Abstract
According to sustainable development target 4.7, by 2030, all signatory nations must ensure learners are provided with education for sustainable development and global citizenship. While many national curricula provide a policy imperative to provide a global dimension in curriculum and teaching, mainstreaming an approach to teaching about sustainable development through pressing global issues requires strong attention to what happens between students and teachers in the classroom. In this article, we aim to help teachers think through an ongoing reflexive approach to teaching by bridging important theoretical and empirical scholarship with the day-to-day pedagogies of global educators. This collaborative praxis offers an actionable approach to engaging with values, conflicts and ethical consequences towards bringing global issues into teaching and learning in a critical and fruitful way. Our results show that teachers and students can both experience discomfort and experience a sense of significance and worthiness of engaging in a more critical approach. In addition, if we critically reflect and support students in doing so, as these teachers have done, we open up possibilities for approaches to global issues pedagogy that come much closer to addressing the pressing issues of our deeply unequal world.
Highlights
According to sustainable development target 4.7, by 2030, all signatory nations must ensure that learners are provided with education for sustainable development and global citizenship
While many national curricula, including that of Sweden [2], provide a policy imperative to provide a global dimension in curriculum and teaching, mainstreaming an approach to teaching about sustainable development through pressing global issues requires strong attention to what happens between students and teachers in the classroom
Developments towards student-oriented and ethical pedagogical approaches to global issues in teaching practice offer promising opportunities; we argue, in line with research in the areas of critical global citizenship education and environmental and sustainability education, e.g., [6,7], applying a global ethical dimension in education is both complex and contentious
Summary
According to sustainable development target 4.7, by 2030, all signatory nations must ensure that learners are provided with education for sustainable development and global citizenship. According to the Global Education Monitoring Report, “more than any other target, 4.7 touches on the social, humanistic and moral purposes of education. While many national curricula, including that of Sweden [2], provide a policy imperative to provide a global dimension in curriculum and teaching, mainstreaming an approach to teaching about sustainable development through pressing global issues requires strong attention to what happens between students and teachers in the classroom. UNESCO [3,4] highlights the importance of including global equity and justice issues in classrooms, aligning with the imperative of today’s growing economic and social inequalities and increasingly severe and unequally experienced impacts of climate change. UNESCO [5] describes the importance of a ‘decentering’ process, whereby learners expand beyond their local realities to consider ‘a vision of other realities and possibilities’ (p. 20)
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