Delinking global issues in Northern Europe classrooms

This article builds from scholarship in Environmental Education Research (EER) and Critical Global Citizenship Education calling for more explicit attention to how teaching global issues is embedded in the colonial matrix of power. We also consider the extent to which recent calls in EER for explicit attention to coloniality connect to discussions about posthuman thinking through a shared critical reading of modernity. We argue that ethical approaches to global issues, and pedagogical processes and practices that would contribute to them, are possible only if we recognize the relations of power that have shaped history and engage with critical modes of inquiry. Furthermore, we argue for the need to engage deeply with and confront historical patterns in concrete pedagogical practices in order to interrupt our own epistemic, political, ethical, and strategic place and categories. Finally, we will draw upon an example from our classroom-based research to consider how our findings relate to what is being called for in the critical scholarship of praxis, as informed by empirical studies

‘Is It That We Do Not Want Them to Have Washing Machines?’: Ethical Global Issues Pedagogy in Swedish Classrooms

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 one, we open up possibilities for approaches to global issues pedagogy that come much closer to addressing the pressing issues of our deeply unequal world

Critical GCE in the era of SDG 4.7: Discussing HEADSUP with secondary teachers in England, Finland, and Sweden.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Education and Learning brings together the main elements of the debates, provides analysis of policies, and suggests new directions for research in these areas. This chapter presents the argument for centring of critiques from environmental and sustainable development scholarship and critical global citizenship education scholarship in response to enacting United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.7. in Global North contexts. As educators and researchers working in these two areas respectively, we draw on Andreotti’s (2012) HEADSUP tool as a bridging framework. The tool centres pedagogical applications towards explicit attention to the ways education for sustainable development and global citizenship education can reproduce colonial systems of power. The chapter shares findings from a small-scale research study engaging secondary and upper secondary teachers in England, Finland and Sweden with the tools and engages with teacher perspectives to consider key possibilities and challenges of applying HEADSUP in both classroom pedagogy and reflexive practice

Governing of young people ‘at risk’ with the alliance of employability and precariousness in the EU youth policy steering

This article focuses on neoliberal governing by the European Union of cross-sectoral youth policies directed at young people ‘at risk’. The aim is to show how the alliance of discourses of employability and precariousness in these policies has emerged and how these discourses operate in policy. In the article, we analyse European Council and European Commission policy documents from 2000 to 2016 by drawing on the idea of discourses and governing with neoliberal political rationality. Our results show that the financial crisis and policy initiatives launched to mitigate its consequences made it possible to mainstream the neoliberal rationality of individual competition and flexibility as an inseparable part of youth policy steering

Global citizenship as taken-for-grantedness: reflecting on Swedish students’ trip to Tanzania

Swedish students regularly take part in school partnership trips to Tanzania. Yet, little research looks at the extent to which these trips support global learning. This paper is interested in the discourses that enable and constrain ethical relationality in these educative encounters. It considers existing research on global citizenship education and school partnerships in relation to decolonial engagements then analyses interview data with four students who participated in an entrepreneurship themed trip to identify discourses available to them. Students articulated an overarching discourse of taken-for-grantedness. Several sub-discourses could enable but tend to constrain an ethical relationality in these educative encounters

SOCIAL JUSTICE: THE MISSING LINK IN SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS’ PERSPECTIVES ON TEACHER INDUCTION

Critical scholars view schooling as one piece of a larger struggle for democracy and social justice. We investigated 41 school administrators‟ perceptions about the role and importance of equity, diversity and social justice in new teacher induction in the province of Ontario. Interviews reveal that principals were interested in shaping teacher induction programming in their schools and school districts, but that they regularly prioritized technical issues like classroom management and pedagogy over systemic issues like equity and social justice. When asked directly about equity, principals spoke about learning styles, special needs and differentiated instruction, but they regularly ignored new teachers‟ abilities to counter systemic oppression—racism, sexism, and classism. Our findings suggest that without an explicit focus on equity and social justice in provincial policy documents, teacher induction programming runs the risk of reproducing a transmission model of new teacher education

Pluriversal possibilities for global education in northern Europe

Purpose: This paper considers the relevance of critical and decolonial approaches to global education in northern Europe through theoretical and empirical research. Methodology: We present a case for an approach that engages the modern/colonial dynamic (Mignolo, 2000; Andreotti, 2014) and pluriversality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). We conducted a project involving workshops with secondary teachers in England, Finland, and Sweden centred on Andreotti’s (2012) HEADSUP tool. We recorded discussions at the workshop and individual interviews after applying the tool in practice. Findings: Teachers are both strategic and reticent in how they take up colonialism when teaching global issues. Wider political contexts and teachers’ and students’ own experiences with colonialism and racialisation are very much part of how ethical global issues are framed, unpacked, and responded to in classrooms. While there are some significant challenges evident, several teachers deepened their approach and co-produced a teacher resource supporting the application of HEADSUP to classroom practice

Linking digital, visual, and civic literacy in an era of mis/disinformation: Canadian teachers reflect on using the Questioning Images tool

The spread of mis- and dis-information during elections creates an opportunity and an imperative to cultivate and develop critical civic literacy with young people. Leading up to the 2019 Canadian federal election, researchers worked with Canadian non-governmental organisation (NGO) CIVIX to translate research on visual media literacy into an innovative and timely teaching resource: Questioning Images. This paper explores what teachers’ responses to using this particular resource can highlight about the links between visual literacy, digital literacy, and civic literacy, to support critical digital citizenship education. After setting up the background to the study, we present key themes from focus groups with teachers who used the resource and then consider implications. Overall, we found the tool supported teachers in deepening their understanding of, and approach to, digital literacy and highlighting the importance of visual literacy, and it supported political education and civic literacy during and beyond the 2019 election. We argue, however, that further resourcing is needed to support a comprehensive approach to visual culture where digital, visual, and civic literacies are mutually constitutive and where visual analysis goes beyond verification to offer ways of understanding visual disinformation in terms of its broader civic implications

Insufficient and inadequate democracy? Exploring coloniality and possibilities for the teaching of slavery in Europe

In the context of calls to decolonise education in European contexts, this paper draws on coloniality-based critiques of Eurocentric modernity to take up the links between democracy, slavery, and colonialism in education. Starting from the position that modernity requires epistemological support to sustain racism and white supremacy in European democracies, we read coloniality-based critiques of democracy with empirical literature about the teaching of slavery. We consider possibilities for revised critical engagements with democracy and with the history of European colonialism and slavery. The paper builds on and contributes to recent decolonial critiques of democracy in education by explicitly engaging a tension raised around the possibility of disentangling democracy from its colonial roots