In a democracy, citizenship education is crucial, since this form of governance depends on active participation of its citizens and their ability to access and evaluate information, while overcoming inevitable disagreements. The collective of citizens should aim to strive for a fair and just society, which might mean to critique and organize against injustices carried out by the government. This primarily applies to citizens on a state level, however the concept of global citizenship gained popularity due to the interconnectedness of our daily lives and interdependency of our actions.

The UNESCO (2015) framework for Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is a guideline that proposes a social justice orientation to citizenship education, aiming to empower students by encouraging them to take action. However, such a social justice-oriented GCE is largely absent in European classrooms at the moment (Tarozzi and Torres 2016; Tarozzi and Inguaggiato 2018). A critical interpretation of GCE is necessary in order to realize the aspired just and fair world. Implementing such a critical approach that acknowledges local and global structures of dominance and oppression is easier said than done, as articulated by Pashby and Sund (2020): “global issues are complex, and we need pedagogical approaches that take up rather than gloss over these complexities'' (80). Intersectionality is such an analytical approach that embraces a complex understanding of reality through investigating the multiple ways in which hegemony and oppression occur in people’s lives. Hence, this research includes intersectionality within GCE in Europe, to ensure a social justice-orientated GCE to develop well-informed and active citizens who are willing to understand the complexity of global issues.

The region has seen a need for citizens who are able to advocate for social justice in the last year. There is a rise of populist right-wing parties who got popular with a nationalistic and anti-immigration rhetoric directly attacking the foundations of those democratic and multicultural societies. As a result, democratically chosen governments have become increasingly authoritarian in a number of European countries, hereby especially targeting marginalized communities. The hard-fought rights of minorities seem to become debatable and the expression of their concerns. A reason for the denial of the existence of privilege and oppression can be explained by a lack of knowledge about the difference between structural oppression versus attitudes or individual practices of discrimination (Lentin 2019). The suggested inclusion of intersectionality within GCE attempts to address this lack of knowledge and understanding, by fully embracing the prescribed task by UNESCO to prepare citizens to build an inclusive, just, and peaceful world. 

The framework developed by UNESCO (2015) describes GCE as transformative learning experiences. Their pedagogical guideline states: “[GCE] aims to be transformative, building the knowledge skills, values and attitudes that learners need to be able to contribute to a more inclusive, just and peaceful world” (15). Transformative learning can be characterized as a learning process that encourages and stimulates learners to rethink their initial ideas about the world and also guide their future actions. Critical reflection, problem-posing pedagogy, and dialectical teaching are key elements of transformative learning (Taylor 2008). Not much is known about the effects of transformative learning on secondary school students. Even more so because of the dominant focus on Mezirow’s theory, while transformative learning should be considered a metatheory of which Mezirow’s is just one (Hoggan 2016). 

Therefore, this research focuses on the following research questions: 

To what extent can intersectional global citizenship be identified as a transformative pedagogy?

1.  How can global citizenship be implemented as a transformative pedagogy?

2. What transformative processes characterize the enactment of intersectional global citizenship?

3. Why does/doesn’t intersectional global citizenship result in a transformative learning opportunity?

The research is a practitioner, thus the research takes place in her own practice for the first cycle. The data to be shared at the annual conference will be the data from the first cycle of data collection. The first cycle of this data collection takes place in a secondary school in the Netherlands, with students between 14 and 15 years old. The research methodology is a combination between Action Research and Grounded Theory as the research question is dealing with a practical problem. As the research focuses on the transformative processes that take place when an intersectional global citizenship pedagogy is enacted by the students and practitioners alike. This study uses critical participatory action research (CPAR) as a research approach which directs the design of the study. Considering that CPAR is not a method, rather a philosophy, Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) is the methodology of this study. It becomes participatory by involving stakeholders in the research who can reflect together on the practice in communicative spaces (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2014, p.16). Bradbury, Lewis, and Embury emphasized that students are often ignored as stakeholders in educational action research, which leads to students being treated as a source of data rather than agents in the research process (2019, p. 10). Therefore, the methods of collecting data are arts-informed instruments, so that students are in control of what they want to share and the power is shared between the students and the researcher. An example of an arts-informed research instrument is an assignment inspired by Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed”, to create an embodied learning opportunity for students. Whereas CPAR is a research philosophy, Grounded Theory (GT) is a very clear and systematic methodology. CGT prescribes a clear path that the researcher applies when analyzing the data, namely open coding, followed by focused coding, and eventually theoretical coding, while simultaneously writing memos about decisions made during this process (Tarozzi 2020). Thus, the first cycle of this research methodology will be shared during the annual conference, which includes the planning, action, observations, and reflections on the first implementation of this pedagogy, while memo writing technique is used to make sense of the collected and processed data.

The outcome of this research will on the one hand be a framework for a transformative pedagogy of GCE that clearly meets the requirements of citizenship education but attempts to rethink and unlearn some of the longstanding and taken-for-granted ideas about modernity and power structures in our society. This includes arts-informed research instruments that can also be perceived as learning performances of students. An additional outcome of this research will be preliminary data on the implementation of this pedagogy and the enactment of its transformative elements. Thus, during the conference, the researcher will share the eventual curriculum as implemented in the classroom, along with initial data coming out of this implementation that would give insights into the transformative processes of such a pedagogy.

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