Teachers’ education in GCE: emerging issues in a comparative perspective

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Global Citizenship Education (GCE) has received increasing attention as a means of supporting children and young people in developing their knowledge and understanding of multiple global issues (Bourn, 2015; Fricke & Gathercole, 2015). Despite this increasing prominence, it is apparent that GCE remains a highly contested notion (Marshall, 2005; Hartung, 2017; Jooste & Heleta, 2017). The report draws on an analysis of nine Global Citizenship Education teacher education programmes across four EU countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Ireland and Italy. The methodology adopted is a multiple-site case study design (Yin, 2014), using ethnography as main method. The research employed a qualitative framework, seeking a description of practices and meaning making to behavioural patterns. Within each country, the research focused on an analysis of two typologies of settings: a) a training course for in-service primary school teachers organized by the project partner in the framework of the project, b) a training course organized by a different organization on themes related to Global Citizenship Education. The selection of the second setting was based on extreme case sampling. This setting was selected for being as different as possible from the initial one, in terms of approach, goals, teachers’ trainers and organization (but on the same or related theme). The theoretical assumption behind this choice is that being organized by a different institution the ideas behind course implementation are more likely to be different. Based on this the report argues that the teacher education programmes examined present an argument as to how teacher education programmes at the focus of this research present a transformational approach to GCE, where the concepts of critical thinking and self-reflection are perceived as the foundations towards action for a more just and sustainable world. This conception echoes aspects of Freirean pedagogy, itself an important GCE theoretical framework (Scheunpflug & Asbrand, 2006). However, less evident was the ‘critical’ approach to GCE, illustrated in the work of Andreotti (2006).