Overview

Concepts shaping
global education partnerships

Global learning/global citizenship education (GCE)

Global learning refers to educational activities that focus on addressing global issues and the responsibility and positioning of learners within global contexts. It provides orientation by building bridges between learners‘ own lives and the rest of the world and supports them in evaluating these connections on the basis of ethical principles. At the same time, it also serves as an approach for political education: the guiding principle is a global transformation in the spirit of global justice. To this end, it enables and encourages learners to recognise and critically question social, cultural, political and economic structures and contexts that influence the lives of all people in the world and to actively change them as responsible (global) citizens.

www.globaleslernen.de I en.unesco.org/themes/gced

Education for sustainable development (ESD)

Development is sustainable if people worldwide, today and in the future, are able to live in dignity and to pursue their needs and talents within the planet‘s limits while recognising cultural diversity. In order to achieve this, social structures and individual behaviour must be transformed. ESD thus uses interactive, research-based and action-oriented methods. It enables learners to understand the effects of their own actions on the world and to make responsible, sustainable decisions. It promotes core competencies such as critical and systemic thinking, cooperative decision-making and taking responsibility for present and future generations. It supports learners in creating a sustainable environment and convincing others of a sustainable way of living.

www.bne-portal.de | en.unesco.org/themes/gced

Transcultural learning and diversity

Within this broad field of concepts, it becomes possible to define learning processes that relate to the perception of and respect for the ways of life and the cultural and personal identities of others. Wherever learners come into contact and interaction with others who are supposedly “strangers“, differences as well as similarities become apparent. More recent approaches such as transcultural learning posit that each individual has a highly complex identity, which is determined, inter alia, through socialisation, a particular way of life shaped by various influences, cultural and religious orientations, (dis)privileges, social power relations and experiences. Through encounters, learners can discover these identity factors, which contributes to the transformation of mental images and the dismantling of stereotypes and prejudices. The central aim is to build a (global) society free from discrimination where everyone is respected and acknowledged.

www.t1p.de/transcultural-education