Enabling Young Children's Global Citizenship Literacies

• In Event: Young Children as Democratic Citizens in Early Childhood Education: International Perspectives

Abstract

This paper advances a narrative on what we call transformative literacies for active global citizenship. It does so in connection with UNICEF’s Executive Director’s open letter to the world’s children, written on the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that inter alia enshrines children’s right to have input on decisions impacting their lives (UNCRC, 1989). The letter addresses children as moral equals in working to resolve global challenges and build better, more socially just worlds. Indeed, the United Nations attests that only by working with children and youth across diversity and difference will global communities be able to achieve peace, security, justice, climate resilience, and sustainable development for all (Clark et al, 2020).

This letter and UN’s testimony raise a significant and somewhat urgent implication for all educators to consider: just how might children across diverse circumstances and different viewpoints enable themselves, and be enabled, to participate as active global citizens? More specifically, what are the literacies inherent in and necessary to such participation?

We conceive transformative literacies for global citizenship (TLGC) as social practices occurring in multiple modes and media to reflexively engage with and transform global issues. TLGC resonate with global meaning-making that capitalizes on diverse understandings and ways of knowing to re-imagine and transform realities through collective reflexivity, knowledge building, and dispositions for creating and enacting constructive solutions to identified problems (Tierney, 2018). In this, too, we find strong alignment with tenets of global citizenship education by emphasizing social justice, ethics of caring, and collective and diverse ways of knowing, and connecting diverse local realities to craft solutions to global challenges (Torres, 2017).

To explicate TLGC, we draw on the Four Resources Model (Freebody & Luke, 2003; Kalantzis & Cope, 2015) to identify and categorize literacies capabilities related to (1) meaning (2) purpose (3) code (4) critical reflection in and about texts. “Text” is viewed in terms of multiple modes of representation. We map these four sets of literacies capabilities onto OECD’s (2018) framework of four dimensions of global competencies – so chosen for its international perspective on global citizenship – in terms of specific textual processes and products involved in the enactment of each global dimension. These global dimensions are: (1) examine issues of local, global, and cultural significance (2) understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others (3) engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions across cultures (4) act for collective well-being and sustainable development.

TLGC that we consequently identify are viewed as necessary to, but not each alone sufficient for, enabling children’s praxis as active global citizens. Such praxis is essential for children are citizens of their here-and-now and future worlds – and supports educators, indeed societies, in welcoming children as active literate citizens with capacity to engage in civic praxis for the greater good of community, humanity, and the planet.

Authors

• Pauline Joan Harris, University of South Australia
  Presenting Author

• Louise Gwenneth Phillips, University of Queensland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cynthia H. Brock, University of Wyoming
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrew Peterson, University of Birmingham
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jenny Ritchie, Victoria University of Wellington
  Non-Presenting Author