Preparing secondary school girls for global citizenship

Abstract

With increasing global interconnectedness students need to be equipped for the global futures and problems the world faces. This has been reflected in the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration (Education Council, 2019) with the goal for Australian students to “understand their responsibilities as global citizens and know how to affect positive change” (p.6). International and Australian research indicates that adolescent girls in particular are falling behind in meeting this goal, feeling more comfortable participating in local and private forms of civic action rather than as global political actors. This research therefore examined how adolescent girls are currently being prepared as global citizens within New South Wales, Australia. Based on four case studies of different school contexts and curricula, including the International Baccalaureate (IB), this research examined how teachers and school leadership conceptualised global citizenship and enacted this within their school settings. Data collected included interviews with teachers and school leaders, classroom observations, and document analysis. This study found that teachers held passive and unclear conceptualisations of what global citizenship entailed and did not actively seek to embed global citizenship education into their pedagogical approaches. Further, teachers had to diverge from the NSW syllabi of social science subjects to prepare students to be active global citizens which was not the case in the IB. Girls were not prepared more effectively as global citizens in any particular school setting, however, were treated as being more sensitive in engaging with global issues in the single-sex schools. Findings from the research highlighted the importance of holistic school approaches to fostering global citizenship including school leadership initiatives, and the significance of teacher expertise and particular pedagogical approaches in enabling secondary school girls to be equipped as global citizens.