Transforming a global competence agenda into pedagogies of intercultural understanding and student voice

Achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015) and Freire’s (2021) vision of a system that educates students to be critical and knowledgeable actors capable of intervening in the world pivots around one word: agency. Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) enshrines the right of children to be heard on matters affecting them, and there is consensus in the field of global citizenship education that a fundamental key to success is the belief that one can bring about change ( OECD, 2018; Oxfam GB, 2015; Peterson, 2016; Reimers et al., 2016; Reysen and Katzarska-Miller, 2013), Despite this, systems and schools persist in imposing outdated top-down power relationships. Aspirational language of graduating global citizens can be seen in international, national and state policy documents (such as the Mparntwe Declaration, 2019; Pakistan National Review, 2019; OECD, 2018; UNESCO, 2017) providing the potential for inclusion of voice and agency in curricula around the world, yet educational systems continue to dictate content-focused ‘banking’ (Freire, 1980) or ‘gas tank’ (Robinson, 2011) models of education. Reimers (2020) argues that one of the reasons global educational approaches remain aspirational for teachers and seldom a reality for students is because ‘more time has been spent examining what it is than discerning how to teach it’ (p. 107).111 For this reason, this chapter takes a very practical approach to exploring how one Australian state disrupted this top-down, content-focused model at system and school level to co-design and trial their own global competence framework. It aims to provide insights into how the collaborative process empowered individual schools and educators with agency to co-create the framework and trial it in action research projects relevant to their contexts. The chapter explains how this approach saw an ostensibly neoliberal agenda (Vaccari and Gardinier, 2019) driven by the addition of a global competence assessment to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme of Student Assessment (PISA) transformed into pedagogies of intercultural understanding and student voice. Presented through the lens of the authors, who acted as participant observers and critical friends throughout the pilot, the chapter does not aim to present a shining example or even a finished product, rather to examine how the educators’ beliefs and situational frameworks (Kelchtermans, 2005; 2009; Marz and Kelchtermans, 2013) impacted the process. To inform, and hopefully empower, others undertaking a similar journey, the chapter also presents school-based case studies and real-world advice from the pilot schools as to the steps they took, the challenges they faced and how the process transformed pedagogical approaches and school culture, and enhanced student voice.