As part of the EUniWell Open Lecture Series, Dr. Sébastien Urbanski and Dr. Lucy Bell spoke on the topic “In what sense can citizenship education be global? A Durkheimian approach.” on Friday 17 March 2023.
About this lecture:
The highly debated notion of Global Citizenship Education, promoted by the United Nations, requires a strong anchoring in the social sciences, to be as effective as possible. To do this, we start from the landmark studies of one the main founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, who advocated a form of republican cosmopolitanism. More precisely, he considered that the division of labour, favouring the interconnection of individuals within countries but also between countries, is an irreversible process that creates "organic solidarity" and hence more pronounced respect for the individual as such.
Education for citizenship is a crucial part of this process: having a potentially universal content, it needs to be achieved internationally, thanks to a regulated division of labour between teachers from different nation-states. That is why in the GlobalSense team we encourage teacher-trainers and their students from five countries to work together to internationalise their understanding of citizenship education. The challenge is in line with Durkheim's republican cosmopolitanism: as people increasingly perceive the global aspects of many issues, such as migration, for instance, nation-states should provide a space for reflection and experimentation of new regulations in the field of teacher training.
In this lecture we will describe our project, for which a four-stage collaborative activity was designed and implemented by an international team of teacher-trainers for their students. We shall also present the current findings of our project with 220 participants so far, showing the impact that participation in international exchanges has on student teachers in Global Citizenship Education. These results already point towards a two-fold learning process, where learning outcomes are experienced on both the personal and the professional level
About the lecturers:
Lucy Bell holds a Ph.D. in Education Sciences. She is conducting post-doctoral research at Nantes Université as the scientific coordinator of the GlobalSense consortium.
Sébastien Urbanski holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is an associate professor of Education Sciences at Nantes Université. He is currently responsible for the federative research axis in Human and Social Sciences at Nantes Université.
This lecture was part of the EUniWell Open Lecture Series. Find the full programme here: www.euniwell.eu/what-we-offer...