Global citizenship amid COVID-19: why climate change and a pandemic spell the end of international experiential learning

Abstract

ABSTRACT The September 2019 Global Climate Strikes witnessed hundreds of thousands of students express forms of global citizenship through street-level environmental activism. These strikes were led, and motivated, by youth who chose to strike from class in order to send a message to world leaders. It was an enormous occupation of public space and public imagination that encouraged schools to cancel classes for students to go outside to engage in street-level politics. Five months later, everyone was told to stay at home. COVID-19 ordinances effectively made many normal activities suddenly illegal, including the sort of activism that engaged youth around the world only months before. This article explores how the Global Climate Strikes and the COVID-19 pandemic will be important moments to advance the concept of global citizenship education within International Development Studies, and especially around the place of international experiential learning in the discipline. Studying, and volunteering abroad, has been long encouraged in International Development Studies (IDS), but with a global youth movement encouraging less carbon-based travel, more street-level activism and a pandemic demanding more digital learning, how will International Development Studies programmes respond? The author argues that International Development Studies can adapt to these events through “Anthropocene Activism”, a term used to depict global connectedness and consciousness for change-making politics. IDS programmes will need to focus curriculum on inclusive postcolonial pedagogy including land-based pedagogy, foster skills of intercultural communication and encourage change-making politics, even if it means expressing it indoors and online. Climate change and COVID-19 are global problems that will require a global citizenship education that goes far beyond experiential learning through service-learning, and instead recognise that meaning can be made out of our current global challenges, including through Anthropocene Activism.