Global Citizenship magazine for schools

As teachers, we’re adept at becoming quickly familiar with the latest initiatives and drivers in education, and finding ways to make these work in practice. Learning for Sustainability (LfS), the newly coined umbrella term that the Scottish Government has coined to capture its commitment to building 'the values, attitudes, knowledge, skills and confidence...which are compatible with a sustainable future in a just and equitable world'¹ , is no exception to this.

Learning for Sustainability

LfS is founded on three core components - Global Citizenship, Sustainable Development and Outdoor Learning – and there are encouraging signs that teachers and schools around the country are getting to grips with the LfS agenda and seeing the opportunities it affords to bring the creative, holistic dimension to teaching and planning teachers have aspired to since the demise of 5-14.  By adopting in full the recommendations from the One Planet Schools report, which was commissioned to look into LfS in 2012, the Scottish Government has confirmed its commitment to Global Citizenship as a core element of Scottish education. Education Scotland’s own guidance supports this view: its recent document Opening Up Great Learning states that while the term LfS is relatively new, “the substance of what it represents will be very familiar.  Many schools, early learning and childcare settings will know it as Global Citizenship.”²

There are signs that many schools are starting to see LfS as a coherent way of ‘joining the dots’ of many existing initiatives, from pupil-led Fair Trade committees to the work carried out by eco groups and rights-based education, and are beginning to link these themes to give pupils a more coherent experience of sustainability. This however should be the starting point for this ambitious goal not a way of ticking it off the list.

Teachers and schools around the country are getting to grips with the LfS agenda and seeing the opportunities it affords to bring the creative, holistic dimension to teaching and planning.

Meeting the challenge

The challenge is to identify and plan for the ways in which Global Citizenship can be embedded within the curriculum.  This is therefore an opportune time to look again at the core elements of education for Global Citizenship, and to re-establish how these are key to supporting teachers in achieving the ambitious agenda for sustainable change outlined in LfS. Oxfam’s guidance documents on education for Global Citizenship have for years been invaluable in developing teachers' understanding ofthis and how it can permeate the curriculum, and in helping them promote the values, attitudes and skills that will support young people in becoming truly active global citizens. In its 2008 edition of Education for Global Citizenship: a guide for schools, Oxfam described the global situation baldly - "current use of the world's resources is inequitable and unsustainable. As the gap between rich and poor widens, poverty continues to deny millions of people around the world their basic rights"³. Increasing dependence on foodbanks, the rise of the 1%, scapegoating of immigrants in the media: these trends, among many others, show that in the time since this statement was published, inequality, nationally and globally, has only increased.

It is a transformative process, through which teachers can encourage young people to critically examine their relationship with the outside world, both locally and globally.

Tools for change

Global Citizenship is the toolkit to support our young people to challenge this. It is a transformative process, through which teachers can encourage young people to critically examine their relationship with the outside world, both locally and globally, and to develop an understanding of how they can have a role in creating a more positive future: sustainability is about nothing if it’s not about the future. One way to begin framing this conversation meaningfully with learners and colleagues alike is to use a tool David Hicks developed called a Futures line.⁴ This supports young people to picture the future they want to build: Global Citizenship provides them with the skills necessary to work towards this. Quite simply, 'education for global citizenship encourages children and young people to care about the planet to develop empathy with, and active concern for, those with whom they share it.’⁵

With Learning for Sustainability, we are at the beginnings of an exciting new phase in Scottish education. Practitioners are being given, at national level, the space to develop classroom and whole-school practices which will equip young people to play a positive role in becoming truly active global citizens, ready to play their part in building a just and equitable world.