6.1.1.2.1 The Interview Study (Study 2). It can be concluded that the participating teachers have a reasonable understanding of the notion of global competence. Out of the ten participants, seven mentioned that a global citizen must be well-informed about different local and global issues, which is only surprising because the university tutors who participated in the pilot study did not mention this component of global competence (Divéki, 2020). Cultural and intercultural knowledge hardly figured in secondary school teachers’ responses, so it might be worth raising awareness of these components in professional development workshops or initial teacher education. When Hungarian EFL teacher trainees finish their university studies, they become teachers of English language and culture, so it would be important to enable them to create links between the concept of global competence and what they already know about teaching culture so that they could more effectively incorporate the global perspective in their teaching. Regarding the skills, according to OECD (2018), global citizens need to be able to reason with information, communicate effectively and respectfully, take different perspectives, manage conflicts, and adapt to new situations. Out of these skills, effective communication and reasoning with information were mentioned by several participants, the others were only mentioned by one. In the PISA classification, openness (towards different cultures), respect, and global mindedness are seen as the most important attitudes of a global citizen. The participants saw it similarly; however, they failed to mention global mindedness during the interviews, which means that they feel like they are primary citizens of their own country rather than citizens of the world.

6.1.1.2.1 The Questionnaire Study (Study 2). In the questionnaire study, 182 secondary school teachers were asked about the components of global competence. Based on their answers, teachers seem to have a limited understanding of the notion of global competence: even though their answers could be categorised according to the OECD framework, in many categories the numbers were low and none of the themes was listed by more than half of the participants. 12 participants had little or no understanding of the notion, as they answered with “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand the question” to the question. Observably, naming the subcomponents of the knowledge dimension of global competence posed problems for the participants: only one-sixth of them mentioned the importance of knowing about sustainability and global issues and only about 30% of the participants alluded to the importance of having knowledge about culture and intercultural relations, and socio-economic development and interdependence. Similar to the participants of the interview study, the respondents of the survey also believed that it is important to be well-informed, thus, this quality may be a valuable addition to the framework. Regarding the skills, effective communication, reasoning with information and perspective taking were highlighted by the participants. In connection with the attitudes, even though openness towards people from other cultures was mentioned by many participants, the respect and global mindedness components were mostly disregarded by the respondents.

 

6.1.1.3 Conclusion and Implications. As can be seen above, the participating tutors and teachers have a different degree of understanding of the notion of global competence. From all these studies, what became apparent was that both tutors and teachers have difficulties defining the knowledge component of global competence: university tutors mostly understand it as knowledge about culture and intercultural relations, and secondary school teachers mostly emphasised well-informedness and knowledge about socio-economic development and global institutions, conflicts, and human rights. Knowledge about global issues was not as accentuated in their answers, as one would expect given the name of the concept. Knowledge of sustainability also received few mentions in each study. It would be useful to raise teachers’ awareness of these components of the knowledge dimension too so that they could incorporate this content into their lessons, e.g., through activities organised around the Sustainable Development Goals (World’s Largest Lesson, n.d.).