Educating for global citizenship

One of CORE's ten trends is Citizenship, addressing three key themes, global citizenship, digital citizenship and cybercitizenship. Today I came across an excellent resource for teachers interested in educating for Global Citizenship. Produced by Oxfam, the downloadable PDF titled Education for Global Citizenship: A Guide for Schools begins with the challenge:

In a fast-changing and interdependent world, education can, and should, help young people to meet the challenges they will confront now and in the future. Oxfam believes that Education for Global Citizenship is essential in helping young people rise to those challenges.

The resource provides an excellent rationale for incorporating Global Citizenship as a focus in our school curriculum together with frameworks, case studies, activities and practical classroom ideas that can be used to help teachers develop their ideas. I particularly liked the 'key elements' illustrated below (click to enlarge):

This framework makes it rather straightforward to incorporate programmes that educate for global citizenship into our classroom programmes within the guidelines of our existing Curriculum Framework – with the three elements aligning nicely with the three dimensions of the NZC:

Now this is only an approximation of thought – but does begin to illustrate that Global Citizenship, empowering young people to act for a more just, secure and sustainable world, need not be considered just an 'add-on' or 'extra' to be addressed when the 'real' stuff of the curriculum has been dealt to.

We owe it to our young people to ensure they are adequately prepared to take a responsible role in the increasingly globalised world that they will participate in as they move through school and on into the workforce.