Rethinking Global Citizenship Resources For New Teachers: Promoting Critical Thinking and Equity

Abstract

Global citizenship education, or education aiming to develop students' knowledge with transnational challenges, has become increasingly recognized as an important field internationally, requiring a particular set of pedagogical understandings and tools to facilitate its learning. Traditionally, global citizenship education resources have been developed by non-governmental organizations to aid teachers in classroom presentations and to profile issues of concern to their constituencies. Understandably, some of these resources require revision to correspond with students’ grade levels, learning styles, subject-based disciplines, and broad issues of equity. Accordingly, we have developed a guide for teacher education candidates and novice teachers based on a collaborative inquiry model that we have called a "Primer” in order to assess the compatibility, equity and adaptability of classroom-ready global citizenship education materials. Our aims were to understand how pre-service candidates made use of the Primer as a means to integrate global citizenship education topics into the regular curriculum. Based on our research that was informed by a mixed-method methodology consisting of focus groups, journal reporting, and survey data, we document teacher education candidates' experiences with the Primer. Our research of how teacher candidates make use of the Primer offers evidence that the teacher candidates' desire and ability to teach global citizenship themes through classroom-ready resources has been facilitated by utilizing the Primer.