Similar to Global Education, GCED is seen as a transdisciplinary concept, which can enhance and enrich any school subject, e.g., English as a Foreign Language (see 2.1.3), by widening its dimensions at any school level (Oxfam, 2015b; UNESCO, 2014). GCED covers the three domains of learning identified in Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom et al., 1956): cognitive (knowledge and thinking skills to understand the world), socio-emotional (values, attitudes and social skills which enable students to learn together with others in peace) and behavioural (acting responsibly for a sustainable world) (UNESCO, 2015). GCED encourages participatory learning, the exploration of local-global connections and the students’ views and assumptions, also the exploration of complex global issues, making connections, and finally, it enables learners to make positive change (Oxfam, 2015b) by equipping them with the following interlinked knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes, which can be found in Table 2.1.

 

Based on the above, according to Oxfam (2015b), a global citizen is someone who

On the other hand, GCED has also been widely criticised for its goals. In this sense, one of the concerns is whether global solidarity or global competitiveness should be encouraged as a main objective of GCED. If the main objective is global solidarity, then GCED should be mainly concerned with the ways students could contribute to the creation of a better world, while when global competitiveness is in the focus, the emphasis is put on the development of the learners’ 21st-century skills so that they become competitive, successful workforce (UNESCO, 2014). As Giroux argues (Giroux & Bosio, 2021), the latter perspective has prevailed due to the influence of neoliberal forces and the fact that “democratic values of solidarity and collectivism are gradually being questioned, or even superseded by notions of competition and individualism” (p. 10). According to UNESCO (2014), this is not an irreconcilable tension and GCED provides terrain for achieving both goals at the same time. Another debate in the field concerns the Western assumptions of progress and values (Andreotti, 2006; Dobson, 2006; Liddy, 2015). According to Dobson, one needs to be careful not to “end up reproducing unequal (paternalistic) power relations and increasing the vulnerability of the recipient” (Dobson, 2006 as cited in Andreotti, 2006, p. 42) by engaging in acts of solidarity in the mantle of saviours. As Liddy (2015) sees it, it is of paramount importance to address questions of power and politics in education so that teachers avoid reproducing injustice.

Giroux (2021) asserts that critical pedagogy (i.e., an educational philosophy which regards learning as an inherently political act, and which aims at developing students’ critical consciousness (Freire, 1998)) must inform global citizenship education so that it enables students to responsibly intervene in the world. In Giroux’s words, citizenship education and critical pedagogy “emphasi[s]e critical reflexivity, bridge the gap between learning and everyday life, make visible the connections between power and knowledge, and provide the conditions for extending democratic rights, values, and identities” (Giroux, 2007, p. 28). So that students become change agents, they need to question their deeply held assumptions and core beliefs, and they need to become able to see questions of “power, governance, agency and desire” through a critical lens (Giroux & Bosio, 2021, p. 6). Andreotti (2006) also emphasises the importance of criticality when creating the soft versus critical global citizenship framework. She puts the notions of “power, voice and difference” (p. 49) at the heart of her critical global citizenship framework, which encourages learners to reflect on their own and other people’s context and assumptions by asking questions about these ideas: “how we came to think/be/feel/act the way we do and the implications of our systems of belief in local/global terms in relation to power, social relationships and the distribution of labour and resources” (p. 49). The main contrast between soft and critical global citizenship education lies in the fact that in the context of the critical approach, the learners are seen as more autonomous, they are not told what to do, rather they are enabled to examine and try out other ways of seeing and thinking in a safe space. Andreotti (2006) admits that in some contexts, implementing soft global citizenship education might already be a “major step”; however, in other contexts, educators should strive to become critically literate or else, “they run the risk of (indirectly and unintentionally) reproducing the systems of belief and practices that harm those they want to support” (p. 49).