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Empowering globally competent primary school teachers at Czech universities.

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2024

Abstract

In today's increasingly interconnected world, notions of citizenship transcend nation-state boundaries (Gaudelli, 2016), hence the recent focus on global citizenship in citizenship education (Gaudelli, 2016; Estellés & Fischman, 2021). The goals of global citizenship education can be considered "lofty" and often do not reflect the limitations of educational practice, which may be why many studies have confirmed that teachers lack the confidence and pedagogical skills to implement them (Estellés & Fischman, 2021).

It is the comprehensive frameworks (models, continua) of global competencies published in peer-reviewed articles between 2018 and 2022 within the Scopus, Web of Science and Eric databases (e.g. Asia Society & OECD, 2018; Tichnor-Wagner et al., 2019; Ramos et al., 2020) that were used in the research study to support the analysis of the data collected.

The aim of the research study is to provide insight into the reality of teaching in nine courses in university programmes preparing primary school teachers at five universities in the Czech Republic, with an emphasis on learning objectives, content, strategies and methods, and impact evaluation. A set of qualitative methods was used to collect data - expert assessment of learning materials used in teaching (e.g., videos, texts, etc.) supported by Oxley & Morris (2013) typology, observation of teaching in each of the selected subjects (11 observations) supported by a newly designed observation sheet (integrated based on global competence frameworks, see above), individual interviews with teacher educators and external lecturers of NGOs (5 individual interviews).

According to Estellés & Fischman (2021), the courses could also focus on developing teachers as global citizens, thus promoting their engagement in public affairs (Tichnor-Wagner, 2016). Nevertheless, it can be said that in the selected courses the emphasis is rather on the development of their didactic competences in the field.

It was found that, in line with, for example, Yemini et al. (2019), the implementation of global issues in the teaching of the selected courses is associated with innovative methods (e.g., dialogic teaching methods, inquiry-based learning).