Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

TEACHING GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY IN TEACHER AND INTERPROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2022

Abstract

Tronto (2009) argues that we are interdependent beings fundamentally connected by the need to receive and give care to others. However, despite growing global morality, apathy, psychological numbing, compassion fatigue and political inaction remain significant problems in terms of global responsibility (Wilson,2010).

Education can play a fundamental role in counteracting moral immunity and in expanding the circle of moral concern (Singer, 1981) by enabling students to take action (response-ability). According Welply (2019) global citizenship is a natural and necessary response to the world we live in.

Global citizenship includes the interrelated dimensions of social responsibility, global competence and global civic engagement (Schippling 2020) and refers to a sense of belonging to a broader community (UNESCO 2015). From the reason that global citizenship education is becoming increasingly relevant for education in the 21st century (Yemini, Tibbitts, Goren 2019), there is a growing tendency to integrate its principles and themes into strategic and curricular documents, teaching and learning (UNESCO 2015).

This reinforces the need to have globally competent teachers (Kopish 2017, Kopish 2016, in Goodwin 2020) with good understanding of transformative and participatory teaching and learning (UNESCO 2015). Initial teacher training plays a key role in this.

The aim of this paper is to present a way of elaborating examples of good practice focusing on sensitive global issues in teacher training courses at selected European universities involved in the Jean Monnet project "Education for Citizenship in the Context of European Values" and to present a research design for analyzing the attitudes and beliefs on global issues and the development of global citizenship of students participating in these courses. A template for case studies and a research design with the aim of identifying attitudes and beliefs of student teachers will be presented with examples from the pilot study.