How do we measure global citizenship education?

Education initiatives to advance progress on U.N. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 4.7 on global citizenship education—focused on ensuring learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, and a culture of peace and nonviolence—have never been more critical in today’s  interconnected world, particularly given the global health, social, and environmental challenges. Countries’ initiatives to transform education in this direction represent hopeful steps toward creating a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. A particular conundrum, though, is how to report and measure country efforts in global citizenship education across diverse cultures and systems to ensure successful classroom implementation. What steps can governments take to devise appropriate indicators—or metrics—to monitor progress toward global citizenship and other aspects of Target 4.7, especially in resource-constrained education settings?

On December 15, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) hosted the final virtual event in a three-part series centered around the assessment of 21st century skills. Building off the previous events on measuring 21st century skills in mainstream education and at the household level to help advocate for education policy change, this last event examined the pilot of a monitoring initiative involving Gambia, Bhutan, and Costa Rica, and discussed approaches to creating appropriate definitions and descriptions of global citizenship skills in the Asia-Pacific region as a possible precursor to the development of indicators for assessing their implementation in schools and classrooms. After short presentations on the value of regional platforms for monitoring initiatives, the emergent “transformative education” perspective, and work supported by the Asia-Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding (APCEIU), the panelists discussed the implications of developing a regional assessment framework for global citizenship.

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