Intersections and collaborative potentials between global citizenship education and education for sustainable development

Abstract

This article examines intersecting agendas and concerns in global citizenship education (GCE) and education for sustainable development (ESD) in the face of current global crises and pressures. While it cannot be assumed that the two educational projects automatically converge, generative and promising overlaps emerge from the shared interest in the SDG 4.7 education target. The article elaborates on a conversation emerging from the Bridge47 Knowledge Exchange Partnership focused on critical global citizenship education, and discusses the tensions, ambiguities, limitations and implications for critical, transgressive and potentially transformative GCE + ESD. While GCE and ESD can be ambivalent and constrained in formal educational settings, especially in comparison to informal projects where there are direct partnerships with people living on the margins of society, we argue that the potential generativity and transgressive possibilities of engaged and collaborative research have been under-emphasised. Participatory and praxis methodologies where education and research overlap offer significant transgressive and transformative potential. We point to important collaborative potentials in research practice that can help to bridge GCE-ESD gaps, given their substantial theoretical and practical experience in situated contexts, engagement with transgressive politics and creative and inclusive ethics of practice.

Interfaces of critical global citizenship education in research about secondary schools in ‘global North’ contexts

“…These studies indicate wider implications of the inadequacy of universal approaches to teaching about global issues in general (heightened through initiatives around SDG 4.7), and western notions of (global) citizenship education in particular. As Khoo and Jørgensen (2021) note in their contribution to this special issue, the context of SDG 4.7 has also begun to bridge discussions between GCE and Environmental and Sustainability Education, highlighting how both fields struggle 'a lot but separately, with questions of 'criticality''(473), while sharing a 'critical edge that speaks to the need for decolonisation and diversification at the epistemological and ontological levels' (6). In ESE this includes ontological engagements with posthuman and new-materialist discussions about how to move beyond the modern divide of human and non-human, as well as engagements with Indigenous knowledges that have never been organised according to this divide but rather emphasise relationality and inter-species interdependence.…”

Editorial: The Role of the Individual in the Great Transformation Toward Sustainability

“…Indeed, one consequence of this deficient meta-theoretical perspective is that most psychologists and educational researchers, while in principle acknowledging their role, treat structural barriers as something separate from the psychological and learning processes they are dealing with. This is reflected in the underdeveloped theorizing of how social-structural realities might inform their analyses (for a related debate on transgressive, transformative, civic and social learning to expand an individualistic scope in environmental and sustainability education research; see Lotz-Sisitka et al, 2015 ; Khoo and Jørgensen, 2021 ). This is problematic, because treating structural barriers as separate from psychology and education denies the reality that psychological and learning processes exist within these external structures and intergroup relationships, and both shape and are shaped by them (see Reicher et al, 2012 ).…”

Mobilising global citizenship education for alternative futures in challenging times: an introduction

“…Their article, however, explores the commonalities in both fields in relation to transgressive and decolonial approaches. Troubling the question of criticality in GCE and ESD, Khoo and Jørgensen (2021) explore 'what is 'critical' in 'critical' GCE and ESD', and what is meant by '"transgressive" education or "transformative" change'. Echoing concerns across the essays in this special issue, they critique the superficial and instrumental agendas in education that have continuously aligned with liberal and neoliberal 'modernisation' projects.…”

“…They call for a praxis of deep questioning that transgresses silences in normative conceptualisations of GCE and ESD, decentring imperial ontologies and epistemologies and dismantling the idea of education as a 'safe space'. Like Dyrness (2021), Khoo and Jørgensen (2021) recognise the problematic nature of formal education. And, similarly to Pashby and Costa (2021), Dhuru and Thapliyal (2021) and Swanson and Gamal (2021), they maintain that formal contexts are still responsible for addressing issues of unsustainability and social injustice and can do so by centring questions of knowledge production.…”

“…In exploring methodological approaches to research in GCE and ESD, they bring to the fore questions of an onto-epistemological nature and call on us to consider 'how transgressive learning practically extends into a commitment to actively living in transgressive ways' (Khoo & Jørgensen 2021, 447). As such, Khoo and Jørgensen (2021) contribute to current debates on the question of criticality in the fields of GCE and ESD by gesturing beyond an emphasis on critique toward a transgressive praxis of collaborative and ethical engagements with border thinking.…”