The Global Citizenship and Multilingual Competences (GCMC) toolkit is an Erasmus+ project with partners in Austria, the UK, Netherlands, Italy and Germany (2020-2023). The aim is to provide online teacher development resources for secondary teachers of all subjects about how to integrate global citizenship goals and plurilingual pedagogies into their practices in a sustainable way.
In this project, we define Global Citizenship (GC) as an “awareness, caring, and embracing [of] cultural diversity while promoting social justice and sustainability, coupled with a sense of responsibility to act” (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013, p. 858). Global citizenship education (GCE) has become part of many international educational policies appears explicitly in UNESCO’s global or sustainable development goals (SDGs) for quality education.
An appreciation of linguistic plurality and the integration of plurilingual pedagogies are core contributors to global citizenship. As Torpsten (2011, p. 4) argues, “when skills increase in different languages, [people] become aware of their identities as multilingual persons [as well as] their possibilities of being active, multicultural, global citizens”. Therefore, this project aims to support teachers in developing their knowledge and skills about plurilingual pedagogies and how to respect and utilize the linguistic resources learners and teachers may bring with them into the classroom. .
Our hope is that the online course and toolkit will inspire a large number of teachers and teacher educators with practical ideas of how to make global citizenship and plurilingual pedagogies of their regular practices. Working towards UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals depends on active, engaged future citizens who respect each other, appreciate diversity, and can work together as collaborators across cultures and contexts. This project seeks to enable teachers to integrate those global life skills into their teaching, no matter what subject they teach. This is the future of education.
The objectives of this project are:
- to explicitly integrate a plurilingual pedagogical approach together with GCE
- to uncover examples of good practice of teaching GCE and plurilingual approaches
- to empower teachers of all subjects to integrate GCE goals with a plurilingual approach into their regular teaching in a sustainable and context-sensitive way
The main outputs of the project will be:
- A self-reflective tool for teacher competences in respect to teaching for global citizenship or plurilingual pedagogies
- An online professional development course and toolkit
- A training and implementation manual for teacher educators
The project strategic partnership is composed of the Universität Graz (Austria), Newcastle University (UK), Fryske Akademy (The Netherlands), University of Bologna (Italy) and NEOSMART Digital (Germany).