Global Citizenship Education and Sustainability: overcoming contradictions, tensions, rhetoric, and ‘flaws’: Global Citizenship and Borderland Learning

Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and Sustainable Development Education (SDE) are key advocacies of Target 4.7 of the UN SDGs yet remain marginalised in national school and university curricula in the UK. When they do appear in educational vision statements and curricula, they are superficial at best or neoliberalised or largely dismissed at worst. Undoubtedly, if we are to address the critical global challenges we currently face, we need a GCE and SDE/Learning for Sustainability (LfS) at the heart of curricula for young people that foregrounds proper engagement with communities, a plurality of knowledges, including indigenous knowledges, fosters critical consciousness and provides agentifying possibilities of transformative learning. Further, we argue: the ‘flaws’/contradictions within GCE and SDE/LfS should be embraced as ‘productive tensions’, rather than dismissed