Global citizenship education. Corina Moscovich

Global citizenship education
I will explore the concept of global citizenship as addressed by both, UNESCO 2014 GCE and OXFAM in their documents for teachers. I will mainly focus on the definition and theoretical introduction of both institutions and will reflect “upon the implications of internationalisation for education in general”, especially about how learners interact and engage with “otherness”.

UNESCO´s Global + citizen-ship 
“Global Citizenship Education (GCED) aims to empower learners to assume active roles to face and resolve global challenges and to become proactive contributors to a more peaceful, tolerant, and inclusive and secure world.” This is the definition published in Unesco´s main website and the message always seems to be the same: When we come together we can do more. In fact, grounded in a lifelong learning perspective, GCE targets all learners of all ages, as well as modality.   
Within the foreword of UNESCO´s publication it is observed: “Although GCE is well recognized as a key dimension of education for dealing with the challenges and opportunities posed by globalisation, consensus about what global citizenship means, and consequently what GCE should promote, is yet to be reached.” (UNESCO, 2014 p. 5) 

Terms come and go, and as I am interested in the concept; if I analyse the two words separately, I have an adjective (Global) and a noun (citizenship).  “Global” has the meaning of something general: circular, goes around the globe (Earth). Then, in the Executive summary of UNESCO, GCE is defined as: “a framing paradigm which encapsulates how education can develop the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes learners need for securing a world which is more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable.” (UNESCO, 2014 page 9) Therefore, I think about citizenship: citizen + ship, as the condition, character or state of being a citizen. So I could interpret it as the global (general) state of being a citizen. It makes sense as GCE as such is closely related to civic values, skills and identity.  
UNESCO´s publication contains one part called “Global citizenship education in practice”. Firstly, under “Curricular approaches” (UNESCO, 2014 p.25) we can obtain information about GCE in different countries. E.g.: Oxfam´s Curriculum for GC has been integrated as a curricular approach in England, Scotland & Wales (UNESCO, 2014 p. 25). Secondly, under “Using information and communication technologies” (UNESCO, 2014 p. 28), we learn that Young Masters Programme on Sustainable Development uses information and communication technologies to expand learning environments. Thirdly, “Sports and arts based approaches” (UNESCO, 2014 p. 30) provides the reader information about international sporting events such as Olympic Values International Programme, which shows that sports - and arts/community- based approaches can create deep and long-lasting lessons in justice, tolerance, diversity and human rights. Fourthly, “Teacher training” (UNESCO, 2014 p. 32) considers international teacher exchange programmes as another method to expose educators to other countries, cultures and societies as well as to new pedagogical methods and competencies. 

Oxford Committee for Famine Relief 
Having read the two bibliographical sources, one could assume that OXFAM, as it was the pioneer one, has more practical and “hands-on” information than UNESCO, which still tries to come up with a perfect concept of GCE. Specifically, OXFAM is “a guide for schools” which includes some specific definitions but which mostly deals with GC across the curriculum (OXFAM, 2006 p. 12-13). About OXFAM, Byram and Parmenter claim: “Oxfam has since produced comprehensive materials for schools aimed at working towards this definition” (Byram and Parmenter 2015).   
Oxfam´s guide does not make reference to the role of parents. Unfortunately, UNICEF does not make reference to them either. Since it “was first published in 1997, Oxfam has worked with educators to review and update” (OXFAM, 2006) their guidance, based mainly on knowledge and understanding, skills, values and attitudes. Their experience is that “embedding global citizenship across all areas of school life results in the greatest impacts and benefits for learners.” (OXFAM, 2006)  

Internationalisation 
To Knight, a definition about internationalisation “needs to be objective enough that it can be used to describe a phenomenon which is in fact, universal, but which has different purposes and outcomes, depending on the actor or stakeholder.” (Knight, year unknown). Besides, for Cambridge and Thompson (2004), “globalist international education” was guaranteed by free market values (p. 161). 

The role of language/s 
Multilingualism generally implies multiculturalism, as language is culture. Or, languages are cultures. (Byram, 2012)  We could say that within an international context of education multilingualism always plays a good value. For Byram, what we need in teaching is a model which represents language and culture competence holistically and shows the relationship between language competence – including language awareness – and intercultural competence, including cultural awareness. 

Corina Moscovich

Sugar girl (Sara Van Der Valk) by Corina Moscovich

Warning: I start with a flashback: (((((Long long time ago, I can still remember* my own hobby. I used to be a tin collector. Specifically I used to collect old and arty tin containers for tea, mints, cookies, etc, etc. I took my hobby so seriously that I reached a point where I had to make a decision. It was impossible to keep them all. At a time where it was more about spreading the word and not sharing on social networks, I was fortunate enough to be able to sell my collection. Probably those were the first euros I have saved in my entire life! )))))  Back to the present my dear readers. Let´s say near present or recent past, as that was when I found out about Sara´s hobby. This smart, curious and smiley Dutch girl showed up one day at uni (of Luxembourg) with an album of her sugar packets collection. Like bees, in an instant we were all around Sara; asking her lots of questions, wanting to have that album in our hands, promising her to enlarge her collection. I remembered that wonderful feeling of getting/receiving/finding/etc a new tin and sharing the collection whenever I had the opportunity with different kind of people. Eventually, I had the chance to interview Sara VAN DER VALK, the “Sugar girl”. 

C.M: How did you start to collect sugar packets and why? Sara: I started in 2006 at age 14 when I was living in Colorado in the US. I remember sitting in the Pizza Hut and looking at the sugar packets. They were pretty so I decided I would keep them and look for more.

C.M: When did you start calling it a collection? Sara: It has been a collection from the very first packet onwards. My mind was just completely set on the idea of collecting them. When I was a teenager of 16 years old I wanted to attend a trader's fair in a small village in Hungary all by myself, but my mother handily prevented it. I do still want to attend one sometime, just to see what other sort of madmen would have such a hobby.

C.M: How does this hobby make you feel? Sara: I think the spirit of collecting is a sort of need to order and categorise the world around oneself, to put things with other things that are like them. Maybe it is a sort of organised hoarding. Maybe it is the feeling of idiosyncrasy and quaintness that I enjoy about collecting sugar packets, I don’t know. 

C.M: Did anybody in your family collect a specific item? Sara: My great-grandfather, my grandfather and his sister, and for a while my father, also collected sugar packets. It was a very common hobby in the Netherlands in the 1950s. Looking at these sugar packets one comes to understand a lot about how people spent their lives, because the packets have images of cafés and restaurants, shops and companies. It was common to have an image of the restaurant on the front of the packet, along with the company’s name and address. A person’s sugar collection was therefore a sort of picture book of the places where they had been.

C.M: What about yours, then? Sara: In comparison, the sugar packets in my own collection more commonly bear the logo of the coffee brand served in the café that distributed the packet. The collection thus shows a transition from a society based on independent businesses to one where branches become more monopolised and franchises are the norm.

C.M: Which is the criteria for your collection? Sara: They have to be sugar packets, not creamer, honey, salt or sweetener. Other than that the focus is pretty broad, maybe too broad in the long run – all periods, countries of origin, shapes, materials and sizes are welcome. Most other collectors seem to focus on completing series of packets. Not so for me, I am fascinated by the individual packets. Nevertheless I do somewhat categorise them when sticking them into albums – for instance on coffee brand, country, shape or colour; whatever sticks out to me when I am inventarising recent additions to the collection.

C.M: You are about to finish a Master in Multicultural and Multilingual Communication and Learning at the University of Luxembourg. You have plans to write your Thesis about your collection... Sara: What I want to look at is how the language choices on sugar packets differ from place to place and from time to time. For instance on the historic Dutch sugar packets, there is a pretty much total absence of any other language than Dutch. Yet on modern Dutch packets, sometimes there is only English. The Dutch sugar packets are only one example, but another interesting case is Luxembourg, of course, where some of the packets have jumbled-up mixes of partially translated bits of information in four different languages. Then there are some multinational sugar and coffee companies that make a point of having hyper-multilingual packets (ten languages or more). I would like to show that through quantitative analysis, and then talk qualitatively about the causes and implications of such changes.  

C.M: From a social perspective then, what is a sugar packet? Sara: I think sugar packets, like any other object, are a snapshot or a momentary result of the power balances in society. The language choices on the sugar packet are a result of the understandings that the company owners and designers have of the way language is used in the society, and of what they think their customers will like or expect. The sugar packets themselves also contribute to the everyday life linguistic experiences of people - in a small way, they shape, challenge or confirm people's expectations about the positions of different languages in society. 

C.M: Who are the main contributors to your hobby? Sara: There is a division in my collection between “modern” packets and “historic” ones. The modern ones I have partially collected myself, of course, when I was having coffee somewhere or simply taken when passing a self-service sugar packet hand-out point. The next main collector would be my mother, who travels a lot and who tirelessly brings me pursefuls of packets every time.
A substantial part of the collection consists of packets given to me by dozens of friendly souls – teachers, family, friends, and since I’ve announced my thesis topic, also lots and lots of classmates. 
C.M: How about the historic ones? Sara: Of course I couldn’t have personally collected first-hand, because I didn’t exist yet at the time that they were distributed. Some of these I inherited from the aforementioned family members – a big photo album with a bunch of them stuck in and two tins full of emptied packets. Then there’s a small notebook with loads of packets from the area around Steenwijk in the Netherlands, which is where I bought it, at a flea market.

C.M: Tell us figures… Sara: It's hard to say exactly how many packets I have. If I have about 250 sugar packets in each album, my own collection is around 600-700 packets (I'm halfway the third album). That is not counting doubles (to the extent that I have succeeded at avoiding sticking doubles in the albums). The "historic" collection is way bigger, I would guess 1500 packets - 100 in the notebook, 100 in the photo album, 100 in each of the tins, 600 in the organised books and another half thousand at least in the bag, but that might contain a fair few doubles. 

C.M: Can you share an anecdote? Sara: I put my e-mail address on a website for Dutch sugar packet collectors, and it is through this channel that an elderly man contacted me who had been an avid collector as a young man, but now the packets had been sitting in a box in his attic for many years. He offered that I could pick up the box for nothing. There are two albums with a total of hundreds and hundreds of packets, organised on placename alphabetically. It is an awe-inspiring opus.

  *Don McLean: Bye, bye Miss American Pie

Corina Moscovich