The global citizenship and multilingual competences toolkit

gcmc

 

 

 

 

 

Unibo structure involved: Department of Modern Languages, Literature, and Cultures - LILEC
Scientific manager: Claudia Borghetti
Unibo Team: Ana Maria Gabriela Beaven
Project Web page: https://gcmc.global
Erasmus+ Action type: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices Strategic Partnerships for school education
Project reference: 2020-1-AT01-KA201-077947
Start Date: 1 September 2020
End Date: 31 August 2023
Budget:      Total: 271,275      UNIBO: € 50,827 

Coordinator
UNIVERSITÄT GRAZ (AT)

Partners
STICHTING FRYSKE AKADEMY (NL)
UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE (UK)
NEOSMART GMBH (DE)
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA (IT) 

Summary
Context and background of the project:
Global citizenship education (GCE) is a core part of many contemporary educational policies and is in line with UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals. It envisages an active, empowered role for citizens in sharing a sense of responsibility for global concerns. It strives towards “a common understanding of shared humanity on a fragile planet coupled with a commitment to addressing social problems through engaged public participation” (Gaudelli, 2016, p. 7). Numerous curricula across the world already include forms of global citizenship and it is typically situated within transversal competences which are the responsibility of every educator of every subject. Yet, training for GCE remains relatively scarce and it is rarely systematically part of educational programmes for teacher development.

An often neglected aspect of global citizenship educational programmes is an explicit awareness of linguistic plurality and the integration of plurilingual pedagogies. Yet, as Torpsten (2011, p. 4) argues, “when skills increase in different languages, [people] become aware of their identities as multilingual persons [as well as] their possibilities of being active, multicultural, global citizens”. Therefore, one of our key innovative objectives is to explicitly integrate the multilingual perspective into a social justice informed notion of global citizenship.

Objectives of the project: Our aim is to provide online teacher development resources to support secondary teachers of all subjects in learning ways to integrate GCE goals including plurlingualism into their daily practice in sustainable ways which will be motivating for them as educators and invaluable for their learners. Our project will create digital resources to help teachers to understand, gain knowledge about, practice, and integrate global citizenship goals through a plurilingual approach into their teaching practices.

Participants:
We seek to address a global population of teachers of all subjects working in primarily secondary, but also tertiary contexts through the website and professional development resources. An additional audience is teacher educators who may wish to utilize the toolkit in their own education programmes with secondary teachers.

Activities:
To meet these aims, we will develop three main forms of output. Firstly, we will gather examples of good practice in respect to GCE and plurilingual pedagogies. Based on these, we will create a framework for teachers to self-assess their competences. The examples of good practice will also form the input basis of our multimodal online course and toolkit for teacher professional development, which is our second major output. The website, which houses the course, will also facilitate community action by participants who can upload localizations and subject-specification adaptations and innovations. The final output is an accompanying manual for teacher educators who may wish to adapt the online course and toolkit for use in their teacher education programmes.

Results and impact:
The online course and toolkit will inspire a large number of teachers and teacher educators across the globe and in diverse subject areas to consider how they can contribute to the EDU2030 challenge of meeting the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals. One key way to do this is through Global Citizenship Education and increased respect for plurilingual and multicultural diversity. Helping educators to know how to make such goals part of their regular pedagogical practices without it feeling like an additional burden is key to the success of this vital educational innovation.