Is the world their oyster?’ Pre-service teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and reported practices concerning global citizenship.

Abstract

In a globalised world teachers’ role is becoming more complex as they are called upon to respond to different educational needs, to commit to social justice and sustainability, and to teach students to tackle local and global problems. Considering these requirements, higher education institutions have been integrating global citizenship education (GCE) in pre-service teacher programmes to cultivate their critical awareness and transformative agency (Appleyard & McLean, 2011; Quezada, 2012). Despite these efforts, pre-service teachers often feel insecure about teaching for global citizenship (Holden & Hicks, 2007; Parkhouse et al., 2016; Kopish, 2017). In light of this context, this presentation reports on an ongoing project that aims: i) to understand the knowledge, beliefs and practices reported by pre-service teachers at a Portuguese university concerning GCE, ii) to understand their motivations and hindrances to include GCE in their teaching, and, addressing the theme of this conference, iii) to unveil emerging differences between foreign language and non-foreign language pre-service teachers. To meet these goals, an exploratory qualitative case study was undertaken, and an online questionnaire was sent via email to all pre-service teachers attending professionalising master’s degrees at the university. The questionnaire included three main sections with various question formats, which were submitted to statistical or thematic analysis. A preliminary analysis of the results shows that despite their motivation to address GCE, pre-service teachers, regardless of teaching area, feel unsure about the way to integrate this perspective in school, claiming that they lack sufficient knowledge of global issues and pedagogical training on the most appropriate methodologies. Findings seem to justify a more systematic work with pre-service teachers to support them in integrating GCE into their skillset and mindset. This work should be sustained on a reflective and critical pedagogy (Starkey, 2012) and on the development and evaluation of GCE projects in classroom settings.