Empowering Global Citizens

approach that “prioritizes critical reflection and asks learners to recognize
their own context and their own and others’ epistemological and ontologi—
cal assumptions.” Furthermore, she argues that in order “to think other—
wise” and to transform Views and relationships, learners must engage with
their own and others’ perspectives. Andreotti’s “critical” global citizenship
model promotes citizenship action as “a choice of the individual after a
careful analysis of the context of intervention, of different views, of power
relations (especially the position of who is intervening) and of short— and
long—term (positive and negative) implications of goals and strategies” (p.
7). Key concepts of critical GCE include “transformation, criticality, self—
reflexivity, diversity, complicity, and agency” (Eidoo et al., 2011).

Also undergirding these various approaches to global education are diverse
ideas about What global competency entails. One approach views global
competency as knowledge and, to some extent, as the ability to use knowl—
edge or skills to solve problems. This idea translates largely into curricular
approaches that focus on giving students access to specific content and
subject matter—such as geography or world history or the study of inter—
national organizations. Additionally, these approaches focus on efforts to
infuse existing curricula of more established disciplines~such as science
or history or literature-with topics that are global in nature, as Kandel
suggested in 1928. Examples of global—in—nature topics include specific
curricula on global education, such as development studies or interna—
tional affairs, and Oxfam’s Global Citizenship Curriculum, an initiative of
Oxfam in the United Kingdom consisting of a series of lesson plans—plus
support for teachers—that foster the development of global citizenship
(Oxfam, 2015). In the United States, infusing global education into the
more established subjects of a curriculum, such as social studies, history,
language, or sciences, is the prevalent approach to global education. A few
states, such as Wisconsin, have developed curricular maps that explicitly
identify opportunities for infusion of global topics into the entire cur—
ricular framework for the state. More recently Wisconsin’s Department
of Public Instruction created a Global Education Achievement Certificate

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