Teacher professionalisation at the intersection of open, moral and critical Global Citizenship Education: Reflections from an international comparative study

Abstract

New social contracts for education, such as those promoted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Dublin Declaration on Global Education to 2050, outline the need to prepare student teachers to be change agents who can help address growing global challenges, using innovative Global Citizenship Education (GCE) approaches. To create and offer their students experimental learning opportunities on how to deal with these challenges, student teachers need to develop global sensitivity and position themselves to think globally, act locally and reflect “glocally”. While various models have been developed to describe these competencies in teacher education, research about their effectiveness is still emerging. The study presented in this article outlines the formal evaluation of an Erasmus+ project on developing global sensitivity in 301 student teachers (187 female, 114 male) from five partner universities. The project developed an interculturally sensitive teacher training concept designed to facilitate an international virtual exchange between the student teachers. It included four key elements: content introduction, lesson planning, international virtual dialogues and reflection. The findings illustrate how the student teachers transferred GCE perspectives into their own teaching practice and outline associated qualification affordances. They also show how didactical arrangements such as international dialogues about “hot topics” influenced the student teachers’ global knowledge, values and dispositions to (at least potentially) better address the pedagogic challenges of teaching global citizenship. Conceptual ideas and empirical results on didactic challenges in the university context are thus reported to stimulate further debate on future GCE implementation in higher education.