In today's uncertain, inequity-ridden world, children and youth are increasingly called upon, and call upon themselves, to engage with hope as active global citizens to help advance collective wellbeing and sustainability for all – as evidenced in UNICEF’s open letter to the world’s children (2019). These calls are well grounded in research that has long supported children’s participation as capable, insightful active citizens (Harris, 2013; Mayall, 2002; Phillips, Ritchie et al, 2020). Such calls, too, situate children as globally minded individuals and communities who, in networked relationships with people and the planet, act beyond state limitations to advance actions for human rights and justice (Bachelet, 2018). Such is the essence of active global citizenship (AGC), which involves enacting social, political, and civil responsibility in service of the common good (Phillips, 2011; Peterson, 2011)—including dialogue about what constitutes ‘the common good’.

But just what are the literacies required for children’s hopeful participation as globally minded citizens in uncertain times, and how do we ensure they have access to these literacies? This question is the focus of this paper. Our objective is to foreground globally-minded literacy practices that are oriented to global mindedness and involved in building and negotiating common worlds that foster collective wellbeing and sustainability. Our objective supports education’s pressing imperative for children to have the necessary capabilities, including literacies, to participate as globally minded citizens – as made clear in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 (2015), UNESCO’s learning objectives for this goal (2017), OECD’s global competence framework (2018a), and UNICEF’s open letter to the world’s children (2019). As the United Nations attests, it is only by working with children as globally minded citizens that global communities can achieve collective wellbeing and sustainability (Clark et al, 2020).

Viewed multidimensionally, global mindedness concerns individuals’ engagement with otherness and difference in complex, uncertain, inequity-ridden contexts (Andreotti, 2010). We emphasize the relational basis of global mindedness within which understanding the interests and lives of others is fundamental, and without which injustices cannot be fully recognized and addressed—while critically heeding how cultural and national specificities shape how individuals engage.

We draw on cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical perspectives to consider what it means for global citizens to engage across diverse humanities, and historic, social, economic, and political divides – acknowledging tensions between these perspectives (see Stournaiuolo & Nichols, 2019). While we value cosmopolitanism scholars’ focus on engaging with diversities (e.g., Hansen, 2014), we acknowledge its problematic assumptions about mobility, access, and dispositions for engaging in and across cultures, without which cultures are essentialized rather than engaging with lived realities (e.g., Kurasawa, 2004). In response to these critiques, cosmopolitics emphasises the labor in constructing common worlds across historic, social, and political conditions that divide us (e.g., Saito, 2015), which resonates with our quest to lay bare the literacy practices involved in AGC work across diversities, differences and divides in an uncertain world.

Making visible these literacy practices is founded on understanding literacy as lived, multimodal practices travelling and changing across time and space (Pahl & Rowsell, 2020), and connected with social, cultural, political, environmental, and economic interests and contexts (Street, 2017). Our search encompassed literacies vis-à-vis wide-ranging texts, platforms, media, and modes including written, spoken, visual, auditory, spatial, corporeal, digital, haptic, multimodal, and socio-material modes (McVee & Boyd, 2016). This conceptualization aligns with our quest to pursue a broad vision of AGC literacy practices that are enabling and accommodate complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty.

Our paper presents findings from our systematic literature review of AGC literacy practices for building and negotiating common worlds that foster collective wellbeing and sustainability. Guided by processes for conducting systematic literature reviews (Booth et al. (2016), search terms we initially applied to databases (notably ProQuest Central) were active citizenship; global citizenship; and (global) citizenship literacy. In response to the variety of literacies that emerged, subsequent search terms included civic literacies; cosmopolitan literacies; global literacies; critical literacies; critical global literacies; cultural literacies; collaborative literacy; geo-literacy; transnational literacies; critical literacy for global citizenship; and digital literacy for global citizenship. Inclusion criteria were that materials must fall 2006-2023, with some exceptions to allow for key or seminal works; be a peer-reviewed academic journal article, book, or book chapter; or document developed by an authoritative transnational organisation (e.g., United Nations; UNESCO; OECD) that is clearly founded on strong scholarship; be an empirical study, literature review, or theoretical paper; and be trustworthy in accord with the research or scholarly paradigm within which the work was developed. We tabulated the intersection of the literacy practices found in the review, with the four dimensions of the OECD’s (2018) Global Competence Framework: - D1. Examine issues of local, global, and cultural significance. - D2. Understand and appreciate the perspectives and worldviews of others. - D3. Engage in open, appropriate, and effective interactions across cultures. - D4. Take action for collective wellbeing and sustainable development. Whilst we acknowledge this Global Competence Framework is connected with measurable human productivity terms that we were eschewing, we instead read its dimensions as serving collective wellbeing and sustainability. Our reading resonates with the OECD’s (2018b) explicit calls for re-thinking educational approaches to prioritize ‘collaboration … common prosperity, sustainability and well-being’ (p. 3). We categorised these tabulated literacies by drawing on the Four Resources Model (4RM) (Freebody & Luke, 2003), resulting in four sets of literacy practices, each framed by global mindedness across differences, diversities and divides: • Literacies for accessing information, knowledge, perspectives, and interactions germane to global/local issues (aligned with de/encoding texts in 4RM) • Literacies for understanding texts, and generating understanding through texts, about global/local issues (aligned with meaning-making in 4RM) • Literacies for critically inquiring into global/local issues (aligned with critical reflection and analysis in 4RM) • Literacies for creating and acting through texts to fulfil the purposes of acting on global/local issues (aligned with using texts for social purposes in 4RM).

The Transformative Literacies for AGC Framework makes literacy practices visible across diversities (cultural, socio-economic, age, generational, ability, neurological, gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and faith-related backgrounds and experiences), differences (divergent worldviews and perspectives), and divides (social, historic, economic, and political realities separating us), which contribute to inequities in distribution of rights, access, and opportunities. In relation to access, AGC literacy practices endowed with global mindedness are required to access and engage with multiple views, including perspectives of people living in marginalised communities or circumstances. Digital agency, access and dexterity are important to raising marginalised voices and democratising knowledge, including Indigenous knowledges. Culturally authentic global literature can create pathways to global realities. AGC literacy practices for understanding what unites, diversifies, and divides us requires but transcends tolerance and sympathy, to include engaging with heterogeneity, and nurturing a narrative imagination. Explicit awareness of one’s own and others’ positionality, and interest in understanding diverse perspectives, are critical – as are engaging with suppressed knowledges and valuing and understanding unseen realities. This work can be supported by collaborative literacy practices that foster divergent thinking. AGC literacy practices for inquiry constitute globally minded praxis to enhance critical consciousness of global issues and their inherent inequities. Drawing on critical global literacies, inquiry involves moving beyond individual responsibilities to engage in group interrogation of constructed narratives to identify motives and biases hindering social justice and humanitarian decision-making – thereby collaboratively reading and re-writing the world. AGC literacy practices for creating and acting through texts for collective wellbeing and sustainability include producing and enacting texts that amplify unheard voices and visibilise people’s lived realities - thereby disrupting the chain of hegemonic command that marginalises diverse realities. Globally minded creative thinking and imagination are crucial for envisioning and enacting effective, equitable, and sustainable solutions to global challenges and their local impacts.

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