Positive Global Citizenship

Globalizing forces—from trade and technology to migration and media—have made our world today more interconnected than ever before. How can we best help young people develop the competencies and consciousness to successfully navigate and make a positive difference in such a world? The relatively recent concept of global citizenship education (GCE) is an umbrella term for many approaches to this challenge.

Unlike national citizenship, global citizenship is not a legal status, but a constructed identity based on moral commitments such as human rights and social responsibility. Though the term has no one agreed-upon definition, GCE often includes goals such as awareness of the wider world and its people, understanding of how the various systems of the world (e.g., economic, political, cultural, environmental) work on a global scale, respect for and valuing of diversity, and motivation and willingness to act to make the world more just and sustainable.

It is this focus on action and involvement that differentiates GCE from other types of “global education.” In other words, GCE involves the cultivation of not only knowledge about the world, but also the skills and attitudes necessary to participate in changing it.

A middle school teacher wants her students to understand and care about global issues and how they affect people around the world. For instance, as part of an academic unit on climate change, she has her students read research and perspectives on how climate change, as well as regulations meant to combat it, may impact various communities. She then has the students participate in role-play exercises in which they adopt the perspectives of different stakeholders, engage in critical discussions with each other, and try to come to collaborative decisions on what to do going forward.

To broaden his students’ intercultural knowledge and empathy, a high school teacher has small groups of students work together to produce a creative product (e.g., video, blog, art piece, poem) about a social or political issue of their choice. Then, each group is paired with a group of students from another country who completed a similar project; the groups share and talk about their work with each other, and end by discussing what they all can do to make a difference with regards to the issues they’ve learned about. Finally, each group presents a summary and reflection on what they learned to the whole class.