The types of global citizenship education that children and young people are exposed to within and beyond schools has important consequences for how they understand themselves and the world, including their role in society, their relationships with others and their environment, and their capacity to affect change.
This webinar offers a critique of dominant ways of thinking about the Anthropocene generation in terms of their innocence/vulnerability, their exceptionalism/heroism, their mental health/eco-anxiety, and their agency/activism. The presenters will argue that mainstream educational thinking that draws on these dominant frames has a range of problematic effects, ranging from: obscuring more uncomfortable realities about some children and youths’ implication in the ecological crisis; occluding more nuanced and expansive encounters with responsibility and vulnerability; and bolstering pedagogical preoccupations which serve to reinscribe “business as usual (but greener)” (BAU-G) politics rather than the system change that is so desperately required (Baskin, 2019).
Drawing on specific literature and examples from the Japanese context, the presenters will outline a range of alternative approaches to global citizenship informed by “de-growth” and post-materialist perspectives as well as non-Western and decolonial scholarship (e.g., Fraser, 2022; Hickel, 2020; Saito, 2022; Rappleye, Komatsu and Silova, 2024) which offer children and young people a concrete vision of what an alternative to BAU-G looks like (Arya & Henn, 2023).
Audrey Bryan is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Human Development at Dublin City University’s Institute of Education. She has published widely in the fields of global citizenship education and climate change education, from a critical perspective. Her scholarship addresses the question of how to teach difficult (ecological) knowledge to learners based in emissions-intensive societies and the associated psycho-affective dimensions of teaching and learning. She is Section Editor (with Yoko Mochizuki) of the Climate Section of the Springer Handbook of Children and Youth Studies (2024).
Yoko Mochizuki is an associate member of the EDA (Éducation, Discours, Apprentissages) laboratory, an interdisciplinary research unit of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Université Paris Cité (formerly Université Paris Descartes). She holds a PhD in comparative and international education, with distinction, from Columbia University. Previously, she was Head of Policy at UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in New Delhi. Before that, she served as a programme specialist for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change at UNESCO Paris and an ESD specialist at the United Nations University.
Teacher Educators; Student Teachers; Undergraduate and PostGraduate Students; Curriculum Developers; education policy makers.
This event, to be held at 16:00 GMT on the 29 April 2025, will last around 90 minutes and will be hosted via Zoom. Please register via Zoom using the button below.
This event is part of a series of online events run by the Academic Network for Global Education & Learning. The series is aimed at Global Education professionals, as well as anyone with an interest in research in the fields of Development Education, Global Citizenship Education, Human Rights Education, Education for Sustainable Development, Education for Peace, and Intercultural Education. This event, along with the other activities of the ANGEL network, is co-funded by the European Union.**
** The establishment of this network and website has been made possible with funding support from the European Commission. The activities and publications of the network are the responsibilities of the organisers, the Development Education Research Centre, and can in no way be seen as reflecting the views of the European Commission.
Conference organised by the UNESCO Chair in Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in Higher Education looks at educational practices and research experiences.
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Carousel image attribution: "panoramio (2525)" by William “Patrick” Ma. Under CC 3.0
The establishment of this network and website has been made possible with funding support from the European Commission.
The activities and publications of the network are the responsibilities of the organisers, the Development Education Research Centre, and can in no way be seen as reflecting the views of the European Commission.
