Global Citizenship Education in Praxis: Pathways for Schools 9781800413535, 9781800413528, 9781800413559, 9781800413542

Citation preview

Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION Series Editors: Michael Byram, University of Durham, UK and Anthony J. Liddicoat, University of Warwick, UK The overall aim of this series is to publish books which will ultimately inform learning and teaching, but whose primary focus is on the analysis of intercultural relationships, whether in textual form or in people’s experience. There will also be books which deal directly with pedagogy, with the relationships between language learning and cultural learning, between processes inside the classroom and beyond. They will all have in common a concern with the relationship between language and culture, and the development of intercultural communicative competence. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK.

LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND ­EDUCATION: 40

Global Citizenship Education in Praxis Pathways for Schools Edited by

Anders Schultz and Mads Blom

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/SCHULT3535 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Schultz, Anders, editor. | Blom, Mads, editor. Title: Global Citizenship Education in Praxis: Pathways for Schools/ Edited by Anders Schultz and Mads Blom. Description: Bristol: Multilingual Matters, [2023] | Series: Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education: 40 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book examines the experience of combining internationalisation, intercultural competence and global citizenship in an upper secondary school in Denmark with links to schools in 15 countries. The book includes a description of the project by the teachers who have taken part and an analysis by researchers who have worked with them”—Provided by publisher. 9781800413535 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800413528 (paperback) | ISBN 9781800413559 (epub) | ISBN 9781800413542 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Education and globalization—Denmark. | World citizenship. | Education, Secondary—Social aspects—Denmark. | Multicultural education—Denmark. Classification: LCC LC191 .G54156 2023 (print) | LCC LC191 (ebook) | DDC 370.117— dc23/eng/20230206 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061576 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061577 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-353-5 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-352-8 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2023 Anders Schultz, Mads Blom and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by SAN Publishing Services.

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgements Preface: Introduction

vii ix xi

1 Globalisation Crisis Anders Schultz

1

Part 17 2  Dannelse – A Danish Concept in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Steen Beck

9

3 Global Citizenship Education in the Wider World Marie Højlund Roesgaard and Michael Byram

17

4 Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum Anders Schultz

27

5  Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation in  Formal and Informal Contexts of Learning Louise Tranekjær

43

6  Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice Louise Tranekjær

58



Part 273

7  Intercultural Understanding – Between Theory and Instrument – Empathy and Critique Mads Blom

75

8  Hong Kong and the Question of Cultural Identity – The English Subject and Global Dannelse Martin Lønstrup Nielsen

87

v

vi  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

9 Global Competencies in Science Poul Nyegaard

97

10 Global Dannelse and French Laura Bjerregaard Sørensen and Lotte Bolander

107

11 Global Dannelse in Natural Geography Anders Folden Brink

116

12  Citizenship and Civicism – History as a School Subject and Global Dannelse Mads Blom

127

13 Where to Next for GCEd in Praxis? Final remarks by Anders Schultz

136

14 GCEd – Necessary but not Sufficient Final remarks by Michael Byram

140

References144 Index148

Contributors

Steen Beck is Associate Professor at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, and Institute of Learning, University of Greenland. Mads Blom holds a master’s degree in History and Nordic language and literature from the University of Copenhagen and a master’s degree in school management from the University of Southern Denmark. He has been the author and editor of a number of books and articles about historical and didactical subjects, and was co-author and co-editor of Veje til Verdensborgerskab – the Danish version of the book in hand. He is the deputy head of the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary. Lotte Bolander holds a master’s degree in Nordic language and literature and French language from Aarhus University. As a part of her master’s degree, she has studied Modern Literature at Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg and has lived and worked in Bruxelles. She has been teaching Danish and French for the past 14 years and since 2014 at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School. Anders Folden Brink is a Danish geographer with a master’s degree in ecological climatology and climate change from the University of Copenhagen. He has formerly worked for the university’s Green Campus Department, focusing on improving the university’s carbon footprint and sharing the results in their global university network, IARU. Since 2014, he has been teaching natural geography and physics at Rysensteen Gymnasium in Copenhagen. Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus at Durham University, England. Having studied languages at Cambridge University, he taught French and German in school and adult education and then did teacher education at Durham. He was adviser to the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe and part of the expert group which produced the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. His research has included the education of minorities, foreign language teaching and intercultural competence, and more recently on how the PhD is experienced and assessed in a range of different countries. vii

viii  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Martin Lønstrup has a master’s degree in English and Italian from the University of Copenhagen and l’Università di Torino. He is an avid traveller, and has lived and worked in France and Italy. Since 2011, he has taught English at Rysensteen Upper Secondary where he aims to introduce his students to the great literature of the English-speaking world. Poul Nyegaard has a master’s in electric engineering and worked with hardware and software development in telecom in over 20 years. For eight years, he has been teaching physics and maths at Rysensteen Gymnasium using his broad experience with these topics to inspire young people to aim for a career in science. Marie Højlund Roesgaard has been Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen since 1995. With a PhD from the University of Aarhus in East Asian Studies in 1994, she specialised in modern society and culture of Japan. Her main research area is education; she has published on educational reform, ‘shadow education’ and, most recently, on the teaching of morality and values in Japanese primary school (Moral Education in Japan: Values in a Global Context, Routledge, 2017). She also works with globalisation, sustainability goals and teaching, the construction of meaning and order, risk-society and cosmopolitanism. Anders Schultz holds a master’s degree in History and Physical Education from the University of Copenhagen. He is now the Head of the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary, and as such is in charge of the programme’s overall academic and pedagogical direction. He is the co-author and editor of Veje til Verdensborgerskab – the Danish version of this book – and has given more than 50 presentations to international audiences of teachers and school leaders from Korea, USA, China, Hong Kong, Egypt, many about Rysensteen's experiences with establishing and maintaining a whole school education programme focused on global citizenship education. Laura Bjerregaard Sørensen has a master’s degree in English and French from the University of Copenhagen. She has lived and worked in Paris and London and has taught at Rysensteen Gymnasium since 2014, where she is also actively engaged in the education programme focused on global citizenship education. Louise Tranekjær is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Arts and has published on global citizenship, intercultural communication and foreign/second language learning in Denmark and Costa Rica. She is the editor in chief of the journal Sprogforum.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank a number of people who made this book possible: All our partners from around the world who have sharpened, challenged, reflected upon and been a part of discussions about GCEd over the years. This book belongs just as much to them, as it belongs to the contributors. All the staff at Rysensteen Gymnasium who have been leading in shaping the Rysensteen Global Citizenship Programme over the last 10 years. Without their willingness to be a part of this massive project, we wouldn’t have been where we are today. August Thorning Hjortshøj and Elisabeth Kirstine From-Pedersen for their hard work with proofreading and dealing with the editors’ sudden and unreasonable deadlines. Anders Schultz and Mads Blom Copenhagen, November 2022

ix

Preface: Introduction

The book at hand – Global Citizenship Education in Praxis: Pathways for Schools – is about Global Citizenship Education (GCEd). About the political importance of GCEd, about how GCEd is understood in different ways in different countries, about the connection between the 17 SDGs and GCEd, but mostly it’s about GCEd in praxis, i.e. how the values and academic aims of Global Citizenship Education can be organised at schools and other teaching institutions and translated into actual teaching and learning activities inside and outside of classrooms. The point of departure for this focus on GCEd in praxis is Rysensteen Upper Secondary School in Copenhagen, Denmark. An upper secondary school that 10 years ago established a whole school programme – the Global Citizenship Programme – with the purpose of teaching GCEd. Throughout the book, the reader will be shown how Rysensteen works with the different elements of the Global Citizenship Programme, from the school’s organisational setup to classroom teaching of GCP to working with the 14 different partner-schools during the study-trips and much more. All written by Rysensteen’s leaders and teachers. The presentations will be accompanied by critical analyses of the same elements, written by researchers of global citizenship, cultural understanding and pedagogy, who have observed the Programme’s teaching, the Programme’s study trips, and the Programme’s extracurricular activities and interviewed both teachers, management and students over a collective period of more than four years. Therefore, although the Global Citizenship Programme is rooted in the Danish tradition of teaching, the book offers valuable insights and inspiration to anyone who is interested in working with Global Citizenship Education in praxis or theory, whether as a school leader, a teacher, student or a researcher. As the title indicates, Global Citizenship Education in Praxis: Pathways for Schools is not Rysensteen Upper Secondary’s presentation of THE WAY to create and work with a whole-school approach to Global Citizenship. Rather it is A WAY. By describing the programme, as it is, and by having external researchers analyse the theory and praxis of the programme, we hope readers can learn from both our successes and our mistakes, so that they may find their own way of working with Global Citizenship Education. At the webpage www.gcedinpraxis.com you can find worksheets, texts, models and more for use in the classroom. xi

1 Globalisation Crisis Anders Schultz

In Chapter 1, Anders Schultz, the Head of the Global Citizenship Programme, writes about WHY Rysensteen Upper Secondary School chose to establish a GCEd-based Programme, and WHAT kind of ­pedagogical/academic/political thinking has guided the aims of the programme. This all leads to a presentation of the structure of the book and a presentation of the different contributors. On 9 November 1989, freedom-aspiring East Germans broke through the Berlin Wall, hereby marking the de facto end to the Cold War, and the victory of Western style democracy and capitalism in the global, ideological battle with Communism. In the years that followed, the sentiment among Western politicians was that the door had been opened to a new and prosperous phase of globalisation. A phase where goods, people and ideas of human rights would move unhindered across the Globe. And this to the benefit of the many, not just the few. Fast forward 30 years, and ‘the globalisation glory days’ of the 1990s seem a distant memory. For the last 10–15 years, the ideology and the processes of globalisation have been viewed with much more scepticism in large parts of the global, general public. Many people feel that globalisation has not delivered the outputs that were promised by the post-Cold War politicians: whether it be the loss of job opportunities, poverty in the Global South, the dwindling political respect for human rights, the growing tension between the worlds’ superpowers, the Covid pandemic, or the challenges with immigration, globalisation has often been blamed. Whether or not the criticism of globalisation is entirely fair is a long discussion. The frustrations are real, and they have laid the foundations for the rise of populist politicians in many different countries. Politicians who present one simple answer to the postulated ills of globalisation: we must turn our backs on globalisation as it is and return to times of the past where goods and services, ideas and people were not exchanged with the same degree of intensity. While much of the scepticism with globalisation is in many ways understandable, the solution of politically, culturally or otherwise turning 1

2  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

our backs to globalisation is utterly unrealistic. The truth is that globalisation is a fact whether we like it or not. But what then is the solution to the real and perceived challenges of globalisation? Education as the Solution

I would suggest that the reason that so many people have been disappointed by the economic, social and political development of the last 20 years is that we – meaning the global public – didn’t prepare properly. We simply let globalisation happen to us instead of taking control of globalisation. Some of the processes of globalisation developed in ways that did, objectively speaking, only enrich the few, and harmed the many (tax loopholes for global corporations, unchecked rise of global tech monopolies, sweatshops in poor-countries, etc.). Other processes of globalisation did not, objectively speaking, harm us (e.g. much of the movement of people and ideas) but were still perceived by parts of the public as doing so. If we had prepared better, maybe we could have ensured that the processes which only enriched the few would have been more in line with the wishes and needs of the many. And if we had prepared better, then maybe the free movement of people and ideas would have been perceived differently by globalisation sceptics. If we want to make sure that coming generations are better prepared to tackle the challenges of globalisation then, surely, we must start with the way we educate our children and youths. We need to make sure that our education systems and approaches to teaching will enlighten our youths about the dynamics of globalisation, so that they become better equipped to take democratic control of them than earlier generations have been. And more than that, we need to teach them about the importance of working together across national boundaries and cultural differences to solve our shared global problems. So they can help break the tendency of people and states to only look out for our own narrow interests instead of the interests of the globe as a whole. Such an approach to teaching must focus on more than just traditional academic skills. It must involve the training of competencies and human traits such as intercultural understanding, empathy, enlightened dialogue and the facilitation of developing a sense of responsibility for our local, regional and global community. Global Citizenship Education

Fortunately, even in the face of the aforementioned criticism of globalisation, for the last 10–15 years, many school leaders, teachers and scholars around the world have pursued holistic, altruistic and global approaches to teaching. Some by establishing national and international education

Globalisation Crisis  3

programmes and frameworks, others by implementing a new, globally oriented approach to teaching in their own lessons (see Chapter 3). This approach to teaching has been named Global Citizen Education (GCEd) or Global Education. GCEd is not a monolith, it covers many different and sometimes contrasting schools of thought. As the reader will see with Højlund and Byram’s analysis in Chapter 3, it is, of course, possible to place Rysensteen within one or more of these GCEd schools of thought. But it is important to stress that the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary was created without any conscious adherence to a particular GCEd school of thought. The inspiration was simply rooted in the acknowledgement that teaching and education in the 21st century must include preparing future generations for the challenges and possibilities of globalisation. And the acceptance that in order for such a globally oriented re-thinking of our academic content and pedagogical approaches to be implemented successfully, we needed to base it on education ideals that already existed in Denmark. Global Citizenship Thinking at Rysensteen and the Concept of Almendannelse

For the last 100 years, Danish teaching and education has been guided by the ideal of almendannelse. A concept that can, somewhat simplistically, be explained by the idea that education is meant to be more than just preparing students for further education and to be part of the workforce; it is meant to form democratic-minded, knowledgeable, active and ‘whole’ human beings (see Chapter 2). At Rysensteen, we chose to let almendannelse guide our new globally oriented approach to teaching. Basing the global citizenship curriculum at Rysensteen Upper Secondary on values such as altruism, democracy, cultural understanding and human rights, because they were natural ‘global extensions’ of values connected to almendannelse. Having almendannelse as a guiding ideal is also the reason why – as done by Højlund and Byram in Chapter 3 – you can argue that the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen in reality embraces elements from most schools of GCEd thought. It does so despite the fact that some of the GCEd schools of thought have contrasting ideas. That being possible, pedagogically, because the idea of almendannelse both entails free, critical thought and discussions, even about the very foundations of the programme – e.g. the UN – and also a large degree of trust in the individual teachers with both the responsibility of the pedagogical methods and defining parts of the academic content. The Structure of the Book

Global Citizenship Education in Praxis: Pathways for Schools is structured in two parts. Part 1 of the book starts with Chapter 2, where

4  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Associate Professor at Syddansk University, Steen Beck, explains and ‘translates’ the concept of almendannelse and the importance thereof to people unfamiliar with Danish education. This opens to an understanding of the way that Global Citizenship Education can be practised and how it is perceived and practised at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School. In Chapter 3, Associate Professor at Copenhagen University, Marie Højlund and Professor Emeritus at Durham University, Michael Byram, discuss Rysensteen’s Global Citizenship Programme in the context of GCEd schools of thought. They argue that Rysensteen’s Global Citizenship Programme is probably closest related to the so-called cosmopolitan ideas of political and social global citizenship. A school of thought that emphasises the importance of Human Rights and adherence to global political institutions such as the UN. Following this, Head of the Global Citizenship Programme, Anders Schultz, in Chapter 4, connects theory with praxis as he explains how Rysensteen Upper Secondary School has used the Global Citizenship Programme to internationalise the school’s curriculum, cross-curricular activities and extracurricular activities. In Chapter 5, Associate Professor at Roskilde University, Louise Tranekjær, analyses the general assessment and evaluation praxis of the Global Citizenship Programme. The chapter is based on Tranekjær’s empirical studies at Rysensteen in 2015–2018. Then, in Chapter 6, Trankjær zooms in on one of the competences touched upon in the previous chapter, namely intercultural communication. She presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of Rysensteen’s approach to teaching and assessing intercultural communication, based on her observations of both Rysensteen’s classroom teaching praxis, intercultural communication exams, and a study-exchange trip to South Korea. Part 2 of the book consists of Chapters 7–13 and provides presentations of and reflections on Global Citizenship teaching praxis by teachers at Rysensteen Upper Secondary. Some of these are based on examples of courses that have been held, and others are more general thoughts on GCEd teaching praxis. Several of the teachers (and their students) have been observed by Associate Professor Steen Beck (Chapter 2). Beck’s comments, which focus on the students’ almendannelse/GCEd output of the classes/activities, are summarised in the last part of the chapters. In the chapters, which are not based on classes observed by Beck, the teachers themselves reflect – explicitly or implicitly – on how to actually assess and measure almendannelse/GCEd effects on their students. Part 2 starts with Chapter 7, where history teacher and Global Citizenship coordinator at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School, Mads Blom explains how Rysensteen uses cultural understanding courses to prepare Rysensteen’s students for their study trips and for further engagement in the globalised world. Chapter 8 by English teacher, Martin Lønstrup, explains how he has integrated Hong Kong and the global

Globalisation Crisis  5

citizenship related question of cultural identity in the country into his English lessons. Chapter 9 by science teacher, Poul Nyegaard, analyses and explains how science competencies can be perceived as global competencies and explores how these can be trained in a course involving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Chapter 10 by French teachers, Laura Bjerregaard and Lotte Bolander, demonstrates how second language learning and cultural understanding/ intercultural communication can be integrated even when the students’ foreign language skills are at quite basic level. Chapter 11 by Natural Geography teacher, Anders Folden Brink, explains how he has worked with comparative studies of policies on climate change in Copenhagen and Toronto (Rysensteen has a partnerschool, UTS, in Toronto), respectively. Both to enhance the students’ understanding of the impact of the policies and to let them reflect on how they can participate in fighting climate change. Chapter 12 by History teacher, Mads Blom, explores how to work with the concepts of civicism and citizenship in History. This, to facilitate a background for students’ ability to critically reflect upon their own rights and responsibilities and what historical foundations the Global Citizenship is based on. Finally, in Chapter 13, Head of Global Citizenship, Anders Schultz gives his final thoughts on the continued development of GCEd in praxis. Arguing that reaching the full potential of GCEd teaching all over the world will require teachers, school leaders and education politicians to constantly inspire each other across national boundaries and cultural differences. It will also take quite a lot of courage from education politicians to help teachers and school leaders turn teaching praxis away from the worldwide obsession of test-scores and instead focus more on almendannelse and GCEd competences such as intercultural understanding, empathy and active citizenship. Professor Michael Byram rounds off the book with reflections about the political importance of working with GCEd in praxis. He does so by focusing on one of the most important challenges of the globalised world, namely, ‘the multicultural’ society. Byram views this challenge both in the common understanding of the term – multicultural national societies – and also as a challenge that exists between states, seeing the whole globe as a multicultural society. He argues that in order to solve this challenge, GCEd teaching is absolutely necessary, giving citizens and future political decision-makers the needed tools to communicate with each other in respectful, empathetic and non-violent ways. But he also argues that GCEd will never be sufficient. Teachers and school leaders can only do so much to promote intercultural understanding. The rest is up to our politicians, and ultimately – by way of elections and everyday choices and behaviour – to each one of us as citizens.

Part 1

2 Dannelse – A Danish Concept in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Steen Beck1

The general educational purpose of cultivation of character, more precisely expressed by the term ‘dannelse’ is important in general in Danish education. It is a very significant element of the way in which Global Competence has been realised at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School. In this chapter, Associate Professor at Syddansk University in Denmark, Steen Beck, will introduce the concept for a non-Danish audience. He starts with a definition of dannelse or Bildung, a German concept to which dannelse is related and a word which has become part of the discourse about education in English. Then he comments on and explains the concept in a perspective based on the history of ideas. Subsequently, he focuses on the current discussions about dannelse and Bildung, beginning with a short description of the education theory of Wolfgang Klafki and a discussion of the present much debated understanding of related issues formulated by Gert Biesta. Definition and Translation of Concepts and their Historical Anchoring

Dannelse (literally translated: ‘formation’ from the verb ‘to form or shape’) can be ‘translated’ into English with Bildung, but the presence of this term in educational discourse in English indicates the complexity of its meaning in both German and Danish. Himmelmann (2006) discusses the difficulties of translation into English of concepts in the German tradition, and chooses to present the German words with, sometimes literal, translation, as I shall do. This is not then simply a linguistic matter but one that also occupies philosophers (Løvlie & Standish, 2002).

9

10  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Turning to other languages helps us to see interpretations of the concept through translation. Bildung has been translated into Japanese, for example, as 陶冶 (tōya), training; education; cultivation, using the characters for pottery/porcelain and melting, or as 人間形成 (ningen keisei) using the characters for human and formation. In Africa, the concept Ubuntu has been suggested for capturing similar ideas of personhood, where Ubuntu as a moral theory would help impart desirable values and norms in the individual and is closely linked to the notion of heritage (Chitumba, 2013). It would also make sense to see dannelse in the context of cultural heritage in Denmark, as it can be seen as the locus of imparting what previous generations have found significant. This illustrates the difficulty in reflecting the contents of the term Bildung/dannelse in translations, but dannelse is central to understanding the GCEd programme at Rysensteen and is a central component in much thinking and discourse on education in Denmark. 2 The concepts of dannelse and almendannelse (literally: general dannelse) have had a central position in the Danish school system since the 19th century. The idea of dannelse has its origin in the Greek concept of pandeia, which relates to the guiding principle of a versatile development of human resources in depth. Bildung derives from ‘picture’ (‘Bild’ in German) and is connected to fundamental reflections on what human beings or students should be a picture of. In the Middle Ages, it was considered that human beings should be raised in God’s image, but with the New Humanism in Germany in the late 18th century, it became rather a question of human beings being a picture of the ideal human, and this is where concepts such as civic virtue, insight into goodness (religion), truth (science) and beauty (the arts) and, later, education for democracy became important landmarks. In the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the idea of Bildung is closely linked to an idea of enlightenment which he called the human being’s way out of its self-inflicted immaturity, and in the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who is often credited for developing the modern concept of Bildung, it is often connected to the idea of the human being who can realise, in freedom, their potential as a rational being. The traditional concept of dannelse is linked to the idea that the human being is not necessarily something pre-defined but is in possession of a potential for developing their intellect or becoming ‘formed or shaped’. These ideas can be found expressed in various examples in the history of ideas, but nowhere more specifically than in the writings of the renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who in his Oration on the Dignity of Man emphasised that human beings are made for creation and are not predefined. This thought is explicitly formulated in the 21st century’s existentialism, e.g. by Jean-Paul Sartre, who in the spirit of Mirandola talks about man as ‘existence’, i.e. as a creature not defined for any specific purpose (or ‘essence’), but who primarily exists by going

Dannelse – A Danish Concept in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives  11

beyond themself and by making a choice. This is one side of dannelse. The other side is humankind realising themself (or fleeing from themself) through a meeting with the ideas, thoughts, sciences etc., which already exist and which contribute to or oppose dannelse. The concept of dannelse thus sets the stage for a specific understanding of students’ development of ‘action competence’ and the individual’s possibility of becoming a mature, action-competent and free human being, who can take responsibility for their own life and vouch for their own ideas. Freedom is in this sense not something possessed in advance but is developed through interaction with and incorporation of cultural resources. On that understanding of dannelse, students are given a sound foundation for making decisions and for an enlightened engagement in community life – both as citizens where democratic competence is central and in working life where the relationship between participation in the life of production in the broadest sense and ethical reflection is important. One can furthermore distinguish between dannelse and almendannelse, by tentatively suggesting that the concept of dannelse concerns the development of the whole person, whereas the concept of almendannelse defines what to teach, within the framework of the school system, in order to enhance such a development. Dannelse is, in other words, concerned with how teaching processes promote the virtue of students (cf. paideia) or in a more modern term: students’ ability to develop into broadly oriented, knowledgeable and morally thinking beings, who by engaging in science, culture and politics will contribute to ‘the good society’. On the other hand, the concept of almendannelse refers to the analysis and discussion of what a subject or discipline (or a group of subjects/disciplines) can contribute to the dannelse of the students through the selection of those central and common knowledges and competences which are important in being able to function in a modern society. The concept of almendannelse focuses on reflection about which skills and knowledge students should possess, but it also sets the stage for a basic discussion about which social values to enforce. When the concepts of dannelse and almendannelse are used in relation to upper secondary schools, the focus is on an approach that emphasises the importance of almendannelse not being limited to specific scientific goals, since that might cause lack of attention to both the formation of personality and broader common knowledge goals. At the same time, the approach includes consideration of what is relevant knowledge and which competences (the ‘general’ in a specific subject) are necessary to function in a democracy and a modern working life. The Double-Sided Opening

According to the German education theorist, Wolfgang Klafki, Bildung consists of a content dimension and a form/process dimension

12  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

(Klafki, 1983, 2005). The content dimension is a matter of education. Genuine processes of dannelse take place when students encounter something that is in some sense ‘larger’ than themselves, and this ‘something’ is the subject or discipline and the ‘thing’ which teacher and student together examine and create knowledge about. One could also call ‘material’ theories of dannelse ‘the adult approach’ in the sense that such theories focus on defining the content that must be learned in order to transfer scientific and cultural knowledge, whether the defining authority is science, tradition or the specific teacher. ‘Material’ approaches to dannelse have to a high degree shaped the educational systems of the 20th century, e.g. in Soviet-structured pedagogy and in the American tradition of curriculum. Reflections concerning the content to be taught are of course necessary, but in a perspective of dannelse, they quickly become uninteresting, especially if these reflections are not linked to a perspective reaching beyond mere socialisation into ‘adult’ culture and thereby a reproduction of already existing understandings. According to Klafki, in making decisions about pedagogy, one cannot just make a general reference to the transferal of scientific and cultural knowledge, which, as is well known, is infinite, and will be ever more incalculable in modern society. The quantity of knowledge is constantly increasing, and one will have to ask what it is relevant to teach if the students must acquire knowledge about what is unpredictable for them in their present and future lives as adults, citizens and workers. Klafki suggests a special criterion for selection, when one has to decide what it is most important to teach, whether as a ministry that designs the curriculum or a teacher that has to make the day-to-day decisions which translate the curriculum into concrete practices. He introduces the criterion of ‘relevance’, by referring to epoch-marking ‘key problems’, and understanding these as questions which are both characteristic for the period and of universal validity, and which do not necessarily have a prior given answer. Klafki’s own five epoch-marking key problems are: the question of war and peace; the environmental and ecological question; socially produced inequality; modern communications technology and interpersonal relationships. The discussion of what defines epoch-marking key problems and how to teach them raises many questions, but there is currently some awareness of how upper secondary schools must relate to the present global climate challenges, not just by including them in the teaching of the subjects, but also by creating a space for students to reflect on their own existential and political understandings of the problem. As already implied, for Klafki, it makes no sense to talk about dannelse through an exclusive focus on knowledge. On the contrary, the teacher must be aware of the students’ prior understanding of the subject and regard them as independent beings driven by reason, who have to learn to relate to the academic content and to analyse their own

Dannelse – A Danish Concept in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives  13

relationship to the content. Reflections on what to teach must therefore be combined with reflections regarding the forms of teaching and dannelse that are about to take place, and that Klafki calls the formal aspect of dannelse. These reflections are concerned with the ‘how’ of the teaching and with the question of how to design the teaching, so that students can develop their ability to understand and act in the world in free and explorative ways. This approach is to a high degree developed through ‘progressive education’, where one begins by asking questions about how children and young people think, and how to design teaching so that it includes students’ experiences, interests and active engagement with the subjects. This approach can be called without exaggeration ‘the student pathway’. Klafki calls theories that emphasise the ways students engage with a subject, ‘formal theories of dannelse’ and notes that these theories focus on strengthening students’ learning and active work with the subject, which is essential for a democratic perspective where students not only have to learn to be adaptive, but also to think for themselves. It must be stressed that there are elements in a dannelse-oriented teaching that are not in themselves formative but are nonetheless a crucial premise for formative processes to take place in a proper manner. For example, the premise for students to be able to talk about the world is that they have sufficiently developed language – not only in their first language but also in learning foreign languages. The premise for thinking scientifically is for them to have mathematical-logical skills. The premise for writing is for them to have competences in written language. There has been a strong focus on such literacy-competences and the PISA-evaluations and other major international studies have focussed on these to a high degree. But necessity is not synonymous with sufficiency, and one can therefore assert that many of the performance management-oriented approaches to the quality of teaching have been operating with what the Danish philosopher and education theorist Peter Kemp has called semi-dannelse (Kemp, 2013), i.e. ideas of education goals which have been insufficient in relation to a dannelse agenda. This does not in any sense mean that an encounter with semi-dannelse – which to a large extent is linked to competence thinking – in itself will end up being only half of dannelse. The students have to have knowledge and abilities, but they also need to have other skills, namely, to relate and use their judgement in a rational way. Socialisation, Qualification, Subjectification

The concept of learning has, together with the concept of competence, been one of the most frequently used concepts in the educational world since the 1990s. Both concepts encompass what happens and should happen to students when they are learning. The concept of learning draws to a high degree on the interest of cognitive psychology and constructivism in the person who is learning, and the concept of competence sets the

14  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

stage for reflections on the teaching that aims at certain forms of learning which ensure personalised competences or abilities in the student. From the 1990s, the concept of competence and the concept of learning were used instrumentally to control exactly what knowledge and what skills students should be taught, and even if there are important and useful dimensions to both concepts, it is undeniable that for a long time the two concepts seemed to undermine the broader and more open idea of dannelse. The notion of control – closely attached to the two concepts – is important in this context, because the concept of learning was transformed into demands to control learning, and the concept of competence development led to a demand to control what competencies should be developed. Yet the question remains whether children and young people’s identity formation can and should be controlled and even more important: is all this control desirable? One could argue that the idea of all students having the same abilities is based on a rather ‘I concept’ of ‘the good society’. And what is even worse: if there is to be a check and control on the development of learning and competences, what is the basis for the measurement? People measure against what they have the ability to imagine and might thereby overlook all sorts of other important issues which are beyond their imagination. It is exactly these problems that the Dutch educational philosopher Gert Biesta has stressed over the last 20–30 years of thinking in educational policy. His thinking is not only crucial with respect to the current dominant approach to education, but also offers concepts and understandings that suggest alternative approaches to teaching and learning processes. Biesta talks in his books about an approach to education which is slow, difficult, frustrating and weak, since the result of this process can never be guaranteed or assured (Biesta, 2012, 2014, 2018). His point is that if we want to create students who can relate to the world in a critical, independent way, we will have to realise that there are many things the teacher cannot control, that students have to make their own way. Biesta calls this the ‘beautiful risk’ of education, and by that he means that students should not be reduced to an object for passive socialisation, but a being that has to be formed into an independent thinking being. The regime of performance control creates, according to Biesta, false expectations of what the task of teaching is, and is inextricably interwoven with the neoliberal thinking of our time, that cannot talk about the task of teaching without mentioning the labour market and competition in the same sentence. There is in our time a longing for a school which can document that students possess something defined, and according to Biesta, we will ultimately pay a price that is too high for such an approach to education. The price is that the highest purpose of schools – to create independent and critical citizens – vanishes in instrumental thinking, where the constant striving for effects and certainty leads to measurement on the basis of various atomised learning goals instead of caring about the

Dannelse – A Danish Concept in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives  15

student’s academic identity. The concept of learning in our time – or as Biesta calls it, the tendency to learnification – supports a way of thinking that has forgotten the real purpose of the school, because it has given up reflecting on what students should do with their knowledge and skills in their lives, students who can think for themselves, seek depths of understanding and different pathways to knowledge. Biesta criticises the view of education where the teacher is seen as the one who facilitates and organises but doesn’t light a fire and give students space to become themselves outside of the omnipresent searchlight of the data-collecting teacher. He talks in this connection about the three purposes of teaching: socialisation, qualification and subjectification, all of which have their justification. Socialisation must ensure that students are capable of learning in school, where there are teachers who teach and other students with whom to learn together. Qualification is directed towards society’s need for certain types of knowledge. Subjectification is related to the student’s ability to develop into an independent being who has academic and personal interests and commitments in society, and who thereby discovers their own being-in-the-world while becoming. Biesta’s point is that the control mechanisms that have shaped education in the era of neoliberalism disturb the balance between the three dimensions, so that socialisation and qualification become identical to the purpose of the school, while subjectification – which is the essential condition for developing critical and independent human beings – vanishes. Biesta has discussed all this in relation to the notion of dannelse, about which he also has certain reservations, because it can end up as a form of identity philosophy, that misses the human being’s meeting with what’s radically different (Biesta, 2012, 2014). Nonetheless, his thoughts in relation to subjectification do relate to the long history of the concept of dannelse since he also cares about teaching as a subject-to-subject relationship and about the strict individual process that is connected to our attempt to find our own voice in the world. Biesta talks about teaching as transcendence, which is completely different from understanding teaching as a way to create pathways of learning for students. He thus turns against the meaning which the concept of, and the thinking about, learning has acquired, because he fears that it reduces the student to a recipient rather than the existential being any human is and must be. With ideas about performance-assessed learning, the question of constructing student identities becomes more important than stimulating students to become themselves through one of the many ways to become a human being. And teaching from Biesta’s point of view is a far more risky affair than what is suggested when teachers are described as people who can ensure that students reach certain goals and learn something specific: We can hope, as teachers whose teaching is directed towards our students’ subjective-ness, that our students will at some point, come back

16  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

to us and recognise that what at first seemed like an undesired disturbance - an exploitation of power – in fact contributes to their existence as adults in and with the world, i.e. their adult subjective-ness (…) But we never know how far such a ‘return’ will happen, and we never know when it will happen, which may well be long after the student has disappeared from our view and our (professional) lives. This implies that all teaching which is directed towards the student’s subjective-ness, is above all a risk since its results cannot be predicted. (Biesta, 2014: 44)

Biesta’s identification of the purpose of teaching as related to socialisation, qualification and subjectification is fruitful and isolates the problem of teaching being reduced to social engineering, which focuses on students’ learning something specific and developing certain competences. One could however ask if Biesta, in his legitimate critique of the dominance of the socialisation and qualification elements in educational thinking, overlooks the fact that subjectification is dependent on reasonable forms of socialisation and qualification (Beck, 2017). To put it in concrete terms, the liberty to think critically and subjectively becomes hollow and meaningless if it is not qualified academically. Dannelse is in this sense – as Klafki (1983) points out – qualified self- and co-determination. One could also ask whether the relationship between socialisation and subjectification can be separated in practice. It is possible to claim, for example – to anticipate the empirical analysis in this book – that the premise of dialogue and reflection (which can be said to lead to subjectification) depends on students having learned to do their homework and thereby being socialised to be students who relate to their role. Concluding Remarks

Subjectification, qualification and socialisation – at least when approaching the question empirically or relating it to the inner logic of pedagogy – should not be seen as separate categories, but as relationcategories. The question in a Klafkian perspective is how academic qualification and subjectification interlink, and the question of socialisation should be seen in a subjectification perspective. And this then makes it possible for us to discuss how young people can be brought up with a sense of community and at the same time be supported in their individual pathways of learning that lead to critical thinking and judgement. Notes (1) Some additions to the text, on questions of translation, were made by Marie Højlund Roesgaard and Michael Byram. (2) See, for example, the 2019 political agreement on the future of Danish schools, where dannelse is part of the title (https://www.uvm.dk/folkeskolen/folkeskolens-maallove-og-regler/faglighed-dannelse-og-frihed).

3 Global Citizenship Education in the Wider World Marie Højlund Roesgaard and Michael Byram

In this chapter, Associate Professor at Copenhagen University, Marie Højlund Roesgaard, and Professor Emeritus, Michael Byram, will explore the different ways Global Citizenship Education is perceived around the world. Different measuring points of GCEd are examined, and these are used to understand how global education is carried out at Rysensteen Upper Secondary. Introduction

We live in a globalised world. We do know about distant others and about events far away to an extent which is unprecedented. So how do we deal with this situation? Various organisations have worked and are working with these issues, and large international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can be seen as existing only because we want to work out how to co-exist in the contemporary world in a mutually beneficial manner. Such organisations devise various strategies for co-existence, depending on their purposes, be they economic, political or cultural. One of their key concepts in this is ‘Global Citizenship Education’ (GCEd), the focus of this book. Relevant initiatives on this concept from governmental organisations include the United Nation’s ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, the OECD PISA’s ‘Global Competence Framework’ and the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture. Nongovernmental organisations are also active, such as the Asia Society’s Center for Global Education and their ‘Teaching for global understanding’ programme and Oxfam’s global citizenship guides (Oxfam). The notion of global citizenship addresses questions of how we can act in this increasingly globalised world, how we can educate future generations to do so and how to make changes and support life in a globalised 17

18  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

world. This book discusses these issues from a variety of viewpoints and furthermore describes and explains how a Danish upper secondary school has implemented a programme for teaching global citizenship, which is based in no small way on GCEd values and goals and the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). This current chapter sets the stage for the coming chapters and discusses some of the different ways of conceiving what exactly global citizenship is before we explain in more detail the GCEd programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School, what kind of programme it is and what its expected educational outcomes will be. Global Citizenship and Global Competence – Contested and Confusing Terms

Laura Oxley and Paul Morris, in their 2013 review of literature on global citizenship, state that ‘global citizenship’ has taken on the status of a ‘global’ or ‘travelling’ educational policy (Oxley & Morris, 2013), but both the term ‘global’ and the term ‘citizenship’ have caused some confusion. Oxley and Morris note that the term ‘global’ in this case can cover anything from a description of the well-rounded and adaptable human being to ideas of civilizing missions embodied for example by former US President Bush’s ‘Global War on terrorism’ (Oxley & Morris, 2013). Furthermore, in combination with ‘citizenship’, even more confusion arises: is it at all possible to be a ‘citizen of the world’ with no specific state to grant you this status? (Davies, 2006). David Miller (2013) argues that citizenship is a political idea and the arena for it is the state. Citizenship is a political relationship between co-citizens, so there can be no such thing as ‘global citizenship’. Instead, he proposes using the phrase a ‘globally concerned citizen’ to describe citizenship that incorporates global issues (Miller, 2013). This perspective also appears in the words used in the 2018 PISA assessment where ‘global competence’ is an umbrella term which includes ‘global citizenship’ and is built on ‘different models of global education, such as intercultural education, global citizenship education and education for democratic citizenship’ (OECD PISA Global Competence, 2018). ‘Democratic culture’ is another expression which subsumes virtues related to the global citizen. The Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture makes ‘democratic citizenship’ its focus, where ‘active, participative and responsible individuals’ should be fostered (Council of Europe, 2018). In a Danish context, however, there is a different position. The term used in Danish and by Rysensteen school is ‘medborgerskab’ (combining the word ‘med/with’ and ‘borgerskab/citizenship’, giving a sense of living together) which is less firmly connected to a state than the English ‘citizenship’ and more indicative of being part of a group of people sharing more or less the same aims and norms.1 Hence, the debate about the use of the English term ‘citizenship’ does not seem quite so relevant in a Danish

Global Citizenship Education in the Wider World  19

context, and we invite our readers to reflect on the terms used in other languages, the nuances of meaning they express, and the possible implications for conceptualisations in different education systems. Global Citizenship Education and Sustainable Development

The phenomenon of globalisation, perhaps seen two or three decades ago as a desirable opening of the world not only in terms of trade but also in terms of mentalities, has more recently been associated with the harm it does to the environment and to the way we live within the natural world. At the same time, globalisation has had multiple effects on our societies – not least through the mobility of large numbers of people – leading to new experiences, which need to be conceptualised in new ways. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an important formulation of how humanity should respond to the complex and often dangerous developments of recent times. The 17 SDGs were adopted by the member countries of the UN in 2015 under the heading ‘the 2030 Agenda’ and have since been used in various ways as guidelines to develop sustainable practices in societies and their educational systems. The goals put a spotlight on problems plaguing the contemporary world, problems such as poverty, hunger, gender equality, climate, peace and justice and sustainability. They focus on health, well-being and education for all, access to clean water, affordable energy, decent working conditions and economic growth, reducing inequalities, responsible consumption and production, life on land and in the water. The UN provides support and capacity building for the SDGs and their related thematic issues and works with the UN system-wide implementation of the 2030 Agenda and with advocacy and outreach activities relating to the SDGs. In order to make the 2030 Agenda a reality, the UN calls for broad owners of the SDGs to ensure a strong commitment by all stakeholders to implement the global goals (United Nations homepage). The Rysensteen project in its own way is a response to this call. Education Systems and the SDGs

Education is specifically targeted at goal number 4: ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. Of particular relevance to this book is target 4.7, which calls on countries to ‘ensure that all learners are provided with the knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development’ (UNESCO, 2016).

20  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

It is in this context that international organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, have begun to turn to education systems and to emphasise the need for the education of ‘the globally concerned citizen’. There are various representations of the characteristics of this ideal and how they will help to create a sustainable response to change. Let us take an example of an NGO as a starting point. The AsianAmerican Asia Society focusses on the SDGs as part of the make-up of the ‘globally competent student’. The knowledge and skills students need in the 21st century to become globally competent are the following: Investigate the World: Globally competent students are aware, curious and interested in learning about the world and how it works. Recognise Perspectives: Globally competent students recognise that they have a particular perspective and that others may or may not share it. Communicate Ideas: Globally competent students can effectively communicate, verbally and non-verbally, with diverse audiences. Take Action: Globally competent students have the skills and knowledge to not just learn about the world but also to make a difference in the world. (Asia Society, https://asiasociety.org/education/what-globalcompetence) An example of a governmental organisation is the OECD PISA testing of global competence, initiated in 2018. The homepage presents the argument for global competences in terms of the ability: • • • •

to live harmoniously in multicultural communities; to thrive in a changing labour market; to use media platforms effectively and responsibly; to support the Sustainable Development Goals. (OECD PISA, https://www.oecd.org/PISA/)

From the last point, it is evident that for the OECD, the SDGs play a crucial role in defining the ideal global citizen. At Rysensteen school, too, the 17 goals of sustainability have helped make it much clearer what Global Citizenship Education (GCEd) teaching could comprise. It has become clearer how, for example, natural sciences teaching can contribute more directly to internationalisation of the curriculum, with the focus on the SDGs making climate and sustainability an even more important issue in GCEd now than in the early years of the programme. However, it is also significant that a focus on the SDGs bears with it the danger of focusing on the (politically) ‘simple’ issues that most of us can agree on, thereby perhaps ignoring more overarching problems such as the Global North–Global South inequality in influence, and the question of democratic values. This is not the case at Rysensteen where those concerns are also dealt with even with the focus on the SDGs. One does not exclude the other.

Global Citizenship Education in the Wider World  21

A major characteristic of the Rysensteen GCEd, which is brought about by the use of the SDGs, is not only the focus on ‘cosmopolitan’ types of global citizenship including political and moral citizenship, which is quite prevalent in GCEd around the world, but also an increased focus on ‘advocacy’ types of global citizenship in general and environmental global citizenship in particular, as we shall see below. This could, if the tendency persists and grows, indicate that we are moving towards, not just increased tolerance and a common platform for citizenship which is what Goren and Yemini (2017) identified as the intended outcome of most European GCEd, but also towards a stronger focus on advocacy types of GCEd, particularly environmental advocacy. The SDGs have certainly been an encouragement for this sort of teaching and an increased focus on the SDGs will very likely also increase environmental global citizenship and advocacy in teaching GCEd. Types of Global Citizenship Education

To understand the type of GCEd practised at Rysensteen and to see this in a wider perspective, we use a typology developed by Laura Oxley and Paul Morris, who compare various interpretations of GCEd and relate them to concepts such as cosmopolitanism, human rights, development and democracy (Oxley & Morris, 2013). They work with two main types of models, namely, ‘cosmopolitan’, which include what they call ‘mainstream’ models, and ‘advocacy’ models. Each type contains four distinct concepts, which define its key characteristics. Cosmopolitan models of GCEd have the following characteristics: • the political which focuses on relationships of individual and state, particularly in the form of cosmopolitan democracy; • the moral which focuses on the ethical positioning of individuals and groups to each other, most often featuring ideas of human rights; • the economic which focuses on the interplay between power, forms of capital, labour, resources and the human condition, often presented as international development; • the cultural which focuses on the symbols that unite and divide members of societies, with particular emphasis on globalisation of the arts, media, languages, sciences and technologies, and cultural competence. Advocacy models of GCEd tend to involve a large degree of advocacy from particular perspectives: • the social, with a focus on the interconnections between individuals and groups and their advocacy for the ‘people’s’ voice, often referred to as global civil society; • the critical, with a focus on the challenges arising from inequalities and oppression, using the critique of social norms to advocate action

22  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

to improve the lives of the dispossessed/subaltern populations, particularly through a post-colonial agenda; • the environmental, with a focus on advocating changes in the actions of humans in relation to the natural environment, generally called the sustainable development agenda; • the spiritual, with a focus on the non-scientific and unmeasurable aspects of human relations, advocating commitment to axioms relating to caring, loving, spiritual and faith-based or emotional connections to the world. (Oxley & Morris, 2013: 305–306).

A weakness of this typology is that Oxley and Morris have developed it only from material in English (Oxley & Morris, 2013), as noted also by Goren and Yemini (2017). This creates a bias towards the Anglophone world in their general analysis, so the framework we can use to describe Rysensteen’s GCEd in, is primarily based on material in English. Furthermore, Oxley and Morris created their typology before UNESCO launched its 17 SDGs and Goren and Yemini’s work was written based on literature pre-dating the SDGs, namely, literature on GCEd in primary and secondary education between 2005 and 2015 so their analysis could not include effects of the launch of the SDGs. The SDGs and concern for the environment play an important role at Rysensteen, something that is not so clearly reflected in what particularly Goren and Yemini’s analysis – based on Oxley and Morris – found in current debates in GCEd. Nonetheless, we can use this work to analyse and describe GCEd at Rysensteen after a brief overview of what GCEd consists of at Rysensteen. Rysensteen Upper Secondary School (Gymnasium)

Rysensteen is a public upper secondary school with about 1100 students located in central Copenhagen, a location it benefits much from in finding partners for collaboration, such as universities, ministries and large companies. It has one of the highest grade point averages in Denmark and is unique in that it was the only ‘international profile’ school for global citizenship education in Denmark recognised by the Ministry of Education, from 2015 till 2020, and the school has maintained this profile after the period of official recognition. As part of the global citizenship programme (GCP) Rysensteen had – until it was halted due to the COVID19 pandemic – a special arrangement with Randersgade School, a public primary and lower secondary school, where the pupils could be admitted to a special five-year programme from the second year in lower secondary (8th grade in Denmark) and then continue on to the international line at Rysensteen, provided they performed satisfactorily (Rysensteen, 2019).

Global Citizenship Education in the Wider World  23

The Aims and Purposes of the Rysensteen GCEd Programme

It should be noted that the comprehensive typology Oxley and Morris (2013) developed was intended for the analysis of curricular contents and goals, while Goren and Yemini used it to explore what GCEd meant in various contexts extending beyond the curriculum (Goren & Yemini, 2017). As the focus here is on the practices and goals at Rysensteen, we will primarily look to Oxley and Morris, using Goren and Yemini to add perspective. A particular programme, such as Rysensteen’s, does not have to be a pure manifestation of a cosmopolitan or advocacy model. It can exhibit features of both, although as we shall see, Rysensteen can be mainly placed in the cosmopolitan type of global citizenship, where the central concepts are the political, the moral, the economic and the cultural. Oxley and Morris use the term ‘antecedents’ to refer to the conditions that facilitate and reflect a focus on a particular concept in GCEd, and ‘transactions’ to refer to what happens in schools and classrooms (Oxley & Morris, 2013). The ‘antecedents’ present in Rysensteen reveal that Rysensteen can be more firmly placed in the ‘moral’ citizenship category, because the reasons cited for encouraging political activity are very often the ethical positioning of the individuals and groups as human beings with global concerns, a focus on human rights and an emphasis on almendannelse/Bildung (described in Chapter 2). Further, ‘cultural’ global citizenship is also a strong factor in the approach because of the generally positive evaluation of multiculturalism and the overarching emphasis on learning about other cultures. ‘Economic’ global citizenship is less pronounced although there is some focus on resources, the human condition and power relations. Rysensteen also has a strong leaning towards ‘political’ global citizenship in terms of the focus on the UN and the significance for individuals of having opportunities to have a political voice. In Oxley and Morris’s ‘advocacy’ type of GCEd, there are the concepts of the social, the critical, the environmental and the spiritual. ‘Spiritual’ global citizenship is not really featured at Rysensteen, and therefore not included in the table below, even though the presence of religion lessons might suggest otherwise. In fact, the contribution of religion lessons to building global citizenship emphasises the enhancement of intercultural understanding, not the promotion of faith or spirituality. Rysensteen has some leaning towards critical and social advocacy in GCEd with a focus on social critique and advocacy of action to improve the plight of the dispossessed. On the other hand, the antecedent of ‘environmental’ global citizenship is a concern about sustainable development and an anthropocentric perspective, and the ‘transactions’, as described by Oxley and Morris, are a focus on managing the environment sustainably, the intended outcomes including a focus on anthropocentric concerns for the environment (Oxley & Morris, 2013). All of this can be found in great measure in Rysensteen, embodied, for example, in the documentaries about energy and sustainability in partner countries, which the students create as part of their

24  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

programme. In fact, such activities within the advocacy category appear to be relatively new elsewhere, according to the findings of Goren and Yemini (2017), who found advocacy types only in Australia and New Zealand (environmental) and South America (social). In Table 3.1, the subjects of the Rysensteen programme are arranged according to the conceptions identified by Oxley and Morris. Table 3.1 Placement of Rysensteen’s programme in Oxley and Morris’s (2013) categories of global citizenship Conception

Illustrative example

Cosmopolitan model Political global citizenship A focus on the relationships of the individual to the state and other polities, particularly in the form of cosmopolitan democracy, political participation.

Focus on basic civic rights in History. French, German, Chinese, Spanish and English also have elements of this.

Moral global citizenship A focus on the ethical positioning of individuals and groups to each other, most often featuring ideas of human rights, Bildung, empathy, responsibility.

Focus on human rights, empathy, almendannelse/Bildung, found in History, Religious studies, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, English, Natural geography, Social Science and Intercultural understanding.

Economic global citizenship A focus on the interplay between power, forms of capital, labour, resources and the human condition, often presented as international development, consumption, global trade.

Not so prevalent, but can be found in Social Sciences and in the focus on resources in Science and to some extent in the first year UN cross-curricular course.

Cultural global citizenship A focus on the symbols that unite and divide members of societies, with particular emphasis on globalisation of arts, media, languages, sciences and technologies, cultural competence, multicultural awareness, equality.

Focus on cultural knowledge and understanding in Danish, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, History, English, Intercultural understanding. In Natural geography a focus on technology.

Advocacy model Social global citizenship A focus on the interconnections between individuals and groups and their advocacy of the ‘people’s’ voice, often referred to as global civil society, relationship building, relativism, inclusion.

Focus on positive and constructive relationships, on encounters and mutual respect in Science, Religious studies, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, English, History, Social science and Natural geography.

Critical global citizenship A focus on the challenges arising from inequalities and oppression, using critique of social norms to advocate action to improve the lives of the dispossessed/subaltern populations, particularly through a post-colonial agenda, focus on prejudice, stereotyping and deconstruction.

Focus on preconceptions, ethnocentrism and the post-colonial in the special courses about Intercultural understanding, History, Religious studies, Social science, English, French, German, Chinese and Spanish.

Environmental global citizenship A focus on advocating changes in the actions of humans in relation to the natural environment, generally called the sustainable development agenda, SDGs, interconnectedness, taking action.

School values very much focus on this aspect, in the subjects this is especially referred to in Social science, Natural geography and Science.

Adapted from Oxley and Morris (2013: 306).

Global Citizenship Education in the Wider World  25

Goren and Yemini found in their review that the main approaches described in GCEd literature concerning Europe were based on themes of immigration and adaptation to multiculturalism as ‘antecedents’ and that the prevalent type was the ‘cosmopolitan’ (moral and cultural) (Goren & Yemini, 2017). In the case of Rysensteen, however, immigration seems to be less of an ‘antecedent’ and adaptation to multiculturalism more important; a sense of global responsibility also looms large. The outcome Goren and Yemini (2017) highlight is increased tolerance and a common platform for ‘citizenship’. In general, in the Danish and Scandinavian context, the political should also be included with the environmental and there are good reasons for considering environmental global citizenship as an advocacy type of citizenship education specific to Scandinavia. An explicit focus on the SDGs and the youth movement for the climate, spearheaded by the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, plays a huge role in the GCEd of Rysensteen. Almendannelse and the Rysensteen Programme

Almendannelse/Bildung as a concept has been presented and discussed in Chapter 2 by Steen Beck; it plays a major role in the basic thinking about the nature of education in Denmark as well as at Rysensteen. In the GCEd programme at Rysensteen, almendannelse/Bildung is linked to character building, education, global citizenship, change, empathy and democracy to name just some elements. Almendannelse/Bildung is basic to everyone growing up to become a Danish as well as a global citizen. This Danish and global citizen is understood as not being related to party politics or any specific country or state, but in possession of a belief in fundamental ideas such as human rights, democracy and the rule of law; the global citizen is an individual capable of taking action and of making a difference. The question of course is whether the efforts of the GCEd programme will result in responsible citizens who will take action when they see a problem. How can school and education prepare for action at a later stage (like living sustainably or engaging internationally)? Many researchers including Davies (2006), Zivkovic (2019) and the review article by Chiba et al. (2021) point to a general tendency for focus in schools to be on concrete issues, such as the environment (picking up litter, recycling, etc.) and solving practical problems, at the expense of larger issues such as North– South inequality or social problems. According to Lynn Davies (2006), there is very little research on the impact of schooling on whether people actually become active citizens locally or globally. This observation is supported by later findings in research on adult learning by Sharon Zivkovic (2019). However, there seems to be universal agreement that the two best school-based predictors of whether people become active citizens are: (1) involvement in school democracy and (2) experience of doing some

26  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

form of community service (Davies, 2006), although Davies also suggests that: It is possible that the charitable, welfare side of active citizenship, the fund-raising for poor countries, does reach more pupils than representative democracy in school. (Davies, 2006: 17)

Despite a more general wish in Denmark to ensure that citizenship is not necessarily linked to political activity, 2 there is a very strong focus on democratic participation and on the almendannelse/Bildung aspect of the GCEd activity at Rysensteen school. Rysensteen is very openly and actively engaged in global social issues as is evident for example from the content of the documentaries the students produce and the RysMUN event. Furthermore, direct contact with the political class is routinely arranged, and much effort is made to make students aware of their own opinions and their rights and duties of participation on all levels of society and politics. Considering that Davies (2006) and Goren and Yemini (2017) found a general reluctance to include the political to be prevalent in the teaching of global citizenship, the Rysensteen case may be pointing to a slightly different path in GCEd. Concluding Remarks

Using the 17 SDGs and the table of concepts as a basis for analysing teaching about GCEd at Rysensteen has meant that we now have an easyto-use common framework for work with global competence and a means of discussing and communicating about activities within the programme. This also means that partner schools can more readily compare and cooperate and establish a shared discourse. The 17 goals and the purposes and characteristics identified in the table constitute a common point of reference for international dialogue among schools, even if the goals and purposes are prioritised and maybe even understood in different ways. Notes (1) Ove Korsgaard says the term ‘medborger’, with one element of the word ‘borger’ (citizen), has roots in the Greco-Roman idea of the city (‘borg’) as the basis for a political community and citizenship (‘borgerskab’). It meant having civic rights and duties in the city. In Denmark, the word ‘borger’ was directly linked to the state for the first time in 1776 and at the same time, the term ‘medborger’ came into use. There is no unequivocal definition of the term ‘medborger’, in Korsgaard’s view, but it is normally used to signify the willed and emotional relation of the individual to the political and legal community one is part of. To be a ‘medborger’ is a collective thing, not something you can do by yourself (Korsgaard, 2012). (2) See, for example, the Ministry of Education’s homepage https://www.uvm.dk/aktuelt/ i-fokus/demokrati-og-medborgerskab or the formal aims of the Folkeskole https:// eng.uvm.dk/primary-and-lower-secondary-education/the-folkeskole/the-aims-of-thefolkeskole.

4 Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum Anders Schultz

In 2012, Rysensteen Gymnasium established the Global Citizenship Programme – a whole-school approach to teaching, learning, extracurricular activities, study trips and general school culture. The aim of the programme was, and still is, to form capable, democratic-minded and interculturally competent global citizens. As such, the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School is an example of how to work with Global Citizenship Education (GCEd) within a whole-school framework. In this chapter, Anders Schultz, the Head of the Global Citizenship Programme, will describe how Rysensteen has organised the Global Citizenship Programme. Both in terms of how the school has set up and is managing the globally focused academic framework of the programme, and in terms of how the school has structured the organisational set-up of management, teachers and students, who maintain and develop the programme. The description will be accompanied by self-critical reflections about the organisational set-up: what has worked well for Rysensteen and what hasn’t worked that well? So that, hopefully, people interested in working with Global Citizenship Education on a whole-school level can learn from Rysensteen’s experiences. Creating the Academic Foundation – Curriculum and Partner-Schools

As explained in Chapter 1, the idea of the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School is to prepare students for life in the globalised world. Both for the students’ own sake – so they can reach for the opportunities of international education and careers, and for the sake of the global community; motivating and

27

28  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

teaching the students how to participate in solving our shared global problems. The programme started taking form in 2010, when the Principal, Gitte Transbøl, decided to involve a selected group of teachers from Rysensteen in coming up with a way for the school to work with these aims in a whole-school framework. The group, which represented all faculties: the humanities, foreign languages and the liberal arts, science, math and political/social science, came up with the idea of a programme that would be bound together by partner–school collaborations and a Global Citizenship curriculum. The partner-schools

The idea of the partner-schools was that if Rysensteen’s students were to really learn about other cultures and learn how to interact with people from other parts of the world, theoretical knowledge would never be enough. The students needed to experience other cultures first hand and to interact with real people from other parts of the world. Therefore, Rysensteen established formal collaborations with first 11 partner-schools, and then later, as the school grew, with 3 more schools, bringing the total number to 14 (see Figure 4.1). So that today Rysensteen has partner schools in 13 countries: China, Singapore, India, Turkey, Egypt, Spain, Croatia, Uganda, USA (2), Canada, Argentina, Poland and South Korea. Each of the partner-schools are affiliated with one cohort of Rysensteen students (in Denmark, students stay together in one cohort for all three years of upper secondary school). Thus, the a-cohorts are tied to our Argentine partner school, the b-cohorts are tied to our Spanish partner

Figure 4.1  Rysensteen’s partner-schools

Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum  29

school, the c-cohorts are tied to our Egyptian partner school and so on. Students visit their partner schools at the beginning of their third year and stay at homestays with the partner school students, just as they also open their homes for their ‘partner school buddies’ during their second or third year of upper secondary. The curriculum

The curriculum – it was decided – should involve the whole school and all subjects. So instead of confining the Global Citizenship Programme to, for example, one course about global issues or a few weeks of thematic teaching, it would be integrated into all courses, all subjects and all activities at the school. In this way, remodelling a ‘normal’ Danish upper secondary school to give it a pervasive global perspective. It was also decided that the programme should be tied to the Danish tradition of almendannelse (see Chapter 2 for an in-depth explanation of the concept). Almendannelse, which has been an integral part of the Danish education system for many years, means that neither Danish school purpose-clauses nor subject curricula focus only on academic goals. They also focus on forming ‘whole’ human beings, as well as caring and responsible citizens. Adhering to almendannelse in the curriculum required for the concept – which earlier had a more national focus on the teaching and learning in Danish schools – to be ‘extrapolated’ into having a global focus: the ideal of a responsible Danish citizen became a responsible global citizen; the ideal of being able to engage empathetically with other people would involve a higher degree of intercultural understanding, etc. This extrapolation was, of course, not easy. Because how, exactly, do we understand good intercultural communication? And how do we define taking responsibility for global challenges? Hence, the extrapolation of almendannelse was helped along by Danish philosopher, Peter Kemp’s, Verdensborgeren (The Global Citizen) (Kemp, 2013), Wolfgang Klafki’s understanding of Epochal Key Problems (Klafki, 1983) and UNESCO’s definition of a Global Citizen (UNESCO) based on Michael Byram’s definition of intercultural competencies. On this basis, the global citizen ideal was summarised in the original purpose clause of the GCP curriculum: The global citizen .... has insight into the challenges and opportunities of the globalised world, and the ability to engage with foreign cultures. The global citizen possesses more than knowledge and competencies… He or she also accepts responsibility for helping to solve the shared problems of the planet. The “Rysensteen” global citizen is…. rooted in his or her own democratic values, but at the same time respectful of differences in tradition, language, religion, habits and way of life ... (Global Citizenship Programme Curriculum, Rysensteen Upper Secondary)

30  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 4.2  The structure of the GCP curriculum

Revision of the curriculum

The fundamental purpose of the Global Citizenship Programme has remained unchanged since the establishment of the Programme. But the exact academic goals and the structure of the GCP curriculum have been revised several times to uphold its relevance in a world of constantly changing challenges and opportunities. Latest in 2018 with the assistance of associate professor from Roskilde University, Louise Tranekjær (see Chapters 5 and 6). The current GCP curriculum is divided into in three categories (Figure 4.2): The first category contains factual knowledge about natural resources and political, cultural, economic and social conditions at a global level and in the students’ different partner countries. The second category contains analytical competencies, which in the context of the Global Citizenship Programme are very much defined by the ability to understand and interpret the culture, or cultures, one is a part of, and the cultures one encounters in the world. It concerns both the linguistic and aesthetic expression of cultures, but also the underlying values that define the framework of the culturally acceptable in a given context. The third category contains skills or competencies needed to take action. It is in this category that knowledge and analytical competencies are unfolded in concrete action, and also here values are linked to global citizenship. Thus, we define both competencies that only have to do with neutral abilities – e.g. intercultural competencies to navigate and communicate with other cultures, but also actions that are based on a specific attitudebased approach to the world. Without adhering to a specific political agenda, the Global Citizenship Programme thus includes – in our understanding – that one exhibits a certain measure of altruism in both thought and action. Specifically, by taking part in helping to solve some of the major global issues that we are facing today. The curriculum links the call for action to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (Figure 4.3). In this way, the action perspective is made tangible for the students while at the same time giving them a sense of being part of a global community working for the same concrete goals and values as themselves. We believe that this sense of global connectedness is very important to our students. Some of them can, at times, express being gripped by feelings of powerlessness when confronted with global problems

Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum  31

Figure 4.3  The 17 sustainable development goals

such as climate change: ‘I can do nothing about it anyway’, is not an infrequently heard objection to the call for action. With the connection to the UN’s 17 SDGs, we can hopefully counteract these feelings and objections. The students are not alone in wanting to make the world a better place. They share their ambitions with the UN and people all over the world. Bringing the Curriculum to Life

The international interest for working with Global Citizenship Education in elementary schools, upper secondary schools and at universities is undoubtedly growing. At Rysensteen, we have, just within the last three years, given more than 50 presentations to interested school leaders and teachers from among other countries the US, Egypt, Korea, Taiwan and Canada. During these presentations, one consideration/question seems to be recurring: ‘Since GCEd is by definition not bound to one subject matter, then HOW do we implement the teaching of it in a way that makes sense for students and teachers in an everyday education reality dominated by the division of the traditional subjects?’ For some education institutions, the answer to this question has been found in establishing special GCEd classes or thematic weeks focusing on GCEd. At Rysensteen, however, we have found the answer in a combination of cross-curricular courses on cultural understanding, the UN SDGs, etc., and the integration of GCEd in all the traditional subjects of the Danish education system. This approach has the great pedagogical advantage of students being presented to a multitude of different angles on GCEd. But the integration of GCEd in the traditional subjects, of course,

32  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

also holds the risk of the teachers and students being lost in confusion. Therefore, we have created two pedagogical/academic tools, which help clarify for students and teachers alike why, what and when they are working with GCEd under the umbrella of the Global Citizenship Programme. The first tool is the aforementioned Global Citizenship Programme curriculum, which sums up the collective goals of the programme so that both students and teachers can always see how each subject contributes to the programme. The second tool is the GCP-Metro, which can be seen below (Figure 4.4). It shows teachers, students and other interested parties when and how students will concretely be working with the curriculum goals at Rysensteen.

Figure 4.4  The GCP Metro

Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum  33

Global Citizenship Programme Metro

At the bottom of the metro are three goals, which encompass the overall Global Citizenship Programme curriculum aims. Together covering the three categories of the GCP curriculum: factual knowledge about the world, analytic skills, especially connected to intercultural understanding and ability to reflect on one’s own actions when interacting with the world, and finally motivation and competencies for taking action to help in solving the Globe’s shared problems. Then, following the metro lines, the illustration explains where ­students can expect to work with these different aims of the Global Citizenship Programme. The metro stops represent activities, in the ­traditional subjects such as Math, Danish language, History, etc. (the trivial pursuit stops), in short cross-curricular courses (the circle), or in extracurricular activities such as short internships or participation in school-­connected NGO work (the star stops). GCP – In the subjects (the trivial pursuit stops on the metro)

Belonging to a different education system than the Danish, it may be difficult to understand how Rysensteen can integrate the aims of the Global Citizenship Programme curriculum into all subjects at the school. This has to do with the way Danish curriculums are formulated. As all other Danish upper secondary schools, Rysensteen is subject to the curriculums formulated by the Danish Ministry of Education. However, the ministerially defined subject curriculums focus on competencies that the students need to acquire, but do not tell the teachers what textbooks to use, and they only define in a very broad way the specific academic content which the teachers have to present the students for. To give an example, below are quoted 3 of the 11 competencies/skills that function as the curriculum aims in the Subject of History in Danish upper secondary schools: • reflect on the interplay between past, present and future as well as on man as history-created and history-creating; • apply a methodological-critical approach to select and analyse historical material, including examples of the use of history; • gain insight into how the subject of history can help to understand and solve problems in the present. History A-level, 2017 – Danish Ministry of Education

Formulated in this way, history teachers are – within limits – free to plan the academic content and pedagogical approach to teaching how they see fit. Of course, there are certain things that the students must learn. In h istory, for example, about historical periods such as Antiquity, ­

34  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Enlightenment and Colonialism – but what academic angle the teachers choose to apply to these periods is entirely up to the teachers themselves Thus, it is possible to focus on slavery, or democracy, or the role of women, or some other theme, when working with Antiquity. Just as it is possible to address the Enlightenment from a Danish perspective, or a French perspective, or a social perspective. Just as long as the students learn the aforementioned competencies/skills. Therefore, when the Global Citizenship Programme curriculum states that an aim such as cultural understanding must be integrated in the subjects, then history teachers can, for example, choose to structure a course on Colonialism around the following question: what has Colonialism done to the way we understand people from other parts of the world today? And what can we do to overcome the historically created prejudices? This goes for all subjects. Again, of course there are things that the students need to study: British literature in English language classes and mathematical formulas in math, etc., but what novels to study and how to apply the formulas on ‘real-life problems’ are up to the individual teachers. It is this individual freedom, which makes it possible for the teachers to implement the GCP curriculum in their respective subjects. Furthermore, the idea of almendannelse – of educating for active citizenship and to form ‘whole’ and capable human beings – which lies at the heart of the Global Citizenship Programme, is also written into all-­ purpose clauses in the Danish Subject curriculums. Therefore, when the GCP curriculum demands that all teachers work with the idea of global citizenship, it is supported by the subject curriculums. The only difference being that the Global Citizenship Programme curriculum has a more global focus as compared to the almendannelse aspects written into the subject curriculums. How the teachers work with GCP curriculum in their respective subjects is therefore very much up to them. In Chapters 7–12, teachers representing different faculties will explain how they do it in their respective subjects. However, the freedom is not total. A couple of years ago we asked the teachers what GCP curriculum aims they could see their respective subjects working with. We did this both to ensure that all the aims of the curriculum were actually attended to at Rysensteen, and also to ensure that the teachers didn’t feel pressured into working with aims that were impossible to integrate into their subjects. For example, not asking Math teachers to work with cultural understanding, or language teachers to work with understanding the natural resources of a given partner-school country. Cross-curricular courses (the circles on the metro)

The Global Citizenship Programme doesn’t only come to life in the traditional subjects. It also comes to life via approximately 13 cross-curricula

Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum  35

courses. These courses have been developed by different teachers at Rysensteen and have been centrally planned to have the same academic content no matter what teacher is in charge of the teaching. All these courses are explained in the Global Citizenship Programme progression plan. Examples of cross-curricula courses

• courses in cultural understanding – preparation for homestay-based study trips As explained in the beginning of the chapter, Rysensteen’s collaboration with our 14 partner-schools lies at the very core of the Global Citizenship Programme. The collaborations culminate with homestaybased study trips. During these, Rysensteen students open their homes for their ‘partner school buddies’ for a 7–10 day visit in Copenhagen during their second year of upper secondary school, and visit their partner schools ‘buddies’ at the beginning of their third year for an equally long period of time. The idea is that participation in a family’s everyday life, insight into the family’s relationships, participation in family meals, and understanding the cultural characteristics of different generations provide an intercultural understanding that cannot be achieved either by academic work at home in the classroom or by traditional study trips. Rysensteen’s students prepare for the study trips in different ways. They work with the partner-school countries’ geography, history, economic conditions, literature, energy production and political system in the relevant subjects. Furthermore, they all participate in a cross-curricular three-year course of intercultural understanding (see Chapter 7). In Chapter 7, history teacher Mads Blom explains the exact content of the course. For now, it is important to stress that it is based on two premises: (1) that culture can be interpreted in many different ways – in more descriptive ways (a positivistic approach), focusing on national cultures (the Chinese are characterised by such and such common characteristics and values, the Argentinians are characterised by such and such common characteristics and values, etc.), and in more complex ways (a social-­ constructivist approach), focusing more on how cultural norms differ from one sub-group to another within the same country, and how these norms are constantly negotiated on a day-to-day basis. (2) To master intercultural communication intelligently is just as much about knowing your own cultural norms and values as it is about knowing the cultural values and norms associated with the people you engage with. Examples of cross-curricula courses The UN and the 17 world goals

The UN and the 17 SDGs are, as mentioned, central to the GCP curriculum. Students are introduced to them for the first time at the

36  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

beginning of their first year in a cross-curricula course. The course explains the 17 SDGs and the many political challenges that the UN is facing today. The course ends with a joint visit to the UN city in Copenhagen, where the first-year students talk and discuss with Danish UN representatives. Thereafter, the students work with the SDGs in the basic science course, where the UN’s climate efforts are in focus. The first year ends with a GCP / innovation course, where the students on the basis of teacher presentations work to make different innovative solutions to economic, political, social or cultural issues in their respective partner countries. In the middle of the students’ second year, Rysensteen hosts its own version of the UN simulation game Model United Nations, abbreviated MUN. The event lasts two days and is held every year in April, with most of our partner schools participating. RysMUN is organised by the school’s own students, largely without interference from Rysensteen’s teachers and management, and gives participants the opportunity to ­represent a country that is not their own, and very often also political convictions that are not their own. In other words, it is an exercise in the part of global citizenship that has to do with being able to put oneself in the place of others. Not necessarily to fully adopt differing political convictions, but to – at least – make an effort to understand what rationale lies behind them. After the introduction to the UN and the hosting of RysMUN, the focus is maintained on the 17 SDGs. Thus, virtually all other courses in the GCP progression plan also include a requirement to incorporate the UN’s 17 SDGs. This ensures that students get to know most of the SDGs fairly thoroughly and understand how different faculty approaches can help solve the major global issues we are all faced with. Extracurricular Activities (the Star Stops on the Metro) Internships, NGO involvement and the GCP committee

The Global Citizenship Programme, as is the case with most GCEd approaches to teaching, subscribes to the ideal of forming responsible and altruistic minded global citizens. For us at Rysensteen, the challenge has been how exactly to facilitate this formation of responsibility and altruism. Of course, classes are important. The students are taught about social issues, global problems such as the climate crisis, poverty in the global south, racism, etc. This all raises awareness. Just as their ability to act on their political and social convictions are qualified by learning about how Danish democracy functions, how the UN are working with the 17 SDGs and how civil rights movements have inspired change in the past, etc. But this is not enough. The students need to act themselves on their own initiative. They need to invest time, work and form ideas to really

Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum  37

understand the importance of political and social engagement and altruism. Therefore, Rysensteen has for many years tried to facilitate the possibility of students taking part in different NGO projects. The challenge, however, has always been that we engage only a few students. When doing the NGO-work on a totally voluntary basis (no extra-credit system for extracurricular work exists in Denmark), too few students signed up for the activities. This, of course, was unsatisfactory for a school devoted to Global Citizenship. Working with a whole-school NGO-project

The solution has been to engage with the international NGO, called Plan. In Danish – ‘PlanBørnefonden’ – which is an NGO devoted to the development of sustainable economic and social development in different parts of Africa, South America and Asia. Especially focusing on supporting children from poor areas with their educational needs. The collaboration with PlanBørnefonden entails that all Rysensteen’s 42 cohorts sponsor one child in the Plan sponsor programme in Kampala, Uganda, each. And that Rysensteen’s staff sponsor eight children in the Plan sponsor programme. Meaning that the students are themselves responsible for collecting the money needed for sponsoring ‘their’ sponsor child, either by organising sales of cakes, coffee, etc. at the school or by taking a job at the local supermarket – in other words, by investing their time. The collaboration with PlanBørnefonden has been a success for several reasons. First of all, the students are not ‘just’ involved in an abstract cause, they are directly responsible for another human being. Secondly, they are informed about the strategy and the progress of PlanBørnefonden’s work. In other words, they are being educated while taking part in the project, which also helps support the students’ sense of meaning. Thirdly, they experience a sense of collectiveness and community within the school, when everyone – including the staff at the school – is involved. And lastly, it is ‘their’ project. They have – via the student council – chosen to engage in the project. This also goes for the organisation of the funding, which is organised by a group of students from the student council. GCEd Teacher Training

At Rysensteen, we believe that a very important part of working with GCEd is to exchange ideas between teachers and school leaders of academic content and pedagogics across national boundaries. From the beginning of the Global Citizenship Programme, we have tried to use the study trips to have teachers observe classes and talk about the different approaches used to teaching GCEd. In 2018, we held an international conference, inviting teachers and school leaders from all our

38  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

partner-schools to talk about how to best work together pedagogically to strengthen our shared ideal of Global Citizenship. These exchanges of ideas were, momentarily, brought to a halt with the Covid pandemic. But then we learnt that zoom actually provides a solid platform for exchanging ideas of pedagogy and academic GCEd content. Therefore, as the pandemic kept most countries under lock-down, in late 2020, we held our first online teachers’ conference for more than 100 teachers from 16 different countries. Since then, we have – together with our partners at Tabor Academy – hosted another four conferences. At the conferences, teachers have been exchanging ideas of how to teach Math with a GCEd purpose, of what can be done pedagogically to facilitate the formation of the global citizenship ideas, which are not strictly tied to the teaching in the class-rooms and much more. The online network, which has been named UGEN – United Global Education Network – https://www.unitedglobaleducation.org/, has proven to be a great way of exchanging pedagogical ideas of GCEd teaching. The network participants are constantly learning from each other. The next steps in the development of UGEN, will be to involve students much more at the Conferences, and – now that the world is opening up again – to combine the online meetings with longer periods of physical teachers’ exchanges. How Rysensteen is Working with the Global Citizenship Programme from an Organisational Perspective

The school’s organisational structure reflects the international perspective on education. An educational leader is employed with GCP as his primary task, a coordinator with the same focus as well as an associated secretary. One of the central committees is the GCP committee, consisting of four teachers, who are responsible for defining and translating the GCP vision into academic content in interdisciplinary courses. This is to ensure a consistent and continuous dialogue about the project between teachers and management. This GCP committee of teachers is supported by a GCP committee of students, who provide feedback for the GCP management, and – importantly – is in charge of our NGO-collaboration with PlanBørnefonden. Management along with the GCP committee of teachers have formulated the progression plan, defined the overall framework of the study trips and other major projects. However, the academic and pedagogical work with regards to the traditional, existing subjects is done with a very high degree of autonomy. It is, after all, the respective subject teachers who know best how to teach their subject. Reflections on Creating a Whole-School Programme

Rysensteen has integrated Global Citizenship Education (GCEd) into all aspects of the school: the subjects, cross-curricular courses,

Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum  39

extracurricular activities, teachers’ courses, school culture, etc. The school has done this without ‘breaking’ with the Danish education system. Rysensteen is still, formally speaking, ‘a normal’ Danish upper secondary school. ‘Just’ an upper secondary school with a thorough Global Citizenship Education Programme. As explained earlier in this chapter, this is in part possible due to the relative freedom, which is given by the Danish Ministry of Education to individual teachers and schools when defining subject content and wholeschool approaches to teaching. This, of course, begs the question: is Rysensteen’s approach to GCEd directly applicable in other countries and other education systems? Probably not. Especially considering that the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School is not only tied to the formal structures of the Danish education system, it is also the product of a Danish culture of teaching and learning, and a culture of managing teachers and teachers, etc. However, direct application has never been the purpose of writing this book. Instead, we hope that teachers, school leaders and even politicians from other countries can find inspiration in our way of working with GCEd on a whole-school level. And then use this inspiration to implement a GCEd programme, or GCEd approach, or a GCEd course which is suited for their respective education system and education culture. Furthermore, all cultural and systemic differences aside, there are some considerations – when striving to implement GCE teaching and learning on a whole-school level – of universal relevance. In the following are a few reflections from Rysensteen based on experiences with establishing and maintaining the Global Citizenship Programme. Curriculum

When working with Global Citizenship Education on a whole-school level, it is, of course, entirely possible to do it without having a specific GCEd-curriculum. Many schools have a global issues course, intercultural competences course, etc., without adhering to written aims and objectives. However, for Rysensteen, the curriculum has been fundamental to the sustainability and the status of the Global Citizenship Programme. It is ‘the constitution’ we can always turn to, and refer to, if either external agents, students or teachers have any doubt about what direction Rysensteen is heading with the programme. The partner schools – And cultural meetings

When working with GCE and intercultural communication on a whole-school level, there is really no way around it: you can only get so

40  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

far with theory and books. If students are to really understand and learn how to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds, they need to experience the interactions themselves. At Rysensteen, we have chosen to work with partner-schools in many different countries around the world, and these collaborations have been invaluable to the Global Citizenship Programme. Year after year, we see our students grow as human beings with their homestay experiences. This is also reflected in our annual student assessment surveys where the cultural understanding/communication questions are always given the highest marks by our students. However, having 14 homestay-based collaborations requires a lot of time and resources. There are travel expenses, the work it takes to establish a new partnership, the planning of the study trips, etc. Therefore, the model that Rysensteen has chosen may not be possible to implement for all interested schools and institutions. But there are certainly other ways of working with intercultural understanding and communication, than Rysensteen is doing. Firstly, with the internet, working with partner-schools in foreign countries doesn’t necessarily require physical meetings. Much can be done by a well-planned online based course. Although not a 100% substitute for the physical visits, during the Covid lockdown, we did have good experiences with onlinebased cultural understanding courses. Secondly, to use the resources of the school’s/institution’s own students is, of course, an obvious way to work with ‘real-life’ cultural understanding. Rysensteen’s students are, ethnically and culturally, quite a homogenous group. Nonetheless, when students from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds share personal experiences of interacting with Danish ‘majority culture’, it adds significantly to the learning outcome of the cultural understanding classes. Of course, there are certain very understandable sensitivities to be considered when involving students in this way. Many students are, understandably, not interested in being singled out as ‘coming from a different culture’. Therefore, it is very important that whatever contribution they bring to the lessons arise from their own initiative. Teacher involvement

Teacher involvement has been incremental to the success of the Global Citizenship Programme. Both in creating and in maintaining the programme. But the management in charge of the programme has at times – unintentionally – ignored this. A concrete example is connected to the formulation of the curriculum. For a while, we forgot to involve the science teachers in the revision of the GCP curriculum. This meant that they couldn’t see how their subjects were relevant for the Global Citizenship Programme. They thought, and rightly so, that the programme goals were mostly focused on intercultural understanding.

Organisation and Internationalising the Curriculum  41

Although it was never the intention, this was a significant problem because when they were asked/told to integrate the GCP curriculum with their subjects, they simply couldn’t see how. After a while, we did change the curriculum to also involve the science teachers’ wishes. We have tried ever since not to forget the importance of teacher involvement when changing the curriculum and the programme in general. After all, it is the teachers who will convey the Global Citizenship Programme teaching to the students. If they feel inadequate or not sufficiently involved, students’ learning will suffer. Teacher support

Teaching GCEd is difficult. Basically, when you ask teachers to teach GCEd, you ask many of them to teach something that was not part of their own university and teacher education. After the first years with the Global Citizenship Programme, we could see that some teachers felt quite challenged in relation to GCP teaching, which was also reflected in the fact that there were relatively large differences in the individual cohorts’ assessment of the outcome of the programme. We tried to solve this challenge in different ways: first, the GCP committee of teachers held both an introductory course for new employees and several pedagogical days with GCP professionalism in focus. Second, it was decided that teachers would visit each other to observe GCP-related teaching. And third, GCP cultural comprehension exams were introduced, which teachers had to collaborate on in pairs, so they could learn from each other. The increased professional and pedagogical support of the teachers had a positive effect on the work with GCP. But having the ambitions that we have at Rysensteen for the Global Citizenship Programme, it remains very important to respect that teaching Global Citizenship Education is challenging and does call for professional support. The students and their parents

The importance of working with GCEd may be obvious to some students and parents. But for others, it can be very difficult to understand why cultural understanding/communication and global responsibility should have any place in a school curriculum. Therefore, ensuring the support of the parents and the students when implementing GCEd teaching is essential. At Rysensteen, we have learnt that when parents do not understand why we have a course about intercultural understanding, or the UN, or a Global Citizenship day, they complain. In response to this, we have done two things: (1) the parents are invited to several parent meetings both before and during their children’s time at Rysensteen. The

42  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

purpose of these meetings is to tell them about how and why we organise our study trips, visits from partner-school students, the Global Citizenship day, etc. (2) As mentioned above, we have established a GCP committee of students, who can constantly give feedback to management about how students experience the content of the GCP curriculum, the content of the GCP cross-curricula courses, etc. Furthermore, the committee is also very involved in our NGO-collaboration with PlanBørnefonden and organises different voluntary GCP events for the other students. In other words, the committee plays an important role in maintaining the Global Citizenship Programme and deciding where it is going in the future. This active role of the students has to a large degree given the students the idea that the Global Citizenship Programme belongs to them. Having this support from parents and students has been very important to the success of working with GCEd on a whole-school level at Rysensteen. It is difficult to imagine it would have any less importance in schools outside of Denmark. Concluding Remarks

Rysensteen Upper Secondary School has chosen to have an immense focus on GCEd teaching and learning. We have done so by establishing our own Global Citizenship Programme, complete with a GCP curriculum, progression plan, partner school network that spans five continents, global online teacher development conferences and much more. And just as importantly, we have done so in accordance with the teaching and learning culture of the Danish tradition. The Global Citizenship Programme is our way to work with Global Citizenship Education, but it is by no means the only way. Successfully implementing Global Citizenship Education into one’s teaching praxis and/ or school organisation requires finding a way that suits one’s systemic needs and cultural preferences. If the Global Citizenship Programme can in any way inspire readers of this book to find their own way to work with Global Citizenship Education, we – the readers and editors of this book – have achieved one the most important goals of this publication.

5 Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation in Formal and Informal Contexts of Learning Louise Tranekjær

To grow as a global citizen requires both academic development and personal development. Therefore, evaluation of global citizenship learning is a complex and debated issue: because how exactly do we assess the development of qualities that are linked to ‘soft’ competencies such as intercultural communication and to value-based perceptions of culture, altruism, ourselves and our fellow human beings? In this chapter, Associate Professor at Roskilde University, Louise Tranekjær presents her findings regarding the assessment practices at Rysensteen and the assessment tools she developed as a consequence of these findings during her three years of field studies at the school from 2015 to 2018. Introduction

This chapter contains reflections and findings relevant to teachers and managers working with evaluation frameworks and practices within education programmes focused on the Global Citizenship Programme (GCP) and intercultural communication and aims to help others develop their own evaluation process. It is based on the content and results of a research and development project that was carried out at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School with the purpose of developing an evaluation framework around their Global Citizenship Profile. The project did not include the actual evaluation of their programme but the development of a framework allowing teachers and management to make systematic evaluations of students’ GCP learning and competences. In order to develop such a framework for evaluation, it was necessary to consider which type of evaluation was best suited for addressing the needs of teachers and management at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School but also to determine which 43

44  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

type of evaluation was suitable for the content and activities of the Global Citizenship Programme. The latter involved carrying out fieldwork and document analysis in order to establish how Global Citizenship (GC) was understood and operationalised in the teaching and to use this knowledge to help teachers and managers specify the learning goals and competence descriptions of the Global Citizenship Programme. This chapter illustrates how formative evaluation can take place while simultaneously creating a conceptual framework for use in other situations. As a consequence, this chapter demonstrates how developing useful evaluation frameworks for educational programmes related to lucid notions such as internationalisation, global citizenship, intercultural dialogue and democratic citizenship requires an initial clarification of how such notions are understood and translated into specific learning goals and learning activities. The chapter begins by providing some general reflections about different approaches to evaluation and describing the rationales for the type of evaluation framework developed for Rysensteen Upper Secondary School’s Global Citizenship Programme. These are followed by a description of the ethnomethodological field study that formed the basis for determining and specifying the learning goals and activities related to the Global Citizenship Programme, including a presentation of a distinction between different types of ‘knowledge’ involved in GCP learning. The chapter concludes with a presentation of the actual evaluation framework that was developed during the project. Evaluation Approaches and Purposes

Evaluation methods are fundamentally normative in the sense that they carry with them values (Stern, 2005) about what learning, behaviour and practice is considered desirable and undesirable and, not least, how such desirable behaviours, answers and displays of knowledge, skills and attitudes are demonstrated and made ‘evaluable’ or ‘assessable’. As described by Stern (2005), different educational contexts carry with them different values and positions with respect to evaluation and the various types of evaluation can very broadly be characterised in terms of purpose and method. Stern outlines five different types of purpose, namely (1) Planning, (2) Accountability, (3) Implementation, (4) Knowledge production and (5) Institutional/community strengthening, that are useful for characterising the type of evaluation framework that are suitable for a programme such as the Rysensteen Global Citizenship programme. The notion of determining the purpose as a first step of evaluation practices is also pointed out as central by Cohen et al. (2018), who note that planning or developing an evaluation framework is in many ways similar to designing a research project.

Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation  45

The Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen had, at the time when the project began in 2015, reached a certain level of maturity and a certain level of public attention that entailed a need for an increasing degree of accountability but also sparked a need for a more systematic evaluation of the implementation of the GCP learning goals in the curriculum as a whole as well as creating a need for systematic knowledge about the learning outcomes of the programme. These needs determined the purpose of the evaluation framework development. In terms of methods, Stern (2005) identifies the following types: (1) economic approaches focused on increasing efficiency; (2) standard- or target-based approaches looking to ensure the performance in relation to particular criteria; (3) explanatory or causal approaches aiming at documenting impact; (4) formative approaches seeking to document self-correction and development; (5) participatory and developmental approaches aimed at community and network building. In principle, then, the programme at Rysensteen, and any similar one, could be evaluated in a number of different ways using different types of data, both quantitative and qualitative. It would have been possible to focus on summative evaluation documenting impact and to collect quantitative data in the form of assessment by tests of students’ global competences (GC). Such tests have, for example, been carried out under the OECD PISA system (2018). Assessment of this kind can also be carried out on the basis of the Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture (2018) of the Council of Europe, which provides descriptors at three levels which can be used to characterise and quantify the levels of learners’ competences at different stages of learning, with the potential for characterising development and change in competences. The evaluative framework developed for Rysensteen can be characterised as, on the one hand, standard- or target-based in the sense that the aim was to develop a way to evaluate whether the students, through their participation in the programme, would actually acquire the competences required of them as global citizens. The evaluation framework development in this way involved specification of the competences and the criteria for evaluating them. On the other hand, the evaluative framework developed for Rysensteen was inspired by formative evaluation approaches, as it was central to the Rysensteen teachers and GCP developers to capture the dynamic and complex ways in which students developed and to feedback the information to those involved in a continuing spiral process of action-evaluation-action. At the onset of this project, there was a shared understanding among researchers, teachers and administrators that a formative approach to evaluation, using qualitative data, was best suited for identifying the

46  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

learning related to the Global Citizenship Programme and that quantitative measures were not needed. The challenge was to identify a variety of ways to systematically evaluate and document the continuing development of the students’ competences as global citizens, as defined by the learning goals of the curriculum. Such documentation of progress and competences was considered essential to the continual development, qualification and communication of the Global Citizenship Programme, internally and externally, and it was central to securing the quality of the pedagogic and academic work with the students. An Ethnomethodological Point of Departure in Educational Practice

The evaluation framework development was based on an ethnomethodological (Garfinkel, 1967) study that took place from 2015 to 2016 of how global citizenship was understood, taught and operationalised by teachers and students; of the organisation as a whole; and of the practices that constituted the GCP programme as they manifested themselves in the documents, reflections and actions of students and teachers. The ethnographic data collection methods consisted of the following elements that individually contributed to a reconstruction of the participant perspective, or the ‘members’ perspective: • Document analysis of the programme description and curricular goals. • Observation and recordings of GCP-related classes such as lessons in history, religion, geography, Danish and English but also lessons involving activities that were specifically aimed at planning or carrying out activities related to the future study abroad experience. One example of this was the RysMUN, which was a mock UN role play, where students would act as UN delegates for a day. Another example was the ‘GCP-day’, which was a one-day seminar about global citizenship with invited lecturers and presentations of the films that students had made about the study exchange experiences and ‘destination countries’. • Observations and recordings of examinations in intercultural understanding. • Interviews with teachers about the relation between their subject and GCP. • Interviews with students about their experiences of the GCP. • Observations and recordings of a study exchange in South Korea. The fieldwork revealed how the GCP is integrated in the broader institutional and formalised teaching that takes place within the school as well as outside of the school, but also showed that it is in many ways ­manifested in and relevant to the informal activities and practices of the ­students. As described by Roberts and Sarangi (1999), working

Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation  47

Figure 5.1  The contexts within which global citizenship develops

with educational development necessitates the use of particular competences to gain insight into the various formal and informal practices that involve evaluation. Inspired by Goffman (1959), Roberts and Sarangi (1999) use a theatrical metaphor to distinguish between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ in order to describe the formal and informal, respectively. This distinction was considered useful for this development project because it accentuates the need for an evaluative approach that incorporates not only the activities explicitly identified as GCPrelated but also the many informal contexts of learning within which GCP competences are used and tested. The model (Figure 5.1) illustrates the various contexts within which global citizenship is potentially developed and employed as a competence, and which must be encompassed by an evaluative framework. These different contexts of learning can, from an ecological perspective on learning, be considered different environments that provide a range of different opportunities or affordances (Van Lier, 2000) for learning and that the teacher can help the student explore and translate into a potential for learning. The usefulness of an ecological perspective of learning in relation to the GCP is that it accentuates an understanding of learning as something that takes place in the meaningful and goal-oriented action within a particular context. From such a perspective, factual knowledge acquired as part of a curriculum becomes merely one among many resources that students employ in relation to a given purpose and the formal educational context becomes merely one amongst many other contexts of learning, development and individual transformation. In relation to the development of a framework of evaluation for GCP, the different contexts where global citizenship competences are potentially developed are considered possible points of evaluation and the students’ competences are seen as processual and situationally defined. As such, it follows that they need to be captured in various ways in relation to the different contexts and practices relevant to GCP and its goals.

48  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

The Relationship Between the Evaluation and Specification of the Programme

The initial empirical studies of the content and practices of the programme indicated the need for a cooperative specification, with teachers and management, of the meaning of the various competences that the school linked to the notion of global citizenship in their documents and their teaching practices. The onset of this specification work was a document analysis that was inspired by an evaluation by Castro et al. (2013, 2015) of the International Baccalaureate programme and informed more generally by previous research within the field of language and culture pedagogy (Daryai-Hansen & Jaeger, 2015). The documents were coded in such a way that the various descriptors, that were used in the school’s descriptions of the programme goals and the desired competencies of students, were coded and grouped in relation to the categories knowledge, skills and attitudes as they have been defined by Byram (1997). ‘Understanding’, which was also a term used repeatedly in the curriculum can be placed somewhere between knowledge, skills and attitudes as understanding expresses knowledge combined with a new perception of and attitude towards something. This was addressed by introducing a three-part division of the notion of knowledge: factual knowledge, common sense and epistemology. I will return to this distinction. The results of the document analysis were then discussed with the teachers and management of GCP, who implemented them by adjusting and specifying the competence descriptions and learning goals. An important observation that was made was the potential to challenge the distinction between activities and learning situations that were explicitly defined as GCP related, and those that were not. In some cases, there were some parts of the teaching that were not considered by the teachers to be GCP related, but nevertheless had clear potential for being oriented towards the GCP learning goals (Risager & Tranekjær, 2019). One example of this was a lesson in Ancient History, where the students’ work with cultural analysis and ethnographic description in relation to sculptures and myths could easily have been linked to reflections about cultural otherness and the cultural positioning of the Danish students, which formed the basis for their interpretations. In other cases, there were situations that were considered peripheral or parenthetical situations during the teaching, where reflections and discussions took place which were in fact central to a GCP perspective. One example of this was the practical planning of the future exchanges with other schools in the network, where norms and expectations about cultural codes and conduct, such as smoking and food habits, were discussed and challenged (Tranekjær & Suarez-Krabbe, 2016). Alongside this work, the initial part of the fieldwork was carried out, and the observations of teaching were provided as input for the

Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation  49

curriculum development work that was being carried out simultaneously with the development of the formative evaluation framework. Findings From the Field Study

The initial field study generated in-depth knowledge and clarity about how teachers, managers and students understood the notion of global citizenship and how that understanding was explicitly but also, at times, only implicitly, translated into particular learning practices and learning goals. It also helped reveal some of the opportunities for GCP learning that were not always exploited fully because they were not considered immediately GCP relevant. This insight was used to specify the learning goals and the competence descriptions of the Global Citizenship Programme, in collaboration with management. It was furthermore presented to teachers and managers as input for a more conscious and explicit implementation of the global citizenship aspects of the curriculum into the teaching activities. This section presents the overall findings that were, in this way, providing the necessary formative input for developing the evaluation framework, specifying the learning goals and competence description and contributing to a more systematic implementation of the GCP in actual teaching and learning activities. A potential for additional subject cooperation and integration of GCP

One of the challenges and potentials that presented itself, based on observations of the teaching as well as interviews with the teachers, was the process of integrating the GCP into the various subjects as well as the cooperation among subjects about particular themes and activities related to GCP. Whereas the goal of management was to integrate GCP into all of the subjects, there were differences among subjects and teachers with respect to how easily GCP could be linked to the curriculum and the activities of individual subjects. There was an understanding that some subjects were obvious GCP subjects whereas others were not. There were varying perceptions among teachers of how much and how little they should adapt the content of their subject in order to make room for GCP. This was related to the fact that the integration of GCP into the subjects was predominantly understood and practiced as ‘country-preparatory’ elements, that is an emphasis on providing students with the subject-relevant knowledge about the country they were planning an exchange with. For example, students going to Iceland learned about the history of Iceland in History, the geography of Iceland in Geography and so on. It was however apparent from observations and interviews that the challenge for teachers in identifying the link between subject content and GCP was a lack of time and energy to cooperate and discuss with the

50  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

other teachers within and across subjects about ideas for particular activities, themes and interdisciplinary curriculum planning. Nevertheless, the observations and interviews revealed a range of examples of creative orientations towards GCP-related goals and content. For example, there was cooperation among Music, Social Science and History around the cultural analysis of concerts, and an interdisciplinary module planned in Danish and Religion about religious ceremonies. Formal versus informal contexts of learning

The learning goals and competences that relate to GC, such as knowledge about global issues and the ability to manage encounters with foreign cultures, are characterised by cutting across and tying together different subject contents. The goals and competences are however also achieved by a problem-orientation which implies that they are developed through students relating to and interacting with reality outside the classroom. Many teachers at Rysensteen are interdisciplinary in their approach to their subject content, and they strive towards expanding the boundaries of the context of learning for GCEd beyond the traditional classroom context. In this way, the students are prepared for their future travels to their country of exchange by being trained in exercises relevant to this experience, such as doing field observations in Copenhagen and engaging in various problem-solving activities in the local community and, later, in the foreign country while doing the exchange. A central project carried out before and during their travels was the planning and making of a film about the destination country, which involved working with research about the destination, developing the theme of the film, scripting and planning the content. At the same time, both observation of teaching and of interviews revealed a clear division in the teachers’ understanding of what characterises off-topic and on-topic activities in relation to the GCP. This is probably connected with the fact that in working to define Rysensteen as a ‘profile’ upper secondary school, an emphasis has been placed on defining the elements of the curriculum that were specifically related to GC and thereby defining what distinguishes this upper secondary school from others. One aspect of this was the construction of knowledge about the destination countries through the subjects that were considered particularly relevant. This meant that other activities and topics, that were also potentially relevant and perhaps even central to building the students’ competences as global citizens, were not made particularly explicit or understood as such by teachers and students. This led to the paradox that efforts to specify and situate the GC content of the programme resulted in obscuring the GC activities and competences that teachers and students were continuously practising in the teaching and everyday life at the school in various off-topic situations.

Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation  51

One example of this, that has been described more thoroughly elsewhere (Tranekjær & Suarez-Krabbe, 2016) is the various situations during classes where the future travel to the destination country is planned, with everything that this entails in relation to dividing the students in groups, planning who eats where and participates in which activities, distribution of rooms and so on. During such discussions, the ‘subject knowledge’ about the destination country is backgrounded, and the official curricular planning is temporarily suspended for the sake of solving issues that to the teachers and students appear as practical issues. Nevertheless, it is sometimes exactly during such ‘backstage’ activities that the students’ knowledge, assumptions, competences and attitudes are expressed, challenged and transformed. A comparable example is the difference between taking driving lessons and knowing how to drive: a person taking driving lessons may be formally trained and tested during driving theory classes and practical driving lessons, but the real test of their driving skills arises as they are suddenly surprised by the car in front of them blocking the breaks. At Rysensteen, such trials presented themselves in discussions about whether and where smoking was allowed in New York or whether it was obligatory to eat the food served at a given Cuban concert venue, or the size of the gift to bring for the host family. Such situations clearly demonstrated the need to extend the notion of what could be characterised as GCPrelated activities and invited exploration of the fact-based notion of knowledge that was initially used in the GCP curriculum and learning goal descriptions. Expanding and specifying the knowledge dimension of GCP

Knowledge is typically understood as the acquisition of facts, and in research, policy and practice in education related to global citizenship and intercultural competence, such knowledge often refers to facts about nations and national cultures (see also Tranekjær & Suarez-Krabbe, 2016). However, this conceptualisation of knowledge appeared insufficient to describe the scope of the epistemological challenges and development that teachers and students worked with as part of the GCP activities at Rysensteen, ‘frontstage’ as well as ‘backstage’. On the basis of observations of the teaching and the initial document analysis, it was suggested that teachers and management work with a three-part division of the notion of knowledge, which included two additional dimensions, namely epistemology and common sense, illustrated in Figure 5.2. The need to specify the knowledge dimension ‘common sense’ presented itself as the teaching implicitly involved challenging and expanding the taken-for-granted, everyday world-knowledge, that formed the point of departure for students’ encounters with factual subject-related

52  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 5.2  The three knowledge dimensions involved in global citizenship work

knowledge such as geography, history and so on. Such knowledge can be described as ‘common sense’ (Billig, 1987, 1991) but should not be understood in a generalising or normative sense. It should rather be understood as the naturalised understandings about reality that individuals within a given context take for granted as their basis for social action and moral order (Garfinkel, 1967). In this case, this includes understandings about what it means to be an upper secondary school student at Rysensteen, what it means to be a teenager at Vesterbro (a district of Copenhagen), to be Muslim or Christian in Denmark, norms about alcohol use in Denmark, how to behave when going to a club, being with your family, social conduct within the classroom and so on. It is a central point that common sense has an ideological dimension because naturalised understandings about reality, and social relations as part of that reality, define a certain version of reality as being true. Not in the sense of absolute and definite truth but in the sense of being meaningful and recognisable. A second important point is that common sense is never absolute and homogenous but rather dilemmatic and conflictual. For example, there is not just one meaningful notion of what it means to live in Copenhagen or what it means to be a migrant in Denmark, and this dilemmatic version of common sense holds the potential for developing and expanding the students’ understandings of themselves, the reality around them and the encounter with difference and ‘the other’. This potential was implicitly explored in both ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ activities, but it was not, initially, explicitly part of the learning goals and was, at the beginning of the project, outside of the realm of evaluation.

Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation  53

An example of ‘frontstage’ activities, where the dilemmatic dimension of common-sense knowledge manifested itself, is an activity called ‘GCP day’ where different controversial topics were discussed with input from politicians and teachers, and the activity RysMUN, which is a mock UN event, where students acted as UN delegates for a day and had to take on different attitudes and positions about a given global dilemma and argue for their position. In both cases, students employed opposing, yet equally naturalised and meaningful common-sense understandings of the world, as well as factual knowledge about social contexts, politics and human rights, as resources for the debates and negotiations. The dilemmas of common sense were also present in ‘backstage’ activities such as the previously mentioned norms about smoking in New York or discussions between students about gender roles and beauty ideals in South Korea (see Chapter 6). Global citizenship work involved challenges to the students’ commonsense understandings and drawing teachers’ and students’ attention to the concept of epistemology (Santos, 2014) that is, bringing their attention to the way that students’ perceptions of the world were shaped by their particular cultural, historical and global positioning within it. This was particularly clear in subjects such as religion and social studies, where teachers and students worked with differences in worldviews, and different understandings of life, God, death and similar concepts. The notion of epistemology was also central to discussions about how particular social conditions, structures and models of society have particular consequences for the actions, world views and social organisation of individuals. This knowledge dimension however also incorporates a potential for a critical and self-critical reflection by the students of their western epistemology in their understanding of education, class knowledge and not least global citizenship. Yet this potential was exploited to a lesser degree. de Sousa Santos (2014) calls this ‘epistemological blindness’, which refers to the individual’s lack of ability to perceive, understand or think from alternative understandings of reality, than the one they have been socialised into (Tranekjær & Suarez-Krabbe, 2016). Working with epistemology is a matter of directing students’ gazes towards their epistemological blind spots which can constitute a barrier for dialogue and problem-solving with people who have a different epistemological base. In particular, it involves students reflecting on a western viewpoint that risks establishing unhelpful hierarchies between the Danish students and students from other parts of the world. Assessing the global citizenship of the students in this respect means looking at the extent to which they are capable of epistemological decentring as Papastephanou (2012) calls it. Such assessment can be made by means of the qualitative and formative type of assessment framework developed for this programme and presented below.

54  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

The reflections about the potential of expanding the notion of knowledge, based on observations during and beyond the teaching activities, were continuously shared and discussed with the teachers and management and formed part of the input to adjust the curriculum and competence descriptions. In this way, they had an impact on the formative evaluation process and also played a central role in the work to develop and evaluate the teaching in intercultural understanding and the teaching that took place during the students’ home exchange and homestay experience. The Evaluation Framework

The reflections presented above about the type of evaluation approaches that fitted the needs of the teachers and managers at Rysensteen as well as the educational context and content of the Global Citizenship Programme resulted in the development of an evaluation framework that will be presented in this final section of the chapter. First, it is perhaps useful for those setting out to evaluate a programme and/or develop an evaluation framework to summarise the steps that I have described as part of such a process: (1) Decide with the participants or future users of the evaluation which kind of evaluation is useful and appropriate for their evaluation purposes. (2) Read and analyse the documents available to describe the goals and content of the educational programme to be evaluated. (3) Carry out fieldwork in order to identify how the learning goals and the content of the programme are operationalised by teachers and determine some of the central teaching and learning situations within which evaluation-related activities could potentially take place. (4) If necessary and possible, carry out interviews with teachers and learners about their understanding of the content and goal of the programme or programme elements to be evaluated. (5) Make sure to create opportunities for continual dialogue with teachers and programme managers throughout in order to discuss observations, reflections and enable possible adjustments in the fieldwork and development process. (6) Collaborate with teachers and managers on the specification of learning goals and competence descriptions, based on the document analysis and the fieldwork in order to provide a precise basis for the evaluation framework development work. (7) If possible, arrange for a trial implementation of elements of the evaluation framework, in order to allow for collaborative adjustments. In some cases, there will be a need to develop teacher guides to accompany parts of the evaluation framework, for example, if a portfolio assessment is developed as part of the framework.

Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation  55

When going through these steps, it is important to bear in mind the necessary distinction between evaluation and assessment and the distinction between summative and formative evaluation types. Evaluation is forming a judgement about the effectiveness of a programme with respect to the appropriateness of its aims, with respect to the effectiveness with which the aims are reached and the efficiency with which this is done. Assessment, on the other hand, is much more narrowly focused on determining (and in some cases, measuring) the performance of students in relation to a given activity, learning goal or programme. Formative evaluation or assessment is, as said above, a matter of monitoring (or self-monitoring) a programme or a process of learning in a collaborative way. In the case of evaluation, this involves the evaluator and teachers/managers, and in the case of assessment, it involves the teacher and the student, but in both situations input, feedback and observations are collected as data over an extended period and used to improve. Summative evaluation or assessment, on the other hand, usually involves the collection of data in a relatively short period to establish to what extent certain aims have been achieved and to make a judgement. It follows from the distinctions above and the development process at Rysensteen as described in this chapter, that developing an evaluation and assessment framework may very well initiate a process of formative evaluation in itself even though this is not necessarily the goal to begin with. Whether the goal is to develop or carry out evaluation or assessment, it is important to include a range of data types as described above but also the assessment of students’ learning, for it is the assessment of learning which gives evidence of whether the educational aims and intended learning outcomes have been achieved. Student Assessment and Programme Learning Outcomes

It was central to the management at Rysensteen Gymnasium to have a framework for assessing students’ learning that could incorporate the different knowledge dimensions, and the formal and informal contexts of learning with formative and summative elements. The assessment framework that was developed consisted of three tools, two of these enabling the assessment of students and the final one allowing for the assessment of the programmes long-term effects: (1) A GCP portfolio as a formative assessment tool, (2) Specified criteria for the summative assessment of the oral exam in intercultural understanding and, at the same time, evaluate the overall success of the GCP and (3) an exit-survey for monitoring students’ actions and dispositions after finishing their studies at Rysensteen and thereby assessing the programme’s future impact. To conclude this chapter, I will briefly go through these in turn. (1) A GCP portfolio as a formative assessment tool to develop the knowledge, skills and competences of students and a teacher guide to the portfolio

56  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Portfolio is an assessment tool that is increasingly used as an alternative to other forms of assessment, as it provides an image of development over time and because it is a form of assessment that centres on students’ ownership and responsibility for their own process and progress of learning. There are different approaches to portfolio assessment (Klenowski et al., 2006) but common to them all is that they consist of a collection of documents, reflections, products, activities and so on, that students have collected over time as a record and display of their learning process. The portfolio developed for the Rysensteen GCP was inspired by the European language portfolio developed by the Council of Europe in relation to the Common Framework of Reference for Languages (2001). A draft of the GCP portfolio was developed on the basis of the l­ earning situations observed during fieldwork and the interviews with t­ eachers.1 At the request of management, a teacher guide was developed that sought to explicate and exemplify the opportunities for using and integrating the portfolio in teaching activities. Both of these drafts were then tested and adjusted in accordance with teachers’ experiences with implementation. (2) Specified criteria for summative assessment in the examination in intercultural understanding On the basis of recordings of the intercultural understanding examination as well as observations of teaching and a fieldwork during an exchange to South Korea, a draft was developed for a specification of criteria for the intercultural understanding examination. This specification employed a division of the students competences into knowledge, analytical competence and competence for action, that were each operationalised in several sub-competences (see Chapter 7) for an elaborate description of the research projects results and findings in relation to the intercultural understanding dimension of GCP. As was the case with the portfolio, the draft for the specification of the assessment criteria was discussed with management and the teachers involved in the intercultural understanding teaching. On that basis, the criteria were later adjusted to match the teachers’ perceptions of what would work and be useful in the actual examination context. (3) An exit-survey to monitor the actions of students after finishing Rysensteen gymnasium The final element of the evaluation framework, that was developed, was an exit-survey, that the GCP management wanted as a tool for the future monitoring of potential patterns in the choices and careers of Rysensteen students. The survey development was inspired by OECD’s work with the development of a Global Competence Assessment Framework, that had just been finished in 2018 as well as being based on input from the GCP management. The idea behind the survey was to

Global Citizenship – Teaching and Evaluation  57

distribute it to the graduates after 5, 10 and 20 years of finishing their Rysensteen schooling and that the information generated from this survey would provide an idea of the role of the GCP in shaping the future lives of students as global citizens. Concluding Remarks

This chapter has presented the work, reflections and outcomes resulting from the development of an evaluation framework for global citizenship at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School. This framework had the purpose of enabling the evaluation of the effects of the programme in terms of learning but also the success of the programme in the form of shaping the students’ future paths. For this reason, the evaluation framework developed included elements that enabled the assessment of students and also the evaluation of the programme’s impact in terms of students’ future actions and career choices. This dual purpose translated into an evaluation framework consisting of a process of deciding on the aims and purposes of the evaluation, formative interaction between evaluator and teachers and administrators, tools for assessing students’ learning and GCP competence development – using qualitative data – as well as an exitsurvey allowing the quantitative monitoring of the students future choices. As described in the chapter, developing an evaluation framework related to notions such as global citizenship, intercultural understanding and internationalisation, which to an increasing extent appear in various educational programmes, requires a thorough investigation of how such notions are understood and practised within the actual teaching. The chapter has demonstrated the significance of basing the development of student assessment frameworks for global citizenship on a practice- and participant-oriented exploration of how such a notion is understood and operationalised by teachers in the actual teaching. Such exploration allows for the specification of learning goals and competence descriptions that constitutes the necessary starting point for any formative evaluation development and practice while also providing opportunity for reflection and development of teaching practices and learning opportunities. Note (1) After the termination of the development project at Rysensteen, the ideas behind the GCP portfolio provided input for the development of the Competences for Democratic Citizenship portfolio, developed by The Council of Europe. The CDC development work that took place at the time of the Rysensteen GCP evaluation project has furthermore continually inspired the work with developing the curriculum, the teaching and the evaluation framework. GCP at Rysensteen has in this way proved exemplary of the development of global citizenship and citizenship education that has taken place for several years at a more general European level.

6 Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice Louise Tranekjær

Most educators engaged in Global Citizenship Education share the hope that GCEd can form students who are able and willing to engage in making the world of tomorrow a little better than the world of today. A prerequisite for this positive engagement in the world is students’ ability to communicate in a sensitive and meaningful manner with people from different cultural backgrounds. Positive, global changes for the better will never come about without proficient abilities for intercultural communication. In this chapter, Associate Professor Louise Tranekjær, from Roskilde University, discusses the intercultural dimension of global citizenship with an empirical point of departure in the curriculum and teaching of the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School including the ‘stay abroad’ visits of the students to partner schools around the world. Louise Tranekjær analyses the potential and challenges of the relation between critical self-reflection and engaged practice, which is in many ways at the heart of intercultural competence, and which manifests itself in the cultural encounters that students engage in as they go abroad and interact with students from the various partner schools. Louise Tranekjær makes a distinction between different types of cultural encounters that provide different pedagogic opportunities and limitations for teachers. It is argued that the learning goals and criteria of evaluation for the cultural studies course and examination, that students have to participate in as they return from their study abroad experience, should be specifically linked to the challenges and opportunities related to these different types of cultural encounters that students have experienced abroad. It is furthermore argued that the intercultural understanding examination

58

Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice  59

presents an important dialogic and reflexive space and learning opportunity which can be further supported by s­ elf-reflexive evaluation tools such as the portfolio and be used to both facilitate and demonstrate the transformation of the students’ ­understanding of themselves and ‘the other’ which is the goal of the culture-dimension of the programme. Introduction

Intercultural understanding, intercultural communication and cultural encounters are notions that often figure in educational programmes related to Global Citizenship Education (GCEd), where they appear as central elements to the learning activities and goals. This chapter seeks to contribute to such programmes and ideas about cultural learning by presenting some reflections on the opportunities but also challenges for learning that cultural encounters can facilitate. Taking an empirical point of departure in an ethnomethodological (Garfinkel, 1967) study (see Chapter 5) of, on the one hand, the teaching of intercultural understanding at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School and, on the other, the cultural encounters that took place during a study exchange to South Korea, the chapter aims at analysing the theories of culture which were used in pedagogical practice. The fieldwork on which the study is based included participant observations and video-recordings of the intercultural understanding lessons and oral examination. These were analysed in order to describe teachers’ understandings and operationalisation of the notion of culture in their teaching activities as well as the extent to which students were able to apply the knowledge, skills and competences that they had gained from their preparatory courses during their ‘stay abroad’. Such observations were also used for the work on developing the evaluation framework described in Chapter 5, but they have a more general relevance too for anyone working with teaching programmes related to intercultural understanding, cultural understanding and cultural encounters. The analysis will then also help teachers to reflect on their own pedagogical work with the notion of culture particularly with respect to the relation between learning opportunities within and beyond the formal context of the classroom. Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Organised Cultural Encounters

The notion of intercultural understanding is based on two fundamental premises, first that various cultures exist side by side in some relation to one another, and that they can be separated, defined and described to such a degree that it is possible to learn about them and learn to

60  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

‘understand’ them. This understanding of culture rests on anthropological notions of culture that have been challenged and discussed for over 30 years and have gradually been replaced by more complex notions of culture as something dynamic and heterogeneous which is co-constructed relationally through interactions and encounters (Barth, 1998; Geertz, 1973; Hastrup, 2004; Street, 1993). Such dynamic notions of culture, cultural memberships and characteristics are not only linked to nationally defined boundaries and communities, but to a cultural practice in a range of different communities. While it is indeed possible to make a synchronic analysis of the culture of any given sociocultural group, large or small, such an analysis involves the temporary fixation and backgrounding of the cultural complexities that present themselves when focusing the analysis on a subject level or a relational level. While the meaning of actions, attitudes and beliefs may, in other words, be described and explained in relation to cultural communities, at the level of the individual, actions, beliefs and attitudes are a manifestation of a particular person’s positioning, relation to and experiences with a range of different cultural communities that they are a ‘member’ of. Furthermore, the actions, attitudes, beliefs and interpretations of an individual within a given cultural context are continually dependent on, and shaped by, the particular interactional context within which a person encounters another. In this way, culture is constituted, reproduced and negotiated as part of interactions. A dynamic notion of culture is in this way not only applied when making a diachronic analysis of cultural communities, that is, looking at the way particular cultural communities develop over time. An analysis of the dynamic of culture can also be applied when looking at the sensemaking practices of individuals in situations of overlapping cultural communities. In such situations, individuals are involved in a continual negotiation of ­ ­expectations about cultural differences and similarities among individuals and the ­various cultural communities they participate in and have been socialised into. This does not mean that the analysis of any given cultural group, or any individual’s encounters or practices should refrain from making any general claims about differences and similarities, but rather that such claims should be empirically based and involve critical reflection and exploration of one’s assumptions. An analysis of cultural communities as comparable units often involves a synchronic fixation of the d ­ iachronically dynamic, complex and overlapping properties of cultures. An individual-­ oriented analysis risks failing to capture the more general ­patterns of action and sensemaking that follow from the ongoing participation of individuals in cultural communities. It follows that both levels of analysis are important and complement each other. The notion of culture as dynamic has also influenced the field of education, at research as well as a practice level. Here, the teaching of intercultural competence is taking over from the teaching of knowledge about

Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice  61

and understanding of a country and its national culture – whether in foreign language teaching or geography or history. The point of departure is a critical approach to culture and cultural difference that seeks to undermine national stereotypes and ideas about culture-clashes and cultural differentiations (Byram et  al., 2013; Dervin & Risager, 2015; Risager, 2018; Svarstad, 2018; Tranekjær, 2007). This has come about through a shift from emphasising knowledge about a social group (national, ethnic, professional, etc.) and its culture analysed at a given point in time, to a focus on the full range of competences a learner can acquire in education, including skills, attitudes and values. However, it is still possible to find ideas about the characteristic and predictable differences of nations and their members, which do not recognise the complex phenomenon of how individuals belong to many varied groups, not only within the field of education, but also in politics, in crosscultural training programmes in business and commerce and public debates. And more importantly, this notion of culture continues to have an impact on students’ understandings of themselves and ‘the other’ as part of a larger, shared community though the essence and nature of such sharedness may be imagined (Anderson, 1991) volatile and flexible (Hastrup, 2004). At Rysensteen Upper Secondary School, the understanding of global citizenship is intimately linked with a notion of almendannelse ‘Bildung’ (Chapter 2; Fleming & Byram, 2019) which is understood and operationalised as a need for knowledge about other countries, skills in cultural analysis and intercultural competences. Such knowledge, skills and other competences are developed through regular subjects such as history and geography but also in particular ‘intercultural understanding’ classes and through their participation in cultural encounters outside of the classroom (see Chapter 5). The intercultural understanding classes at Rysensteen take their point of departure in the ambivalence and struggle around the notion of culture and the difference between employing a synchronically fixed versus a dynamic notion of culture for analysing a particular encounter (see Chapter 7). On the one hand, the teachers work on causing reflection among the students about cultural complexity and heterogeneity. On the other hand, they work on providing students with knowledge that enables them to understand themselves and ‘the other’ as cultural beings whose actions, norms and epistemologies are grounded in a socialisation within particular cultural communities and a given nation state. The students are, in other words, to learn that intercultural understanding is about capturing and embracing the dynamic, flexible and unpredictable while also being able to describe a given cultural ­community – be it a national or an ethnic or a professional or religious etc. community – as it exists at a given point in (present) time on the basis of overall patterns of actions, values and ritualised, institutionalised practices.

62  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

In relation to the learning goals of global citizenship, one could say that the first mentioned dimension of the classes in intercultural understanding prepares students for inevitably unpredictable encounters with what is unfamiliar and potentially strange to them. The second provides them with the knowledge to analyse an encounter by characterising the actions and norms of a specific ‘other’ that differs from their own, and which they need to be able to engage with and manage in the ‘global problem solving’ activities that form a central part of the learning goals for their Global Citizenship Education. The aim of training and preparing students for cultural encounters carries with it challenges that are linked to educational and evaluative practices. One challenge is for teachers to clearly formulate what they mean by a cultural encounter and how/what they expect the students to learn from engaging in it. Another challenge is that the competences that teachers wish to develop in students are processual and contextdependent, which means that they develop over time as the students engage in a range of different cultural encounters, with different challenges, needing different competences. In the following sections of this chapter, I will specify the nature of these challenges on the basis of my observations of the teaching, the examination and the study exchange to South Korea. ‘Intercultural Understanding’ and Cultural Encounters in Theory and Practice

The classes in ‘intercultural understanding’ at Rysensteen are, as mentioned previously, structured in such a way that they prepare students for the challenges and activities that they will encounter in their future study abroad experience. One assessment of the students’ ‘intercultural understanding’ takes place at the school, as the students return from their travels, in a relatively informal group examination with two teachers, one who went on the study tour with the students, and one of those who teach the ‘intercultural understanding’ classes. Another form of assessment is travel essays, which the students write retrospectively in order to reflect on their experiences during their study abroad. The teachers’ implicit theorising that forms the basis of both types of assessment is that the intercultural understanding teaching supplies students with knowledge and tools that they can employ when abroad. Furthermore, it is assumed that the very experience of the cultural encounter will spark reflections that will develop their competences for managing future cultural encounters. The implicit assumption is, in other words, that the desired transformation and learning in the form of increased intercultural understanding and intercultural competence will not result from the formal teaching of intercultural understanding alone, or from

Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice  63

merely throwing students into a given cultural encounter. It results, rather, from the students’ movement between the context of teaching and the context of practice. The focus of the group examination is, for this reason, the students’ abilities to reflect on the relation between theory and practice, and the experiences and realisations of the applicability or lack of applicability of the analytical and theoretical tools given to them as part of the formal teaching. Specifying the Content and Criteria of Assessment of Students’ Intercultural Understanding

While the discussion format of the intercultural understanding examination provides the opportunity for a formative way of assessing students’ intercultural understanding, the retrospective elements of this format had the negative effect of encouraging students to highlight and emphasise the stories of cultural difference as ‘national’. As students were asked to give examples of how they used their cultural competences and situations where intercultural understanding was needed, they were implicitly invited to produce stories that could be said to produce and contribute to a discourse of difference and cultural clash that was in a sense counterproductive to the learning goals of the programme. As described elsewhere (Galal et  al., 2017), this was also the case in the essays that some of the students were asked to write following from their study trip to Egypt. What this points to is the importance of securing not only the intercultural understanding of the students in terms of an understanding of the relation between more static and more dynamic aspects of culture but also securing a format of assessment that allows for a nuanced representation of this understanding, for example, through more emphasis on how they solved problems and/or cooperated with ‘others’ as individuals rather than as representatives of a national group. The presence of national stereotypical representations of cultural differences in students’ reflections should not be considered a result of the classes in intercultural understanding nor as a display of a lack of intercultural competence. Rather it should be seen as a consequence of the fact that the stories about intercultural understandings and cultural encounters that students were invited to make in the travel essay and in the intercultural understanding exam tend to invite stories about experiences and situations which illuminate expected differences, the generalisable and stereotypical rather than the unpredictable, the complexities and the similarities. A significant result of the observations of classes and the examination in intercultural understanding was a dialogue with the teachers about their learning goals in relation to the teaching and the students’ study abroad experience and the ways in which the current form of examination

64  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

allowed for an adequate representation of the students’ competence. For it was clear from some of the examinations that the students were perfectly able to understand and express that the different social reality they had encountered in, for example, Turkey, was not necessarily related to nationality or religion but was also a result of differences in class or the structure of the education system, and yet the form of the examination did not allow this to appear. As a consequence, it was suggested that a specification of the criteria for assessing the examination would improve the nature of the discussion with the students by challenging their experiences and reflections in ways that would allow them to demonstrate their ability to challenge their own prior generalisations and to consider the more dynamic aspects of their cultural encounters. It was also pointed out that the dialogic format of the group examination provided an opportunity for the teachers to exploit the full potential of the formative type of assessment, which the group examination could be considered to exemplify. Based on my observations and recordings of the intercultural understanding examination, I would discuss the way in which the questions they asked contributed to producing a particular kind of response and the ways in which they could make use of questions that would stimulate the perspective-shifting of the students and contribute to bringing out the full extent of their knowledge of cultural theory and their operationalisation of different analytical perspectives on the reality they had experienced during their travels. Teachers were in this way made aware that during this group examination they could, to a greater extent than they did at the time, focus explicitly on challenging and encouraging students to shift between descriptions of complexity, exceptions and dynamic notions of culture on the one hand and patterns, generalities and cultural characteristics of a given social group on the other. As described in Chapter 5 in this book, it is possible to characterise the knowledge that students were forming about the country they were travelling to as consisting of three different types: (1) their factual knowledge about the given country and their knowledge of culture more generally, (2) the naturalised common-sense knowledge about the social reality around them that they had accumulated prior to and during their travels and (3) their epistemological point of departure, that is their perceptions of the world shaped by their positioning within it. The group examination illuminated a somewhat unexploited potential to explore all these dimensions. As Billig (1991, 1996) writes, common sense is not homogenous but dilemmatic in the sense that it incorporates the different and often contradictory understandings, experiences and ‘truths’ that form the basis of the students’ experiences of the cultural encounter. It was exactly this contradictory nature and ambivalence that the examination could explore, if students were encouraged to take different interpretative and analytical positions.

Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice  65

In short, an improvement of the practices of assessment of intercultural understanding was on the one hand to contribute to the specification of the learning goals for the intercultural understanding classes. On the other hand, it involved a specification of the assessment criteria and content of the examination, which emphasised students’ critical reflections not only about cultural patterns but also about cultural complexity, and also invited discussions about ambivalences rather than the stereotypical generalisations of cultural difference. Specifying the Content and Organisation of the Cultural Encounter

A different, yet related, challenge that presented itself in the evaluation of the intercultural understanding classes and the study abroad experiences of teachers and students was a lack of specification with respect to the notion of ‘cultural encounter’, which led the students to fall into the trap of thinking that cultural encounters are synonymous with ‘the trip to Turkey’ or ‘the encounter with Turkey’ more generally. As already emphasised above, cultural encounters take place all the time as different cultural identities and backgrounds are made salient in various situations. Cultural encounters are in other words not limited to the nationally defined encounter with the foreign country that students are travelling to but include the daily encounters with cultural differences related to gender, race, class, language background and so on that students experience as part of their everyday lives at Rysensteen, in the local area of Vesterbro in Copenhagen where many of the students live, at soccer practice or in clubbing in Copenhagen. These cultural encounters are all situations, where differences between individual experiences and epistemologies give rise to potential conflict in a given situation, and differences in expectations about actions and behaviours can give rise to estrangement, surprise, negotiations, misunderstandings and new knowledge and understandings. From this perspective, it is also a ‘cultural encounter’ when students learn French, or work with drama or when they are to interpret Greek tragedies. It is also a cultural encounter when they work as volunteers in a shelter or participate in the mock UN learning activity called RysMUN, when they visit the Danish Parliament or meet a member of Scientology at a family social event. While all such cultural encounters hold the potential to transform and develop the students’ understandings of their own culture and the culture of others, the transformation can be pedagogically facilitated and encouraged within a context of education such as the GCP. Within such an educational context, the different types of cultural encounters, ranging from the reading of Greek tragedies to encounters with students in South Korea, hold different potentials and limitations in terms of realising the learning goals of the GCP. Whereas the reading of Greek tragedies or

66  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

studying sculptures may develop the students’ competences in cultural analysis and teach them about perspective taking and cultural representations, it will teach them little about how to navigate when encountering differences in sociocultural norms, behaviours and values among students from abroad. The orientation towards practice and problemsolving in the learning goals of the GCP in this way invites a distinction between the types of face-to-face cultural encounters taking place as part of the trip abroad, and some of the other types of cultural encounters mentioned above. Some of these face-to-face cultural encounters are formalised, staged or organised, some even as part of the teaching, and others are random, informal and take place outside of the context of teaching and evaluation at Rysensteen. The notion of ‘organised cultural encounters’ (Christiansen et al., 2017; Galal et al., 2017; Galal & Hvenegård-Lassen, 2020) is useful for illuminating how the very arrangement and orchestration of a cultural encounter contributes to creating particular opportunities and limitations for a particular output, considered in terms of transformation of knowledge, social relations and understanding. Taking a point of departure in the idea of the organised cultural encounter it is possible to consider the cultural encounters that students (at Rysensteen or elsewhere) engage in as a matter of various degrees of organisation, ranging from the very informal and spontaneous cultural encounters, such as the random encounter with a homeless person, to the carefully organised and formalised encounters such as the RysMUN, a mock UN learning activity, or the school visit to South Korea. In this way, the cultural encounter can be operationalised as a part of the educational practice, and it is possible to consider learning goals and opportunities that relate to particular cultural encounters that students engage in. Some of these cultural encounters and the cultural competences that they may demand and develop in students lie outside of the formal teaching context at Rysensteen and not least beyond what can be assessed formally as part of the GCP teaching. Nevertheless, a discussion of different types of cultural encounters can contribute to raising the awareness of teachers and students about the many cultural encounters, which can be included in and developed as part of the GCP. These local, national and global cultural encounters can in various ways be considered and incorporated into the planning and evaluation of the intercultural understanding teaching that takes place as preparation for the students’ trip abroad as well as the intercultural understanding examination. In the following and final part of this chapter, I will present a brief analysis of three types of cultural encounters taking place during a Rysensteen trip abroad to South Korea and which represent different degrees of formalisation as well as different opportunities and limitations in relation to intercultural understanding.

Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice  67

The Formally Organised Cultural Encounter at ‘The Tea Room’

This type of cultural encounter consisted of an organised tea ceremony that was planned as one of the cultural exchange activities on the Rysensteen students’ trip to South Korea (Figure 6.1). The students were ‘mixed’ with the Korean students around various tables and were instructed in how to make tea by the owner of the tea room. The Korean and the Danish students were in this way participating in a predefined cultural performance (Alexander, 2004) designed for the Danish students to encounter Korean culture, where culture was implicitly defined as something national, something ritualised and something that all South Koreans, and thereby the students, were knowledgeable about and representatives of. Nevertheless, it was clear that many of the Korean students were clearly not familiar nor comfortable with the procedure of the ceremony and had to be instructed on equal terms with the Danish students. While the cultural encounter worked to give the Danish students, and the Korean students for that matter, knowledge of and experience with an aspect of South Korean national culture and history, which they would otherwise not have encountered, it did not provide an opportunity for bringing out the Korean students’ own understandings of and experiences with Korean culture. Furthermore, it had some limitations as a facilitation of cultural encounters and dialogue because the very organisation of the cultural encounter positioned the students in particular ways in relation to one another. For, within this formal and strictly organised cultural encounter, a clear division was created between the Danish students as ‘guests’ and the Korean students as ‘hosts’. Within this relation, the South Korean students could be said to represent the majority and the authority, but the fact that they were given a role in a cultural spectacle, which was far removed from their everyday reality, had the counterproductive effect of positioning them in a disempowered position of ‘the exotic’ other, in relation to the Danish students.

Figure 6.1  Organised, formal cultural encounter, a tea ceremony on study abroad to South Korea

68  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

The Partially Organised and Semi-formal Cultural Encounter in the Food-Market

This cultural encounter was organised as a one-hour ‘shopping’ situation in the local food market where the Danish students could walk around with the Korean students and were each given a token to use as payment at the various stalls (Figure 6.2). The idea was that the Korean students, as in the previous example, were the ‘hosts’ or guides for the Danish students and that they were to help them buy and ask about food and manage the offers and practices of the market. Contrary to the case in the tea room, there were no teachers present, and the students were free to define the conditions of their encounter with the market and with each other. Another central difference was that the visit to the market was a familiar activity for the Korean students, and they could in this way take on a more authentic role as the authority and cultural experts than in the tea room. At the same time, the encounter around food and shopping opened up different opportunities for establishing not only difference, but also sameness and sharedness between the Korean and the Danish students. The students could shop and eat together, share tastes and preferences and bring to the fore their individual experiences, differences and similarities with respect to food. And yet, the organised staging of the cultural encounter was evident in the students taking on particular roles. The Danish students performed the role of asking questions and showing interest, tasting what they were offered and showing excitement and estrangement of the different types of food. The Korean students performed the role of being cultural representatives offering the Danish students various products, paying for their food, communicating with the stall owners in Korean, explaining the meaning, flavours and use of different products and so on.

Figure 6.2  Organised but semi-formal cultural encounter, a trip to the food market on study abroad to South Korea

Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice  69

The Unorganised, Informal Encounter

This kind of cultural encounter took place in many different situations during the trip to South Korea, such as the deck of the hostel, where the students were to live after they had stayed at the house of the Korean students (Figure 6.3). This kind of encounter was characterised by unpredictability in the topics, which were discussed, because the purpose of the meeting was not defined beforehand. A space was created for small talk and an opportunity for discussions about a range of topics that were not school-related or GCP relevant, topics such as shopping, makeup and gaming. Nonetheless, both the Korean and the Danish students showed, through their choices of topics and their actions that even in the informal encounter, they considered themselves to be ‘cultural ambassadors’ in the relation to the exchange that they were taking part in, and that this constituted the overall context of and reason behind the encounter. The Danish students in particular would ask about culturally related topics such as the Korean students’ names, their ways of writing the Korean letters, norms about smoking, gender patterns, schooling in South Korea and so on. Compared with the formal and the semi-formal types of cultural encounters, where the Korean students were more explicitly positioned as hosts as part of the very arrangement of the encounter, the students’ roles and relations in the informal encounter at the hostel deck were to a much larger extent negotiable in the sense that the Korean students and the Danish students were less restricted in defining and negotiating amongst themselves which identities and group memberships were relevant at that particular moment. This changed, to some extent, the framework for participation and dialogue in the direction of more mutual dialogue and exchange about cultural differences and particularities, but it also

Figure 6.3  An instance of an unorganised, informal cultural encounter on study abroad to South Korea

70  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

resulted in the Danish students sometimes stepping into or being placed in a ‘Western’ and somewhat superior position in relation to the Korean students. This was reflected quite explicitly in many of the informal social encounters between the students where the Korean students would express their admiration and preference of, for example, the Danish students’ physical appearance and their educational system. Where this hierarchisation was also at play in the other, more formalised types of encounters, the students’ roles as cultural experts in the formalised encounters contributed to evening out the Danish students’ status as representatives for the white, the Western and the modern. This role was more pronounced in the informal, spontaneous encounter, where the Danish students were explicitly and clearly positioned as the elite. Implications for Teaching and Assessment

Each of these various cultural encounters provides in its own way opportunities and barriers for teachers’ and students’ work with intercultural understanding, cultural difference and cultural hierarchies. Furthermore, the various cultural encounters invite reflections and discussions about the various roles, positions and hierarchies that play out between the students as cultural representatives, and which can be a challenge for the students to navigate in. The pedagogic possibilities and challenges were discussed later with teachers and management with reference to observations and recordings in South Korea. As part of a more concrete input for the teaching and assessment practice at Rysensteen, I developed a catalogue of ideas that appeared relevant for the intercultural understanding teaching that took place prior to the travel, including suggestions for activities and exercises, and that could be carried out in the situations and encounters that took place during the travel. Another significant finding was the need for a space for reflection about the often very intense and demanding cultural encounters that the students experienced. As Hannah Arendt (1971) says, there is an inevitable contradiction between ‘being present’ and ‘being reflexive’, which means that the conscious reflections that the encounter with ‘the other’ requires cannot take place during the actual encounter because it creates a distance that is counterproductive to real, authentic interaction with another person. This distancing movement was displayed in the students’ actions and behaviours as their attentiveness to acting appropriately as cultural ambassadors and global citizens sometimes resulted in a communication and interaction format that seemed overly self-conscious and ‘once-removed’, often in relation to the more formalised and organised cultural encounters. But it also became evident in informal situations – when they were shopping or engaging in small talk on the terrasse – that the students were making an effort to be simultaneously present and also reflect on how to manage differences in an appropriate manner. While

Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice  71

such navigating between a mode of action and a mode of reflection was challenging, it is exactly this type of navigating that is key to the development of intercultural understanding and competence. The intercultural understanding examination that took place after the trip is a useful formative assessment context for addressing this challenge, because it constitutes a space where the students, together with teachers, can reflect on their experiences and their ways of managing the cultural encounters. At the same time, the examination element of this interaction with the teachers in some ways limits the freer types of reflection about the challenges that the students had experienced, just as it was not necessarily the optimal forum for putting into words some of the experiences that they had perhaps not been able to handle. It was therefore suggested to the teachers and managers to employ the portfolio tool which was developed as part of the evaluation framework (see Chapter 5) to provide a freer space for the students’ reflections and individual work with the experiences from the trip. Here, the students could write about their experiences, challenges and ways of coping with the various cultural encounters that the journey involved and they could, at a later stage, choose to incorporate some of these reflections into the intercultural understanding examination. One of the advantages of this type of assessment of their intercultural understanding is the way it provides for a formative type of assessment since it can be used as a logbook of their own development of experiences and competences over time. Concluding Remarks

The work to evaluate the intercultural understanding dimension at Rysensteen has, since the programme’s beginning, been characterised by the need for the students to move between theory and practice, between action and reflection. The research project, which has been summarised in this chapter and in Chapter 5, sought to support and specify this goal in various ways. On the basis of observations from the teaching and examination of the intercultural understanding lessons at Rysensteen as well as the study exchange to South Korea, collaborative work was carried out with teachers and management for the specification of the criteria of assessment for intercultural understanding and intercultural competence. This specification was built on the distinction between the different types of knowledge involved in the students’ process of cultural learning, described in Chapter 5. As described in this chapter, the emphasis of the lessons and examination of intercultural understanding involved not only providing students with factual knowledge about the destination countries that they were travelling to, but also arranging for the students to encounter alternative epistemologies by engaging in actual cultural encounters through their trip abroad. A central aspect of the teaching and the assessment was the students’ abilities to reflect on how their own naturalised assumptions, their common-sense knowledge, about the world, themselves and others

72  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

played into such encounters. In this chapter, I have demonstrated how a specification of the criteria for assessment of intercultural understanding that considers these different levels of knowledge makes it possible to explore the true potential of the dialogic format of the intercultural understanding examination, which allows teachers to discuss with students the applicability and limitations of both factual, epistemological and commonsense knowledge for understanding and managing cultural encounters and cultural difference during their travel experiences. Another central point made in this chapter in relation to the intercultural understanding examination was the need to consider the relation between the learning goals of the intercultural understanding lessons, the criteria of assessment and the actual examination format. It was clear from the analysis of the intercultural understanding examinations that the retrospective format of the examination and the invitations from teachers to reflect on experiences with intercultural understanding and difference resulted in the elicitation of more traditional and essentialist discourses of culture and cultural differences. This had the counterproductive effect of backgrounding the students’ knowledge and awareness of a more complex and dynamic notion of culture, which they had also been familiarised with during their intercultural understanding lessons. Furthermore, and more importantly, it did not facilitate the students’ reflections about the various cultural identities and communities of ‘the other’ but rather tended to highlight nationally defined, large-scale cultural differences rather than potential similarities between the Danish students and ‘the other’. The final point made in this chapter in relation to teaching and assessing intercultural understanding is the potential of more explicit and specific consideration about the ways in which ‘cultural encounters’ are decided, planned and used as a context of learning, as a site within which students work with knowledge, and skills. The chapter has contributed to such pedagogic specification by presenting the notion of ‘organised cultural encounters’ and illustrating how different degrees and forms of organisation involve different opportunities and challenges for the students’ engagement, action and learning. Such specification and pedagogic consideration about the various cultural encounters that the students engage in and learn from during their travels but also during the everyday cultural encounters outside the formal context of the classroom is useful for the teaching as well as the examination in intercultural understanding as it works to structure the students’ reflections while also being conducive to facilitating their movements between practice and reflection, which is a premise for learning. The chapter argues that the dialogic format of the oral intercultural understanding examination, or the self-assessment tools such as the portfolio, can be productive spaces for formative assessment and learning because they can facilitate such movement between action and reflection as well as encouraging students to move between a notion of culture that is more traditional and descriptive and one that is more dynamic and complex.

Part 2 This second part of Global Citizenship in Praxis: Pathways for Schools will turn the focus from an overall and theoretical perspective on the pedagogics of GCEd to a focus on the practical ways of teaching with a global perspective. This will be done through six chapters written by teachers from Rysensteen Gymnasium. The chapters will outline the ideas of the progression of GCEd at the school. As mentioned in Chapter 4, all subjects at Rysensteen Gymnasium have committed themselves to teaching at least one course with a global perspective for each of the three years; either focusing on the cohort’s partner-school country or perspectives on epochal key problems (see extended description in Chapter 2) or different approaches to intercultural understanding. The chapters are about the teaching in five different subjects – English as a second language, science subjects as a whole, French as a third language, natural geography and history – supplemented with a chapter on intercultural understanding. The six chapters are – apart from being about different subjects – very different in both form and content. This is deliberate since a certain form of teaching cannot be applied to these very heterogenic subjects, but the purpose is to show the plurality in which GCEd can be taught as well. Some chapters offer descriptions on a certain course, and some give more broad descriptions on pedagogical praxis. All of the chapters will offer concrete examples of how to teach with perspectives, and some will suggest certain empirical possibilities within the subject. All of the subject chapters will contain examples and reflections based on the feedback from the students (and in some cases observations, thoughts and analysis on the teaching from Professor Steen Beck) with an evaluation of the learning outcome of the teaching. In contrast to the first part of the book, these chapters are primarily written with fellow teachers as the intended recipients. This quite concrete focus of the chapters has been chosen to match the daily reality of teachers when they are planning their courses and teaching methods. We have compared different curriculums and have taken as a starting point the common denominator of the student’s baseline of knowledge, preconception, ‘almendannelse’ and view on culture. The first chapter on intercultural understanding (Chapter 7 by teacher Mads Blom) gives a variety of topics, methods and approaches to teaching ideas and perspectives of culture that both view culture on a macrolevel where the students are given the tools for examining the hegemonies of a country’s or a region’s cultural manifestations, but also provides the tools

74  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

for dealing with cultural plurality within a society. The chapter will discuss the pros and cons of the two perspectives and show how these theories can be adapted concretely in the day-to-day teaching. The next chapter (Chapter 8 by English teacher Martin Lønstrup) will describe how English teachers can use examples from different parts of the Commonwealth to broaden the students’ perspectives on the cultural impact of the British empire and how it clashes, is obtained and ­re-negotiated in the former colonies. The chapter offers a broad selection of different text and genres from the case of Hong Kong and shows how this can be taught. Thereafter, Chapter 9 by physics and math teacher Poul Nyegaard is focused on the teaching on GCEd in science subjects. With the science subject’s focus on strict objectivity and the laws of nature, it has in many cases been difficult to teach in these subjects with a global perspective. The 17 sustainable development goals (the SDGs) have, however, made it much more relevant to see the science subjects in a global perspective, and the chapter offers ideas of how to focus on themes such as climate, environment and energy which can be done within the requirements of the national curriculums and will give perspectives on GCEd that social sciences and humanities do not. This is followed by a chapter on the teaching of French as a third language (Chapter 10 by French teachers Lotte Bolander and Laura Bjeregaard Sørensen). With their perspective on both the student’s preconception of France and the French as well as internal French discussions about the nature of what French culture is, the students are offered a debate on different views on the concept of culture. With most language curriculums’ focus on a monocultural perspective of the countries where the language is spoken, the chapter nuances this. The chapter is about the French subject but can be read and used by all language teachers. The chapter on Natural geography (Chapter 11 by teacher of natural geography Anders Folden Brink) gives an example of a course in sustainability. A comparative study of climate initiatives in Copenhagen and Toronto will elaborate on different perspectives on sustainability and how this can be analysed through the science subjects in general and in natural geography in particular. The chapter about the history subject (Chapter 12 by history teacher Mads Blom) discusses how the teaching of history can be used as a way of training the student’s intercultural competences. By examining the meaning of the concept of citizenship over time, the subject knowledge and the methodology of the history subject can enhance the student’s ability to understand and emphasise with cultures they are unfamiliar with both in time and space. For all of the chapters, there will be a number of worksheets, models, additional examples, texts and more that can be accessed through the website www.gcedinpraxis.com.

7 Intercultural Understanding – Between Theory and Instrument – Empathy and Critique Mads Blom

At Rysensteen Upper Secondary, we perceive courses in intercultural understanding as absolutely necessary to prepare students for the challenges of the globalised world. In this chapter, history teacher Mads Blom will show how the teaching of intercultural will enhance the students’ global dannelse. Furthermore, Mads Blom presents a number of theories and methodologies and their adaptability in the everyday work with the students and reflects on students’ almendannelse in relation to this. Finally, he argues how important it is to engage in dialogues with the students about their preconceptions about culture and the necessity to develop their ability to analyse a conversation without preconceived understandings of a ­positivistic idea of ‘truth’. Purpose of Teaching Intercultural Understanding

It is hard to imagine a global citizen with almendannelse that doesn’t have insight into and an understanding of other cultures. Global citizenship can – among other things – be defined as interactions with foreign life worlds, and foreign life worlds include differences in tradition, language, religion, habits and forms of life – in other words, what we in everyday language understand as ‘culture’ (see Chapter 3). Intercultural understanding is therefore knowledgeable not only about the existence of other ways of living, but also about the ability to understand them, enter the spirit of them and identify oneself with them. There seems to be a need to educate young people in skills of not only understanding culture, but also be critical about the concept of culture, and it should be a task for the upper secondary education system to train these skills as a part of GCEd. In these settings, culture should be understood as a common production of meaning between people, and as a 75

76  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

significant part of the identity formation on both a local and a global level. There is a necessity for a double perspective on the process where culture is produced and reproduced, and for this to succeed, there is a need for a theoretical framework as well as a vocabulary that can help the students explore, understand and assess cultural behaviours and gain a global form of almendannelse (see Chapter 2). Teaching intercultural understanding is a task that falls into several categories: it relates to pedagogical and teaching categories such as knowledge, skills, reflection, critique and behaviour. As educators, we must give the students the proper tools for understanding cultures, and that requires insight into cultural concepts and how they are used in different traditions and different societies. Through examples and examinations of cultural understandings in time and space, the students will gain knowledge and a methodological toolbox for cultural analyses and praxis. The students should subsequently be able to view the concepts of culture with a critical approach; monocultural and homogeneous conceptions of cultures should be challenged by the students and more diverse, plural and dynamic cultural manifestations should be a centre of the pedagogical process. However, when we are dealing with students on an upper secondary school level, we need to apply a scaffolding strategy in the work with the student’s pre-understanding and learning progress; upper secondary students often don’t have a developed or well-established understanding of neither cultural concepts nor knowledge of specific cultures – being their own or others’ cultural backgrounds. While being aware of the variability of cultures, we shouldn’t be afraid of using generalisations when talking about different cultural similarities in different societies. We cannot begin with the deconstruction of cultural concepts before we establish that most societies of course have hegemonic characteristics within national borders – when the vast majority of a country’s population has gone through the same educational system, has been exposed to the same national television channels, speaks the same language, etc., it will of course have significance in ways of viewing society, oneself and the world. Generalisation is – and has for decades – been a central tool in many scientific processes in many different subjects, and we should not avoid using this in the teaching of intercultural understanding. As long as we at the same time teach the students to move in and out of the two different perspectives – viewing cultural hegemony and being able to differentiate between and criticise essentialistic positions – the students will be able to use this in their intercultural encounters, and it that case the understanding of cultures will affect their behaviour. Cultural production is often an instinctive process, to which we all contribute, but rarely notice, and that emphasises the need for separate and continuous attention from teachers and educators. It has been said that culture is like the tailwind when you are riding a bike – you don’t really feel it until you change direction and notice the windy weather. In other words:

Intercultural Understanding – Between Theory and Instrument – Empathy and Critique  77

culture won’t be significant for us until we notice that something all of a sudden is different and breaks with the things, we take for granted. One of the purposes with the teaching of intercultural understanding is therefore to break the blind spots and sharpen the student’s eye for the things that are different. We should as teachers try to give the students a little more headwind. But more than that: the things that are strange, are perceived that way, because we are subjected to a system of values, habits and traditions that feels natural to us and therefore ‘normal’ or ‘right’. Intercultural understanding is therefore about giving the students an understanding of the essentialisation of their own culture, that is a part of cultural (re)production. Teaching becomes a question of giving students an experience of contingency – the experience that everything is accidental and that everything – including cultural identity – could be different. The fact that ‘everything could be different’ implies that cultures are man-made, and since it is more or less accidental which culture you are born into, the feeling of a secure cultural ground under your feet is in itself an illusion. Cultural identity is not carved in stone but is relative and subjected to the same arbitrariness as many other parts of human life. Students’ growing experiences of their own culture as not necessarily ‘right’ or ‘ideal’, and that it doesn’t have any real naturalness, can be very frustrating to many students. But instead of sparing them this unpleasantness, we must realise that this frustration isn’t that much different from any other education process or part of almendannelse. The experience of contingency, cultural disillusion and personal frustration may be great existential challenges, but at the same time, they can be culturally fruitful challenges and fertile ways to ‘the zones of proximal development’: this is where we learn that other ways of being human exists; that there are things to gain in other life worlds. When we are confronted with the strange, we often react with rejection, denial or resignation. The strange is unknown, and the unknown is unsafe. The recognition of the existence of other cultures is, however, an important epistemological and cognitive step – even though, at first, it may lead to assumptions about the superiority of one’s own culture. The transition shows that the students have left a position characterised by low recognition or total denial of the existence of other cultures. A central part of global almendannelse is to reflect on other cultures, but to the same extent to reflect on your own preconditions and prejudices in the meeting with another culture. You can use this slightly adapted model of intercultural sensitivity by Milton Bennett (1986) as a meta-reflection tool for the students and as a general illustration of the different positions an individual can take in the meeting with strange cultures (Figure 7.1). The model suggests a brief and compressed form to summarise different positions in intercultural encounters. It consists of a basic distinction between ethnocentrism and ethnorelativism and their subcategories. It must of course be underlined that these

78  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 7.1  Development of intercultural sensitivity

are ideal types rather than actual positions and that most people will probably position themselves at different places in the model at different times, depending on which cultural habits and values they are confronted with. The purpose of the teaching of intercultural understanding is however to break the ethnocentric understanding of the positional superiority of one’s own culture. A (for some) provocative postulate could be that all students start off with approximately the same ethnocentric starting point – most people do. But the purpose of our teaching is not to push the students into the opposite ethnorelative category, but to shake them a little bit in their cultural foundation, make them gain experiences of cultural differences and thereby achieve a certain intercultural understanding. They are free to move across the spectrum of intercultural sensitivity and take any position they like – the only point is, that it should be an informed choice. Pedagogical Progression

An important premise for the teaching of intercultural understanding is for the students to understand what ‘culture’ is. Culture is – as ­mentioned – a concept with many facets, and though many people have a sense of its content, very few can actually define it more precisely. The concept of culture can be highly controversial, but an undogmatic use of the concept opens it up. There is a danger in choosing one particular definition, since many unambiguous definitions tend to be highly ideological and shut out other understandings and approaches. It is more constructive to describe different – and sometimes contradictory – approaches with awareness of the danger of ambiguities, letting the students discuss the functionality and the suitability of the different positions. It is important therefore to start early in the teaching of intercultural understanding with a terminological – but undogmatic – clarification of the concept of culture. Since the concept is used in countless contexts and with a great variety of meanings, it is a premise for differentiating between

Intercultural Understanding – Between Theory and Instrument – Empathy and Critique  79

different concepts of culture that the students have an approximate idea of culture as a basic phenomenon. One of the dimensions of the discussion is to exemplify the span of the concept and at the same time emphasise distinctions between established and different expressions such as ‘youth culture’, ‘popular culture’, ‘cultural heritage’, ‘subculture’ and ‘high culture’, to name a few examples. A tentative definition of the concept of culture could partly start with an etymological explanation, partly with the dialectics between culture and nature. The etymological explanation teaches us that ‘culture’ originates from Latin cultus which means ‘growing’ or ‘processing’ and is about human cultivating and manipulation of nature. The dialectics between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ can be summed up in a student friendly table (Table 7.1): Table 7.1  Differences between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ Nature

Culture

The inborn

The cultivation and processing of the inborn

What is unaffected by human influence

What is affected by human influence

The existing, the basic

What is built upon the existing

The way every individual is unique in their fundamental form

Something several people are doing in the same way

The paradox is that the very concept of ‘nature’ in itself is a cultural construction. There is no inherent quality of nature, and it has no immanent name and is in itself not the opposite of culture. The conceptualisation of nature is thereby an example of the cultural processing of nature since language and tables are cultural artefacts in themselves. To simplify, the students should primarily use two basic cultural concepts: what we call the descriptive and the complex cultural concept. The purpose is not to choose between the two, but rather eclectically to teach students to alternate both concepts and to use them in a complementary way. The two concepts distinguish themselves by their fundamental perspectives on the spheres and the functions of culture (Table 7.2). The descriptive cultural concept is defined by a macro-approach with focus on people as more or less carriers of culture, whereas the complex cultural concept has a micro-approach focusing on people as active performers and co-constructors of culture. In a simplified way, we can talk about culture as something you either are/have or do. They are relatively different frames, but also different scientific theoretical positions, linked to the cultural observations in the descriptive and the complex cultural concepts. Where the descriptive cultural concept primarily focuses on national cultures based on the premise that culture is immanent and though not static, a slowly changing phenomenon, the complex concept deals with cultural subdivisions and forms of praxis in

80  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Table 7.2  The descriptive and the complex cultural concepts The descriptive cultural concept

The complex cultural concept

Where does culture come from?

Culture is something that we ‘have’ or ‘are’

Culture is something that we ‘do’

What comes first?

Culture → Actions

Actions → culture

How is culture developed?

Static

Dynamic

Which analytic approach?

Deductive

Inductive

Which perspective?

Macro

Micro

How do we conclude on culture?

Generalisations

The unique

Which scientific position?

Essentialism

Constructivism

Problems

Stereotypification – borderline racism

Total relativism – borderline abolishing of the concept of culture

primarily local settings. Culture is in this case a highly changeable, dynamic and a discursive phenomenon that is constantly renegotiated. So, where the descriptive cultural concept has an essentialist, positivist approach with a tendency for generalisations or reduction and simplification of complex phenomena which in the worst case can lead to racism, the complex cultural concept has a constructivist, relativist approach with low chances of generalisations and a risk of overemphasising isolated phenomena. The descriptive cultural concept makes a lot of sense when we use it in our classrooms at our home school and talk about countries or cultures we are going to visit. Since we are far away from these countries and have little or no possibility to talk to its inhabitants, we will to some extent focus on the national cultures and some of the hegemonies that inevitably appear within a culture. We study these hegemonies in their politics, their traditions, their literature and art and in their manifestations of identity. This analysis gives the students a backdrop to the country they are about to visit. Is it the full and nuanced picture of the different cultures in the country? Probably not, but the students get an overall view of the national culture that can help explain some of the structures and tendencies within the as well as some of the internal and external narratives about the country’s culture. But this cannot stand alone. Once the students travel to the relevant country, they need to make their observations with another set of tools. They will soon observe (if they keep their eyes open) that the picture that has been described to them, has a lot more colours to it. Several cultures exist side by side, and they are in flux and sometimes they compete with one another and have different conceptions of for example truth, power and right and wrong.

Intercultural Understanding – Between Theory and Instrument – Empathy and Critique  81

Three Levels of Cultural Analysis

When students travel abroad – especially when they have been introduced to the theories and methodology presented in this chapter – they often come back having been exposed to many nuances in the countries they have visited, and they have been able to navigate in the cultural encounter, with the least cognitive dissonance or even mental breakdowns. But you can still experience quite a lot of students who fall back into very monocultural descriptions of the people they have visited, when they have to describe them to a third party. Isolated, individual experiences with South Koreans all of a sudden gain a level of general application, and other experiences are not only hierarchised, but often forgotten in the retelling of the visited culture. Global dannelse requires an ability to differentiate between different manifestations of culture, which will be described below. Any guidebook will focus on the differences between the home ­country and the destinations that are the subject for the book, and there is nothing strange about that. Who would buy a book that says that 90% of the culture at the destination is the same as the one you come from? And who would spend a small fortune on visiting a country if you could apparently just as well stay at home and get the same experience for free? That’s the nature of the business of travel books, but we can see the same tendencies amongst our students. When they visit other countries, they fall into the same patterns when they observe the other cultures. It is very much the descriptive cultural concept that they seem to use in their processing of the differences they observe, and that might be because it is easier to apply than the complex cultural concept that requires much more thorough investigations of the other culture’s underlying structures and backgrounds and they seem to experience a lot of complications when they try to separate the many different and parallel cultures in a country. When the students become overwhelmed with this complexity, it seems easier to focus on what is different and strange in the visited culture compared to their own. However, since we are educational institutions and not publishers of travel guides, we must train our students to explore the levels within the cultures of a country, with an eye to analysing both the differences and the similarities. And to do that, we need to differentiate between the cultural encounters the students are subjected to when they travel abroad. Students can do this by categorizing their different cultural meetings into three main domains, as described in the model below (Figure 7.2). The model is described as an iceberg based on the well-known metaphor that says that only the top is visible, but the main part is situated under the surface and is hard to see or at least difficult to get a grasp of, to analyse and to categorise.

82  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 7.2  The three domains of cultural encounters

At the top, we find the formalised cultural encounter. This is often related to the descriptive cultural concept’s understanding of culture as static, and the focus will often be on national cultures that follow state borders. This cultural encounter often happens in a structure where the sender represents the top of a hierarchy (e.g. the state), and the narrative, that is mediated, is often very clear in its message. It will often be a very meaningful narrative that focuses on the differences between cultures, and therefore it will often be quite essentialist. When students visit other schools in China, for example, they will often be presented with calligraphy, Peking opera, brewing of tea and tai chi. The same tendencies are evident in historical museums that will present the nation’s long and glorious past and will often postulate that the nation’s history is layered deep into the identity of all citizens and can explain their present actions. This is not exclusive to China but can be found in a vast majority of countries. On the next level, we find cultural encounters that are inherently more intimate and therefore not as hierarchically controlled, but still have a number of formal structures and the relationship between the sender and the receiver is still rather obvious. This can be categorised as the less formalised cultural encounters. This type is often observed in connection with a student’s homestay with a family in the destination country, where they get a close sense of the daily life of a local family. Within the family, the visiting student will of course experience a reproduction of the national narrative, but it is not at all as controlled as at the top level. Instead, it will be the family’s own narrative that is primary. Every family has their own way of doing things (for example, arranging and completing dinner), but of course, there are common features. The point is, that when you are

Intercultural Understanding – Between Theory and Instrument – Empathy and Critique  83

introduced to life in a Spanish family, it doesn’t represent the state, but their own little kingdom in their own house, where the family members’ different roles and ways of doing things are explained and justified. On this level, we enter a middle layer between the essentialist and the constructivist. The family might tell us a story about Spain and the Spaniards that is rather static and typical (‘this is how we eat in this country’; ‘this how we move around in our towns’; ‘this is how a Spanish family talks to each other’), but there is also a narrative that describes the family as very unique (‘this is how we do things in our family’; ‘because we have these jobs, we eat a little late’; ‘because our family have had these experiences, we have chosen to structure our family in this way’). The last level is related to the encounters visiting students have with the students from the partner country, and this is where the cultural meeting becomes more complex. At this level, there won’t be a control of the meeting in the same way as in the two previous examples, but instead an informal cultural meeting. In this meeting, it is rather a dialogue between one young person and another. Subjects relate to the everyday thoughts which often appear with young people between ages 16 to 19 and could concern girlfriends/boyfriends and falling in love, relations to parents and feelings of pressure, relations to classmates and concerns about fitting in, and thoughts and dreams about another life with other degrees of freedom. At this level, there is no longer a focus on what separates us, but rather on what we have in common. The similarities are many, but the context is of course always different, and that is what our students need to analyse. The scene for these meetings often takes place in a far less hierarchical setting. We are not in the formalised classroom or the structured museum, neither are they around a dinner table with very welldefined roles dependent on a formal relation, age and gender, but instead they find themselves in a teenage bedroom, at a coffee shop, or going shopping. The inter-human relation is much more present, and none of the two parties will have an urgent need to perform within the frames we experienced in the two earlier cultural encounters, although there always will exist some sort of power relation between the two (gender, age, language skills, knowledge, economy, etc.) that will determine a certain behaviour. By making students reflect on the different settings and actions between the three levels, they gain nuances in their understanding of what culture is, and how different cultures are inter connected. Because the iceberg model above doesn’t represent the entire truth, when it pictures the levels as separated, as a complement, the three levels can be described as circles that may exist in their own right, but also overlap and intersect (Figure 7.3). When students are at school, there are examples of informal and low-structured meetings, and in the teenage room there are representations of national culture – and this is actually where it gets really exciting.

84  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 7.3  Overlap of the three levels of cultural encounters

Praxis Analysis

A method to examine in a way that opens up to a more diverse range of cultural manifestations is through praxis analysis. What we won’t find by viewing cultures in a macro-perspective, we can often find if we zoom in on the very concrete ways and signs of behaviour among different groups in a society. This could – and should – also be done through qualitative interviews, but this method can sometimes be problematic if the interviewed persons aren’t honest and credible in their answers. A different way of looking at cultures with an applied objectivity is the praxis analysis where the students – without being an active part of the observed ­activities – will view behaviour in order to see how one’s culture is not the driving force behind one’s action, but that an adopted set of rules in distinct group creates culture (culture → actions or actions → culture). This can be trained at home in a very easy way by making the students visit different classes at the school and thereby see (what all teachers know) that different classes at the same school have very different group dynamics (how do they address each other/do they raise their hand before speaking/how does group work function/what is the relationship between students and teacher?). This experience should open up their minds about the changeability in different cultures, and they are hereby a bit more prepared for doing examinations of cultures further away from themselves. The students start by finding categories that they want to examine. It could, for example, be ‘students in China’, ‘standing in line in an

Intercultural Understanding – Between Theory and Instrument – Empathy and Critique  85

Argentinean supermarket)’, ‘spectators at a Korean hip-hop concert’ or ‘female teenagers in an Egyptian mall’. Then they will – at a distance – observe the praxis in this category and find out what the appropriate behaviour is. Through these three concepts, they will develop a vocabulary for observing, analysing and discussing cultures, and they will look at routines, body languages, rituals, rules, discourses and hierarchies to find the appropriate behaviour and hereby making hypotheses about this specific culture, its significance for the society, its historical, economical and demographic background. They will examine how these subcultures interact with each other and how they react when they meet other cultures. Finally, they will find out whether these ways of acting are the ruling praxis or if there are competing praxis and of course reflect upon their own objectivity in the process. This approach is in many ways quite simple and an easy way for many students to engage in intercultural analysis. If they have language problems or are not comfortable with interviewing, this is a way to gather empirical data in a way where they don’t get too exposed. On the other hand, it is quite complex to find out what to observe, to have an eye for the many nuances in the praxis and the difficulty of concluding on their observations, but this can be trained and gives any student – who ­participates – a better eye for cultural differences, their own biases and the ­complex concept of culture – all a part of their developing of global dannelse. Concluding Remarks

We have tried to describe our view on global dannelse, our way of thinking and teaching intercultural understanding and our ideas on how to give the students global dannelse. What you read above is not a fixed recipe for how to teach and develop the students’ cultural sensitivity and empathy – neither in a normative nor in a practical sense. We have instead tried to describe our way of thinking based on our experiences. We have had a wide range of experiences based on trial and error, and we have most certainly made mistakes, but we try to learn from our mistakes and every time get a little closer to the students’ life-world and perception of reality. Theories and methods have come and gone, so what you have just read is a snapshot of what works for us right now. It is always the close coherence between the type of student, the type of teacher, the pedagogical landscape and the context that defines what works, but the necessity for enhanced teaching of intercultural competences is obvious. It is very necessary to supplement the normal teaching, in the subjects, about international issues with teaching in intercultural understanding; to give the students the necessary skills to travel abroad; to develop their empathy; and to give them a theoretical/methodological set of tools for

86  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

analysis, if we want them to be able to analyse their meeting with other cultures, and to reflect on their own role in such a meeting, thus acquiring global dannelse. Worksheets, models and more examples can be found at www. gcedinpraxis.com.

8 Hong Kong and the Question of Cultural Identity – The English Subject and Global Dannelse Martin Lønstrup Nielsen

English as a second language subject is mandatory in most countries around the world and is primarily focused on conversation skills, grammar and literature, but can easily be used as a tool for working with intercultural communication and the skills to understand different societies within the English-speaking world. In this chapter, English language teacher, Martin Lønstrup, presents how he has integrated GCEd competences such as cultural understanding and cultural identity in a course focused on politics and culture in modern Hong Kong. Introduction

Living in a globalised world, we are constantly presented with information from every corner of the planet. The subject of English is an obvious arena to explore global dilemmas as they occur around us. As mentioned, Danish curriculums are quite open (see Chapter 4). For the subject of English, this means that although traditional language acquisition is emphasised, there is also a lot of room for the general, sociological, historical and political science study of the English-speaking world. The presence of English and American culture around the world opens up a possibility and need for working with the many cultures that have the English language as (at least one) of their official languages. The old phrase ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’ has been used to boast of the British Empire’s vastness and reach, and today it might leave some with a bad taste in their mouth, but at the same time, it opens up a new world of hybrid cultures, identity issues and redefinitions of nationality and citizenship. 87

88  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Students work with English as the culture-bearing language in relation to English-speaking regions and thus experience the connection between a country’s culture(s) and its language. At the same time, students should be able to experience English as part of their own linguistic repertoire, which they can use in their encounters with other cultures. Part of English as a cultural subject is that the subject is a door opener to other cultures – not only in a national, but also in an international almendannelse perspective. Being able to analyse and understand current social conditions in English-speaking regions on the basis of English-language knowledge of historical, cultural and societal conditions in the United Kingdom, the United States and the Commonwealth is paramount. For students to be able to put a factual text, a novel, a short story or a documentary into a larger historical and cultural context is a true global competence, and presupposes knowledge of social conditions, culture and history. The students’ education and global dannelse (see Chapter 2) are strengthened through the work with the English language and intercultural understanding from the teaching, which enables the students to use the language and gives them insight into global problems and constructs. The purpose of the subject can generally be divided into the competence-­oriented, i.e. the practical in relation to English-language texts, cultures and society, and the almendannelse-oriented, where the student learns to relate to the world as well as his, her and their own cultural background and thereby achieves global competence and democratic understanding. The competencies thus support the almendannelse-oriented purpose, namely, the students’ personal and active participation in the global world, their ability to communicate across cultural differences and their awareness of language and the meaning and possibilities of language in general. The usefulness of the subject must be founded in accordance with the idea of dannelse and contribute to the students’ personal and democratic understanding. As stated in Chapter 7 about intercultural understanding: ‘Intercultural understanding is therefore not only knowledge about the existence of other ways of living, but also the ability to understand them, enter the spirit of them and identify with them’. With current conditions in English-speaking regions in mind, an obvious choice would be focusing on the former British crown colony: Hong Kong. In Denmark and many other European countries, the focus of the teaching in English is often on more well-known former colonies like India, South Africa or Australia. Many students – at least in Europe – don’t know much about Hong Kong, and much of their understanding of China might be built around prejudice. If they do know about Hong Kong, it’s usually Hong Kong’s role as an international business and financial hub or mainly as a tourist destination. What makes Hong Kong an

Hong Kong and the Question of Cultural Identity – The English Subject and Global Dannelse 89

interesting topic to work with is the cultural and political identity crisis and resistance to Beijing’s interference from parts of the Hong Kong population, which has led to many cases of civil unrest in the former British colony in recent times. Predominantly young, and to our students relatable, pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong would like the region to remain independent and different from other Chinese cities. Hong Kong is officially and legally a part of The People’s Republic of China, but could it be considered a de facto country? And what role does the United Kingdom play in this? As with many things in Hong Kong, the answer is not clear-cut, and the result is almost that of a hybrid. For most other former British colonies, independence would eventually come – but Hong Kongers never became masters in their own house. They went from being ‘British Hong Kong’ – a colony and dependent territory of the British Empire from 1841 to 1997 to being handed over to China in accordance with the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle as stated in the Sino-British Joint Declaration.1 Students in general may lack a pre-understanding for this discourse on democracy. When you do not live in a postcolonial society yourself, it is difficult to understand the many layers and aspects of colonialism. For the students, it is somewhat abstract to comprehend other forms of government than their own. It is important to make them understand that Hong Kong did not have a democracy in the traditional sense before the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle. Even given a charitable view of the sunset era of the British rule as its finest hour in Hong Kong, a more informed and balanced assessment of its past deeds must be appreciated in the fuller context of the actual inputs and outputs. Indeed, democratic reforms only reached Hong Kong in the last years of British rule (Chan, 1997). The last British Governor of Hong Kong, Christopher Patten, became synonymous with four of the most important British contributions to Hong Kong’s success – namely, the rule of law, the civil service, economic freedom and democratisation. These are good starting points for the students to understand and articulate the British legacy from a Hong Kong perspective before we move on to present time’s debate. The relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China is far more complex than most people realise. It involves politics, trade, economics, laws and, above all, the people. Many ‘Hongkongers’, as they’re known, who lived for years under the influence and ways of former ruler Great Britain, are wary about China’s intentions and indignant about the mainland’s meddling in its political affairs. We are in a rather unprecedented situation, where a part of the population in a former colony is fighting to preserve the values from its former coloniser under a new rule. The uprising is carried out by ‘Generation HK’ – teenage activists who grew up in post-handover Hong Kong, and who have little attachment to the era of British colonial rule or today’s China. Instead, they see themselves as Hongkongers, a hybrid identity that is both reinforced and at the same

90  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

time threatened by the rapid expansion of Beijing’s influence. Generation HK is fighting for a better and brighter future. The fight can be seen as Hong Kong’s coming-of-age story and is relevant for all young people around the world. The students will in this process be asked to relate and to reflect on their own country’s – in many cases – much older history and talk about how relationships to neighbouring powers, the struggle for self-determination and the creation of an internal narrative of identity has taken many years to reach. As in all cases of teaching intercultural understanding, the students should not only reflect on the subject at hand, but also of the preconceptions that all people have based on the (often) unconscious narratives of their own culture. The class that this chapter is based on, have worked on projects that address their GCP-destination and partner school in Hangzhou, China (see Chapter 4 by Anders Schultz about the Rysensteen exchange programme). The students’ knowledge of China and Chinese culture and affairs is substantial due to the Global Citizen Programme. Normally, Chinese relations are not a part of the curriculum of the English subject but when it comes to postcolonial studies, the former British crown colony Hong Kong works just as well as any other former colony – maybe even better – as Hong Kong never gained proper independence, but was handed over to China in 1997, which has resulted in a hybrid culture – where culture and identity are unique and a creation of the population out of their particular circumstances. Even though this specific class had quite a vast knowledge about China and Chinese relations, the course can easily be completed with the basic preconceptions that most other students have about China, Chinese culture and China’s place in the world. The overall idea behind the course was to introduce the students to the idea of colonialism and postcolonialism. Most students – living in a former colonising or colonised country – have inherent ideas and feelings about this. These feelings need to be developed and refined with appropriate knowledge, theories and concepts. In this way, the students’ unreflected preconceptions will give way to a more academic – but by no means less engaged – approach to the subject. The study of Hong Kong is in and of itself interesting, and, of course, in many ways unique, but it also contains many aspects of postcolonialism, the struggle for human rights, etc. that could easily be compared to other cases around the English-speaking world. In this way, the study of Hong Kong can serve as an excellent dooropener to the whole field of postcolonial studies. This academisation of the students’ approach to the subject gives the students tools for acknowledging the nature, the form and the consequences of colonisation and decolonisation. Some students might find it hard to work with Hong Kong, as for many Europeans this is not a well-known subject, and their preconceptions may be quite unskilled and/or even prejudiced for dealing with this subject, but it will benefit and train the students’ abilities to approach the concept of colonialism on a more reflected basis.

Hong Kong and the Question of Cultural Identity – The English Subject and Global Dannelse 91

Subsequently, the class will draw parallels to an actual discussion of the current problem, thus making it present and relevant from a GCEd point of view. In addition to that, the students would once again be challenged about their prejudices towards other countries and systems, as a central part of global dannelse is to reflect on your own preconditions and prejudices in the meeting with another culture and national identity (Chapter 7). In the process of expressing the students’ prejudices, they will be forced to give arguments for their preconceptions and thereby refine their thoughts on parts of the world they only know very little about. The experience is that the students in this process of using the newly adapted theories and concepts tend to gain a much more accepting approach to what seems strange to them. The focus for this exercise would be on different types of texts and material so as to motivate the students and encourage them to be active in class (and through virtual teaching) by introducing several different working methods. This is also where the exercises reveal the methodological differences between the English subject and, for example, the History subject. Through similar and various ways the English subject’s focus on linguistic-, media- and fiction-analysis shows the students a different way of gaining knowledge on the subject. The idea behind that is Wolfgang Klafki’s (1983) ‘progressive education’ approach, as mentioned by Steen Beck (Chapter 2), where one begins by asking questions about how the students think, and then how to design teaching so that it includes students’ experiences, interests and active engagement with the subject. The material would include excerpts from a dissertation, articles, short stories, historical videos, podcasts and a documentary. The variation of empirical data gives the students many different perspectives on the subject at hand: the material itself will challenge the students to reflect on the subject from many different angles as well as encourage many different methodological approaches. This multifaceted approach will strengthen the students’ ability for further analysis of intercultural studies since such studies always require many different materials and methods for a more complete understanding. In addition, the students would be teamed up in smaller groups and given a medium to follow for each class and take turns in presenting what was written about Hong Kong that week. The media outlets would cover different political spectrums and borders, e.g. BBC World, CNN, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Free Press, etc. That way the students and the teacher would be up to date with the topic and situation, and the students would feel ownership over the direction of the course. The goal was to shed light on a current global issue and subject the students to a critical yet respectful examination of identity, democracy and human rights – values that often are taken for granted in our part of the world – and the frailness of said values in Hong Kong. Finally, the students will be given the task to reflect on the paradox that the protests

92  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

in Hong Kong are, in a nutshell, about protecting their own specific culture as a former British colony. The dilemma of taking over the identity of Hong Kong’s former coloniser encourages the students to reflect upon the different layers of identity that is very much a part of present Hong Kong. While the citizenship of Hong Kong is a closed issue after China resumed Hong Kong’s sovereignty in 1997, the question of cultural identity is open to negotiation. (Fung, 2004: 399)

Starting with an introduction to Hong Kong’s colonial history, the course moved on to focusing on the main points in Professor Anthony Fung’s 2004 dissertation Postcolonial Hong Kong Identity: Hybridising the Local and the National (Fung, 2004), which investigates the changing contour of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. Fung’s study conceptualises Hong Kong identity as the cultural effect on the local from the national – a spatial distance between ‘us’ and ‘others’. And even though the citizenship of Hong Kong is a closed issue after China resumed Hong Kong’s sovereignty in 1997, the question of cultural identity is very much open to negotiation. According to Fung, the people of Hong Kong have started to face the reality of appropriating a new dual Hong Kong/China identity. Through this work, the students will work with the two perspectives of intercultural understanding – the descriptive and the complex concept of culture (see Chapter 7). The assignments for the students will make them debate on the duality of an essentialistic view on culture versus a dynamic understanding of a society’s many cultural layers that seem to exist at the same time. The goal of this lesson was to make the students understand why the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China seems to be contradictory to various global and historical trends, and to get there they had to learn more about Hong Kong people’s identity before, during and after the decolonisation and the re-nationalisation that sprang up in the decades after the return to China. This exercise is of course related to the case of Hong Kong but can be applied to a vast number of debates about identity in many societies, and the students will be asked to find other examples from other parts of the world. This will enhance the students’ understanding of relatively young countries’ struggles with finding a common ground for nation building and will support their global dannelse. For the students, the understanding of Hong Kong identity starts here. ‘There is this question of identity, which is really at the heart of a lot of what has happened’ – Ben Bland – Director of the Southeast Asia project at the Lowy Institute. (The News Lens, 2017)

In the following lesson, the focus on Hong Kong identity shifted to the younger generation. The generation who grew up in post-handover Hong

Hong Kong and the Question of Cultural Identity – The English Subject and Global Dannelse 93

Kong and have very little attachment to the era of British colonial rule or today’s China: Generation HK. As a warm up, the students watched and made a rhetorical analysis of Governor Chris Patten’s Hong Kong Handover Ceremony Speech and lingered on the now famous last words from Britain ‘Now, Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is the promise. And that is the unshakeable destiny.’ (Patten, 1997). By using this mode of close reading that focuses on the text itself, the students would employ the principles of rhetoric to examine the interactions between a text, an author and an audience – in this case made interesting as it was Britain’s official farewell to Hong Kong in front of an official Chinese audience. Knowing how to interpret rhetorical devices and mastering different aspects of argumentation is key to intercultural understanding and an important part of global dannelse. Patten’s send off to a new beginning for Hong Kong was also the birth of Generation HK. Ben Bland has written the book Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow (Bland, 2017), in which he introduces readers to the new generation of Hongkongers. Everything from political activists, underground filmmakers, multi-millionaire super tutors and even the children of the city’s business tycoons. Having grown up after the 1997 handover, Ben Bland argues that they have formed a whole new identity – an identity that simultaneously is a major concern to Beijing (Generation HK and the Hong Kong Identity, 2017). The students work with a comparison of their own work so far and compare it to Bland’s analysis, and then listened to The News Lens’ radio podcast Generation HK and the Hong Kong Identity (2017), where Ben Bland is being interviewed about the development of the new Hong Kong identity and its implications for both Hong Kong and China. For the students, it was a welcome opportunity not to read but actually listen and learn more on why and how Hong Kong has been redefined by its young people. How the 2014 Umbrella Movement started, and how student leaders led hundreds of thousands in protest and a never before seen violent uprising against the Chinese government since the Tiananmen Square protests. The students got a better understanding of what the key elements for the protests are, and which role identity plays in them. As Ben Bland says in the podcast: ‘When you talk to people and ask them about the British, it’s meaningless to them (…) it bears no meaning for their lives, and equally when you ask them about Mainland China, it’s not important to who they think they are’ (The News Lens, 2017). With the focus on national identity, the students get a greater insight into the problems surrounding the autonomy promised to the Hong Kong people under the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model. Bland also raises the question whether Generation HK will be willing to compromise and live in a China where they have freedom of speech, the right to protest, etc.

94  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

’Give Me Death or Freedom’ – Vincent (Barnell, 2020)

In the next lesson, the students watched the documentary The Battle for Hong Kong by Robin Barnell (2020), which follows five young protesters mobilising and taking part in the most intense clashes over several months of pro-democracy protests that took place immediately after Hong Kong’s government proposed an extradition bill that would allow its people to be sent for trial in mainland China. This political move struck a spark in the tinderbox of fears that have been growing as Hong Kong reaches the halfway point of the 50 years of special protection it was granted when the British handed the colony back to China in 1997. Beijing promised to allow Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy for 50 years, which included freedom of speech, assembly and to protest. This is an example of intercultural understanding that the students can relate to since the discussion of these basic civic rights has been a growing part of the public discourse in the western world over the last decades. The documentary examines the youngsters’ struggle against what they say is growing influence from the communist government of mainland China. An influence that has brought millions of Hongkongers to the streets – many of them are secondary school students just like our students. The Chinese leadership has likened the demonstrations to terrorism, which leads to an interesting discussion in class about the semantic difference between the words ‘protesters’ and ‘rioters’, and how are they used by the different sides in the documentary. The students will once again compare the case of Hong Kong to similar discussions in other parts of the world. The Generation HK students and their fight represent people caught up in this moment of global significance, and for the students, it’s a reminder and an opportunity to reflect upon a culture and values that we take for granted, while at the same time understanding that not all people of Hong Kong agree with the protesters. The descriptive and the complex concepts of culture will once again be used to discuss how and why there seems to be many different cultural and identity perspectives in the fast changeable Hong Kong society. The Battle for Hong Kong also portrays how the quest for identity and the demonstrations have created rifts between generations and ethnicities and torn families apart. So even though opinion polls show that the number of people identifying as Hongkongers rather than Chinese is at a record high, the students were left with the big question: how can you change Hong Kong without changing China? Although the students throughout the course also read fiction, like short stories from the great anthology Hong Kong Noir (Ng, 2018), the main focus has been to read recent articles and watch up-to-date reports. Fiction, however, has been the most popular choice by the students, as

Hong Kong and the Question of Cultural Identity – The English Subject and Global Dannelse 95

literary fiction enables the students to open their eyes and see themselves in the shoes of others and grow their capacity for empathy, while simultaneously helping them get a better understanding of others and seeing the world from a new global dannelse perspective. We read the two haunting short stories One Marriage, Two People by Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang and The Ghost of Yulan Past by Jason Y. Ng from the Hong Kong Noir anthology. Both stories worked very well as an introduction to postcolonial literature and at the same time they gave a greater and deeper insight into the human consequences of the handover in 1997 and subsequently the cost of holding on to your culture and nostalgia. The course concluded with the students doing group presentations on the topic ‘The Future of Hong Kong’. They had to research the topic and find a suitable article to present to the rest of the class and discuss and reflect upon whether said article’s outlook on Hong Kong’s future was realistic or not. Many angles were covered, e.g. ‘Hong Kong’s future lies in the North’ and ‘Trying to find the right balance for Hong Kong’, and the students used their new-found knowledge to interpret the problem while being realistic about the prospects. Although we will never understand a different contemporary culture (if such a thing exists) on a one-toone basis, the students used their almendannelse and intercultural empathy and came to the conclusion that the ‘one country, two systems’ framework would likely soon become ‘one country, one system’, that the full annexation of Hong Kong in 20472 may well happen in 2023 already, and that Generation HK would leave Hong Kong before that. It was rather surprising that none of the students believed there could be full democracy and independence for Hong Kong, and that is probably due to our students having a somewhat pessimistic view on the world order and a somewhat one-sided idea of what democracy is and should be from a Western perspective. Concluding Remarks

The course has been the root of many great discussions in English class about human rights, values, culture, freedom and identity and how to fight to preserve them. All part of the almendannelse that comes with being a global citizen. The students have found the necessity to use different methodological approaches for their work with the subject of Hong Kong as well as using the tools of intercultural understanding. The many chances to relate the case of Hong Kong to struggles elsewhere in the world have given the students an understanding and a vocabulary to examine global issues with a knowledge of the need for many empirical approaches, different methods and the need for viewing cultures through different lenses. Teaching students about another country’s culture and identity is a subject full of pitfalls because, at its worst, it can become very superficial.

96  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

This descriptive cultural concept of identity makes great sense in the classroom but can also, if we are not careful, become one-sided. To quote Mads Blom’s chapter about intercultural understanding (p. 86), ‘Since we are far away from these countries and have little or no possibility to talk to their inhabitants, we will to some extent focus on the national cultures and some of the hegemonies in their politics, their traditions, their literature and art in their manifestations of identity (...) Is it the full nuanced picture of the different cultures in the country?’ Definitely not, but it is however a start and an insight into a national identity that might just explain some of the tendencies in Hong Kong on a global scale. Texts, worksheets and more can be found at www.gcedinpraxis.com. Notes (1) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-British_Joint_Declaration for more details. (2) On 1 July 2047, the 50-year period of ‘One Country Two Systems’ will officially end.

9 Global Competencies in Science Poul Nyegaard

Today, consumption and monetisation of our technological advances have become strangely mixed up with the idea of good citizenship. The word consumer has almost become a synonym for citizen. But citizen implies engagement, contribution, give-and-take, while consumer suggests only taking, as if it is our right to devour everything in sight. Being a global citizen requires being aware of the global consequences of one’s consumption choices and acting to improve these. It is a deliberate choice, and it needs development of global competences to become one. In this chapter, physics and math teacher, Poul Nyegaard, reflects upon the importance of the natural sciences in GCEd teaching and GCEd programmes. He argues that the natural sciences are essential to understanding most – if not all – of the epochal global issues that humankind is faced with in the 21st century (see Chapter 2). But he also argues that the natural sciences are not enough; a profound understanding of the epochal challenges of the 21st century – e.g. The Climate Crisis – requires that teachers and learning institutions work with an interdisciplinary approach to them, involving the natural sciences, math, political science, the humanities, etc. It also requires teachers and learning institutions to focus on the acquisition of global competencies rather than just accumulating factual knowledge. For Poul Nyegaard, these competencies can in connection with the natural sciences be defined as the ability to investigate the world, to recognise other perspectives on the world than the students’ own, to be able to communicate ideas and to be able to act in the world. Introduction

Disciplinary knowledge in science enables the students to understand the workings of the earth, ecosystems, energy systems and materials. But most important challenges in the world today (e.g. environmental sustainability) involves many perspectives and needs to be approached using several disciplines. This interdisciplinary understanding is an essential component of global competence. Clearly, neither students nor experts can fully master the large amount of information available about the 97

98  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 9.1  Global competencies in science

natural sciences, social science, history, economics and other fields. But being a global citizen is not merely a matter of having all this information. Rather, it pivots around the ability to acquire such knowledge: to investigate claims, to analyse contexts, pointing out phenomena and their connections. And this ability is at the core of the scientific way of working. Based on the concept of global citizenship of Rysensteen Upper Secondary School, this is condensed into four global competencies related to science (Figure 9.1). • Investigate the world beyond the students’ immediate environment, ask well-framed questions. • Recognise perspectives of different viewpoints, articulating and explaining them. • Communicate ideas using appropriate scientific terminology and language. • Act to improve, viewing themselves as actors in the world. Each of the competencies will be described in more detail below. While each of them is important in their own right, it is really their integration and deliberate application that makes a global citizen. To Teach Global Competencies

As with any teaching, we must answer the following questions when integrating global competence into our teaching: (1) What are the most important topics? (2) What should students learn? (3) What will students do to learn? (4) How will we know they have learned? Simple questions to ask, but quite difficult to answer. Experience at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School has shown that certain aspects of these questions are especially important to consider as I will explain below.

Global Competencies in Science  99

What are the most important topics? Globally significant

A topic must of course be globally significant. Topics can be significant for multiple reasons: large scope, uniqueness, consequences and urgency. Examples are climate change due to global warming that affects all inhabitants on Earth, UV radiation due to the ozone layer hole that demands urgent action, etc. Unfortunately, most curriculums do not put topics in a global context, but just dryly state what students must learn e.g. ‘equivalence between mass and energy’. It is up to the teacher to make it a globally significant topic. ‘Equivalence between mass and energy’, for example, is related to nuclear physics, and a globally significant task could be ‘use the equivalence between mass and energy to estimate for how long currently known uranium resources can power the world’s electricity demand’, or a more open task ‘Is nuclear power the climate friendly source of power of the future?’. Both questions involve more than the basic ‘equivalence between mass and energy’, and it will be necessary to have data about the world, e.g. energy consumption, (International Energy Agency) nuclear power plants (International Atomic Energy Agency), availability of fuel and possibly health aspects. Certainly, it is a challenge for the teacher to find sources of information and provide the necessary scaffolding. One may object that certain topics are simply not suited to put in a global context. Yes, it might be so in a few cases, but think about the fact that most science topics have practical and often important applications for many people. For example, the topic of ‘total internal reflection’ may be viewed as just a topic to put challenging theoretical problems to the student, or it could be viewed as part of how it is possible to pass light signals through long submarine fiber optic cables (Submarine Cable Map) that constitute the backbone of the internet that we are so much dependent on today. The topic has become globally significant. Another topic like ‘inverse square law’ could be framed as part of an explanation of what the ‘cellular’ in a cellular phone means. It could be part of a driving question like ‘The mobile phone has connected all of us. How is it possible to talk with people on the other side of the world using a mobile phone?’ Global–local connections

To be engaging to the students a topic must be present in and relate to their world. It should not only be global, but it must also be local. It is the connections between the global and local aspects that provide opportunity to develop global competence through the questions: • How does a global issue affect our local conditions? • How do our local actions affect the global condition? • How are other people, regions and technologies involved?

100  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 9.2  Example on feedback loop in global warming

These questions may be used in several ways: as a driving question to introduce new concepts and their scientific description, or as questions directly posed to the students. A useful formula to put a scientific topic (X) in a global (Y)-local (Z) context is: use X to explain the role of Y for Z, e.g. ‘use the concept of heat capacity to explain the role of land and sea for the difference in temperature in Denmark and Canada’. With these questions, it is not the aim to obtain an exhaustive understanding of global heating or climate differences, but rather to create awareness of the connections between global and local conditions, and that they may be understood scientifically. In case there are several connections, it may be possible to study higher levels of complexity like feedback loops (Figure 9.2). An example is that global warming (i.e. increasing temperature) melts the glaciers in the Himalayas, smaller glaciers reduce albedo, and reduced albedo further increase the temperature. This constitutes a reinforcing feedback loop in which global warming leads to further global warming. Using the formula above a question could be: ‘Use Earth’s radiative equilibrium to explain the role of the glaciers in the Himalayas in global warming’. What should students learn?

Four competencies were identified as essential to science in a global context, and they’ll be described in some detail below. Investigate the world

Most curriculums already contain a list of scientific topics and skills that students should acquire. Students should experience that this knowledge is useful to describe and understand global topics, and this relies very much on the teacher selecting and framing topics of global significance and providing appropriate scaffolding. It makes the student know about the world. But global citizenship involves more than knowledge about the world. It is also necessary to be able to ask meaningful questions, find answers and take a critical look at the answers. That means being able to investigate the world, which is captured in the following three skills:

Global Competencies in Science  101

• Identify and scope problems and questions so they can be investigated scientifically. • Design and conduct a scientific investigation to answer questions. • Use data to judge evidence for a claim. Globally significant topics are often complex, and a globally competent student should be able to divide it into sub-topics and formulate questions that can be investigated scientifically. For the investigation, the student should collect and analyse credible information from a variety of national and international sources or produce data from experiments. The information should be assembled and judged as evidence to create defensible conclusions. Recognise perspectives

Science, or at least its products, do not exist alone in space. There are consequences of technological solutions and choices made, and they may be viewed from different perspectives. Perspectives can be points of view of human beings but need not be confined to that. They can just as well be environmental, pollution, resources, economical, short-term, longterm perspectives. Teaching about energy sources clearly shows the importance of perspectives where, for example, a transition from fossil fuels to photo-voltaic elements may certainly have a benefit of lower carbon emissions but increase demand for resources like germanium and create an environmental stress where it is mined, and the elements take up land area that could be used in other ways. The necessary skills are: • Recognise and express relevant perspectives (environmental, resources, short-/long-term, …) on a situation, issue or phenomena. • Recognise and explain points of view of the people involved. Such considerations are often not part of a strict science curriculum. Pure science is neutral, only concerned with establishing and using laws of causes and effects – something that is only possible in highly controlled laboratory experiments. While this is a very important part of science, it should not overshadow that science is also called upon to investigate the complex reality outside the lab. It is when we do that, we cannot assume the environment or people to stay indifferent. We can choose to ignore this or start to make it a habit to include it in our investigations. For example, when learning about nuclear energy, it is, in these times of global warming, quite natural for students to consider it a preferred energy source due to no emission of greenhouse gasses. The habit of considering perspectives should make the students take a broader view and consider aspects like amount of known fuel resources, their geographical location and mining, handling of spent radioactive fuel, dismantling of old reactors, etc. These considerations do not lead to a simple quantitative or yes/no answer but point out important local–global connections.

102  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Students often fail to recognise this as a competence, and it is perceived as fuzzy and less important than the strict scientific competences. A way to mitigate this is to formalise it with named tools that students learn to use. One can ask the students to perform an OPV (Other People’s View or Other Points of View), CAF (Consider All Factors) or PMI (Plus Minus Interesting) (see de Bono’s 1992 book for more details on these tools and how to use them). These tools in time become as natural a habit to the students as using math tools like ‘perform a linear regression’ or laboratory tools like ‘use the multimeter to measure the voltage’. Communicate ideas

It is quite common that students are given assignments containing very clear and specific questions posed by the teacher. This is an efficient way to ensure that students work with the relevant questions and makes assessment easier. The drawback is that students never struggle with writing thoughts and questions themselves. Science risks being reduced to answering a sequence of seemingly disconnected questions. That will not do. Students need to write well to communicate their understanding and ideas. It builds on the investigate world competence, where the student struggles with the fundamentals of scoping a question, devising a way to investigate it and performing the investigation. The student should be able to convert the investigation into written text that can meaningfully be communicated to others. This among other things, involves: • writing well-formulated questions; • writing readable answers and selecting good ways to present the material, e.g. in tables and diagrams; • writing textual transitions that helps the reader grasp the logical flow, and how it leads to a conclusion; • being aware of the ability of the intended reader and choosing a communication strategy accordingly. It is quite a different matter, for example, to write a fixed format report for peers and an essay article for the public. It is important to deliberately select the way to present a subject, use of terminology and depth of explanations. The process of writing and teaching writing can be difficult for students and teachers. Some teachers already have instructional strategies on this, or else a three-part approach is suggested here. • Pre-writing is the act of preparing to write, trying to capture the gist of the text to be. It should address the following: state the main idea and supportive ideas, find the sources to support the idea, set the scope, consider the audience. • Outlining and drafting is where writing takes shape. Outlining helps students to present their material in a logical flow by grouping ideas

Global Competencies in Science  103

and supportive material into clearly named headings. Once completed the ideas and argumentation can be turned into sentences – without being too critical. The aim is to get text onto paper. • Revising is the final stage where the student first (a) takes a critical look at the writing: is the flow logical? Do the transitions between sections guide the reader? Are all claims supported by evidence? and (b) checks spelling, grammar and formalities. Act to improve

It would be fantastic if students looked at the world, identified opportunities for improvement, considered people’s perspectives, developed solutions and put them into action. It is seldom that we get so far, but that should not detain us from working with one or more of the steps from idea to action. • • • •

Identify opportunities. Evaluate existing solutions. Design and evaluate new solutions. Create prototype solutions.

Sometimes there is an opportunity to let students work with realworld problems, global or local in the community, and let real subject matter experts participate. However, the steps of action may equally well be developed on a much smaller setup suitable for science laboratories. It could, for example, be to suggest ways to reduce power consumption of a given electrical circuit or reduce the component count (price tag or cost) or increase performance of this model windmill or solar panel. All competences together

A globally competent student can apply all four competences seamlessly in our daily lives. However, when learning them, it works best if we focus on only a few of the competences at a time. In a lesson about nuclear power, it is feasible to include the recognise perspectives competence through reading about the challenges running a nuclear power plant like Barsebäck or Indian Point, in addition to the strictly scientific ones (nuclear reactions, mass–energy relation). Another unit on mechanical forces and statics could include the act to improve competence by having students suggest and try out improvements to a model bridge, in addition to the strictly scientific factors (forces, equilibrium conditions). What will students do to learn?

Global competence is not really shown through colourful computer presentations or theatrical events at the end of a unit. These may be great fun to do, but easily miss the point of establishing the habits of regularly

104  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

thinking about perspectives and precise communication of ideas and findings. Connect local and world experience

For science, it is essential for students to experience the connections between local and global. They should work extensively identifying and explaining: • local consequences of global patterns, and • global consequences of local patterns. A good starting point is a local issue or question. It could be prepared by the teacher or students could be asked to identify a current news story that they think illustrates a topic of the unit. What do the students already know or guess about it? Pose more detailed questions that could be investigated scientifically. What do we need to know to find out? This often gives an opportunity to bring a range of the curriculum into play. Simple questions like ‘How much energy must be produced by the power plant for this lamp to be turned on for an hour?’ or ‘What is the most energy efficient way to transport yourself (walk, bike, car, train, …) when ALL needed energy is considered?’ involve a lot of considerations and may have quite surprising answers. The students realise that there is a close connection between their own way of living and what happens in the country, region, and world. A convenient way to keep an eye on ‘what’s up’ in the World is to regularly check internet sites like www.earthweek.com. Investigation

Investigation is central to science also in a global context. Below is a brief sampling of some of the activities I use to support development of global competences. Driving question is a writing activity where students are asked to write about the ‘driving question’. It may be run twice in a unit: first at the start of the unit, and then, later when students have acquired more knowledge. The aim is to develop and refine their knowledge and broaden their perspectives. What do you ask? is an activity where the students are presented with a problem, issue or event (real or fictional), and they must suggest a panel of people (actual or historical) to study the issue. The goal is to think about the different skills and perspectives of different people and the types of questions each might ask. Claim testing is an activity where students are presented with a series of statements and use claim testing to establish a position as to whether the statements are true, false or somewhere in between. This develops their understanding of judging evidence for a claim and practising their presentation skills.

Global Competencies in Science  105

Personal synthesis

Students do not always recognize the global competencies and skills they acquire. To facilitate students’ awareness, it is necessary to regularly reflect on them, a personal synthesis. It should not be about how scientific concepts and theories were applied to calculate or investigate a topic, but rather asking the questions • Why and how did we come up with the problem, issue, or question in the first place? • What did we learn from the investigation? • How could this be communicated and used to improve? It is not uncommon that students working with topics like climate changes (for the worse) or dynamics (car accidents and injuries) get a feeling of powerlessness or fear. They can work constructively with these feelings and simultaneously build competences like communicating ideas (e.g. how their own family could become more aware of the problem) and act to improve (e.g. set up their personal climate plan). How will we know they have learned? Assessment of global competences

A lot of assessments are already made, and to that we now add assessment of global competences. We must construct assignments and activities, so that they elicit these competences and enable us to assess them. Initially the questions should be posed quite explicitly, and as global habits are evolving, the elicitations should become more indirect, and we should expect students to select and apply the most relevant skills by themselves. At Rysensteen Upper Secondary School, students have kept their personal synthesis (i.e. reflections on their use of global competences) in a dedicated portfolio. It has the benefit that reflections are readily visible, but it also disconnects the reflections from their context making it more difficult to assess them. So simply including questions targeting global competences in the assignments is often simpler for teachers and students. Formative assessment

As global competence is a new and quite demanding thing for students, it is not very useful for them only to get a summative assessment. A student must be told which reflections show their global skills and where they should improve. Assessments from experts

It is very useful to get feedback not only from the teacher. Peer review is a good possibility that also trains us to give and receive critique and use

106  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

it constructively to become better. In connection with external activities, it is strongly recommended to let external subject matter experts give feedback on student presentations and products. Concluding Remarks How to act

It is not feasible for me to include global competences in all courses and lessons. It is not even possible as there are requirements to customise the courses in other directions too. I usually stick to launching just one or two projects featuring at most two of the global competences. My experience is that it is also possible to include global skills in short activities during lessons and in homework. It can be done frequently and therefore in a much better way to establish the habits of global competence. Just ask students to make an OPV (Other Points of View) or PMI (Plus-MinusInteresting) (see more in de Bono’s (1992) book Teach Your Child How to Think) when it makes sense to look for perspectives – I always have templates ready on paper for this. The crucial point is really if I’m able to frame a given science topic in a global context with sufficiently interesting global – local connections. Is supporting material available? Do I know enough about the global context to facilitate the development of the competences? If not, it is probably better to wait and try another topic. Worksheets, models and more examples can be found at www.gcedinpraxis.com.

10 Global Dannelse and French Laura Bjerregaard Sørensen and Lotte Bolander

In this chapter, Lotte Bolander and Laura Bjerregaard Sørensen will describe how French as a school subject can work with global dannelse. It will explain how and why intercultural competences play an important role in studies of foreign languages. A concrete example of a course in intercultural understanding will be described, including the concepts and methods applied. Furthermore, the chapter will contain pedagogical reflections to the course. Though the main perspective for this chapter is French, the reflections and methodology can be applied on any foreign language subject. Introduction

Apart from the focus on knowledge, skill and being able to speak the language, the aspect of intercultural competences is quintessential to all studies of foreign languages and in this specific example: French. All these different elements are in fact equal, in that they enrich each other and are what gives the subject depth and cohesion. The central facet is of course in this case the French language as a means of communication in European and global relations and contexts, but it is likewise a means to understanding other languages and cultures. Thus, aside from developing the students’ ability to communicate in French, the study of French and Francophone literatures, societies and cultures provides them with insight into a globalised world and the ability to grasp the role of French culture within it. All these different dimensions develop and strengthen the students’ linguistic and cultural knowledge as well as their democratic understanding and thus contribute to their almendannelse (see Chapter 2). While we of course work towards our students being able to analyse and interpret different genres of French literature, articles and film, we also strive to see the material in its connection with relevant historical and cultural and intercultural contexts. Furthermore, the students need to be able put this knowledge into perspective when drawing parallels from French and Francophone cultural and political contexts to other cultures and societies, including their own. In this connection, the intercultural competence of each student is an important area of discovery and 107

108  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

development. This is done in order to avoid intercultural miscommunication, conflict, ethnocentrism and language as a barrier, and instead promote proficiency in intercultural interaction in order to be able to function effectively across cultures when travelling, studying or working abroad and in other ways when needing to communicate and work with people of different cultural backgrounds. To thus facilitate the multicultural encounter and understanding the cultural diversity of the world and becoming aware, curious, tolerant and open towards it, we need to help the students take their basic comprehension of different cultural praxis and worldviews, expand it and be able to use it to be(come) mature, respectful and competent human beings able to establish positive and constructive relationships wherever they go. Finally, French lessons provide students with the ability to reflect upon their own national culture in the meeting with a diverse French culture. This is in fact a reciprocal interaction in that our students already at the beginning of their first year are given a course in intercultural understanding and here are introduced to the concepts and theory of this subject. It is our goal as language teachers to follow-up on these insights and continuously develop them in our teaching of French culture, where they alternately reflect upon their own culture and the studied cultures, be it French, Congolese or Canadian-French. Obviously, the teaching of intercultural competences should not replace, but complement and contextualise, the teaching of grammar, pronunciation, etc. This is one of the reasons why we have chosen to carry out this course during the spring in the second year, so that the students already have a solid linguistic foundation. Global Citizenship Education (GCEd)-Course: Meeting of Cultures

We as teachers often feel like everything we teach is about culture and cultural comparison and understanding, whether it be the French school system, life in Quebec, Muslim minorities in France or the values of the Republic. However, in their feedback, the students often don’t experience the lessons in their second foreign language as being part of their Global Citizenship Education. Therefore, we have found that it is important to draw a distinction and let some courses be about more subtle cultural phenomena as a complement to the teaching of French per se and others be about specific global citizenship-focused ones. As a consequence, the teachers in the second foreign languages – Spanish, Chinese, German and French – at Rysensteen have agreed to teach a GCEd course on cultural encounters during the students’ second year. In order to create a clear coherence between this course and the subject intercultural understanding (see Chapter 7), we have translated the vocabulary of the cultural theory into French, Spanish, Chinese and German. In this way, the students get

Global Dannelse and French  109

a better understanding of how the lessons in their second foreign language contribute to the Global Citizenship Programme in this particular GCEd course, but in fact in almost every course in the subject. The teachers are free to plan and carry out the GCEd course as they like, but we commit ourselves to applying the vocabulary of cultural theory. In this chapter, we will describe a specific course of this kind called La rencontre de cultures (Meeting of cultures). La rencontre de cultures

The purpose of this course is to help the students get an understanding of French national culture that transcends the stereotypes that often dominate our perception of other cultures. As teachers in a second foreign language, we are always met by the challenge that the students’ vocabulary and grammatical skills are limited. Thus, when teaching complex subjects such as intercultural understanding, we sometimes have to accept a certain level of simplification in the discussions. To simplify the many layers of culture in a society is of course always problematic: when you work with broad categories you tend to overlook all the exceptions, and if you exclusively define culture as national culture you automatically force certain values and praxis on to groups of citizens in this society that in no way apply to this description. Well aware of this fact we must start with a simplistic definition of a foreign culture and from that point adding more and more layers of cultural differences within the society – to start out with the relativistic and extremely complex description of the cultural nuances of French society wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial to the students – especially when doing this in a foreign language. In any learning process, the teacher must find the students’ zones for proximal development, and a certain level of simplification is of course necessary in this process. That being said, we must always make our students aware that the simplified form is never a description of the truth and that more information, more nuances, more contradictions and more reflections on both the observed culture and the students themselves as observers will be examined along the way. Therefore, we take an easily definable French culture as a starting point and try to help the students understand where these clichés come from and discuss them. The course consists of two parts: La culture française and La rencontre de cultures. Part one: La culture française

In the first part of the course: La culture française, the students were asked to repeat their knowledge from the previous year as we revised the vocabulary from the theory of intercultural understanding. During the first lesson in the course, the students were asked to define the distinction between two broad cultural concepts (i.e. ways of perceiving culture

110  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

within the field of anthropology), namely, the descriptive (or essentialist) concept of culture and the complex (or dynamic) concept of culture (see Chapter 7). The two concepts are not direct opposites but represent two perceptions of culture which differ from one another in a number of ways. The descriptive (or essentialist) concept of culture sees culture as an enclosed unit preserved within the borders of a nation built upon the idea of common values and norms. In this understanding, people’s actions can be understood on the basis of their cultural background. Using this concept, students obviously often miss some of the subtleties and differences which exist between individual people’s cultural values and general praxis, and risk judging individuals based on what they already know about the culture, rather than how they actually behave in various situations. The descriptive concept can be used, for example, when needing to draw some generalisations, e.g. when comparing school culture in Denmark and France. Here, we have some easily identifiable markers that often differ greatly between different countries. For example, the level of authority in the teachers, the applied pedagogical praxis, the freedom of choice concerning curriculum, the use of school uniforms, etc. This comparison will usually highlight the fact that discipline and one-way communication are more prevalent and democratic debate more scarce in French schools than in Danish schools. Although it is always important to remind the students that they should be critical when talking about cultures as fixed and bounded entities when we live in a globalised world characterised by a high degree of cultural exchange across national borders, this area (the education system) is however a good example of one thing that shapes all Frenchmen alike and thus we are able to distinguish some definable traits of a French national culture. The complex concept of culture though sees culture as a dynamic process created by people as something they do rather than something they have or are, and hence culture is something that continuously arises and changes in the interaction between people. Here, people’s actions cannot necessarily be predicted on the basis of their national culture, as individuals can be part of many different cultural communities and draw on different cultural values and praxis in different contexts. It is also recognised that individuals’ actions are influenced by other factors such as education, personality, interests, etc. We also revise the concepts: ethnocentrism and ethnorelativism. These terms complement the two cultural concepts and help the students reflect upon their immediate reactions towards other cultures and countries (see Chapter 7). The students are already familiar with the vocabulary, but the repetition ensures that everybody is able to apply them during the course, and this also makes it easier to apply rather complex terms in French, as they have already studied them in Danish classes. In the second foreign languages, we strive to apply the terms when talking about a text or a film studied in class that deals with cultural issues. The goal is not to

Global Dannelse and French  111

make the students reject the descriptive concept of culture completely but rather to help them reflect upon the representation of cultures as it is for instance pictured in literature and cinema. Before studying French and Francophone culture using the complex concept of culture, we wanted to raise the students’ consciousness about the fact that we often tend to perceive other cultures from a more or less ethnocentric point of view using the descriptive concept of culture. Thus, their first task after the theoretical introduction was to describe French culture – in French – in a collaborative document. The students write clichés like the French are very cultural and sophisticated, the French are arrogant, the French love baguette and cheese, the education of children in France is very strict, the French always demonstrate. Hereafter, we read all of the statements, and in groups, the students were asked to answer if they agreed with the statements or not (and why). They were also asked to answer whether they had used the essentialist/descriptive or the complex concept of culture. Because of the initial revision of these concepts, they were able to express in French that most of the statements reflected an essential conception of the French national culture (Webpage – gcedinpraxis.com). As mentioned earlier in the chapter, it is a major challenge to talk about cultures in a nuanced way in a second foreign language. In order to meet this issue, it is important to meet the students where they are as to linguistic competences and cultural understanding. Therefore, the essentialist idea of a French national culture is a good starting point for discussing cultures, as the students already possess these ideas, for instance, from popular culture, and thus, they can more easily express them in French. It is a premise for the classes in the second foreign language that we study the history and the institutions of the country/countries where the languages are spoken and from this distinguish some definable traits of a national culture. In the following lesson, the statements from the collaborative document thus served as a starting point for discussing the background for some of the traits that you can argue seeing in French society. The students were introduced to the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions1 where the countries are graded on six dimensions: power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, longterm orientation and indulgence. They study and discuss the comparison between the scores for Denmark and France. Thereupon they were asked to revisit their statements on French culture and French people which they had written in the prior lesson. We used a tree metaphor to illustrate the complexity of a national culture: the trunk and the branches are our actions – what other people see and hear – and the invisible roots underground are our history, our religion, etc. The students were now told to ‘dig into the earth’ for the roots as they tried to explain the essentialist and/or ethnocentric statements about France using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and their knowledge about France from the French lessons in

112  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

general and from other subjects like history, social studies and religion. The discussions were mainly in Danish, whereas they formulated their ultimate explanations in French (first in writing, then verbally; Webpage – gcedinpraxis.com). As an example, a group of students revisited the statement: Les Français sont arrogants (The French are arrogant). As an ‘explication possible’, they pointed to France’s role as a former colonial power which has both resulted in great national pride, but also in the fact that English teaching has played a smaller role in France than in a small country like Denmark. Maybe the alleged arrogance sometimes just reflects the uneasiness of many French people when speaking in other languages? Another group discussed the school system in France which Danish students perceive as very strict, because the French teachers expect more discipline and respect from their students. We talked about religion as a possible ‘root’ for this difference, as the catholic countries tend to have a higher degree of hierarchical structure than the protestant countries as Denmark. In addition to the mere linguistic competences, this sequence thus raises the students’ awareness about French history which can be regarded as the root for certain common features in French society. In insisting to transcend the simple prejudices, we hope to contribute to the almendannelse of the students. It was clearly easier for the students to express the clichés than the underlying history in French, so as a teacher in a second foreign language you always have to consider whether you want to spend some time discussing in Danish at the cost of conversation in the foreign language or rather accept a higher level of simplification. In this particular case, we chose to let the students discuss in Danish some of the time, but even so the exercise is inevitably marked by some generalisation. However, we still find it useful to invite the students to revisit their preconceived notions of the French as it will hopefully initiate the desire to understand the complexity of both their own and other cultures. Even with this newly acquired awareness of cultural sensitivity, we had still only perceived France and French culture from a Danish point of view. Therefore, the next step in the course was to look into how the French perceive their culture. For that purpose, the class examined the discourse of the two politicians François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron and how they address French culture and multiculturalism (Webpage – gcedinpraxis.com). The students were asked to listen to and read the quotes of Francois Fillon, Prime Minister under Nicholas Sarkozy, who when asked about his vision of France and its future as a multicultural society answered that: ‘No [there can be no multicultural France] France has a history, a language and a culture, and although both language and culture have been enriched by foreign cultures, it is the foundation of our French identity’2 . He therefore rejects multiculturalism, which he associates with parallel societies, as a choice for France. He wants immigrants to assimilate and embrace the cultural heritage and preserve French values, which he perceives as inherent and historic and the very soul of

Global Dannelse and French  113

France. He allows for the tolerance of such a national identity and culture to develop in a globalised world, but it cannot be allowed to disappear. Along these lines but also more open and tolerant though not all together opposed, Macron when asked the same question – (which in itself stresses the perpetual obsession with a pure culture as opposed to multiculturalism) answered that there is not a French culture but there is a culture in France, and it is diverse and multiple ‘Il n’y a pas une culture française, il y a une culture en France, elle est diverse, elle est multiple’3. He went on to say that he is passionate about French culture as it is a meeting point of sensitivities, experiences and influences and adds that the French spirit does not rely (solely) on (blood) and citizenship. He used a metaphor of French culture as a river nourished by multiple tributary streams but then contradicted the serenity of this image by threatening that if there is a risk of France becoming multicultural, he will combat it. After having worked to translate and understand the texts, the students once more applied the vocabulary from intercultural understanding in analysing the position of the two politicians regarding their conception of culture. They were now able to point out that Fillon represents the descriptive/essentialist concept, whereas Macron tends towards the complex concept of culture. To get to a deeper understanding behind these two opposing standpoints, a discussion about the reasons why some see the first as a way of preserving a fragile state shaken in its once evident values by mass immigration, and others the second one as a way of trying to unite an increasingly divided country is highly relevant. This issue is important in today’s globalised world and not just to France, and the students’ ability to recognise and debate this is part of their dannelse as global citizens. Part two: La rencontre de cultures

As seen when working with Macron’s and Fillon’s discourse on culture, the presence of other cultures in France cannot be ignored. If assuming that all French people are shaped by the values of the Republic: liberté, égalité, fraternité, you neglect not only the fact that not all French people have the same background but are enriched and rounded out by other revolutions than the French and by other uprisings and wars (e.g. Algerians in France with persistent deep wounds from a bloody war of independence) but also that even though a young person with, e.g. Algerian background may desire only to be immersed in French society, they might not always feel the brotherhood and equality proudly proclaimed by their supposed peers, confined as they may be in an impoverished suburb with next to no possibilities to climb the social ladder. In a natural sequence, a course on being caught between two cultures is now a logical choice on the string of coherent courses elaborating on France and the meeting, as well as the clashing of cultures in the wake of postcolonialism. Consequently, in the second part of this GCEd course, we look into the

114  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

cultural encounters within French society. Fiction is a great catalyst for cultural understanding, and several French films highlight this issue and are brilliant to use in class. La Haine, Entre les Murs and Les Misérables all leave a lasting impression on students and light their interest in discussing and analysing the problematic. In this particular course, we watched the film Bienvenue à MarlyGomont, a comedy about a Congolese family arriving in a small and rainy village in France in the 1970s. The film shows the difficulties for an immigrant family to be accepted in the community. Not only because of the cultural differences, but by distinctions reinforced by the surrounding ‘true French’ culture which often refuses to include descendants of immigrants. Once again it is important to start with some rather simple exercises to build up a vocabulary to talk about the subject. The class thus first talked about their personal opinion of the film and described screen shots from the film in order to characterise the protagonists and define the major conflicts in the film. After this, the students talked about the film in smaller groups starting from the questions: (1) which contrasts are represented in the film? (2) Describe the representation of the Zantoko family and the Congolese culture in the film. (3) Describe the representation of the inhabitants of Marly-Gomont and rural France (la France profonde) in the film. (4) In your opinion, does the film apply the descriptive concept of cultures or the complex concept of cultures? Justify your answers. The students were now able to use the vocabulary from the first part of the course to reflect upon the representation in the film of the narrow-minded French villagers on the one side, and the colourful Congolese family on the other side. They were able to put into words that the film used a descriptive concept of culture in order to accentuate the contrasts. In this way, we were able to discuss, not only the cultural clash described in the film, but also on a meta level the way the filmmakers had chosen to represent these cultures. We also studied an interview with a young girl with Arab roots living in the suburbs of Paris who, like many other postcolonial immigrants and descendants in France, struggles with her culture and identity, as being accepted as truly French. The exercises for this text were to talk about the prejudices this girl is met with and compare to Denmark. The comparison between the two countries and the different realities connected to past (colonial) history raises the students’ perspective on as well as awareness of the root of racism and discrimination and is an important part of their global dannelse. Our final subject of analysis in the course was a song by FrenchRwandan author and musician Gaël Faye who in his rap text: ‘Metis’. The students were asked to find the passages in the text where the author describes the feeling of being métis, bicultural and analyse his metaphors. For example, he describes it as sitting between two chairs. The purpose of studying texts by bicultural authors is to show the students how cultural encounters can sometimes be a challenge and create an identity crisis.

Global Dannelse and French  115

In the first part of the course, the students learned about France’s past as a great colonial power and the impact of this past in their present culture, and therefore they were now able to talk about the difficulties for immigrants and descendants of immigrants with more profound arguments. For example, they were able to involve the political positions to multiculturalism as presented respectively by François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron in the discussions. Although it is a complex subject to study and many students found it difficult, the majority evaluated it positively as an enlightening and interesting course since it touched upon issues that are familiar to most societies and the course has given the students the theories and vocabulary to debate, reflect and understand this discourse. Concluding Remarks How to act

To obtain global dannelse, it is not enough to obtain knowledge about the globalised world and the different cultures. We need to cultivate in the students a desire for changing the world. The task is not hard, as the young generation at hand is already characterised by a strong desire to make a difference and put their mark on the world. This is seen through our students’ interest in doing voluntary work, taking climate action, making efforts to make their school and their personal lifestyle choices more sustainable and so much more. They are already ‘active, participative and responsible individuals’. However, we as teachers can still encourage them, e.g. by inviting external partners into the classroom. Specifically we have had: a Red Cross volunteer telling the class about her posting in Frenchspeaking African countries, an election observer recounting her experiences in safeguarding democracy in Haiti, visiting teachers from an upper secondary school in a socially deprived area (outside of Paris) talking about their experiences, a former student coming to talk about his work in a refugee camp in Algeria, etc. When teaching global problems and challenges and inviting identifiable guest teachers who make a difference in the world, we aim to inspire our students and spark their curiosity. It is our hope that the understanding of cultural encounters and competences obtained through this course will help the student to go out and act themselves. Worksheets and more examples can be found at www.gcedinpraxis.com. Notes (1) Hofstede Insights. See https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries Webpage. (2) https://www.thelocal.fr/20161125/fillon-vows-hes-the-man-to-radically-reform-france/. (3) https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/politique/2017/02/06/31001-20170206ARTFIG00209emmanuel-macron-et-le-reniement-de-la-culture-francaise.php

11 Global Dannelse in Natural Geography Anders Folden Brink

How do we prepare upper secondary school students for a future where climate change and its consequences are to become an inevitable part of everyday life? And how do we develop students’ ability to contribute in a qualified way with future solutions to these challenges? In this chapter, Natural Geography professor, Anders Folden Brink, reflects on how understanding and experiencing differences and similarities in climate adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development in Copenhagen vs Toronto can contribute to the students’ global dannelse (see Chapter 2). Introduction

This chapter is based on a course in the subject of Natural Geography in the Danish upper secondary school system. In the first line of the curriculum in Natural Geography, the subject is described as: ‘a scientific field that describes and explains global patterns and differences’. The overall goal of this subject is to unite the scientific fields of geography and geology and at the same time draw parallels to the political and social sides of subjects such as climatology, environmental studies, production and consumption of renewable vs non-renewable energy and natural disasters. Through working with this combination of scientific fields, the students gain an understanding of the interplay between the basic natural conditions and processes of the Earth, as well as how humans affect and depend on these. All projects in Natural Geography are organised as themes with a focus on local, regional or global issues and the relationship between these different levels. Thus, it is not sufficient simply to gain a professional understanding of the geoscientific concepts, laws and models. This understanding must be used to analyse and discuss specific cases and thereby give the students competencies to acquire, on their own, new knowledge and take an active part in current, global debates on a scientific, geoscientific basis. For the teacher, the challenge is to make sure that the global issues are made relevant and part of the students’ reality. In this way, students will 116

Global Dannelse in Natural Geography  117

gain both a general global overview, as well as a nuanced understanding of the importance of this on a local scale. In this context, Wolfgang Klafki’s theory of epoch-defining key problems can appropriately be applied. Klafki identifies a number of issues, which by virtue of their position in the public debate, their theory about our age as well as opportunities and dangers in the future, are designated as so-called epoch-defining key problems. According to Klafki (1983), these problems are, for example, peace, environment and societal inequality (Dolin et al., 2017; Hobel, 2017). The Natural Geography subject focuses on a wide range of these key epoch-defining problems and can be part of different interdisciplinary courses. It thereby contributes to giving students a scientific view of the world and an understanding of how this fits into other academic perspectives. Natural Geography is thus one of the upper secondary school subjects, where the global perspective is most evident in the curriculum and the teaching practices. The similarities between the Natural Geography curriculum and the Global Citizenship Programme (GCP) curriculum (see Chapter 4) therefore make the course an obvious part of the students’ global dannelse. However, it is important to add that for other school systems in other countries, similar projects could also be carried out in the more ‘traditional’ science-related courses, such as physics, biology or chemistry. Global dannelse in the Subject Matter

This chapter is based on a course called: ‘Climate adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development in bigger cities’. The climate challenges of the future are a common global challenge, and sharing international knowledge and cooperation in this field is crucial for us to be able to maintain our standard of living in the big cities of the world. The subject matter is one of the epoch-defining key problems that the students, as citizens of a modern capital, will be confronted with on a daily basis and therefore an obvious part of the students’ global dannelse. Throughout all three years of upper secondary school, the cohort of students that this chapter is based on, has worked on projects that address their GCP-destination and partner school in Toronto, Canada. This project therefore focuses on differences and similarities in the climate adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development in Copenhagen vs Toronto. These are both big western, old-industrialised cities in the temperate climate zone. Despite the large geographical distance between them, there are a number of similarities between the climatic challenges that the cities face in the future and the work that must be done to prevent and mitigate the consequences of these. It is important to add that this subject matter is far from limited to working with these two cities. It will be relevant for the majority of the larger cities in the world. It could, for example, be very interesting to look

118  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

at differences and similarities between cities in countries with larger socioeconomic differences than Denmark and Canada. The project was structured in three parts taken from the three components of the GCP curriculum as described in Chapter 4. (1) A review and analysis of the man-made climate changes and their consequences for the two cities. (2) An experimental fieldwork project in Copenhagen and Toronto. (3) A development and presentation of the students’ own innovative climate adaptation or mitigation projects in the two cities. Through this, the students experienced how their knowledge and competencies achieved through the course can be used to overcome the cultural differences that may exist when working internationally with global problems and can help them to find the best common solutions to this. Climate adaptation and mitigation in larger cities is thus an obvious part of the students’ global dannelse. In the chapter ‘Global Competencies in Science’ (see Chapter 9), there is a visual representation of how the three components from the GCP ­curriculum – factual knowledge, analytical competencies and action/­ communication – can be implemented in the teaching of science related courses (Figure 11.1). (1) Investigate the world beyond students’ immediate environment, ask well-framed questions. (2) Recognise perspectives from different viewpoints, articulating and explaining them. (3) Communicate ideas using appropriate scientific terminology and language. (4) Act to improve, viewing themselves as social actors in the world. While Natural Geography at the first-year basic introductory levels mainly focuses on the first two points, ‘Investigate the world’ and ‘Recognise perspectives’, the teaching at the second- and third-year more

Figure 11.1  Global competencies in science

Global Dannelse in Natural Geography  119

advanced levels provides a greater opportunity to work with all four areas and thereby include, ‘Act to improve’ and ‘Communicate ideas’. Based on the curriculum in Natural Geography and GCP, as well as the four points above, the project is therefore structured in three main parts, which will give the students competencies within all three components of global dannelse. These are described in the following sections. Factual knowledge – Global, regional and local climate change and the consequences for big cities

In order to investigate the extent and causes of the climate changes that Copenhagen and Toronto will face in the future, the course begins with a presentation of the most important climatological theory and models. This includes the development of the atmospheric CO2 content, the carbon cycle, the radiation and energy balance, the water cycle, ocean currents and the global wind circulation. On the basis of this, climate change is studied at the temperate latitudes, where both Copenhagen and Toronto are located. In this part of the course, the students are also introduced to the digital map material, which will form the basis for their later empirical studies, analyses and discussions of the extent and consequences of climate change in Copenhagen and Toronto. Selected map material is used in both Google Earth and other digital map platforms (GIS). This digital map material enables work with global data and information in a way that would not otherwise be possible without extensive fieldwork at the sites in question. This ‘virtual fieldwork’ is therefore an obvious tool for bringing distant global conditions, which the students may otherwise have difficulty relating to, into the classroom. In this way the distance is reduced and made more relevant for students. Finally, the first part of the project examines how the consequences of climate change are reflected in Copenhagen’s and Toronto’s adaptation and mitigation efforts. The starting point is the current climate and environmental plans and reports that the two cities have prepared and published. The specific reports are mentioned in the teaching description below. Through this, the students gain the factual knowledge that will form the basis for their subsequent analyses of the problem complexes, as well as their development of independent, innovative urban spaces. Analytical competencies – Natural geography in the field

The curriculum in Natural Geography, like all other upper secondary school science subjects, requires that a certain percentage of teaching must consist of experimental, empirical work. In the laboratory, the students often work with simplified models of reality, which have been developed with a teaching goal in mind. The scale and complexity of the geo-­ scientific issues, such as global climate change and its significance for

120  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

humans, makes it difficult to develop ‘traditional’ laboratory experiments that adequately allow students to analyse the specific cases, while building a global overview in which these can be placed. The geo-scientific method differs from subjects such as physics and chemistry in that the majority of the experimental work does not necessarily take place within the four walls of the laboratory, but rather in the field. Natural Geography is therefore based more on observations rather than experiments. Precisely, this observing fieldwork is one of the most important and fundamental parts of Natural Geography and the students’ global dannelse. It gives them the opportunity to step out of the classroom and apply their theoretical knowledge in the real world. The complexity of the geoscientific issues that the fieldwork presents to the students forces them away from the safe framework of the textbooks and final conclusions. In the field, it is not always possible to look up the correct answer. On the other hand, it requires a deeper understanding of the connections between the local conditions at the site itself and the associated global consequences, which often go beyond the specific local case study. The fieldwork therefore helps to make teaching ‘application-oriented/applied’, and the global issues are made current, relevant and part of the students’ reality. The fieldwork in this course takes place in two of Copenhagen’s so called ‘climate neighbourhoods’ of Nordhavn and Østerbro, where climate adaptation and sustainable urban development are a clear part of the cityscape. These two neighbourhoods are obvious fieldwork sites, as they are both part of the global elite in the climate field. Every year, delegations from all over the world flock to the neighbourhoods to be inspired by their creative and high-tech solutions. Before the fieldwork, the class is divided into groups, each of which is assigned responsibility for one of the sites. These ‘expert groups’ must then familiarise themselves with the area’s climate challenges, solutions and future plans and are responsible for presenting this knowledge to the rest of the class while facilitating tours of the site in question. The students therefore have a responsibility in common to share their knowledge in such a way that everyone in the class gets the maximum benefit from the fieldwork. The role of the teacher in this context is that of an unobtrusive observer than during a more ‘traditional’ excursion with teacher-led field lectures. After the students’ field presentations, it will be the teacher’s task to ask authentic questions and facilitate the joint discussion and collection of empirical data on the site. Here, it is important to keep the global perspective in mind, which can be a challenge for the students. They must be trained not only to analyse the field site in question, but to use their knowledge, experience and empirical data to assess which global contexts may be relevant. This means that they must be able to assess whether the specific climatic challenges and consequent climate adaptation or sustainability solutions experienced at the field site are unique to that particular site, or whether they could also be used in other parts of the world. This

Global Dannelse in Natural Geography  121

requires students to be able to link their factual theoretical knowledge about regional and global climate change and societal perspectives, with the local empirical data they gather on the field site. This particular fieldwork, the focus was of course on the similarities and differences between Copenhagen and Toronto. In this way, students gain an understanding of how their knowledge, experience and competencies can be applied in a Canadian collaboration, and what differences they need to be aware of in this process. This first part of fieldwork is thus designed as a student-led excursion, where the collected empirical data consists of knowledge, interviews and pictures of the site. In order to also train the students’ more traditional experimental competencies, the second part of the fieldwork is designed as a field experiment. In this case, a local radiation balance is measured on the different sites. The students here examine whether the climate mitigation and adaptation efforts in the cities have led to changes in the local radiation balance. They have previously in the course done similar experiments in the laboratory on simple model setups, and this existing knowledge must now be compared with the results from the field sites. Where the first part of the fieldwork mainly gives qualitative results, this experiment gives the students an opportunity to collect and analyse their own quantitative data. The third part of the fieldwork is the class’s study trip to Canada. The academic content of this trip has a broader interdisciplinary focus, and in this specific class, the Natural Geography course was not part of the trip to Canada. However, before departure, the students had been prepared to collect empirical evidence based on their factual background knowledge and their experiences from the fieldwork in Copenhagen with the focus on the differences and similarities between the climatic challenges and proposed solutions seen in the two cities. This was to be done through city walks in Toronto as well as conversations, discussions and interviews with selected Canadian students, teachers or experts. Acting to improve and Communication – Development of an innovative urban space

As the final part of the project, the students develop an innovative proposal for a new climate-adapted, sustainable urban space in either Copenhagen or Toronto. They must base this on their theoretical background knowledge and results of the digital map material as well as the fieldwork in Copenhagen and Toronto. In addition to a technical description of the design of the urban space, the proposal should contain an indepth description of which climatic challenges it will alleviate, and finally be assessed by what advantages and disadvantages there would be in implementation, if the proposed solution should be implemented in the other city.

122  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Before leaving for Toronto, each group makes a pitch of their preliminary project proposals to the rest of the cohort and receives formative feedback from other students and the teacher. In this way, students practise communicating their knowledge and ideas while preparing for their field work and conversations in Toronto. Through this process, students implement the third point of the GCP curriculum: Acting to improve and Communication. Students acquire the skills to, in a qualified way, translate their knowledge into action and thereby develop and communicate a local solution proposal for the regional and global climate challenges of the future. An example of this was the project ‘Reflect Toronto’. Here, students worked on possible solutions to the so-called ‘heat island’ effect, which is one of the future challenges highlighted in the city’s climate adaptation plans. The students took as their starting point their factual knowledge about the radiation and energy balance, as well as their results from the field experiment with the local radiation balance. Based on this, they prepared a proposal focusing on making selected roads and roof surfaces in Toronto brighter in order to reflect larger parts of the sun’s incoming shortwave radiation and thereby reduce the heat island effect. This concrete proposal was inspired by similar projects from the warmer parts of the North American continent, such as Los Angeles, where parts of the city’s roads and roof surfaces are currently in the process of being painted white. The students estimated that similar measures will be relevant in Toronto, which by 2050 will find that the extreme maximum temperatures will rise from 37 degrees to 44 degrees Celsius, and that the annual long drought periods will quadruple. On the study trip to Toronto, students had the opportunity to experience the city’s current challenges and climate adaptation initiatives and discuss their proposed solutions to these with the Canadian students, teachers and experts. Through this, they experienced how their knowledge, empirical results and innovative proposals from the course gave them a common scientific language, which makes it possible to communicate and collaborate on current climate adaptation issues across both cultural and physical boundaries. Evaluation – Experiences from the course

Through this course in Natural Geography, the students worked with all three goals of the GCP curriculum, namely, (1) factual knowledge, (2) analytical skills and (3) action/communication. From both a scientific and global dannelse perspective, the course met the professional goals and the students achieved good results. At the end, they were asked to evaluate their own experience of the benefits from the course with focus on the three GCP academic goals. The specific questions can be seen in the teaching description at the end of the chapter. The evaluation showed a

Global Dannelse in Natural Geography  123

predominant satisfaction with both the professional content and the global dannelse in the course. One student says: The teaching prepared us really well for the experiences we had in Toronto. It was great to work a lot in the field, it gives a concrete understanding of the academic content of the subject. The project was exciting which made us students more involved in the teaching.

A challenge in the fieldwork-based teaching of Natural Geography is the complexity of the global climate processes and their consequences for the human population. This was evident as the students’ biggest challenge in the final innovative products was to clarify the connections between the theory and models they had reviewed in their classes and the local empirical data they collected during the fieldwork. One of the reasons for this challenge may be that there are many similarities between the climatic and socioeconomic conditions in Copenhagen and Toronto. Differences in the climatic challenges and consequent climate adaptation and sustainability proposals experienced in the two cities are therefore not as evident as they would be if a similar project were done with a class that has a partner destination in a country with a larger variation in the climatic and socioeconomic conditions, such as other partner schools in, for example, India, Uganda or Argentina. Another challenge was that Natural Geography, as mentioned earlier, was not included in the actual study trip to Canada. Although the students had been prepared for the fieldwork in Canada before departure, the fieldwork in Toronto was not as focused on climate adaptation and mitigation as what the students previously experienced in Copenhagen. The empirical data from Toronto therefore constituted a relatively small part of their final projects. This may also be due to the fact that the students in Toronto didn’t appear to have the same focus on subject matter. Therefore, the Danish students’ benefit from the discussions with the Canadians was not as great as one might wish. This was also reflected in the students’ evaluations. One student says: The study trip and the students from Toronto had a low focus on climate projects, so it is difficult to include their perspective.

Some students did however manage to use this lack of climate awareness or interest they found among the Canadian students as a part of their understanding of the differences that still exist between the two countries, in spite of the many similarities. The optimal solution to this problem would have been that Natural Geography had been part of the study trip itself. For practical and logistical reasons, it is naturally not a possibility for all the subjects in the class to be part of the study trip. It is therefore important that other subjects

124  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

can find a way to participate without being physically present. This is despite the challenges achieved to a satisfying degree in this project. The students acquired a number of important subject competencies, an indepth understanding of Copenhagen’s and Toronto’s challenges and efforts in the climate field and at the same time incorporated all three components in the GCP curriculum. Where and How Are Signs of Global dannelse Seen?

Finally, the big question is whether there have been any signs of global dannelse in students. The GCP curriculum (Chapter 4) describes a global citizen as a student who, on the basis of their insight into global issues, can acquire the skills to contribute with solutions in an appropriate manner. This is exactly what the students achieved in this course. Naturally, it was never the goal that the students’ final products, the ‘innovative urban spaces’, would be the next projects to be implemented in Copenhagen or Toronto. Nor is it necessarily the goal that students in the future will become the next climatologists or urban planners. However, the course nonetheless contributed to the students’ global dannelse through the emphasis on ‘communication’ and ‘improvement’. It gave them a common scientific language, a global knowledge and a number of intercultural competencies. On the study trip to Canada, it gave them the opportunity to engage in discussions and projects with the Canadian students, teachers and experts. In this way, they experienced how their knowledge from the course can be used to overcome the cultural differences that may exist when working internationally with global problems and help them find the best, common solutions to this. Whether we live in Copenhagen or Toronto, or for that matter in another of the world’s big cities, climate adaptation, mitigation and sustainability development are a necessity to secure our common future, and Natural Geography is one of the disciplines that helps to create the citizens of the world who must find the right solutions to this. Observations of the Course – Associate Professor at the University of the Southern Denmark, Steen Beck

Pedagogical researcher and associate professor Steen Beck (from the University of Southern Denmark) observed the class just described and carried out a number of interviews with students. Steen Beck describes how the course is at the very core of the GCEd mindset at Rysensteen. Natural Geography is about the nature that surrounds mankind and the human influence on this nature by virtue of the way we use its resources. Following Klafki’s (1983) theory of ‘The doublesided opening’ as a starting point for dannelse (Chapter 2), the world opens up to the students, when they venture into nature and urban spaces.

Global Dannelse in Natural Geography  125

At the same time, the students are given the opportunity to open up to the world in a very concrete way, when they go out and explore it in the field. This is reflected in one of Steen Beck’s interviews, where a student expresses: ‘We are allowed to leave the classroom to feel and try…. It is quite motivating’. In an otherwise very ‘bookish’ school system, where the world first and foremost appears as signs and symbols on pages, the fieldwork is an approach that creates great opportunities for dannelse. Students also seem to benefit from the group-based structure they use in the classroom and in the field. The group work with its information gathering, division of labour, knowledge sharing, small discussions and concluding joint production of results mimics the kind of processes that they will encounter in their later working life. The students emphasise in their interviews that they actually gain an extra ‘something’ from this process, beside their knowledge of ‘Climate adaptation and mitigation’. The comprehensive and complex amounts of information and data that the fieldwork-based teaching presents to the students forces them to learn to investigate reality ‘on the spot’. They must learn to extract points from material that points in many different directions and that are not necessarily created with an academic teaching purpose in mind. The work with ‘authentic’ information places great demands, and it is to a large extent the ability to handle this, that is at the centre of the teachings in this course. One can always discuss whether this approach creates the necessary common direction in relation to the task, and during the course Steen Beck witnessed, there were moments of small communication breakdowns between the students. The question, however, is whether or not experience of this kind is part of the students’ process of Global dannelse. In any case, one should listen carefully to the students’ considerations about how in such processes one actually learns to develop strategies in relation to ‘bouncing back’, which can be said to be a preparation for situations the students will encounter again and again in their future working life beyond the walls of the school system. In a Klafki perspective, therefore, everything suggests that a project like this offers rich opportunities for ‘The double-sides opening’, i.e. an understanding of reality, which at the same time makes the reality visible and gives the students the opportunity to work investigatively and critically with it. Concluding Remarks

Climate change, Climate mitigation and Climate adaptation are some of the most important political, economic and scientific issues of the 21st century. Hence, they must constitute an essential part of any programme invested in GCEd teaching. In this chapter, Natural Geography teacher Anders Folden Brink has presented how he has worked with these issues under the umbrella of

126  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Rysensteen’s Global Citizenship Programme and the Danish curriculum of Natural Geography. During Brink’s course, his students studied the differences and similarities between Copenhagen’s and Toronto’s Climate mitigation projects and were asked to come up with their own innovative solutions to solving concrete Climate challenges in the two cities. His pedagogical and academic approach to the course not only combined traditional teaching goals with innovative aims, but also the changing of the physical arena of learning between the classroom and ‘real-world’ settings where Climate mitigation initiatives could be observed. The somewhat non-traditional pedagogical approach to the course was not without its challenges. But the student evaluations of the course, as well as the quality of their innovative products is a testament to the fact that engaging students in real-world problems on the basis of their own critical and innovative thinking can enhance both the students’ motivation and learning. As such, maybe Brink’s course and chapter may encourage other teachers to – at least sometimes – break with the routines of the traditional textbooks and classroom settings and in the words of Wolfgang Klafki open the world up to the students and the students up to the world. Worksheets, models and more examples can be found at www. gcedinpraxis.com.

12 Citizenship and Civicism – History as a School Subject and Global Dannelse Mads Blom

One may not – at first thought – consider the subject of history as relevant to GCEd. Because how can analysing the actions and thoughts of people of the past possibly help us to understand and manoeuvre in the globalised world of the 21st century? However, in this chapter, History teacher, Mads Blom, argues that studying the actions and thoughts of people of the past exercises exactly the skills and human traits needed to understand people of the present from different cultural and geographical backgrounds: Hence, Mads Blom argues that the subject of History is essentially a subject of intercultural understanding. Mads Blom provides an example of this by presenting and reflecting on a concrete course on the historical development of the concepts of citizenship and civicism. He explains how the students have worked with the different meanings of the concept over time, and how they by the end of the course were asked to relate this to the concept of global citizenship. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there – L.P. Hartley

Ideas about the necessity of history as a subject are many: is the subject an inspiration for generations to come or a guideline for us to avoid making the same mistakes as in the past? Is the subject a crucial tool in nation building and therefore essential in the shaping and understanding of national identity? Are investigations of the past a means of training methodological skills that are needed for any enlightened citizen, or is

127

128  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

research on your own past really an investigation of human nature and therefore an existentialist scrutiny of one’s self? Suggestions about what constitutes the essence of the subject are many and have been a source of heated debates for centuries. This chapter will not engage in this discussion, but rather use the concepts mentioned to discuss the subject’s ability to illustrate global issues. Furthermore, the following chapter will introduce yet another perspective on teaching history – namely, the subject’s ability to enhance the student’s intercultural understanding and competences and be a part of the work with the student’s global dannelse (see Chapter 2). For that purpose, the article will be grounded in the preliminary quote from L.P. Hartley (1953). The precondition of any historical investigation is to understand the past on its own premises. If we use the ethics, the mentality and the logic of our own age in our studies the result might very well be more judgemental than understanding. And the result of using the standards of our own age, our scrutinises will at best say more about us than about the subject of our investigation, and our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of medieval clergymen, of 17th-century peasantry or of the soldiers in the trenches in Flanders, is lost. Any historical investigation requires a methodological attempt at objectivity – on that we can all agree – but a humanistic methodology also demands an element of empathy: an understanding of a shared humanity and basic human conditions regardless of time and space. Empathy is a skill that needs to be trained, discussed and processed throughout life, but is primarily established in primary and secondary school. History as a subject is an obvious tool for the development of student empathy and the student’s work with the understanding of people from the past. If we can train them in the understanding of serfdom in the Roman Empire, merchants of the renaissance and the suffragette movement, we have the opportunity to use the same approach to develop the student’s skills in cultural encounters with people from other parts of the world and shape their intercultural competences. As in historical investigations, we will never understand a different contemporary culture on a one-to-one basis. We will all have our own personal views on the individual, society and right and wrong that are so deeprooted, that we could never put them aside to fully embrace the past and its peoples in their own logic and on their own terms, but through a methodological and empathic approach we can get closer if we use historical investigation as a tool – not only to learn about the past – but to learn about ourselves. Students’ investigations should be both about the past and about themselves and their engagement with what they consider as ‘strange’. This can then be transferred to the student’s travels to other countries where they will experience forms of living that confuse and provoke them, and in an attempt to rise above the tourist experience, they can benefit from the training they’ve had in their analytic experiences in history as a subject.

Citizenship and Civicism – History as a School Subject and Global Dannelse 129

To develop this sense of reflecting on oneself and enhance intercultural empathy (in this book described with the German term Bildung or the Danish almendannelse – (see Chapter 2), we have at Rysensteen Gymnasium decided to train all our students in historical investigations of the concept of citizenship as it has developed over the last 2500 years in terms of basic civic rights, conceptions of responsibility towards the state, engagement in electoral processes, and views on volunteer work. The reason for this focus has been that we observed our students while travelling with the school to different parts of the world. While the students in their own mind had a clear understanding of the meaning of the elements of citizenship as listed above, it was very much based on their own culture which they used to measure the rest of the world – the closer it was to their own society, the better it was. And we found that the students had many difficulties in conversations with people from different countries about these issues since different cultures had different connotations regarding these concepts and this led to confusions and at worst misinterpretations. We had the idea that the students through examinations of previous relations between the governing and the governed, rights and duties and conceptions of ‘the good citizen’ would come to the understanding that these often are determined by social status and are always defined through context. Through reading of primary sources from antiquity to modern times, the students were directed to define the understandings of citizenship in four categories: the liberal model with a focus on citizen’s rights and with no other obligations than payment of taxes and respect for the law; the republican model which demands an active participation and is seen as a political cooperation linked to the wellbeing of the nation state; the communitarian model that focuses on social and cultural communities; and the cosmopolitan model that regards all people on the planet as a part of the same community with a responsibility for each other across state borders (Thun, 2016). A list of historical examples was made: the antiquity; the Middle Ages; renaissance and humanism; enlightenment and revolutions; colonialism and imperialism; nationalism; democratisation and the rise of the class society in the 19th century; First World War and the rise of nations; totalitarian movements in the interwar period and the Holocaust; decolonisation and globalisation. More could without doubt be added, but since it is hard to have expertise in all periods, each history teacher had the freedom to use examples of their own choosing. As a theoretical/methodological frame, we chose conceptual history, because we find the methodology is a very useful tool to work with students’ preconceptions. The students could choose concepts such as ‘citizen’, ‘democracy’, ‘gender’, ‘the people’, etc. and examine how these concepts were interpreted in specific historical periods (synchronic analysis) and how the concept has changed over time (diachronic analysis) and

130  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

have affected the contemporary view on citizenship and civicism. The reason for this was – as mentioned earlier – an enhanced understanding of the past on its own premises, since concepts as well as other historical elements are bound to a specific context and cannot be assessed statically without an imminent danger of anachronisms. But it is to the same extent an exercise of dannelse, that will train the student’s ability to evaluate the use of concepts in different societies and cultures, that may differ although the concepts are the same. Danes and Turks might have a different interpretation of the concept of ‘democracy’, Germans and Singaporeans might not agree on the concept of ‘peoples’, and Americans and Chinese could have varying ideas of the concept of ‘state’. Outline of the Course

This course can take many different forms and many different periods can be used to exemplify how, for example, the meaning of ‘citizenship’ has varied over time (see Figure 12.1). In its most simple structure, the students work with three different periods, and I have suggested three primary sources to work with that are linked to the three periods: • Athenian democracy Primary source: Pericles’ funeral speech, 430 BCE • The age of enlightenment Primary source: Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 26th of August, 1789 • Fascism in the interwar period Primary source: Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour & Reich Citizenship Law, 15th September 1935 





Figure 12.1  Synchronic/diachronic analysis

Citizenship and Civicism – History as a School Subject and Global Dannelse 131

Table 12.1  Citizenship in different periods Periods to choose from:  Ancient Greece (philosophers)  Ancient Rome  The Middle Ages  The Renaissance  Philosophers of the Enlightenment  Absolutism  The rise of nationalism  The industrialisation  Post-war citizenship  The rise of welfare states  The age of globalisation  Historical examples from you own countries / regions   Present examples from your own countries / regions  And many more…

Many more periods can be added, but the course can be taught with only a few examples if time is an issue. The three periods have very different contexts and in Table 12.1 there are more examples of periods to choose from (see www.gcedinpraxis.com for exercises in conceptual history). The point is, that the concept of ‘Citizenship’ varies a lot, and should always be viewed through the eyes of the culture and the context it exists in. Examples From the Course

An illustration of the theme in two of the classes in the course is a focus on yet another period – the transition between the 18th and 19th century in Europe, where the concept of citizenship was much debated. The students have in the classes prior to this been introduced to the Renaissance philosophy of man with an elaboration on the basic ideas of humanism, and since this course could end up being a course on philosophy or the history of ideas, it was emphasised that this phenomenon should be tied to a historical understanding of the rise of the bourgeois in this era. The classes focused on the difference between patriotism and nationalism and on the consequences that these two positions had on the understanding of the rights and duties of a citizen (Figure 12.2). For each of the examples in the course’s 2500 years overview the students had to read primary sources, and in this specific class the students read a defence of the absolute monarchy in Denmark, but it might as well have been French (early 18th-century Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet) or English (mid-17th-century Thomas Hobbes). The sources argue for a very inclusive concept of citizenship, that included all the citizens of the unified state (Denmark, Norway, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and various colonies) regardless of ethnicity and culture, as long as all the citizens – rich and

132  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

Figure 12.2  Model for patriotism

Figure 12.3  Model for nationalism

poor, young and old, man or woman – worked in favor of the strength, skillfulness and flexibility of the state. The students should, through their analysis of texts, be able to identify and explain how this is an early example of a republican model of citizenship, where the interpretation of the citizen is very qualitative. Fundamental civic rights existed of course, but the citizen was evaluated through his loyalty, love and dedication to the state. Opposed to this we find the nationalistic ideas of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who introduced the concept of Volksgeist or ‘national spirit’ or ‘spirit of the people’ as the basic core of society. Instead of an idea of ‘the state’ as a demarcation from other people, ‘the nation’ was seen as a cultural community. Citizenship should no longer be assessed based on what you did, but rather based on who you were. In this interpretation, all people in the nation are linked through culture, possess the same culture and can therefore no longer operate with a qualitative conception of the civic virtues, but rather a communitarian model of citizenship – an equality based on the people’s cultural possession (see Figure 12.3). A possible (but not at the time intended) consequence of Herder’s nationalism could be democratisation, since neither the absolute kings nor the nobility possesses the national culture any more than the peasants on their estates, and Herder’s ideas break away from the

Citizenship and Civicism – History as a School Subject and Global Dannelse 133

hierarchical concept of citizenship as seen in patriotism and transfer this into a non-hierarchical instead. The students were divided into three groups and were asked to do (1) a classical analysis of the context of the primary sources, (2) a conceptual historical analysis of the concept of ‘people’ in the sources and (3) produce relevant questions about the sources. The analysis of the context (1) is relevant and necessary to distinguish history as subject from the timeless philosophical perspective that this theme – as mentioned earlier – could become and to force the students into viewing the source as a product of its time. It is central for the students to gain an understanding of the 18thcentury understanding of state and homeland as historically unique. The conceptual historical analysis (2) aims to assess the concept of ‘People’ both back in time and into our own time, where ‘the people’ has developed into one of the strongest concepts in political communication, and finally the work of producing relevant questions about the primary sources (3) exercises the student’s understanding of the outcome of analysis of the source as a consequence of the questions they approach it with. The three exercises illustrate how historical analysis is cultural analysis, and that insight into the thoughts and actions of previous social actors must always be evaluated based on their context. This consistent methodological approach will make sure that the students will be trained in questioning themselves, their preconceptions and their tendency to generalise about the past and instead viewing primary sources as connected to past structures. The discussion is rounded off with readings and analysis of a primary source by German philosopher Immanuel Kant who represents yet a third point of view – the cosmopolitan model of citizenship. Based on Kant’s categorical imperative, the students will be introduced to the idea that we have a responsibility to every person on the planet and that we therefore cannot differentiate between different people. The comparison of the three primary sources becomes more interesting by the fact that it was these very cosmopolitan thoughts that turned Herder towards nationalism based on a discontent with the relativism represented by cosmopolitanism. Effects on Almendannelse

Assessments indicate that the students gain a number of competences through this course. Firstly, their chronological understanding of world history is strengthened, and they develop their interpretations of coherence between perceptions of ‘the good society’ and the general development of society which is part of the basis of History as a subject. Furthermore, they are trained in a global mindset connected to understanding of the rights and duties of being a citizen. The course begins and ends with the students creating their own ideal of what citizenship should consist of and what a good citizen is in their own opinion. On the basis of the many principled discussions from the different historical periods the

134  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

students have a tendency to develop a certain consciousness about the elasticity and context relativity of the concept of citizenship and therefore we often find that their ideal of citizenship changes during the course. That being said, there is a risk of the students having difficulties in gaining an overview of the basic tendencies in the long diachronic perspective, and they might tend to get lost in specific historical examples. The course has relatively many concepts, and the students have to manoeuvre between methodological terms, theories on citizenship and concepts linked to the historical periods. There is always a risk when introducing complex concepts to students: instead of using the concepts to comprehend the world, they might end up with a very categorical understanding where the concept becomes the goal itself instead of a tool for understanding. There is a danger of losing the overview, and hence the teacher must use the concepts frequently in class to make the students familiar with them and make them a natural part of their academic vocabulary. One could also argue about the length of the course. Does it benefit the students that the course runs over 8 to 10 lessons, or do they get tired and lose perspective? Would a more compact course be preferable with the risk of a superficial understanding of the complex of problems? These are definitely perspectives for the teacher to consider, and the course must be designed based on the teacher’s own ideas and the skill levels of the class. Observations of the Course – Steen Beck

Pedagogical researcher, Professor Steen Beck from the University of Southern Denmark observed the class just described and carried out a number of interviews with students present at the class. He describes it as an ideological investigation characteristic and significant ideas about how the secularised human being or the early modern citizen can use his newly gained right to interfere in political discussions. The class has in this sense directed towards the historical past and the emergence of modern forms of thinking where Immanuel Kant’s theories of universal citizenship and Johan Gottfried Herder’s thoughts about peoples and nations continuously are discussed in relation to the topic of national self-determination and global corporation. It is clear from the interviews with the students that they don’t have any problems in seeing contemporary applicability in the topics from the classes. The teacher choses to focus on ideological- and social historical topics which have great relevance today in discussions of how to define the reality the individual has to act within: as a national reality founded in history, language and culture, or as a global reality founded in the shared beliefs of all mankind. They have no problems connecting the past and present and thereby establishing an ‘interest’ of history that leads towards

Citizenship and Civicism – History as a School Subject and Global Dannelse 135

epochal key issues. The single most interesting part of the students’ reflections on the national aspect is how nuanced they are and how much they seek complexity. They all believe that it is important to relate to global issues, but they unite this with a positive correlation with the national. One of the students even talked about love of the motherland, and that a historical understanding of the feelings and arguments that underlie a passion related to national culture and national shared belief is far more interesting than one would think, if you simply see yourself as a ‘global citizen’. Based on Wolfgang Klafki’s (1983) theory of ‘The double-sided opening’ (see Chapter 2) and the notion of the inner coherence of historical reality, the students have to dedicate themselves to active work on understanding this, and the observations show that this type of task creates different types of learning and that the students seem to engage in the conversations within the class. The interviews with the students show that the students to a high extent can use the teaching of history in their contemporary reflections on the state of the world in general and the relationship between global and local consciousness in particular. The teaching has sparked many thoughts in the students’ minds and made it possible for them to understand phenomena in new ways – not least through the process of decentring from their intuitive understanding of the present, that can be created through historical cognition, and the chronological approach sets the scene for a ‘finale’, where contemporary ways of thinking and the globalised world can be integrated in the historical ‘narrative’ and give the students a deep understanding of continuity and discontinuity in the historical process. Concluding Remarks

The process with the work with the primary sources and the theoretical framework seems to support the students’ global dannelse. They develop the tools for understanding of other cultures in time and space, and they gain a vocabulary for analysing and reflecting on the differences and similarities that they will be able to use in many other forms outside the history classroom. They realise the need for an empathy towards peoples that live or have lived under different circumstances than themselves due to the training in understanding of other cultures rather than evaluating and judging them based on their own life worlds and preconditions. History as a subject in itself won’t create global citizens, but it offers a set of tools and perspectives on culture that will enhance and contribute to future intercultural encounters. Worksheets, additional texts, models and more examples can be found at www.gcedinpraxis.com.

13 Where to Next for GCEd in Praxis? Final remarks by Anders Schultz

Globalisation is here to stay. It can be criticised, scrutinised and maybe even halted in specific arenas. But it will not go away. The global exchange of ideas and goods will, in all likelihood, continue to intensify in the 21st century. The same goes for encounters between people of different cultural backgrounds, and countries of differing interests and political opinions. So, as citizens we face a choice: we can either close our eyes and hope in vain to return to – at least perceived – easier and calmer times of a pre-globalised world. Or we can accept reality, and strive to make the processes of globalisation work for the benefit of all humankind. If we choose the former, then surely the ills of globalisation that we are currently experiencing in the world today – climate change, rising global inequality, discrimination of ethnic and cultural minority groups, pandemics, etc. will continue to haunt us all through the 21st century. But if we choose the latter, then maybe – just maybe – we will be able to find a way to solve our common problems and realise the undeniable positive potential of globalisation. So that encounters between different cultural and ethnic groups can be perceived as enriching and not as potential risks of conflict, technology and science can help – to an even larger degree than now – to solve the climate crisis, and the wealth created from global trade can be shared more equally between the people of the Global South and the Global North. This work of realising the positive potential of globalisation is, of course, much too comprehensive for us educators and school leaders to do on our own. But we can certainly contribute. The values and practices of GCEd hold enormous potential to influence and prepare our children and youths for becoming the positive change makers of tomorrow. Not by laying a heavy burden of responsibility on their shoulders of ills they had no part in creating, but by forming them as insightful and willpowered citizens. And not by telling them they are alone in this, fighting against former generations’ mistakes and ill intentions, but by letting them know there are many people out there, of all ages, who are 136

Where to Next for GCEd in Praxis?  137

hoping and working for the same change of direction of the processes of globalisation. Fortunately, many education institutions, school leaders, teachers and researchers around the world have taken the ideals and the practices of GCEd to heart. At Rysensteen, we know them. At conferences around the world, we have met them, and during our collaborations with our friends from our partner-schools, we talk with them every week. From Argentina, Spain, Egypt, China, Canada, Korea, Uganda, Poland, Singapore, USA, India, Croatia and Turkey – they are all committed to help forming students to become true global citizens with a mindset of wanting to make the world of tomorrow a little better than the world of today. In the literature as well, a substantial body of work exists on the topic of GCEd and global citizenship. However, very little of this is on the actual teaching praxis of GCEd. As educators, it is definitely helpful to read about the philosophical foundations or the political importance of GCEd, but we also need to be inspired as to how to actually implement the ideals of GCEd in education institutions. Therefore, it is our hope at Rysensteen that Global Citizenship Education in Praxis: Pathways for Schools will be the first of many, where educators present and discuss GCEd teaching praxis. In the book, we have presented our way of working with GCEd. A whole school Global Citizenship Programme with 15 homestay-based partner-school collaborations around the world, a GCP curriculum, a GCP-metro and obligatory integration of the GCP-aims into all subjects taught at the school (see Chapter 4). We by no means claim that this is THE WAY to work with GCEd, it is just OUR WAY, and therefore we do not expect anyone to copy – one to one – everything that we have done. We do, however, hope that readers will find some inspiration. Either in the structure of the Global Citizenship Programme, the homestaybased collaborations or the GCP-metro (Chapter 4). Or in the concrete teaching praxis. For example, from Chapter 7, by Mads Blom, about using the descriptive and the complex concept of culture when working with cultural understanding. Or from Chapter 10, by Lotte Bolander and Laura Bjerregaard Sørensen, about how to implement the cultural understanding concepts in French language teaching. Or from Chapters 9 and 11, about how to understand GCEd competences in a science context and to implement them in a course about climate change and climate change mitigation. Or in the way that we have worked with the difficult and important task of assessing and evaluating GCEd competences (Chapters 5 and 6 by Associate Professor Louise Tranekjær). But mostly we hope that readers of this book will be inspired by the concept of almendannelse (Chapter 2). Almendannelse, the idea that education must entail more than ‘just’ preparing for tests, for further education and to help students find their place in the workforce – it must also entail forming students as capable, competent and independent thinking

138  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

democratic citizens. Almendannelse has always been part of Danish education culture. It lies at the heart of how we at Rysensteen have approached our work with GCEd, because in essence to form democratic and altruistic-­minded and critically thinking citizens is the overall aim of the Global Citizenship Programme. Of course, readers of this book are probably already familiar and agree with the ideals of GCEd, and therefore also to a large extent the ideals of almendannelse. Therefore, one might ask, is there any new inspiration in the concept of almendannelse if you are already engaged in GCEd work? The answer to this is yes. Firstly, the influence of almendannelse on Danish education thinking gives GCEd teaching and GCEd programmes a natural political support that does not exist in other countries where test scores are prioritised above everything else. So, if you are reading this book as a GCEd-engaged education politician, we can only hope that you might be inspired to find ways of giving the teachers and school leaders of your country the political and structural support they need to successfully implement GCEd teaching in their schools. Secondly, the concept of almendannelse is both in theory and praxis connected to ALL subjects and activities at schools, because the idea is that in order to develop as democratic citizens, students need to know about everything from literature, to languages, to political science to maths and the natural sciences, etc. They also need to be presented with how this knowledge can actually help them understand ‘the real world’ and how they can use it to make qualified choices as citizens and consumers. Hence, almendannelse cannot be taught in a single ‘dannelse’s lesson’ once or twice a week. It needs to be present for students at all times and in all places. The same goes for GCEd teaching and learning. Global citizenship – the ideal of GCEd – requires broad knowledge about society, cultures and the natural world. Just as it requires a certain mindset of responsibility, tolerance, altruism and the willingness for positive change. Therefore, limiting GCEd teaching to a specific lesson – or course – will, in the thinking of Rysensteen, not suffice. Where to Next?

At Rysensteen, we feel that we have come a long way with our Global Citizenship Programme. But we are not satisfied, and we never will be. Because GCEd thinking and teaching must constantly be developed, both in academic content and pedagogy. If not, GCEd will lose its relevance with students and the outside world. At Rysensteen, we believe that the key-word for GCEd teaching in the years to come not only for our school but for all teachers and school leaders, who are invested in GCEd, is courage. Courage to break with the traditional thinking of teaching and the obsession of students, teachers

Where to Next for GCEd in Praxis?  139

and parents with test scores. So that we to an even larger degree can bring the outside world to students and students to the outside world, and more students can reflect like Anders Folden Brink’s student did on his Natural Geography fieldwork (Chapter 11). It was great to work a lot in the field, it gives a concrete understanding of the academic content of the subject. The project was exciting which made us students more involved in the teaching.

And we can focus even more on the intercultural encounters between students from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, so that more students might reflect like this Rysensteen student after her ­homestay-based study trip to Kampala, Uganda. I feel like no words are big enough to describe the journey, the culture, the nature we met in this country. I’m not the same after I got home… I wouldn’t trade the trip for anything, at all. It has been overwhelming, hard, eye-opening and fantastic. I come home with a renewed world understanding and perception of life.

But of course, even the most capable and courageous teachers and school leaders in the world cannot get rid of the obsession with tests and the comfort of traditional classroom teaching, and embrace GCEd thinking and teaching praxis alone. We need help from our politicians, so that our exam systems, curriculums, etc. support this way of thinking pedagogy and academic competences. To make this change in our education systems is, no doubt, difficult for politicians. One can imagine the questions they are anxiously asking themselves: what will it do to the academic level of the students? Will our country’s international competitiveness suffer? And will the parents be against it? These are understandable questions, but also based on a basic misunderstanding. GCEd teaching does not lower academic levels and weaken international trade competitiveness. On the contrary, it strengthens both, as we at Rysensteen know from our experience, because GCEd teaches exactly the competences needed to do well in the competition in the globalised world: critical thinking, intercultural competencies and using academic knowledge to understand and interact in and with the outside world. It does so at the same time as it forms human traits such as responsibility for the global community, empathy and the ability and willingness to participate in positive political change. The choice might be anxiety-provoking for politicians, but it is also utterly necessary that they make it. Because globalisation is here to stay. We need to make sure that our education system and teaching praxis reflect this, so that our children and youths can both benefit from its possibilities and take part in solving its problems.

14 GCEd – Necessary but not Sufficient Final remarks by Michael Byram

One of the noticeable features of this book and the programme of work from which it stems is the fact that it began with – and continues to be anchored in – the experience and views about education and almendannelse of practising teachers. It is a product above all of what one might call ‘professional intuitions’ about what education and almendannelse are and what are the needs of young people in the contemporary world. The programme was developed by teachers and then ‘theorised’ and evaluated by researchers post hoc. The contributions of researchers – Steen Beck, Marie Højlund Roesgaard and Louise Tranekjær – and of the editors – Anders Schultz and Mads Blom – have given a theoretical framework which ensures that the ‘solutions’ to the needs of students at Rysensteen can be understood and used by others in other schools and other countries. They ensure that the particularity of Danish education is comprehensible to those who work in other countries and education systems. They allow readers to understand the specific and highly detailed studies of global citizenship education in different parts of the Rysensteen curriculum, and in a range of school subjects. In this final chapter, I want to briefly present another framework which will allow readers to reflect on the substance of the GCEd as described in this book and on Rysensteen’ programme and also to see its significance in a broader context, which includes but goes beyond education. In doing so, I will suggest an apparent paradox, that global citizenship is important, indeed essential, but that Global Citizenship Education (GCEd) is not enough, that GCEd is ‘necessary but not sufficient’, to use a familiar phrase. ‘Necessary …’

Global citizenship is a matter of preparing young people for a ‘globalised’ world and a world that is more than ever in its history impacted 140

GCEd – Necessary but not Sufficient  141

by what human beings do – the Anthropocene age. There are many dimensions to analysing and understanding this new age, but here I shall concentrate on one: the multicultural nature of our individual societies and of the world as a whole, and what GCEd provides for young people in such societies. The term ‘multicultural’ usually refers to the make-up of one society, a society in which many ‘cultures’ or more precisely, ‘cultural groups’ exist, and live side by side often with minimal interaction. European countries including Denmark have had such characteristics for centuries. In Denmark, there has been a German-speaking minority and most if not all countries in Europe and beyond have had comparable ‘indigenous’ minorities. This situation was not however described as ‘multicultural’ until new minorities arrived in Europe, including Denmark, in the second half of the 20th century. At that point, it became much more obvious that different cultural groups lived side by side, but not always harmoniously. Any potential harmony was disrupted when ‘social problems’ arose – usually a scarcity of resources such as housing, proper education or employment – and conflicts began, both between established ‘majority’ and recently arrived ‘minority’ groups; and in some cases between ‘new minorities’. Because of a lack of harmonious living together, multiculturalism in Europe was described as a failure by politicians – by Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron and others – and a new paradigm was sought. The crucial feature of the new paradigm was ‘dialogue’. The year 2008 was designated the Year of Intercultural Dialogue by the European Union, and the Council of Europe produced a White Paper declaring the need for ‘intercultural dialogue’ as a crucial condition for harmonious ‘Living Together As Equals in Dignity’. This was the policy for countries, but I would argue that the world seen as one global and globalised society is itself multicultural. Cultural groups, i.e. nations, live side by side in a degree of harmony until it is broken by violent interactions, which often become wars. A White Paper for the world comparable to the one written for Europe would emphasise the need for intercultural (or international) dialogue as a condition for peace. Global Citizenship Education as developed at Rysensteen promotes intercultural dialogue. It does so indirectly by encouraging students to see the global dimension in all their studies. It does so directly when students visit another country as the pinnacle of their global citizenship education. The evaluation of the programme by Louise Tranekjær in an earlier chapter reveals inter alia the ways in which students’ intercultural understanding develops and can be recorded. There can therefore be no doubt that GCEd is necessary as part of young people’s preparation for living in the globalised Anthropocene society, a society that needs to move on from a ‘multicultural’ to an ‘intercultural’ perspective.

142  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

‘…but not sufficient’

The UNESCO report Measuring Intercultural Dialogue: A Conceptual and Technical Framework ‘highlights how intercultural dialogue can serve as a shared solution for advancing strategic priorities across different pillars of action’ (2020: 7). It has four aims: • Provide a background to the conceptual debates around intercultural dialogue. • Explain the different enabling conditions and drivers of ICD (intercultural dialogue) for conflict prevention and related goals. • Identify the entry points for actions to strengthen the enabling environment for intercultural dialogue. • Present a comprehensive measurement framework. It is the second aim that provides the wider context in which educational projects such as Rysensteen’s GCEd must be located. The report acknowledges the significance of education: Two core elements of education contribute to intercultural dialogue. The first is what is taught (or the curriculum) for its role in providing specific intercultural dialogue competences; the second is creating the spaces/ opportunities for intercultural dialogue engagement. (2020: 13)

And there is no doubt that Rysensteen GCEd includes both. At the same time, the report emphasises that there are structural and enabling factors which are necessary, i.e. the ‘collection of forces that create the potential for intercultural dialogue to contribute to goals such as social cohesion, reconciliation and conflict prevention’. These factors are listed as: Structural factors • • • • •

Stability and non-violence, Governance and citizenship, Freedom of expression, Horizontal equality, Social cohesion.

Enabling factors (Principles, values and competences) • • • •

Organization and leadership, Inclusion and representation, Linkages and coherency, Skills and values.

(UNESCO, 2020: 20)

‘Skills and values’ are also labelled as ‘intercultural competence’, an enabling factor that teachers and schools can and should promote, and which is integral to Rysensteen’s GCEd. It is however just one factor, and

GCEd – Necessary but not Sufficient  143

it is evident that the others are a matter for a society as a whole and in particular for its politicians. They are beyond the control of teachers. It is for this reason that education is not sufficient; it needs to be complemented by other social activities and societal instructions. Where does this leave schools and schoolteachers? What does it mean for readers of this book who may themselves be teachers or other social actors within education systems? Cooperation is one of the crucial elements of citizenship. It is a competence which the Rysensteen GCEd project seeks to develop in students. Problems are better solved through cooperation, and this principle is equally relevant to education systems. They must cooperate with other social institutions. Teachers cannot and should not expect, or be expected, to be solely responsible for resolving societal issues however important their role may be – and it is certainly important. Readers of this book will have acquired many insights and inspirations. They can draw upon these to contribute in a necessary way to the education of global citizens ready to meet the issues of a globalised world. At the same time, they as citizens themselves need to consider what actions they take in society to ensure that their work as teachers is complemented and enabled.

References

Alexander, B.K. (2004) Passing, cultural performance, and individual agency: Performative reflections on Black masculine identity. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 4 (3), 377–404. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Arendt, H. (1971) Thinking and moral considerations. Social Research 3, 417–446. Asia Society, Center for Global Education. See https://asiasociety.org/education/whatglobal-competence (accessed 14 June 2021). Barnell, R. (director) (2020) The Battle for Hong Kong [documentary]. Arlington, VA: Frontline, PBS Studios. Barth, F. (ed.) (1998) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Long Grove, Il: Waveland Press. Beck, S. (2017) Al den snak om læring. Copenhagen: Frydenlund. Bennett, M. (1986) A developmental approach to training intercultural sensitivity. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 10 (2), 179–186. Biesta, G. (2012) The future of teacher education – Evidence, competence or wisdom. Roser – Research of Steiner Education 3 (1), 8–21. Biesta, G. (2014) Den smukke risiko i uddannelse og pædagogik. Århus: Klim. Biesta, G. (2018) Undervisningens genopdagelse. Copenhagen: Klim. Billig, M. (1987) Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Billig, M. (1991) Ideology and Opinions. Studies in Rhetorical Psychology. London: SAGE. Billig, M. (1996) Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bland, B. (2017) Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow. Melbourne: Penguin Books. Byram, M. (1997) Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence (1st edn). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., Holmes, P. and Savvides, N. (2013) Teaching and learning intercultural communication in the second/foreign language classroom. The Language Learning Journal Special Issue 41 (3), 251–253. Castro, P., Lundgren, U. and Woodlin, J. (2013) Conceptualizing and Assessing International Mindedness (IM): An Exploratory Study. The Hague: International Baccalaureate. Castro, P., Lundgren, U. and Woodlin, J. (2015) International mindedness through the looking glass: Reflections on a concept. Journal of Research in International Education 14 (3), 187–197. Chan, M.K. (1997) The legacy of the British Administration of Hong Kong: A view from Hong Kong. The China Quarterly 151, 567–582. Chiba, M., Sustarsic, M., Perriton, S. and Edwards Jr, D.B. (2021) Investigating effective teaching and learning for sustainable development and global citizenship: Implications from a systematic review of the literature. International Journal of Educational Development 81, 102337. 144

Reference 145

Chitumba, W. (2013) University education for personhood through Ubuntu philosophy. International Journal of Asian Social Science 3 (5), 1268–1276. Christiansen, L.B., Galal, L.P. and Hvenegård-Lassen, K (2017) Organised cultural encounters: Interculturality and transformative practices. Journal of Intercultural Studies 38 (6), 599–605. Cohen, L., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. (eds) (2018) Research Methods in Education (7th edn, pp. 79–86). New York: Routledge. Council of Europe (2001) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Council of Europe (2008) White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue: ‘Living Together as Equals in Dignity’. Strasbourg: Committee of Ministers, Council of Europe. Council of Europe (2018) Reference Framework of Competencies for Democratic Culture, Vol. 1. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. https://www.coe.int/ en/web/campaign-free-tospeak-safe-to-learn/reference-framework-of-competences-for-democratic-culture. Daryai-Hansen, P. and Jaeger, C. (2015) The FREPA descriptors – An operationalisation to deepen and complement Byram’s and Deardorff’s definitions of intercultural competence. In E.J. Nash, N.C. Brown and L. Bracci (eds) Intercultural Horizons Vol. III – Intercultural Competence: Key to the New Multicultural Societies of the Globalized World (pp. 112–132). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Davies, L. (2006) Global citizenship: Abstraction or framework for action? Educational Review 58 (1), 5–25. de Bono, E. (1992) Teach Your Child How to Think. London: Penguin. de Sousa Santos, B. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Paradigm. Dervin, F. and Risager, K. (eds) (2015) Researching Identity and Interculturality. New York: Routledge. Dolin, J., Holten Ingerslev, G. and Sparholt Jørgensen (eds) (2017) Gymnasiepædagogik – En Grundbog. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Fleming, M. and Byram, M. (2019) Bildung (dannelse) and language education: Reflections on an integrated perspective. Sprogforum 69, 15–22. Fung, A. (2004) Postcolonial Hong Kong identity: Hybridising the local and the national. Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 10 (3), 399–414. Galal, L.P. and Hvenegård-Lassen, K. (2020) Organized Cultural Encounters: Practices of Transformation. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Galal, L.P., Hvenegård-Lassen, K. and Tranekjær, L. (2017) Organiserede kulturmøder i praksis. Sprogforum 64, 13–21. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Global Citizenship Curriculum, Rysensteen Upper Secondary. https://rysensteen.dk/ laereplan_og_progressionsplan. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Goren, H. and Yemini, M. (2017) Global citizenship education redefined – A systematic review of empirical studies on global citizenship education. International Journal of Educational Research 82, 170–183. Hartley, L.P. (1953) The Go-Between. London: Hamish Hamilton. Hastrup, K. (2004) Kultur - Det fleksible fællesskab. Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag. Himmelmann, G. (2006) Concepts and issues in citizenship education. A comparative study of Germany, Britain and the USA. In G. Alred, M. Byram and M. Fleming (eds) Education for Intercultural Citizenship: Concepts and Comparisons (pp. 69–85). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hobel, P. (2017) Planlægning af forløb og enkelttimer. In J. Dolin, G. Holten Ingerslev and H. Sparholt Jørgensen (eds) Gymnasiepædagogik – En Grundbog. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

146  Global Citizenship Education in Praxis

https://www.uvm.dk (2017) https://www.uvm.dk/-/media/filer/uvm/gym-laereplaner-2017/ stx/historie-a-stx-august-2017.pdf International Atomic Energy Agency. See www.iaea.org (accessed 25 October 2022). International Energy Agency. See www.iea.org (accessed 25 October 2022). Kemp, P. (2013) Verdensborgeren – pædagogisk og politisk ideal for det 21. Århundrede. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels. Klafki, W. (1983) Kategorial dannelse og kritisk konstruktiv pædagogik. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck. Klafki, W. (2005) Dannelsesteori og didaktik – Nye studier. Copenhagen: Forlaget Klim. Klenowski, V., Askew, S. and Carnell, E. (2006) Portfolios for learning, assessment and professional development in higher education. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 31 (3), 267–286. Korsgaard, O. (2012) Medborgerskab og social poesi: Hvad vil det sige at være borger? MiD Magasin (26), 4–7. Løvlie, L. and Standish, P. (2002) Introduction: Bildung and the idea of a liberal education. Journal of Philosophy of Education 36 (3), 317–340. Miller, D. (2013) The idea of global citizenship. In S.R. Ben-Porath and R.M. Smith (eds) Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (pp. 227–243). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ng, J.Y. and Blumberg-Kason, S. (eds) (2018) Hong Kong Noir. New York: Akashic. OECD PISA (2018) Global competence. See https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2018-globalcompetence.htm (accessed 14 June 2021). Oxfam. See https://www.oxfam.org.uk/education/who-we-are/what-is-global-citizenship/ (accessed 14 June 2021). Oxley, L. and Morris, P. (2013) Global citizenship: A typology for distinguishing its multiple conceptions. British Journal of Educational Studies 61 (3), 301–325. Papastephanou, M. (2012) Thinking Differently About Cosmopolitanism. Theory, Eccentricity and the Globalized World. New York: Routledge. Patten, C.F. (1997) Hong Kong Handover Ceremony Address. American Rhetoric. See https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/chrispattenhongkonghandoverceremony. htm (accessed 25 October 2022). Risager, K. (2018) Representations of the World in Language Textbooks. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Risager, K. and Tranekjær L. (2019) Intercultural dialogue in a critical and multilingual perspective. In U. Lundgren, P. Castro and J. Woodin (eds) Educational Approaches to Internationalisation through Intercultural Dialogue: Reflections on Theory and Practice (pp. 139–149). New York: Routledge. Roberts, C. and Sarangi, S. (eds) (1999) Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediations, and Management Settings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Stern, E. (ed.) (2005) Evaluation Research Methods. London: Sage. Street, B.V. (1993) Culture is a verb: Anthropological aspects of language and cultural process. In D. Graddol, L. Thomson and M. Byram (eds) Language and Culture (pp. 23–43). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Submarine Cable Map. See http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ (accessed 25 October 2022). Svarstad, L.K. (2018) A cultural studies approach to intercultural encounters and interculturality. In H. Juul (ed.) Foreign Language Education: Between Topic and Education Theory (pp. 45–66). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels. The News Lens (2017) Generation HK and the Hong Kong Identity [podcast]. https:// international.thenewslens.com/article/72525. Thun, V. (2016) Liberal, communitarian or cosmopolitan? The European Commission's conceptualization of EU citizenship. ARENA Report 1 (16). https://www.sv.uio.no/ arena/english/research/publications/arena-reports/2016/arena_rapport_1_16_thun. pdf.

Reference 147

Tranekjær, L. (2007) Kulturmøder til forhandling. Tidsskriftet Antropologi 56, 87–111. Tranekjær, L. and Suarez-Krabbe, J. (2016) De blinde pletter i verdensborgerens blik. Sprogforum 62, 12–20. UNESCO (2016) Action for climate empowerment: Guidelines for accelerating solutions through education, training and public awareness. See https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ ark:/48223/pf0000246435 (accessed 9 August 2021). UNESCO (2020) Measuring Intercultural Dialogue: A Conceptual and Technical Framework. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO (2021) What is global citizenship education? See https://en.unesco.org/themes/ gced/definition#:~:text=Global%20Citizenship%20Education%20(GCED)%20aims, %2C%20socio%2Demotional%20and%20behavioural (accessed 25 October 2022). United Nations homepage. See https://sdgs.un.org/goals (accessed 14 June 2021). Van Lier, L. (2000) From input to affordance: Social interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J.P. Lantolf (ed.) Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning (pp. 245–259). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zivkovic, S. (2019) The need for a complexity informed active citizenship education program. Australian Journal of Adult Learning 59 (1), 53–75.

Index

Advocacy 19, 21, 23, 24 Almendannelse 10–11, 24–26, 29, 34, 61, 75–77, 88, 95, 107, 112, 129, 133, 137–138 Anthropocentric 23 Assessment 18, 40–41, 45, 53–57, 62–65, 70–72, 89, 105, 135

Environmental 12, 19, 21–25, 97, 98, 101, 116–118, 142 Epistemology 48, 51, 53 Essentialism 72, 76, 77, 80 Evaluation 13, 23, 43–49, 52, 54–59, 66, 71, 74, 122, 123, 126, 141 Extra curricular activities 33–39

Bildung 9, 10, 11, 23, 24, 25, 26, 61, 129

GCP metro 32, 137 Global Citizenship Education (GCEd) 3, 10, 17–18, 20–23, 25–27, 31, 32, 36, 37–39, 41–42, 50, 73–75, 91, 109, 124, 137–143 Global Citizenship Program (GCP) 3–4, 18, 20, 22, 23–30, 32–46, 48–50, 53–55, 57, 59, 90, 109, 117, 126, 137–138, 140, 141 Global South 1, 20, 25, 36, 136 Globalisation 1–3, 19, 21, 24, 129, 131, 136, 137, 139

Climate 13, 19, 20, 25, 31, 36, 75, 99, 100, 105, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 136, 137 Curriculum 3–4, 12, 23, 28–35, 37, 39–42, 46–51, 54, 74–75, 87, 90, 99–101, 104, 110, 117–119, 122, 124, 126, 137, 140, 142 Common sense 48, 51–53, 64, 71–72, 82 Competences 5, 11, 13, 14, 16, 20, 39, 43, 45–48, 50–51, 55–56, 61–63, 66, 71, 75, 98, 102–108, 111, 112, 115, 128, 133, 137, 139, 142 Cosmopolitan 21, 23–25, 129, 133 Covid 19 1, 22, 38, 40 Cross curricular 24, 31, 33–38 Cultural encounters 24, 30, 50–51, 58–67, 69–72, 76–77, 81–84, 88, 108, 114–115, 128, 135–136, 139

History 24, 33–35, 46, 48–50, 52, 61, 67, 74, 82, 88, 90–92, 98, 111, 113–114, 127–129, 131, 133–135 Home stay 31, 35, 40, 54, 82, 137, 139 Human rights 1, 3, 4, 19, 21, 23–25, 53, 90–91, 95, 129, 131 Identity 14, 15, 75, 77, 80, 82, 87, 89–96, 112–114, 127 Implementation 44, 45, 49, 54, 56, 121 Informal learning 43, 46, 47, 50, 55 Intercultural understanding 2, 24, 29, 33, 35, 40–41, 46, 54–59, 61–67, 70–78, 85, 88, 91–97, 107–109, 113, 128, 141 Intercultural education 23, 29, 39, 43, 51, 54, 56, 59, 61, 66, 70, 75, 77–78, 91- 93, 95, 107–109, 113, 124, 128, 139, 141–142

Dialogue 16, 26, 38, 53–54, 63, 67, 69, 73, 83, 141, 142 Education system 2, 10, 12, 19, 20, 29, 31, 33, 39, 64, 70, 75, 76, 108, 110, 114, 139, 140, 143 Epochal key problems 29, 73, 97, 135 Democratic 2, 3, 11, 13, 18, 20, 25, 26, 29, 88, 89, 107, 129, 138 Empathy 2, 5, 24, 29, 85, 95, 128, 129, 135, 139 148

Index 149

Internationalisation 20, 27, 44, 57 Language 10, 13, 21, 28, 36, 61, 65, 74–76, 83, 85, 87–88, 107–112, 134 Management 13, 27, 36, 38, 40, 42–43, 48–49, 51, 55–56, 70–71 MUN 36, 53, 65–66 Natural Science 20, 28, 36, 40–41, 97– 100, 102, 104, 117–119, 137–138 NGO 20, 33, 36–38, 42 OECD 17–18, 20, 45, 56 Parents 41–42, 85, 139 Partner schools 22, 26–29, 34–36, 38– 40, 42, 58, 73, 90, 117, 123, 137 Pedagogics 1, 3, 31–33, 37–38, 41, 46, 58–59, 65, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 85, 107, 110, 124, 126 PISA 13, 17–18, 20, 45

Relations 22, 35, 52, 66, 69, 83, 108 Religion 11, 23, 29, 46, 50, 53, 64, 75, 111–112 SDG 18–22, 24–26, 31, 35–36, 74 Constructivism 13, 35, 80, 83 Sustainability 17–20, 22–23, 30–31, 39, 74–75, 97, 117, 120–121, 123–124 Student interview 46, 125, 134–135 Study trips 35, 37, 40, 63, 65, 67, 71, 121, 123, 124, 139 Teacher interview 46, 49–50, 54, 56, 121 UGEN 38 UN 17–19, 23–24, 30–31, 35, 36, 41, 46, 53, 65 UNESCO 19, 22, 29, 142 Whole school program 27–29, 37–39, 42, 137