This is a research report, by Harm-Jan Fricke and Cathryn Gathercole with contributions from Amy Skinner, that seeks to address the following questions:
(1) What are the key differences and similarities between diverse forms of ‘adjectival educations’ that contribute to, or generally express themselves as allied to an ‘education for global citizenship’?
(2) What do they contribute to an education for global citizenship?
(3) How, if at all, do they interpret the notion of ‘transformation’?
(4) What do practitioners consider to be the major challenges and opportunities for monitoring (transformative) education for global citizenship?
(5) Which approaches and means of monitoring and assessing transformative education for global citizenship appear to be feasible?
The report explores the challenges and opportunities of monitoring education for global citizenship (EfGC), aiming to provide a contribution to debates around education targets and indicators of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals related to GCE / EfGC.
This report outlines the opportunities and challenges related to monitoring GCE as identified through a survey of opinions of over 200 educators working in more than 50 countries, with a predominance of respondents based in Europe. It also provides an overview of different conceptualizations of “adjectival” educations (‘development education’ (DE), ‘global education’ (GE), ‘global learning’ (GL), ‘human rights education’ (HRE), and ‘education for sustainable development’ (ESD), which can be useful for conceptual clarity and identifications of overlaps when engaging with partners/stakeholders from different background.
More importantly it presents arguments both for and against implementation of evaluation frameworks that are relevant for those interested in development of “evidence”-based policies and advocacy strategies. A relevant observation is that the interviewed educators by and large expressed an opposition towards introduction of monitoring frameworks that were considered either as extra work, mechanisms of control, culturally insensitive (hegemonic) and as potentially leading to a re-orientation of emphasis onto (measurable) learning outcomes and outputs, rather than on the educational process.