Locating a Course on Environmental Justice in Theories of Environmental Education and Global Citizenship

Abstract

Environmental education is an increasingly important concern for policymakers and universities, as it is critical to the success of the broader agenda represented by the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Achieving this within the higher education sector has proven difficult, however. This article examines how an interdisciplinary, extra-curricular course on the justice implications of climate change, delivered as part of University College London’s Global Citizenship Programme, combined a range of practical and theoretical methodologies to deliver environmental education and the related concept of education for global citizenship. Evidence indicates that courses such as this could be a powerful means of overcoming the shortcomings in mainstream higher education and equipping students with the skills necessary for them to assist society, at global, national and subnational levels, in transitioning towards more sustainable behaviours.

Keywords

Climate change environmental education environmental justice global citizenship higher education

Introduction

Global citizenship is an increasingly important concern for higher education institutions, as it both reflects and provides a framework for interdisciplinary and inter- and intra-institutional research. The vehicle through which University College London (UCL), an urban, expanding and research-focused university, incorporates global citizenship into its curriculum is the Global Citizenship Programme (GCP). This multifaceted course creates an environment in which students can engage in, discuss and reflect on global challenges, thereby providing an opportunity for higher education to ‘serve as an important site for reflexive, socially accountable, and critically informed conversations’ about how society could develop (Stein, 2017, p. 4). As such, it supports the view that higher education serves to aid individuals in making ‘better’, in this context meaning more environmentally sound, decisions and rationally inform collective behaviours so as to achieve society’s environmental goals (Gough & Scott, 2007, Chap. 2).

This article examines how a GCP course on climate change delivered environmental education and education for global citizenship. We begin by providing an overview of the GCP and key aspects of the climate change course. The article then locates the course in theories of environmental education, noting particularly how it goes beyond mainstream approaches to incorporating sustainable development into higher education. Finally, drawing on evaluation data, we examine how the course reflects global citizenship education (GCE) as a process and its potential to transform students into global citizens. Our findings suggest that interdisciplinary and immersive courses like the GCP have an important role to play in developing students as global citizens and providing them with the skills necessary to challenge and reform society’s unsustainable behaviours.

University College London’s Global Citizenship Programme and the Global Environmental Justice Strand

The GCP comprises different strands framed within UCL’s research agenda.¹ Between 2016 and 2018, a strand on global environmental justice (the GEJ strand) was offered, which has now evolved to look more broadly at global environmental challenges. The GEJ strand focused on the global and local justice implications of climate change, what is being done to tackle climate change and how the students, acting individually and collectively, could deliver positive change. Its learning objectives focused on enhancing the students’ ability, working together and individually, to critically analyse different aspects of the climate change debate, contribute to effective campaigning and engage in and present research in a range of formats. Initially a 2-week summer school, the GCP has now evolved into a year-long extracurricular programme. For the environment strand, the course now comprises a series of themed term-time events, a ‘weekend challenge’ led by NGOs and other partners and a 1-week summer school concerned with environmentalism in different countries and contexts. Combined, these enable students to comprehensively understand what ‘global citizenship’ means as both an intellectual concept and practical ambition within an environmental context.

Each year, approximately 90 students from UCL participated in the strand. The students were from a variety of disciplines and at different stages of their degrees. They were divided into eight groups, each of which was assigned a country.² These countries provided a focus for the students’ research into environmental justice and were who they represented in the climate change negotiation simulation (discussed later), an integral part of the course. PhD students, again from a range of disciplines, were employed to act as ‘navigators’. Their primary responsibilities were to facilitate group discussions, lead the academic tutorials and support the students as they developed their research outputs. The navigators were crucial to the programme’s success; their enthusiasm and unique insights undoubtedly enhanced the students’ experience by exposing them to additional professional and personal perspectives.

The strand included lectures, tutorials, workshops and project-based activities. An international series of speakers, with expertise in the humanities, science and education, was invited to talk on, inter alia, the Anthropocene, climate activism in the Pacific, human rights in the Niger Delta, the experiences of women in international climate change institutions and the transition towns movement. Workshops covered graphic design, environmental activism and carbon-neutral campaigning. The academic tutorials included tasks such as writing environmental justice manifestos, calculating and responding to the students’ personal carbon footprints and debating trade-offs that have to be made within the sustainability agenda. The project work consisted of a research poster based on the environmental justice issues relevant to their assigned country.

Engaging Students with Environmental Justice

Environmental justice is a complex concept, theoretically and practically. Its origins lie in the USA, where, during the 1970s and 1980s, growing evidence emerged that locally undesirable land uses were deliberately sited near poor and ethnic minority communities. In short, these communities represented ‘the line of least resistance’ to developments such as toxic waste sites because they lacked the knowledge, capacity and resources to effectively engage in local planning procedures (United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, 1987). Responses to this so-called environmental racism culminated in President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898, which required the potential health effects of proposed developments on minority and low-income populations to be taken into account in decisions taken under the National Environmental Policy Act 1969. However, although an important statement of political intent, weaknesses in the design and judicial interpretation of this Act have limited its ability to both protect vulnerable communities and achieve its ambitious environmental objectives (Karkkainen, 2007).

At the global level, questions of justice are particularly relevant in the context of climate change. The impacts of climate change fall hardest on the poorest states, but it is the developed states that have contributed more to the rising global temperature through their historic emissions. There is also the question of what obligations, if any, are owed by the current generation to future generations. It has been persuasively argued that any consideration of how we deal with climate change today should take into account the (perceived) interests of those that will follow us tomorrow (Skillington, 2017, pp. 238–243). Brown Weiss (1992), for example, believes that to achieve intergenerational equity in terms of the environment, it is necessary to ensure that each generation does not exploit natural and cultural diversity to the extent that it undermines future generations’ ability to respond to their own environmental challenges. In other words, each generation has an obligation to conserve the options of future generations (1992, pp. 402–404). Creating a sufficiently robust and just international response to climate change has therefore proven difficult. On the one hand, without dramatic reductions in carbon emissions, the global temperature will continue to rise, resulting in fundamental ecological change to the planet (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). On the other, developing states, quite legitimately, wish to achieve the same level of prosperity as developed states. To do so, and not withstanding recent developments in the viability and accessibility of renewable energy, they need to not only continue to emit greenhouse gases but, in many cases, also increase their emissions as well.

Environmental justice is relevant to all aspects of environmental law and policymaking, not just climate change (Ebbesson & Okowa, 2009). It is a legitimate topic for a full academic module, and even this would not allow for a comprehensive consideration of every aspect. To make the course material accessible to the students, we therefore used three mechanisms. The success of these was evident in the final presentations the students made in their country groups to the rest of the strand. It was clear that not only had the students fully grasped the key principles and challenges of environmental justice but were also confident enough to begin to develop their own strategies for delivering it in different contexts through a strengthened sense of connection to the global human and natural community.

First, our analysis of environmental justice was framed within its two constituent elements: distributive and procedural justice (Schlosberg, 2007, Chap. 2). The students were encouraged to consider what the principal drivers of climate change are, who suffers from the impacts of climate change and who should bear the burden of mitigating these (distributive justice); and who has a say in decision-making, how to make these processes relevant to different communities and why this is important (procedural justice).

Second, to illustrate questions that are central to GEJ debates, the students were introduced to Posner and Weisbach’s asteroid example (2010, 75 et seq.). Posner and Weisbach ask us to imagine that an asteroid is heading for the Earth and will collide with India in 100 years’ time. If the world acted together, technology could be developed to divert the asteroid and dramatically reduce its impact. This could only be achieved, however, at significant cost to all states. What would the nature and extent of other states’ obligations be towards India? They then posit a different scenario, in which there is no way to predict where the asteroid will hit. Again, what would the obligations of developed states be to poorer states, which would be less able to prepare for the asteroid and cope with its impact? Although different to the long-term and cumulative process of climate change, the asteroid example raises the same issues of legal obligations, moral responsibilities and respective capacities to deal with significant harm that the students engaged with throughout the course.

Third, to demonstrate the difficulties in delivering environmental justice, we highlighted that global and local environmental justice agenda, while sharing similar aims and principles, are not always compatible. For example, following a genuinely inclusive and democratic decision-making procedure, a community could decide to reject the construction of a wind farm in their local area. This would be a valid expression of local environmental justice but also contrary to the emphasis on low and zero-carbon energy in GEJ discourse (e.g., see Outka, 2012). If, however, the government overruled the community and approved the wind farm proposal, citing the need to reduce carbon emissions, GEJ would be served, but local environmental justice would be denied. The students engaged with this tension throughout the course, recognizing the value of education in helping to show why global perspectives need to be taken on what appear to be only local issues.

The Climate Change Negotiation Simulation

The first week of the GEJ strand built towards a simulation of the negotiations of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change.³ The COP is the annual or biannual meeting of states party to an international instrument at which they, inter alia, review progress and adopt new rules and programmes of work. Specifically, the students formed a contact group of the 2015 Paris Agreement’s COP Meeting as the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA),⁴ that is, a small group of states representing different negotiating blocs, like the Small Island Developing States Group and the Environmental Integrity Group,⁵ tasked with negotiating a text on a specific issue or provision within the Agreement that is then presented to a plenary session of the CMA.

Students were provided with a negotiation text and background paper on an aspect of the Paris Agreement, as well as confidential country negotiation instructions. They began by drafting and presenting their opening statements, in which they set out the position that they would be advocating in the negotiations. Representatives from each country then tried to reach common positions before the groups came together to negotiate. The objective of the exercise was not to agree a final version of the text. Rather, it was to demonstrate the difficulties in reaching an agreement by consensus with partners that have different experiences of climate change and hold different, potentially contradictory, values, thereby providing an important insight into the operation of, and links between, international climate change policy and global citizenship.

Role-play exercises have notable advantages in education, including improving communication and listening skills, which, when coupled with the greater levels of enthusiasm associated with more interactive teaching techniques, result in higher knowledge retention (e.g., see Vizeshfar et al., 2019). The COP simulation therefore provides a way of critiquing current approaches to legal education, which typically rely on more mainstream modes of delivery, like lectures and seminars. For three consecutive years, students demonstrated an understanding of complex legal, political and scientific issues that would ordinarily only be expected after years of study. Immersive, interdisciplinary courses taking in a range of perspectives on climate change and other environmental issues, like the GEJ strand, could therefore be a powerful way of furthering, in a connected manner, transdisciplinary environmental education and ideas of transformative global citizenship. The remainder of this article considers whether the GEJ strand did so.

Environmental Education

The different approaches to environmental education and their intersections with legal education have been categorized by Holder (2013) on a scale focused around three anchor points. At one end of the scale is education for sustainable development (ESD), a minimum standard of environmental education. It represents a process of mainstreaming sustainable development, defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (1987, pp. 8 and 43), into all aspects of education. As Holder observes, however, while universities have been reasonably successful in incorporating sustainable development into the management of their estates, they have been unable to radically reform curricula so that students not only hear from experts from different disciplines but are also themselves equipped to analyse problems from a range of disciplinary perspectives (2013, p. 550). This is reflective of a broader trend in the implementation of sustainable development, whereby stakeholders tend to deliver only on those aspects of the sustainable development agenda that do not entail fundamental structural reform (Amos & Lydgate, 2019). In the context of education, Sterling (2001) attributes this to the co-evolution of modern education and neoliberal economic systems along the lines of a reductionist and mechanistic world view, which fails to recognize the links within and between human and natural systems. Education is designed so that individuals are equipped to fulfil narrow criteria required by professions rather than effect meaningful change so that society develops along a more sustainable track (Sterling, 2001, p. 16). This is perhaps unsurprising, as many siloed disciplines are reductionist, objectivist and materialist, commonly valuing intellectual understanding more than affective and practical knowing (Gaard et al., 2017, p. 1274). In the words of Giroux, ‘education has been reduced to another market-driven sphere, pedagogy has been instrumentalized, and public values have been transformed into private interests’ (2011, p. 123).

At the other end of Holder’s scale is ecological intelligence. This rejects the division of analysis into disciplines and, instead, emphasizes the need to understand integrative relationships (Sterling, 2001, p. 16). Ecological intelligence is the most challenging form of environmental education to import into pre-existing educational structures because it cuts across disciplines in a way that is an anathema to traditional forms of education (Holder, 2013, pp. 545–546). It is, nevertheless, achievable, as experience in conservation shows. Mace (2014) traces the evolution of conservation-thinking through four stages. During the 1960s, a ‘conservation for itself’ mindset prevailed, with the focus being on protecting individual areas of untouched areas of supposed wilderness. As awareness of the impacts of human activities increased in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘nature despite people’ conservation emerged. The targets of conservation action remained distinct entities, but they were individual threats, species and habitat types rather than specific places. A major shift in thinking occurred in the 1990s when ecosystems became the object of conservation action. Under this ‘nature for people’ approach, the goal was to ensure the provision of benefits to society by protecting ecosystem services. Finally, the past decade has seen the emergence of ‘people and nature’, which ‘emphasizes the importance of cultural structures and institutions for developing sustainable and resilient interactions between human societies and the natural environment’ (Mace, 2014, p. 1559). This is a similar evolution in thinking and practice, that is, a shift from isolated and narrow consideration of issues to a more holistic appraisal, to what Holder and Sterling advocate in relation to education.

The midpoint between ESD and ecological intelligence on Holder’s scale is education for sustainability literacy. The emphasis, here, is on education, imparting the skill set necessary for an individual to help society transition towards a more sustainable future (Stibbe & Luna, 2009). This skill set comprises both practical (for instance, understanding zero-carbon technologies: Quilley, 2009) and intellectual (e.g., adopting systems-level analysis to problems: Strachan, 2009) elements.

The GEJ strand is situated between ecological intelligence and sustainability literacy. While it presented the different scientific, social, technological, anthropological, legal and political aspects of climate change holistically, it fell short of providing the experiential understanding of injustices that are considered essential in delivering ecological intelligence (Holder, 2013, p. 546). The value of a more immersive approach to teaching in terms of developing responses to challenges like climate change is evident when reference is made to quotidian epistemology. This emphasizes the importance of experience-based expertise in decision-making in complementing and socially locating evidence gathered through strict scientific methodologies (Morrow, 2011, p. 140). Applying this in the current context, it is argued that it is not possible to formulate comprehensive solutions to problems like climate change without drawing on peoples’ lived experiences. Scientists can predict and measure the effects of climate change, but only people who live on the frontline of climate change can provide information about its impacts.

Practical limitations prevented us from giving the students an opportunity to engage with such communities. However, they did hear from speakers who had this first-hand experience and were therefore provided with a deeper understanding of climate justice issues than would have been possible in a purely technical lecture. It is the exposure to these experiences, and the students’ subsequent application of what they learnt in their tutorial discussions and project work, that shifts the GEJ strand beyond ESD and towards ecological intelligence (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Source: The authors.

Global Citizenship

Environmental education is an important aspect of global citizenship. The two concepts are brought together under UNESCO’s programme for GCE.⁶ UNESCO’s work on GCE has, in part, been presented as a response to incidents like the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Pigozzi, 2006, p. 3). GCE should not be seen as limited to such appalling incidents, however. Climate change, while lacking the immediate shock value that accompanies such acts, may be considered no less violent in both its causes, as evidenced by the destruction of the Niger Delta by fossil fuel companies and the associated human rights abuses (Izarali, 2016), and its consequences, like the forced displacement of ‘climate refugees’.⁷ The cross-cutting nature of global citizenship is reflected in its inclusion in Target 4.7 of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (UN General Assembly, 2015).

Rather than being a single universal ideal, global citizenship may therefore, instead, be better understood as comprising a range of equally valid, context-specific, interpretations. Oxley and Morris (2013), for example, identify two forms of global citizenship—cosmopolitan-based and advocacy-based—each of which incorporates four distinct types of global citizenship. Environmental global citizenship is considered one of the four advocacy forms (the others being social, critical and spiritual), characterized by ‘an ecological awareness of the fundamental interrelatedness of all aspects of the Earth’ (Richardson, 2008, p. 128, cited in Oxley & Morris, 2013, p. 314). What distinguishes it from other manifestations of global citizenship is that it operates within the contested and complex dichotomy of anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism in environmental policymaking.

Viewing this tension through the prism of global citizenship highlights the importance of striking a balance between these two paradigms. Placing too much emphasis on anthropocentric concerns, as the current international order arguably does so (Kotzé & French, 2018), results in a destructive relationship between humanity and nature that undermines efforts to deliver other elements of the global citizenship and sustainability agenda. The human rights abuses resulting from the unsustainable exploitation of the Niger Delta, referred to earlier, are a good example of this. Core ideas of ecocentric theories, like granting nature legal rights (Stone, 2010) and developing societal infrastructure so that it supports and restores the natural world (Mason, 2011), redefine the nature–human relationship in terms that prioritize the protection of the interactions within and between ecosystems over socio-economic concerns. This would, it is argued, ensure that sustainable development is actually sustainable because the inevitable policy trade-offs between environmental protection, economic development and social equity would be framed by the Earth’s ecological carrying capacity (Bosselmann, 2017). It follows that other aspects of global citizenship that can be linked with sustainable development would therefore also be facilitated, at least to a greater extent than current systems typically allow. However, pursuing an excessively ecocentric approach risks alienating policymakers, making it harder for more moderate ecocentric policies, like strengthening the role of ecological science in environmental assessment procedures (Holder, 2007), to be debated in decision-making fora.

Tensions between competing interests also exist in discussions on what form of global citizenship should be the subject, and aspiration, of education. Stein (2015) identifies four positions on global citizenship, which, like Holder’s three forms of environmental education, offer different opportunities and limitations in shifting social constructs, including education, away from the neoliberal agenda of sustainable development that has broadly failed to solve inequalities within human society and between humanity and nature. The entrepreneurial position, for example, under which global citizenship is seen as a way of enabling students to participate in the global economy, has been criticized for lacking the essential element of responsibility towards ‘others’ (Caruna, 2014) inherent to ideas of global citizenship (Beasley-Murray, 2015). Provided that everyone has the right to engage in the global economy, questions of inequality can be largely ignored (Stein, 2015, drawing on Harvey, 2005). Consideration of ‘others’, however, particularly the disadvantaged in global and local societies, was central to the work undertaken by the GEJ students. The course therefore broadly corresponded to the liberal humanist position on global citizenship (see Figure 1).⁸ Nussbaum’s prerequisite capacities of global citizens, that is, critical self-examination, recognizing one’s links with other humans and imagining oneself in the position of another (2002, cited in Stein, 2015), were developed through the strand’s tutorials and the climate change negotiation simulation, with the latter also enhancing the students’ capacity for intercultural understanding. As such, the strand can be seen as a tool through which education influences individual and collective mindsets, identified by Wamsler (2020) as an essential necessity to deliver Target 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Global citizenship scholarship offers a range of criteria against which courses like the GEJ strand can be assessed, relating to both GCE as a process and whether that process results in individuals identifying themselves as global citizens. Taking GCE as a process first, we have selected Oxley and Morris’ three dimensions of curricula—antecedents, transactions and outcomes—as an evaluation tool because they address key aspects of educational courses. They cover not just a course’s learning outcomes but also its delivery methods (transactions) and wider physical and theoretical context (antecedents) (Oxley & Morris, 2013, pp. 316–317). These criteria will be used to assess the extent to which ideas of (environmental) global citizenship underpin the GEJ strand. If the overarching rationale of the strand is to deliver a course on global citizenship through the prism of environmental justice and climate change, then it is important that these are reflected in the three features of educational courses identified by Oxley and Morris.

The strand’s transactions have already been discussed. Lectures introduced topics relevant to various aspects of climate change and environmental justice. Related tutorials allowed students to consolidate and further explore issues that had been raised in the lectures. The activism workshops and negotiation simulation situated their skills-training within a practical transdisciplinary environment that enabled students to see their potential for application in their future studies and careers. All of this fed into the students’ project work, which allowed them to relate issues that were being discussed during the course to a specific country’s socio-economic and environmental context.

Turning to learning outcomes, these were:

By the end of this strand, students will be able to:

critically analyse theories of environmental justice and their application in specific contexts;

challenge preconceptions about the science and impacts of climate change;

understand how international law responds to climate change and how different groups engage in international policymaking;

participate in negotiations;

develop creative and sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems;

devise strategies for and engage in environmental activism; and

undertake collaborative and individual research tasks and present their findings in a range of visual and oral formats.

While these related to the strand’s specific content, they lacked an explicit link to global citizenship and the idea of ‘global citizens’ as both a theoretical concept and practical ambition. This was mitigated, however, by the strand’s antecedents. The strand was one part of UCL’s wider GCP, and there was consequently an overt emphasis on different aspects of global citizenship. It should also be seen within the broader context of UCL’s Grand Challenges, an interdisciplinary framework facilitating integrated research across the university. The work students were undertaking was, therefore, situated at all times within ideas and concepts of global citizenship. A range of materials, such as expert-prepared country negotiation positions, relevant media reports and items that had been gifted by Pacific islanders to some of the speakers contextualized the students’ academic discussions and lent a physical dimension to hypothetical tasks.

Overall, the strand can be said to have delivered a strong element of global citizenship. It is, however, important to note its limitations, particularly the short duration of the course. This was a significant restriction on our capacity to allow for an in-depth and immersive consideration of the relationships between climate change, global citizenship and environmental justice. As already noted, environmental justice is a huge academic topic and 2 weeks is insufficient time to adequately address every aspect. The mechanisms discussed earlier were a pragmatic response to this, but not a substitute for an extended period of study. The short duration also had an impact on the strand’s transactions. In particular, the students’ research into the different countries had to be kept to a relatively superficial level. A comprehensive appraisal of the impacts that climate change has in each country, and the consequent environmental justice issues, was not possible within the time frame.

Recent changes to the GCP’s format go some way in remedying these issues. The greater scope provided by the year-long format enables the students to explore the complex issues raised by the environment strand’s content in greater depth than the 2-week summer school, thereby allowing for more detailed consideration of how environmental concerns feed into discussions of global citizenship and vice versa. By developing these connections, we provide some basis for co-designing and co-facilitating programmes that contribute directly to the sustainability movement.

The second set of criteria against which we will evaluate the GEJ strand is Oxfam’s characteristics of a global citizen. This analysis does not concern the design and content of the course, but rather its potential to transform its participants into global citizens. According to Oxfam, a global citizen is someone who:

is aware of the wider world and sense their own role as a world citizen;

respects and values diversity;

has an understanding of how the world works economically, politically, socially, culturally, technologically and environmentally;

is outraged by social injustice;

participates in and contributes to the community at a range of levels from the local to the global;

is willing to act to make the world a more sustainable place; and

takes responsibility for their actions (Oxfam, 1997, p. 5)

Oxfam’s criteria can be broadly divided into two categories: those that relate to active global citizens and those that relate to passive global citizens. A passive global citizen may be defined as someone who recognizes their place in international, national and subnational communities; holds values associated with global citizenship; and understands the flaws in current social paradigms, but does not take related actions. An active global citizen, in comparison, takes steps to implement their values in their own lives and also within their communities. They will not only understand how carbon emissions cause air pollution at home and rising sea levels abroad but also reduce their carbon footprint and join a campaign to persuade their local council to divest from fossil fuels. A similar distinction is made by Skrbis et al. (2004) between authentic and mundane cosmopolitanism, itself an aspect of global citizenship (Beasley-Murray, 2015). A mundane cosmopolitan is someone who dresses up in the native dress of a country they support in the Eurovision Song Contest, while an authentic cosmopolitan will immerse themselves in that country’s culture by living and working there (Skrbis et al., 2004, pp. 129–130). Mundane cosmopolitans are not criticized as somehow being phonies, or as incapable of having a transformative effect on society. Rather, Skrbis et al. recognize that they may lay the groundwork for deeper social change (2004, p. 130, drawing on Nava, 2002). The same observations apply to passive global citizens. Within the context of climate change, however, it is legitimate to question the value of the mundane and passive when the general consensus is that significant remedial action is urgently required (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018).

We are able to measure the success of the strand in developing students as global citizens by comparing the (anonymous) responses of the 2018 cohort to a set of global citizen statements given before and after the programme (Table 1). Students were asked to score from 1 to 5 (1 being lowest) the extent to which these statements applied to them. The statements, devised by the GCP’s Academic Director with input from the strand academic leads and the GCP steering committee, were informed by a literature search for existing measures of global citizenship in higher education (including Ferreira, 2011; Hunter et al., 2006; Morais & Ogden, 2011). They are a combination of statements that had been validated in other tools that matched or could be adapted to UCL’s definition of global citizenship⁹ and new statements written specifically for this course in a manner that reflects common practice in how such statements are devised (e.g., the use of the phrase ‘I am informed…’). Asking the students to respond to the statements on the first and last days of the course reduced the influence that non-GCP activities would have on their answers. Statements 1 to 5, 9 and 10 relate to passive global citizens, while statements 6–8 are more closely associated with active global citizens.

Table 1

Mean Scores of Student Response to Global Citizen Statements from the GEJ Strand.

2018 Global Citizenship Statements	Before	After	Change
Sample Size	61	54	Change
1. I am informed about the different ways in which my life and the lives of people around the world are connected.	3.61	4.28	+0.67
2. I am informed about the different ways in which my actions can contribute to global problems.	3.59	4.39	+0.80
3. I am informed about the global challenges that face human society.	3.85	4.48	+0.63
4. I am informed about how human society could change so that life is more sustainable.	3.46	4.19	+0.73
5. I feel a sense of responsibility for how human society develops.	4.02	4.50	+0.48
6. During my time at UCL, I plan to be involved in activities that tackle global problems (such as volunteering, campaigning, lobbying, charity work or other forms of activism).	4.00	4.17	+0.17
7. I can work in equal partnership with individuals, community and other organizations to bring about social change.	3.79	4.17	+0.38
8. I know several ways in which I can make a difference to some of the world’s most challenging problems.	3.00	4.00	+1.00
9. I am willing to question my own views when they differ from other people’s views.	4.21	4.44	+0.23
10. I feel able to operate in social and work settings anywhere in the world.	3.54	4.09	+0.55

Source: The authors.

There are limits to what this evaluation data tell us, and it should be noted that they were devised to inform the ongoing development of the GCP rather than for purposes of research. The sample size was determined by the students who were present on the first and last days, and although the majority of participants were the same, it is still the case that a few would have only responded to one set of statements. It is also not possible to tell whether those students who scored highly on the active global citizen statements followed through and undertook some form of activism or volunteering. Drawing on data from multiple years and tracking the students’ engagement in the months following the course will be important when advancing this research in the future. Nevertheless, that there was a positive change across all 10 statements suggests at this early stage that the strand succeeded to some extent in developing students as global citizens. It reinforced those characteristics associated with passive global citizenship and strengthened students’ self-identification as global citizens. It also inspired and enabled participants to actively engage in activities associated with environmental justice and global citizenship after the course had been completed.

Conclusion

The GEJ strand met key criteria of environmental education and GCE literature. Its immersive and interdisciplinary approach, which placed as much emphasis on practical experience as it did on academic study, shifted the strand beyond the ESD model that has been embraced by higher education institutions towards an educational paradigm arguably more capable of preparing students to deliver positive social change. In terms of GCE as an educational process, the strand delivered important global citizenship messages across its learning objectives, transactions and antecedents. Although these were limited by the 2-week duration of the course, recent changes in the GCP’s format, so that it is now a year-long programme, provide opportunities to develop these in the future. Further research is needed to establish the extent to which the strand developed students as global citizens, but initial results indicate that such courses could have real value in this regard.

What is clear is that courses like the GCP and its GEJ strand are important tools in higher education. They remedy some of the artificial limitations imposed by current approaches to teaching by allowing students to critique the causes and potential solutions to challenges like climate change in a more holistic, and therefore more relevant, manner than is possible in a law course, or an economics course, or a scientific course. They have the potential to produce globally responsible citizens with the skill set necessary to aid society in its transition towards a more sustainable future.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dr Clare Bentall and Dr Nicole Blum (both at UCL’s Institute of Education) for their comments on previous versions of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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