The dominance of standardised assessment when designing mainstream curricula tends to push criticality, reflection and collaborative action to the margins in favour of individualised knowledge and skill acquisition through a banking model of education (Freire 2017). Within this context of standardisation and fragmentation of curricula, this talk will explore the interdisciplinary nature of global citizenship education (GCE) and how this speaks to environmental and sustainability issues. In English schools, sustainability education remains primarily in the domain of Science and Geography, where it remains compartmentalised and objectified as knowledge to be processed and examined. This fragmentation of the curriculum presents a challenge to developing a mode of learning that allows for reflection, a ‘cross pollination’ of ideas, criticality and hope. The knowledge agenda and its impact on the (inconsistent) delivery of GCE within English schools chimes with citizenship as competence in European policy documents (Joris et al 2022) in which the focus is on individuals’ attainment of a predetermined set of knowledge and values. This reflects the wider tenson within education between working for change and emancipation, and individual achievement and social continuity. This tension is further highlighted by the work of UNESCO and its drive for global citizenship, sustainability and peace education (Mochizuki and Vickers 2024).

Drawing on a fieldwork project that worked with fifty-one young people across four educational settings in the southwest of England, this talk will address the following research questions: 1) how do young people in poast-16 education in England define citizenship? 2) which issues are important to them? and 3) how does learning through visual engagement with outdoor spaces facilitate a transdisciplinary framing of GCE?

Many typographies of GCE exist, however within a neoliberal agenda the aims and goals of the statutory education sector impact directly on the framing and delivery of citizenship education. For example, Kennedy (2010) illustrates that ‘active citizenship’ can be adopted by any political agenda and defined to suit their means. Therefore, the broadly neo-liberal political agenda of England and the European Union (Büllesbach 2017) has ramifications for the flavour of active citizenship promoted within the citizenship curriculum. Pashby et al. remind us that active citizenship in this context will focus on GCE as a means to an end for individual employability, and national global competitiveness (2020 p151).

 The challenge for citizenship education then, is to expand from pursuing a knowledge or competence-based outcome to encompassing criticality and reflection on knowledge and actions. This transcends a ‘thin’ or ‘soft’ (Andreotti 2014) approach to citizenship, moving towards to one that deals with international responsibility in times of global uncertainty in order to address environmental and sustainability issues critically, embracing transdisciplinarity. Due to the problematic nature of many framings of GCE, I posit critical sustainability citizenship (CSC) education as having potential to address some of the above shortcomings. I define CSC as acknowledging the asymmetry behind the rhetoric of globalization and holding a space for plurality and hybridity, stepping back from political and economic affiliations that constrain neoliberal societies and taking inspiration from narratives that seek to decolonialise and reinstate the role of the more than human elements of the world at large. It seeks to transcend borders between subjects, between the indoors and outdoors, the classroom and local streets, and borders between formal and informal learning. Therefore, sustainability education and by extension (CSC) requires learners to critically engage with their role as implicated subjects (Bryan 2022) in climate change and global inequality. In light of this, opportunities must be given for open, safe, and embodied learning environments.

The use of participatory and creative methods is central in repositioning research participants as agentic within a research process which amplifies their voices rather than (re)presenting them from a position of power and/or privilege. The project discussed in this talk used photovoice as a framework for a creative participatory data generation method. Drawn from critical pedagogy, feminist theory and documentary photography, photovoice amplifies the voice of often marginalised participants through the data generation process and the sharing of the data with key stakeholders (Wang and Burris 1994). The method has been used successfully with young people especially urban youth (Delgado 2015) and is particularly well suited to this age group due to their familiarity with digital technology and multi-modal communication and the increasing visual nature of ‘life narration’ (O’Latz 2017 p4). The generation of photovoice data or ‘photo-texts’ (Evans-Agnew and Rosemberg 2016) allows participants to fix meaning more clearly, creating less ambiguity in the analysis process (Sutton-Brown 2014) in which they are also involved (Wang and Burris 1997). In order to adapt this framework to a formal education setting for the purposes of this study photovoice has been conceptualised in a ‘compact’ form (Williams forthcoming) necessitating few resources of time and money. The three-session format used in this study facilitates both pedagogical and research outcomes. The majority of the field work took pace in an outdoor setting to liberate learners from the constraints of a typical/subject specific learning environment (Barratt Hacking et al 2022:56). The small, localised project presented here looks to how the microcosmic nature of local place-based pedagogies opens up links to broader issues that transcend local and national boundaries. The place-based nature of this study looked to critical pedagogies of place (Grunewald 2003) in tying these local issues to broader global issues. This in turn links to the relevance of this corner of England to the wider European field of citizenship education in post-Brexit times. The outdoor setting of the fieldwork allowed for links to be made across curriculum specific learning and life experience specifically through engagement with their regional locations and landmarks self-creating “educational opportunity zones” Burke et al (2016) This ability to look at how local issues can teach us about wider contexts is a valuable attribute of photovoice (Derr and Simons 2020:364).

For young people in England the focus on standardised assessment limits the opportunity to reflect and cross-pollinate curriculum-based knowledge and life experience. This combined with a lack of statutory entitlement to citizenship education for 16-18 year olds provides fertile ground to develop a transdisciplinary pedagogy for citizenship that embraces pedagogies of place to allow for vital links between the local and global to be made. The presence of metaphor in the photo-texts generated by the young participants in this study asks the ‘audience’ to further reflect and take on the global messages captured in a snapshot of the locality. Messages of sustainability and social justice are evident throughout the data, and unity, equality and peace form an ideological core in youth definitions of citizenship. Broadly the themes identified in the analysis of the photo-texts are: the environment and its relationship to the social world; access, barriers, agency and voice; community and belonging; and complexities of urban life. These themes will be further broken down and explored in this talk. The wide-ranging topics of discussion within the groups, and the analysis of workshop transcripts, afforded the additional themes of the interconnectedness of people and planet, the layered and complex nature of citizenship, and citizenship feeling ‘out of reach’. This further supports the need for educational space that transgress disciplinary boundaries to allow for critical sustainable citizenship.

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