of north/south hierarchies (Grotlüschen, 2018) and for imposing a sort of global consensus on what is a greatly contentious concept.

The diversity paradox builds from these critiques by raising the tension of ‘who’ is assumed to be the learner/subject of global competence and ‘who’ is the source/object of intercultural competency learning (Idrissi, Engel & Pashby, 2020; Pashby, 2012).

Professor Pashby will then consider what research mapping interfaces of discursive orientations to ethical internationalisation in higher education contributes to a reflexive approach to understanding global and international education (Pashby et al., 2020). She will end by considering how critical and post-critical approaches in global citizenship education can be bridged with environmental and sustainability education in practice by sharing insights from recent participatory research with teachers.

Karen Pashby is Professor of Global Citizenship Education at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Booking information

Open to all. Any teachers/lecturing or support staff within higher education institutions.

Enquiries

For enquiries please contact Mandy Ashley

globallearning@coventry.ac.uk

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