Ethical global issues pedagogy in practice: educators’ reflexive work in critical global citizenship education

Scholars have observed that superficial efforts to promote global citizenship education and education for sustainable development can reproduce colonial relations of power through, for example, solutionist and feel-good pedagogies that obscure structural inequalities and mainstream perspectives on global issues. In response, critical approaches to global citizenship education foreground reflexivity as a means of interrogating dominant narratives, unsettling deficit constructions of distant ‘others’ and engaging with issues such as power, racism and climate justice. This article presents an empirical analysis of educators’ engagement with the Ethical Global Issues Pedagogy resource. Findings are drawn from analysis of online survey responses and online semi-structured interviews with 30 educators working across 16 countries. The study examines how the Ethical Global Issues Pedagogy is taken up, interpreted and adapted across diverse educational contexts, asking: (1) why is the Ethical Global Issues Pedagogy resource of interest to educators across contexts, regions and languages; and (2) what insights and implications for practice stem from the uptake of the resource across diverse educational settings? Findings indicate that the Ethical Global Issues Pedagogy is valued for supporting reflexive engagement with global issues without collapsing complexity into simplified or solutions-oriented responses. At the same time, educators identify multi-scale tensions that shape how the resource can be enacted in practice. This article argues that Ethical Global Issues Pedagogy functions as a reflexive pedagogical tool that mediates teachers’ reflexivity, contributing insights for teacher education and professional development concerned with critical global citizenship education in conditions of ongoing global crisis.