During the first two years of my Ed.D. program, I focused much of my research on the concepts and practices of service-learning and global citizenship education. Arising from this research, I proposed a high school, one semester course, intended for seniors, at the International School of Kigali. The course was rooted in the Global Citizenship Education standards put forth by UNESCO in alignment with UN SDG #4. I then proceeded to pilot the course with a small group of students during the 23-24 school-year. Then in the following school-year, we implemented it as a required course for all seniors.

I plan to write a few different blog posts about my experience with this course. In this post, I’m just providing the syllabus so that readers can get an overview.

Syllabus: Critical Global Citizenship

The Critical Global Citizenship course is a semester-long, high school-level, required course for seniors at ISK. The course arises from key parts of the ISK vision and mission statements, including “engagement with local and global community” and “engaged in meaningful change both locally and globally.” The course is anchored primarily in the GCE standards from UNESCO (2015; see appendix 1), but also influenced by the frameworks presented by Andreotti (2006; see appendix 2), and Angyagre & Quainoo (2019; see appendix 3). Of UNESCO’s (2015) three learning domains, a particular focus of this course will be on the Behavioral Domain. The goal of learning in the Behavioral Domain is: “To act effectively and responsibly at local, national and global levels for a more peaceful and sustainable world” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 15). A key word in that statement is “act.” An important goal in this course is that students will engage in critical action-learning through a model of participatory action-research; this means that students will learn about the world, act on their learning in the world, and further learn from that action, all with a spirit of reflection / reflexivity.

Guiding Theoretical Foundations for the Course

Critical GCE: In a pivotal article called “Soft vs. Critical Global Citizenship Education,” written in 2006, Vanessa Andreotti questioned the common approaches to GCE, which she called “soft” forms. She explained that these approaches to GCE focus more on the development of individual student competences that will benefit them in the economically globalized world. She also explained that these approaches often assume a western-centric and paternalistic perspective of charity towards the non-western peoples and societies of the world. Finally, she noted that these approaches often value cultural diversity and common humanity while often failing to recognize structures and hierarchies that create injustice, inequality and oppression in the world. Andreotti called instead for a “critical” approach to GCE. In Critical GCE, students investigate oppressive structures of power and root causes of injustice and engage in action to transform these structures for greater social justice. Students also question the western-centric dominant narratives about the world, while intentionally seeking-out and foregrounding non-western and marginalized ways of knowing.

Participatory Action-Research:

Qualitative Research: Critical Global Citizens are curious about the world around them. They want to know how things work; they want to understand how other people experience the world. They see issues, problems or challenges in the world, and want to better understand them, and how real people are impacted by them. In other words, Critical Global Citizens are researchers. They gather data to understand the world. In this course, while we will draw on secondary sources, some of which will even involve quantitative data, our focus will be on qualitative data collection. We will take a more phenomenological approach to qualitative research, meaning that we will embrace its intentional subjectivity, and focus on learning from how people experience the world around them and make meaning of those experiences. Qualitative research entails data collection practices such as interviews, focus groups, and observations; phenomenologically, it’s about understanding the stories people tell to make meaning of and interpret their subjective experiences of the world. In this course, students will learn how to collect and analyze qualitative data, specifically interviews and observations.

Action-Research: But Global Citizens are not just interested in learning about the world; they also want to change the world. In other words, Global Citizens take what they’ve learned through research in order to act in the world to address issues, solve problems, and work for greater social justice. Unlike much of the learning that takes place in school, action-research focuses on learning about real-world issues and then taking action to address those real-world issues. The goal of the learning is to inform the action. Action-Research is often presented as a cycle that involves Inquiry (conducting research / learning about something), Action (doing something to address an issue informed by the research), and Reflection (learning from the action to understand more about the issue to inform future actions).

Participatory Action-Research: This course will be grounded in a specific vision of action-research, that of participatory action-research. The core belief in this model is that the people most affected by an issue being researched should be the leaders of the research and the action. Based on this approach, rather than “learning about” and “acting for” other people, we will focus on “learning from” and “acting with.” In fact, we even orient our research differently from the outset. We go into the research to learn about the lived experience of the people who are part of our community partner groups; from there we’ll learn from and work with these people to understand and address issues that affect them. In other words, we are participants in the action-research, together with the people of our community partner groups.

Ethnographer’s Mindset: As international students at an international school located in Rwanda, when learning from and acting with partner organizations, we must consider the important role of culture. Most of the students at ISK are, to some degree, outsiders to the culture of our community partners. We must recognize that we all interpret our experiences through a cultural lens and just because another’s culture lens is different than our own does not mean it is inferior or superior. We must suspend our culturally-informed biases, assumptions, and value judgements, and seek to understand the other’s experience from within their own culture.

Importance of Local Place: One of the criticisms sometimes levied against common approaches to GCE is that it tends to focus on abstract notions of global community, and decontextualized issues unmoored from real people and communities. This may be especially true in international schools where the connection to the local context is often thin, as many of the teachers and students are expatriates from elsewhere who have limited understanding of the local culture, language, or issues. This course, however, will very intentionally focus on participatory action-research connected to ISK’s locally situated context in Kigali, Rwanda. We will do this by developing sustainable and reciprocal partnerships with local communities, institutions and organizations, again with the goal of “learning from” and “acting with.” There is a common saying among educators who work in Global Citizenship Education: “Think Global, Act Local.” This course will go one step further with that adage and state: “Start Local, Think Global, Act Local.” So while we’ll start with understanding local people, culture and issues, our learning will place those issues within the broader global context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, before reinserting ourselves back into the local context in order to act.

Reflective and Reflexive: Reflective practice refers to a stance where we will regularly pause and think about what we’ve learned about specific issues, our actions, the community, etc. The goal is to further our learning, and engage in further actions to address the issues we’re studying. Reflexive practice refers to a process of looking inward at our own roles and positions. What are our positions of privilege? What are our personal responsibilities? What are our personal biases? How do we fit within the structures of injustice and oppression that we’re investigating?

Course Standards, Big Ideas and Skills

Course Outline

Weekly Cycle of Theory and Practice

The class will meet twice per week (and sometimes for a 3rd shorter class on Fridays). Each week one of the class blocks will be focused on discussion and engagement with theory and knowledge about global citizenship and global issues. The other of the weekly class blocks will focus on the practice of our participatory action-research approach to global citizenship. Our theoretical discussion classes will involve engagement with readings and other media materials, often through socratic discussions and individual reflection activities. The outline below shows how these theoretical classes will be organized around three thematic units. Students will be assessed on their knowledge and understanding of these concepts and topics. Our practical work will be on-going throughout the unit. We will learn, practice and implement different aspects of the participatory action-research approach, which will be assessed as semester culminating reports / presentations / reflection projects.