Decolonial options and foreclosures for global citizenship education and education for sustainable development

Abstract

This article builds from scholarship in Environmental and Sustainability Education and Critical Global Citizenship Education calling for more explicit attention to how teaching global issues is embedded in the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo, 2018). It reports on findings from a study with secondary and upper secondary school teachers in England, Finland, and Sweden who participated in workshops drawing on the HEADSUP (Andreotti, 2012) tool which specifies seven repeated and intersecting historical patterns of oppression often reproduced through global learning initiatives. Teachers reacted to and discussed the tool and considered how it might be applied in their practice. The paper reviews two of the key findings: a) the relationship between formal and nonformal global education and mediation of mainstream charity discourses, and b) emerging evidence of how national policy culture and context influence teachers’ perceptions in somewhat surprising ways.