Reimagining global citizenship education for a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world

Abstract

In this article, I propose the need to reimagine global citizenship education for a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In this context, it remains unclear what kind of GCE could adequately prepare young people for numerous overlapping global challenges. Most responses to this conjuncture suggest that we revise our descriptions of the problems we face, and cohere around a single prescription for how to proceed in order to either reform or replace our existing system. Drawing on a diagnosis of the present offered by Zygmunt Bauman, and a decolonial analysis of how we arrived here, I ask how we might reimagine GCE in ways that are strategically responsive to current systemic crises, and ethically responsive to the ongoing colonial conditions that are at the root of these crises. I propose an approach to GCE that moves beyond the transmission of static competencies or content, and instead fosters learners’ capacities for ongoing self-reflexivity, accountability, and discernment. Toward this end, I suggest balancing concrete policy and open-ended pedagogy, critical and affective literacy, and intellectual and relational rigour. I also suggest the need to identify and interrupt harmful circularities that commonly emerge in efforts to imagine GCE otherwise.

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