Good evening, everyone, thank you very much for coming. Have a great audience today.
I'm delighted to present our speaker. This is Dr. Mary Yemeni, who is based at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
She is comparative education is holding UNESCO's chair on technology and internationalisation this year.
Miriam Mina is visiting Humboldt Foundation, experienced researcher as Fry for University of Currently.
Her research interests include globalisation, health and in education, global citizenship,
education, internationalisation, intermediaries in education and the global middle class.
Many Yemenis succeeded to secure a substantial funding for our research, amongst others from the foundation based European Union,
UNESCO's Humboldt Foundation and Israel Minister of Education Dr. Yemeni Sex as an editor for International Studies and Sociology of Education.
International Journal of Educational Development and Multicultural Education Review.
She will be speaking today about Ri and De Contextualisation of global citizenship education,
and she will be presenting the results of a systematic analysis of the scholarship in the field.
Thank you again. So much for travelling from Germany today. We look forward to hearing from Thank you and thank you well.
I'm really honoured to be here and how lucky you are to study at Oxford, right?
So basically, it's it's a it's a thing for me, just as well as them for you to be here.
I hope you will find this same sort of introductory talk interesting and perhaps useful for your own research.
As what I try to do here is basically to combine two studies.
One is a type of literature review, and the other one uses literature review to do some empirical investigation.
So I'm going to talk about mainly about global citizenship education, which is the topic that I'm interested in.
But I think that the methodologically speaking, it would be useful for many other fields.
So to begin with, and I'll just say that my talk is based on these two articles that can be found online.
Well, the first one soon will be online and basically.
It all started with our work on the citizenship education in Israel,
so Israel is a conflict ridden society where different streams or different sectors
are educated together by the same court supervised by the same Ministry of Education.
And there are questions of narratives and on how to present different historical
events or different events that relate to citizenship education in Israel.
So basically, the first idea I was working and I'm sort of bringing you inside.
This closes the circle where you decide how to to to do your research, what kind of research questions to ask.
So we're very interested in understanding how global dimensions and basically
being implemented or been acknowledged at the education system in Israel.
And when you want to ask questions about global dimensions in education,
it's actually a tricky situation because not when you approach schools with teachers, school principals or even the the Ministry of Education.
People not always aware of these big terms like globalisation,
internationalisation and global citizenship education and for the first sort of step in this research.
We wanted to understand what kind of issues can be related to these topics and what the scholarship is.
Basically, IM talking in how the field is shaped.
So this was the initial ideal of this study and global citizenship education obviously was
already then in the news as part of the UNESCO's Work on Sustainable Development Goals.
But even before is sort of part of peace studies of peace related projects within schools with the
idea that if people ideally would be able to refer to a notion that is bigger than the nation state,
the bigger than the specific narrative, then they perhaps can or might find a mutually understanding.
This was basically the idea behind and using global citizenship education in the PISA programmes and obviously wants global citizenship.
Education was incorporated within the Global Loom within the Sustainable Development Goals.
On one hand, and was part of the assessment structure of OCD within PISA as global competence,
which can be defined, as well as they related to global citizenship.
Obviously, people start to look at it more and teachers of their faith and obviously policymakers as well.
So there is the interest in the field and.
And and on top of that, I would say that.
It's not only about global citizenship, but in general squalor.
Until now, I sort of mentioned schools and policymakers, but also scholars.
And in recent decades became more aware of sort of global dimension.
And many studies it looked into how globalisation and globalisation related processes.
It basically incorporated the national education system.
Part of this international assessment, part of it as sort of neoliberal understanding of who is this graduate of school and what
kind of sort of competitive and neoliberal global environment he or she has to deal with.
So basically, in schools all over the world and teachers and policymakers and even sometimes parents started to to
use this global notions of competencies of skills on one hand of empathy of global peace on the other.
And once it became part of curricula in different countries and many studies began to sort of use the same terms.
And when you as a student or as a as a scholar going into a new field, as we did with this notion of global citizenship education,
you'll find many terms like global competencies, global skills that I mentioned.
An international baccalaureate organisation usually use international mindedness,
which has basically very similar meaning intercultural competence, just to name a few.
And basically, the idea was to look into the field to sort of try to understand what kind of terms are there and and how basically we can examine it.
Or we can refer to this terms empirically about when we are going into the field and basically interview teachers or do observations.
So this is the first part of my talk and they'll show you what we did.
Basically, if I'm here, there are many methodologies to perform this so-called conceptual review, empirical review of of scholarship.
What we try to do here is them basically use big data methodologies in order to analyse the huge amount of data.
And the idea is there to sort of combine two different methodologies that I'll
present in a second in order to map the field graphically and analytically.
And so it all started in a very naive sort of way when we searched the 30th Scholastica
search engines for different terms which were known to us either from curricula,
from different countries,
from our knowledge, as scholars or from different programmes that were developed by international organisations like the deal,
the U.N. or UNESCO's in particular, and from other fields.
So basically, it was 21st century skills.
And again, all these are sort of buzzwords that you meet in every framework that you analysed in many, many countries.
And we found out that we have about 10 terms, but more for most of them, not enough articles were available.
So basically, they set the terms.
Eventually, we analysed in depth 21st century skills, intercultural competencies, cosmopolitan education and for all others.
We didn't have enough data, but I'll show you what you can do with other terms as well.
We basically retrieved all of the articles that we could find online, and we did two things the first one,
instead of reading and sort of summarising articles like what you usually do in the review,
we used technique called natural language processing, which is a technique that basically uses different algorithms in order to understand
mechanics technically what the field is about the what the article is about.
Basically, this specific technique use the Wikipedia to know what Wikipedia is read.
Obviously, so it use Wikipedia taxonomy in terms of like what values you have and what relations,
what what links between the values you have in order to to sort of see if these
values appear in the text and how they relate to how they relate to each other.
So once you have specific terms in our software basically knows what kind of relations exist according to what is done in Wikipedia.
And then in that way, we can understand what is more important.
It's not the words that will appear more time or it's not the world.
It will be in the title, but it will be the word of the meaning that basically has more links to other terms.
And that way, you can categorise for each paper, for each article, for each text that you analyse.
So the fourth kind of we call them social tags, what kind of terms are important, what the papers are about?
But not only that, you can basically see how these different terms are cited or appear in different articles.
And then you can basically link between these terms in order to understand the links in the field.
So just to remind you,
our goal was to understand what people mean when they speak about global citizenship or 21st century skills or intercultural competencies,
etc., etc. And then basically, once we had all the data,
we combined it and created networks in order to sort of analyse the density of of of the network
and where the same these terms appear and how we can use them for our empirical research.
And so I'll show you in a second there an example of a network.
And basically, if you will approach me after the, I will be able happily to send you the networks, but they are not.
The import of the graphical meanings are less important than what we we can understand from them from in analytical terms.
But basically, and I'll show you how the network look like and what kind of perhaps interesting things you can,
things you can understand from the network. And then I show you how we use it in the empirical research.
So is this a phone for networks that they will focus in on cosmopolitan education,
intercultural competence, 21st century skills and global citizenship education?
And and then I will try and show you what kind of issues like inequality and multicultural education,
language education or technology we can see all over networks and what kind of different meanings they say these topics have within the networks.
So just to remind you, we are looking now at a result and outcome of the guess is software where topics on the.
Cosmopolitan education located and we have different colours.
Each colour present a community, meaning that these terms that you probably can't see really clearly,
but for example, if you look into the orange one,
you can see philosophical environment, philosophy of life, sociology, education, anthropology, discrimination government.
And these are the terms that relate closely to each of the other terms in the network.
So if I ask myself when people talk about cosmopolitan education, what the what are the meanings that can be?
This would be the answer. So basically, we can see here several communities and we can see links between different communities.
So cosmopolitan education obviously has the same yellow community of global citizenship,
education, their global education, human rights, globalisation.
It also has quite a large domain on the linguistic language policy.
And what we have here. Critical theory English as a second language.
Obviously, you have a lot of issues with English here as as part of cosmopolitan education.
And also, you have issues there on the gender inequality, gender studies, gender, all feminist theory.
Again, you can see what kind of topics appear when we analyse articles that are focussed on cosmopolitan education.
So basically, if I try to sort of look into these different communities, communities of knowledge, we can see,
first of all, that the network is quite diverse and the communities are not very close to each other.
We have different topics, different things, and they are very philosophical in nature.
I will show you in the minutes how, for example,
21st Century Skills Network looks like you will see that if the difference there and we can see that, for example,
internationalisation of higher education also appears here as sort of outcome of cosmopolitan education,
which basically can give us some hints about how teachers or how and how educators will use this term in their curricula.
And and global citizenship education basically is portrayed as an outcome of cosmopolitan education,
which is also very interesting sometimes in the literature, if you will sort of try to understand what is an internationalisation,
then issues of cosmopolitan education would be like more of a moral sort of emphatic type of scholarship
and then issues of competencies and skills and the sort of new or liberal type of scholarship.
We'll talk more about the internationalisation and we can see both of this see here.
So if we look at the 21st Century Skills Network and.
Then we can see how in issues of technology are basically overtaking the whole network,
so when people then scholars acknowledge 21st century skills, it will be mostly about technology and about sort of limited, very limited terms.
I'll show you in a second again. You can see, for example, standards in a learning environment, active learning.
You can see quite a lot of issues related to digital literacy.
It was a blue terms here. Science education, you see again, where we started from the same domain and here and it's depicted totally different.
You can see also experience of international organisations like OCD and UNESCO's,
who basically relate to 21st century skills, which also influences, in turn, the scholarship in the field.
If we look to an intercultural competence, you can see this network is less dense,
you have much less terms here, and obviously this network is a bit different.
It totally relates to higher education and much less so schools, and it's mostly about language education.
The the yellow community. But it also contains sort of critical third to as critical pedagogy and sort of cultural intelligence,
multiculturalism and all this blue community over here.
And so basically, this network, you can say this, it's a bit similar to 21st century skills.
It's less philosophical, it's less sort of it's much more concrete.
So and that's why basically, it's more related to higher education,
where basically things like internationalisation immediately leads to intercultural competence in the scholarship or in schools,
it will be to 21st century skills, while a cosmopolitan education is the first term that they show you.
It was very dispersed with very many different terms meant many different
topics that people talk about when they talk about cosmopolitan and education,
and the less the network is their global citizenship education, which is in a sense similar to cosmopolitan education network.
Here you can see as well. Obviously, UNESCO's as that is largely influenced the the wording in the terms of the field here.
Yeah. What is interesting here also the combination between all things that are related, I wouldn't say sustainability education,
but all things that related to environment or environment related education also
appears here is part of Cosmopolitan as part of global citizenship education and.
And you can see how basically this domain is shaped by the work of international organisations
and UNESCO in the sense and global competencies is a term only and recently in the work.
I would imagine that if we will do the same exercise next year, you will see much more scholarship on on the issues related to global competencies.
This is a sort of a new domain here. So basically, this is a full, full network of all the terms combined.
Just an example. Obviously, it has much more terms, much more a complex network.
And what we can see basically that if we we we we took this for terms.
We can see that some of them combined, for example, as 21st century skills and global competence and which are separate.
But but then all the technology sort of would be the same.
And instead of a community on global citizenship, education and global competencies, you will see language related community.
And if you remember, we can see language appears in many as thinking all of them.
There are issues of language of not on the language, in particular English,
as part of what we call cosmopolitan educational global citizenship education.
And I think we should be obviously very critical about the appearance of fair language here.
If we sort of try to see what what is common in all in the whole network and I would say, well,
there are four topics that are listed here I would and put some emphasis on inequality and multiculturalism.
So basically and. When we when we talk about inequality and the scholarship in this terms, and we can see that.
Sometimes it is more common, well, not sometimes it is much more common to see is is this discourse in global citizenship,
education and cosmopolitan education, but quite rarely in 21st century skills, which would be sort of presented as normalised and not nuanced,
not contextualised the topic as well as intercultural competence.
And we did the same analysis, by the way, by dividing the scholarship into years like four for each decade of each three years.
Actually, we try to see how these terms develop, and you can basically look at two different aspects.
But the most prominent one was the way international organisations basically shape the scholarship of the scholarship and term.
We can imagine shapes the curricula and what teachers basically talk about and how students perceive this context context within the classrooms.
And this is basically brings me to the second part of what I wanted to show you today.
So once we had this huge amount of data,
so and we basically were able to see what kind of context and what kinds of concepts are relevant to our of our field we in.
Could potentially approach schools and try to see what the flies or what is relevant again to the teachers in our sample.
And now I bring you back to to Israel, and I want to show you how teachers in the three different sectors in Israeli society,
the Jewish settler world, which is the the the largest sector of the vote, well, depends on the cohort.
But about 60 percent of the students the Palestinian Arab sector,
which is about 20 percent of the students attending the schools and the Jewish religious sector, which they arrest him 20 percent.
How teachers in these schools basically work and apply this notion of global citizenship education,
I think important to note that global citizenship education as a concept doesn't appear in the curriculum,
neither in civics nor in history or in other subjects that you can think about.
But I think it was an advantage actually for us,
because then you can basically ask teachers about their perceptions and about how they use their
autonomy or their agency if you want to basically discuss or avoid this term in the classroom.
And if this term would be in the curriculum,
I would guess that the answers of the teachers will give us would be much more sort of normalised within the scheme of the existing curriculum.
So that was our starting point.
And. I want to go over the models,
but I will just say that I'm starting this topic in Israel is kind of tricky actually once because sometimes teachers are not familiar with this term.
And then the first part of the study was very useful because we could ask about the communities,
about sort of technology or about English English language or about this is a fair, I don't know,
inequality issues and not directly about global citizenship education,
because in some places it would be highly controversial and in some places it would be totally and familiar.
And the additional point is that on top of conflicts that I mentioned before in these three different streams that we're they're focussing on,
and the system is also sort of turning to now between the image of a Start-Up Nation sort of high technology investments type investments in R&D,
and it obviously penetrates the schools, but also this very nationalistic,
very religious in a sense environment where a schools obviously part of the society and are influenced by it.
So this was our standing point, and we interviewed. This is a small study interviewed seven teachers from each of the main sectors.
It was obviously an exploratory study for the purpose of a larger sample.
When we approached teachers from these different sectors in different geographical areas and we performed interviews and asking them about
issues that can be relevant to global citizenship education as a general term and in top in teachers of subjects that you can find.
Perhaps we saw that we can find some lessons or some plans that might be relevant to the field.
So I'll show you basically how different this conceptualisation of teachers were in different sectors,
and maybe this can set to resonate to to the different communities that we found in our review before.
So for him, obviously, all of these, these are huge generalisations and and many different teachers might have different views.
But I think it gives you it gives you some feeling of what can happen in one country, one small country with a group of teachers.
So basically full Palestinian Arab sectors.
And we could see how basically they were in general very positive about global citizenship education and as a main thing.
And it was. And as a sort of filling of the vacuum of of a feeling of national belonging.
And the teacher basically said, OK, we can't be part of what Ministry of Education of Israel.
And basically sort of main agenda.
But global citizenship, education, all related terms can serve as an alternative.
And then if we teach our students to be towards global citizenship, then they will have a place to to belong in the sense and.
Just to just an example of one Palestinian teacher,
and so basically he talks here about it on one hand and as religion been part of global citizenship education,
which is very interesting, by the way,
in none of the communities religion or religious related terms appear as part of of this global trend in education.
But that's what this teacher says. But also, he takes this to sort of and ICIS type issues, and he will.
He told us about this.
This case in his school, there were a couple of students just basically viral on the internet and sort of used their global citizenship,
and then they ran the from running away from their families and joined them.
And he was saying that that was this is dangerous directions that he's talking about.
So basically in these communities, we would mostly look the cosmopolitan type of education,
which is not related to economy or to skills or two to two competencies and like we saw in the communities in the review.
But more about sort of philosophical standing where people can find alternative identity alternative mode of belonging,
which is helpful, obviously when the dominant mode of belonging is not relevant to this community.
And with the same sort of standing with the Jewish religious sector again 20 20, around 20 percent of the population they attend the schools.
Basically, the teacher and the teachers were very negative about the term and these same issues related to sort of global dimensions in education and
basically claiming that this is a threat of this to the separation type of identity of Jewish identity that they're trying to develop.
So basically, if global citizenship education relates somehow to global or universal values,
then the teachers in this sector felt that they oppose their Jewish values.
And then sort of these the children will leave, the religion will immigrate will.
I don't know that they were like that developed. This notion of catastrophe will happen if, if, if this will be instilled in the classroom.
But on the other hand, similarly, perhaps two Palestinian teachers,
they spoke about the global citizenship education as part of religion, as part of Judaism, for example,
this teacher and talk about how they can move around the world and still be able to to perform their
their religious obligations because they are Jewish communities of Abad or whatever around the world.
And just an example.
So basically this this interview happened when in Israel, there was a huge campaign about how important it is to take what you call in England,
A-plus English level as as a foreign language and basically the Minister of Education,
the new Minister of Education, who is, by the way, religious, which is also quite an interest in getting the revised or transformed the curriculum
to more sort of spoken English instead of just the grammar that was there before.
And and then the teacher sort of presents this danger of spoken English that students will know not only how to read and write,
but they can sort of have a common language, which is like a huge danger for this community.
That's how the teacher presented is presenting it.
And then basically they will become an American or European and sort of disappear from from this community.
So, so well for the Muslim community, it was an alternative mode of belonging,
but also a bit of danger when they exposed to sort of negative issues here.
It was a very dangerous concept that should be avoided.
And they sort of fought against this the goals of Ministry of Education to to instil in English as a spoken language and in Israel.
And again, if we go back to the review and you don't see here these dominant neo-Liberal issues
of competencies or of skills will perhaps more than than in the Muslim communities.
And but it's again this feeling. Suffolk standing of who, who are we and who is the other right,
and just to think that's in our review on the idea of global citizenship, education is unique course.
If it was, the whole idea is to make this lens is bridges to build bridges with the others,
so you can see how teachers basically interpret it differently.
And the last one is the the secular education sector, which is this is a majority basically of the population.
And and they precept is that they present perceptions of global citizenship education basically
as a skill set that helps the students and that most of them were very positive about it to an.
So to fail, it will it will be part of this sort of competitive graduate, that's the the education system is trying to to develop it,
but also they spoke a bit about the brain drain in the Scholastica terms.
And you can see here a quote from me, from my one teacher and.
So basically, as I as I said, there is no curriculum on global citizenship education,
but then they perceive it as something universal like a stem, right?
And. And then he was like a bit a bit critical of how the system tells him how to teach global citizenship education,
basically doing global citizenship without saying the word the word,
but all notion, all that he speaks about is all about the world of work, the skills, the capability to to to compete globally.
It's not. It's all about identity, belonging or all other things that were so important to the teachers in the other sectors that I show you.
So basically, this would be this community of the review of 21st century skills,
perhaps a little bit of intercultural competence where you see that some so sometimes some notions were picked out well,
while most of them were basically abolished in each of these communities in these sectors.
And so basically, to conclude this part and perhaps an old dog, I would say that the scholarship,
but also the field allows us to to to C to to to to analyse or to understand very different
notions of this global education and specifically of global citizenship education.
We can say that. The idea, for example, to test to measure global citizenship education,
as it done currently in the recent visa cycle is basically meaningless because for every sector just in this small country,
you can see how different the notions are and how different teachers perceive it and what kind of sort of obviously,
curricula follows these same notions, but also in scholarship.
Basically, these two strands of competencies on one hand and sort of moral understanding of the other hand,
also are also so multidimensional and so complex that, first of all, to measure it, it would be basically a ridiculous idea.
But also, if I would take sort of the positive stand towards how can we as educators,
as teachers to use this notion of global citizenship education, we already understand that if you want to take the positives of it,
we need to make it fully contextualised and adapted to the different types of of of school,
so different populations that we, we encounter in different schools.
So if, for example, going back to today's world case,
if we are trying to develop sort of alternative pathways to create belonging amongst different types of populations.
So obviously, we need to take this path of how this can be something bigger than national citizenship, which is so controversial in Israel.
And if we want to bring on board Jewish religious population,
then we definitely can stress this universal notions, but rather to speak about how you can still be Jewish,
but to develop sort of different aspects of belonging and how you can communicate with others without changing your own identity, I would say.
And I think that in general,
and what I showed you today is basically very powerful methodologies that can help you
to to to do research and to to sort of move the scholarship forward in every field.
When you take this advanced technological solutions and using big data in order
to then go back to the field and ask about this specific terms with specific a
specific notions that otherwise you wouldn't be able to to to find them to to to
basically put your finger on them in this ocean of data that we have these days.
So basically, I think it shows nicely how you can.
And was this macro work? Trying to understand the field goals is big words, but also go back to individual teacher.
And when you sit in front of your informant,
you basically can be more knowledgeable and more more accurate when you ask your questions and in your research.
So thank you very much.