Developing Middle School Students’ Global Citizenship Competencies Through a STEAM-C Virtual After-School Exchange Club

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching: Peace Literacies, Cross-Cultural Engagement, and Teacher Mentoring

Proposal

IGlobal is a practice-based Virtual Global Engagement (VGE) program that extends traditional virtual exchange by engaging university teacher candidates as facilitators who lead multinational middle school cohorts in themed, inquiry-driven projects (Authors et al., 2025). To accommodate global time zones, IGlobal schedules four–five parallel one-hour Zoom sessions each week; students choose the time that fits, forming multinational cohorts of roughly 30–70 middle schoolers from three to four countries. Sessions mix whole-group interaction and breakout rooms for focused small-group dialogue. All participating students use an online platform to share work and continue conversations asynchronously. This structure allows peers who cannot meet at the same hour to still exchange ideas and provide feedback. In both synchronous and asynchronous spaces, students discuss Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and co-create artifacts including artwork, writing, short videos, science experiments, and globally collected data display. These product-oriented tasks, designed within a STEAM-C framework, serve as anchors for cross-cultural collaboration and reflection, with an ultimate aim of fostering global citizenship competencies. In Fall 2025, the curriculum will focus on SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).

This study aims to explore how middle school students develop global citizenship competencies through participation in the IGlobal program, within the framework of UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education (GCED). It seeks to evaluate students’ experiences based on the core conceptual dimensions of the framework: cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral (UNESCO, 2015). The research questions include: What are middle school students’ perceptions of virtual intercultural interactions with peers from around the world? How do students perceive the impact of the IGlobal on their understanding of global learning, citizenship, and sustainable development?

The study is designed as a case study to investigate the problem in depth. Middle school students will be voluntarily selected through purposive sampling and will include 6th and 7th graders from a foundation school in Ankara, Turkey. The anticipated sample size is 10 or 15 students who will participate in the Fall 2025 IGlobal program. Data will be collected using a Student Interview Protocol developed by the research team. The program will run for eight weeks, with one-hour Zoom sessions held weekly. After the program concludes, individual semi-structured interviews will be conducted one-on-one with each student. Data will be analyzed using a traditional qualitative coding approach with NVivo, beginning with open coding, followed by categorization. Themes will then be developed in alignment with the research questions. To ensure inter-coder reliability, data will be coded independently by multiple researchers and then compared to reach consensus.


Findings are expected to amplify student voices regarding their experiences and development as global citizens. Prior research has largely centered on undergraduate students (Authors et al., 2024; Kopish & Marques, 2020; Scherer Bassani & Buchem, 2019), leaving middle school students’ learning, engagement, and GCED outcomes under-documented. Focusing on middle schoolers addresses this gap by verifying whether global citizenship is actually achieved and generating actionable insights to improve curriculum quality, participation equity, and decisions about scaling and policy support.

Authors

• Ozlenen OZDIYAR GEDIK, Hacettepe University

• Gulbahar Yilmaz, Michigan State University, College of Education

• Lu Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Allison Witt, University of Illinois