Global Learning may be understood as an educational response to the „fact of a development towards a world society“. The development of world society is accompanied by a wide range of adaptation challenges, such as the development of global social justice, the overcoming of paternalism, or the facilitation of social solidarity and dealing with migration in an era of climate change.

The keynote will be about presenting challenges of learning in this context and reflecting them against the background of empirical data. Why do people hardly target global disparities or global climate change? What are the challenges to act against global social inequality? How should education look like reflecting risky global developments and enhancing the reflection of consequences of human behaviour? It will also be necessary to ask to what extent these challenges are new and significant in terms of human history and in what respect they are different from those crisis diagnoses that usually accompany generational change.

Second, didactic settings on global learning need to be reflected. It will be discussed, to which extend learning arrangements potentially raise awareness of global risks and how to enable awareness of global inequalities. What encourages people to face these challenges in the first place? In this context, informal learning and global learning arrangements play a special role. It is also necessary to discuss whether these concepts per se are appropriate to be globalised or what the spreading “glocality” means for concepts of global learning.

These concepts are challenging research in two ways: From a systematically perspective, the inherent future scenarios on global learning are contingent. Therefore, how to describe distinct teaching on a contingent future in a consistent way? From an empirical point of view, it becomes obvious that the empirical evidence in this working field is not sufficient so far. What sort of empirical research is needed to address these challenges? Moreover, what are the risks associated with this research?

The presentation will highlight a number of future areas of research, and will suggest a framework for research concerning global learning.

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