Mapping Critical Global Citizenship Education in Spanish School (2021)

This project extends the work of the previous project, by expanding our Map of Global Citizenship Education experiences to the (Spanish) state level. In previous projects, we detected two general trends: 1) GCE practice in the primary classroom is usually structured as short-term interventions led by external agents; and 2) these proposals are less likely to be included in the official curriculum, so they are seen as special extracurricular activities that can be reduced or even eliminated if there is not enough time to “cover” the required curriculum.  

Therefore, we intend to support primary school teachers in establishing collaboration with external specialists (NGDOs and teaching area specialists), while maintaining their central role in the design of GCE projects. Since teachers are expected to follow the curriculum required by the state, we aim to help teachers find ways to simultaneously achieve GCE and curricular goals, thus reducing the possibility that the former may be abandoned when coverage of the required content takes precedence.  

The project includes two central elements that aim to address these objectives: 1) Cartography - Adapting the Galician pilot map to the national level, in order to support professionals to extend and develop this network of practices to the rest of Spain, and 2) Interviews - Interviewing NGDO staff, primary school teachers, and specialists in the teaching of mathematics, science, and language in each of Spain's 17 autonomous communities. We hope to identify existing relevant practice, facilitate its incorporation into the map, link the practice with the official curriculum in these areas, and explore possibilities for the design of new initiatives.