Becoming Otherwise: Ontology, Selfhood, and the Future of Global Education

By Simon Lightman (UCL Institute of Education)

Summary

Global education stands at a crossroads. International frameworks have long oriented learners toward acquiring competencies for responsible participation in an interconnected world. Yet in conditions of compound crisis, including ecological breakdown, democratic erosion, and epistemic fragmentation, this competency-based orientation begins to strain. This piece proposes a deeper ontological shift, from understanding learning as the acquisition of individual capacities toward understanding it as a formative process through which learners and institutions come to inhabit different ways of being in relation to others and the world. It explores why this shift matters for young people navigating profound uncertainty and considers how schools might cultivate humility, interdependence, and ethical attention as foundations for more just and sustainable futures.

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Global Education in a Time of Polycrisis

Young people today encounter global challenges not as distant abstractions but as lived, affective realities. Ecological breakdown, democratic erosion, widening inequality, and epistemic fragmentation no longer appear as discrete challenges but as mutually reinforcing dynamics that structure contemporary life (Albert, 2024). These conditions shape how futures are imagined and how agency is experienced, often through emotions such as anxiety, moral distress, and uncertainty (Pihkala, 2020; Zembylas, 2024).

Policy responses to this moment have largely framed global education as a matter of preparedness. Learners are to be equipped with competencies that enable responsible participation in an interconnected world, commonly articulated through skills such as critical thinking, empathy, intercultural understanding, and civic engagement (UNESCO, 2015). This framing has helped secure legitimacy for global learning within formal education systems, yet it also reveals a limit.

The language of competencies struggles to register the depth of the crisis to which it responds, particularly where learning is framed in instrumental terms that prioritise measurable outcomes over shifts in worldview and educational purpose (Sterling, 2001; Vare & Scott, 2007). What is increasingly at stake is not simply whether learners acquire the appropriate skills, but how education shapes forms of selfhood in conditions of profound ecological and social instability. As contemporary crises register at the level of identity, meaning, and agency, education operates not only as preparation for action but as a formative space in which orientations toward responsibility, relation, and the future are produced and normalised (Biesta, 2013).

From Competencies to Ontology

Learning is commonly structured into domains, translated into indicators, and positioned as the acquisition of transferable capacities linked to measurable outcomes (UNESCO, 2015; UNESCO, 2023). Analyses of global citizenship education further note that, even within critical and justice-oriented approaches, this framing often centres individual learner attributes and competencies rather than shifts in relational orientation or educational purpose (Andreotti, 2016; Pashby et al., 2020). Within this logic, the learner appears as a largely autonomous subject who develops knowledge and values that can later be applied to global challenges. Responsibility becomes externalised, something one takes up rather than something one inhabits, and the world appears as an object of concern rather than a field of entanglement.

This grammar encodes an ontology, a way of understanding what it means to be, to know, and to be responsible. It presumes separation between learner and world, knower and known, subject and context. While this assumption has been widely critiqued within global citizenship education scholarship, it continues to shape how educational structures are designed and how learning is measured (Andreotti, 2016; Pashby et al., 2020).
In conditions of polycrisis, these assumptions begin to strain. Ecological breakdown in particular exposes the limits of educational models that position learners outside the systems they study. If young people are already embedded within ecological systems experiencing profound disruption, the challenge is no longer how to educate about interdependence, but how to educate within it. This requires a shift from instrumental framings toward an ontological orientation in which education is understood as shaping how learners come to be in relation with a shared, fragile world.

Such a shift does not reject knowledge, rigour, or structure. It reframes their purpose. Knowledge becomes a way of attending to reality rather than mastering it. Learning becomes a process of reorientation rather than accumulation. Education is understood less as transmission of content and more as formation of persons, a practice through which dispositions, perceptions, and relations are cultivated.

Education as Formation: Becoming Otherwise

To speak of becoming otherwise is to foreground the formative dimension of education that is often implicit but rarely acknowledged. Educational structures, including curriculum design, assessment regimes, timetables, leadership practices, and the exercise of authority, participate in shaping dispositions, perceptions, and ways of relating. Education always produces subjects, whether or not this formative role is explicitly recognised (Biesta, 2013).

Becoming otherwise names an educational orientation in which learners are invited into different ways of inhabiting responsibility, uncertainty, and plurality. It resists the assumption that the task of education is to prepare individuals for stable futures, recognising instead that assumptions of social, ecological, and economic continuity have already fractured (Albert, 2024). Education becomes a site where young people learn how to orient themselves ethically and relationally within uncertainty, rather than in preparation for a knowable future.

This orientation resonates with longstanding distinctions in sustainability education between instrumental and transformative learning, where the latter emphasises shifts in worldview and purpose rather than optimisation of existing systems (Sterling, 2001; Vare & Scott, 2007). What is distinctive in an ontological framing is the explicit emphasis on how selfhood itself is formed through educational practice.

From this perspective, global education is concerned less with producing competent actors and more with cultivating capacities for attentiveness, humility, ethical discernment, and relational agency. These are forms of agency exercised through participation in shared worlds rather than by autonomous individuals. Such capacities are not skills in the conventional sense. They emerge through encounter, lived experience, and sustained engagement with others.

From Egoic to Ecosystemic Learning

Much modern schooling operates within what might be called an egoic model of the learner, implicitly prioritising autonomy, performance, and individual mastery within market-oriented systems. Here, egoic functions as analytic shorthand for educational logics that treat knowledge as a resource to be accumulated and success as individual attainment measured through outcomes.

This tendency is not limited to overtly instrumental or performance-driven approaches. Learner-centred pedagogies, despite their emancipatory intentions, can also reproduce individualistic assumptions when learning remains organised primarily around personal choice, self-expression, and individual development without a corresponding reorientation toward relational responsibility and shared worlds.

An ecosystemic orientation begins from a different premise. Selfhood is understood as emergent rather than enclosed, shaped through relations with others, institutions, histories, and more-than-human systems. Learning involves shifts in perception, responsibility, and belonging, not merely cognitive acquisition. Agency is relational rather than individualised.

This distinction matters because global education frequently adopts the language of interdependence while remaining organised around egoic assumptions (Andreotti, 2016; Pashby et al., 2020). Without an ontological shift, calls for global responsibility risk being layered onto unchanged architectures of separation. An ecosystemic orientation, by contrast, brings ecological thinking into the heart of educational purpose. It recognises that learners are already embedded within living systems and that ethical responsibility arises from participation rather than abstract principle or individual moral choice.

This orientation also creates space for attending to emotion and affect as epistemic resources. Young people’s climate anxiety, grief, and moral distress are not problems to be managed but signals of how learners are making sense of ecological conditions and their ethical implications (Pihkala, 2020). When affect is excluded from learning, education risks severing knowledge from lived experience.

Whole-School Approaches and the Challenge of Depth

Whole-school approaches to sustainability and global education are often presented as the mechanism through which such reorientation can occur. By integrating sustainability across curriculum, governance, operations, and institutional ethos, they aim to embed global responsibility into the fabric of school life rather than treating it as a discrete subject or enrichment activity (Tilbury & Wortman, 2004).

In practice, these approaches often generate what might be called fragile coherence. Schools develop policies, audits, and strategic frameworks that signal alignment and commitment, while everyday pedagogical and cultural practices remain largely unchanged (Mogren et al., 2018; Eames et al., 2010). The appearance of transformation is achieved without corresponding shifts in how learning is lived at the level of classroom practice, relational culture, and institutional decision-making.

A familiar example is student voice. Schools may establish councils or forums that solicit opinion, yet leave epistemic authority and consequential decision-making intact. Participation becomes representational rather than relational, and agency is performed rather than practised. Such arrangements reproduce the separation they seek to overcome.

From an ontological perspective, the issue is not a lack of frameworks or good intentions, but a misalignment between structure and meaning. Institutions may formally enact sustainability without reorienting how decisions are made, how authority is exercised, or how responsibility is shared. The challenge is therefore not simply to design better frameworks, but to cultivate institutional conditions where genuine shifts in relation and responsibility can occur.

Leadership, Affect, and Epistemic Responsibility

If whole-school approaches are to move beyond fragile coherence toward genuine transformation, leadership must be understood differently. Leadership for global education is not primarily a technical function but an ethical and ontological practice. It involves holding uncertainty, resisting premature closure, and creating conditions in which reflection, experimentation, and learning can flourish.

Such leadership attends explicitly to the emotional life of institutions. Climate-related emotions, including anxiety, grief, and moral tension, constitute epistemic resources. They signal how learners and educators are making sense of ecological conditions and their ethical implications (Zembylas, 2024). Normalising these emotions as appropriate responses rather than problems to be managed supports deeper learning and transformation.

This orientation also reshapes how youth agency is understood. Student voice initiatives often position young people as future actors rather than present epistemic agents. An ontological approach foregrounds epistemic responsibility, including whose knowledge is recognised as valid, how participation is structured, and whether young people are invited into genuinely consequential forms of decision-making.

When learners are recognised as co-participants in shared worlds, education becomes a practice of collective responsibility rather than moral rehearsal.

Implications for Practice

An ontological reorientation has several practical implications.

1. Curriculum and pedagogy: Rather than adding global or sustainability content, schools might ask what forms of selfhood and relationality are cultivated through teaching and assessment. Knowledge can become a way of attending to reality rather than mastering it, with pedagogies emphasising encounter, dialogue, and lived experience.
2. Institutional structures: Whole-school approaches require shifts in how authority is exercised and decisions are made. This may involve collective deliberation, genuinely incorporating student perspectives in consequential decisions, and ensuring sustainability shapes institutional operations, not only curriculum.
3. Teacher professional development: Educators need support in holding uncertainty, working with emotion, and cultivating relational pedagogies. This calls for sustained professional learning communities focused on formation rather than technique alone.
4. Leadership practice: Leaders can attend intentionally to the emotional and relational dimensions of change, creating safe containers for grief and anxiety while sustaining commitment to transformation.
5. Assessment and accountability: While challenging within current regimes, schools might explore more holistic approaches that attend to shifts in perception, belonging, and relational capacity alongside conventional metrics.

Conclusion: Education as Ontological Practice

This is not a rejection of global education but a call for its deepening. In a time of polycrisis, education oriented primarily toward competencies risks producing learners who may be technically capable yet insufficiently supported in navigating questions of meaning, responsibility, and agency under conditions of uncertainty.

Becoming otherwise offers a different horizon. It frames global education as an ontological practice concerned with how learners and institutions come to inhabit interdependence, responsibility, and plurality. From this perspective, whole-school approaches are not blueprints to be implemented but fragile experiments in institutional becoming. Their value lies not in procedural alignment but in their capacity to cultivate conditions where genuine shifts in relation and responsibility can occur.
If global education is to meet the ethical demands of the present, it must attend not only to systems and skills, but to selfhood, relation, care, and the conditions through which learning becomes formation. The future of global education depends on whether this ontological turn is taken seriously, not as an added dimension, but as the heart of educational purpose itself.

References

• Albert, M. (2024). Governing the polycrisis. Cambridge University Press.
• Andreotti, V. (2016). The political economy of global citizenship education. Routledge.
• Biesta, G. (2013). The beautiful risk of education. Paradigm.
• Eames, C., Cowie, B., & Bolstad, R. (2010). Sustainability in schools. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 11(3), 263–277.
• Mogren, A., Gericke, N., & Scherp, H.-Å. (2018). Whole-school approaches to ESD. Environmental Education Research, 25(4), 508–531.
• Pashby, K., da Costa, M., Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2020). A meta-review of global citizenship education. Review of Educational Research, 90(2), 147–189.
• Pihkala, P. (2020). Eco-anxiety and education. Sustainability, 12(23).
• Sterling, S. (2001). Sustainable education. Green Books.
• Tilbury, D., & Wortman, D. (2004). Whole-school approaches to sustainability. UNESCO.
• UNESCO. (2015). Global citizenship education: Topics and learning objectives.
• Vare, P., & Scott, W. (2007). Learning for a change. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 1(2), 191–198.
• Zembylas, M. (2024). Emotion and climate education. Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Short biography 

Simon Lightman is an educator and researcher working at the intersection of global citizenship education, sustainability, and educational philosophy. He completed an MA in Global Learning at UCL’s Institute of Education and has forthcoming journal articles and book chapters on ontology, selfhood, and transformative approaches to global and sustainability education.

Links to further reading

• Andreotti, V. (2016). The political economy of global citizenship education. Routledge.
• Biesta, G. (2013). The beautiful risk of education. Paradigm.
• Pashby, K., da Costa, M., Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2020). A meta-review of global citizenship education. Review of Educational Research, 90(2), 147–189.
• Pihkala, P. (2020). Eco-anxiety and education. Sustainability, 12(23).
• Sterling, S. (2001). Sustainable education. Green Books.
• Zembylas, M. (2024). Emotion and climate education. Educational Philosophy and Theory.