Critical World Citizenship

TeachEUR

Exploration

Support

Put simply, critical world citizenship is an attitude. Critical world citizens combine scientific knowledge and personal development to actively improve society. Practicing critical world citizenship requires a set of skills that blend moderation with determination. These competencies are rooted in active learning methods and are presented here with concrete tools and tips for teachers and students.

Skills

Do you want to know which skills contribute to being a critical world citizen, or are you looking for inspiration? Visit the pages below for detailed information, practical tips, teaching activities and learning materials for each skill.

Patience
Overarching skill that underpins all other Critical World Citizenship skills.
Information literacy
Appreciate the varying quality of information and assess the value of information.
Listening
Listening with the intention of learning, reflecting and developing.
Self-reflection
Critical assessment of one’s own performance and actions.
Open mindedness
Being able to go into conversation with curiosity and without prejudice.
Empathy
Being open to different perspectives and sparking interest in learning from others.
Positionality
Understanding of where you stand as a person in your society and in the world.
Autonomy
Ability to discern dominant narratives in society and to think beyond them.
Fun & failure
Practicing without fear of failure and with opportunities to have fun while learning.

Q&A about this toolbox

The EUR Strategy 2024 aims to involve students as co-creators and critical citizens, focusing on interdisciplinarity and inclusiveness in an international context. The strategic vision did not, however, indicate what exactly critical citizens are nor how they should gain critical thinking skills.

The value of this toolbox on critical world citizenship skills lies in its capacity to serve as a point of entry for anyone interested in the concept, be it in a role of student or as a teacher; as novice or expert. Since we believe that critical world citizenship is, ultimately, an attitude of constant exchange, affirmation and reflection that leads to permanent improvement and readjustment, we deliberately developed this toolbox from the bottom-up, based on insights from Erasmus University College (EUC) teaching staff, students and alumni.

As a microcosm of EUR due to its diverse curriculum and community, EUC has a longstanding commitment to educating critical world citizens, an ambition integrated in the Intended Learning Outcomes of its programme. Despite this explicit aspiration and a focus on active learning formats, many (EUC) students have found it hard to acquire and practice critical world citizenship skills throughout the curriculum. This leads to paradoxical situations whereby, on one hand, EUC is recognised as a pioneer in critical world citizenship but where, on the other hand, practical implications of this concept are not clearly articulated. Thus, a variety of perspectives on critical world citizenship circulate: we find it employed as cross-cultural communication but we also find it employed in activist terms connected to achieving social justice.

De facto, these multiple perspectives can lead to tense debates on what critical world citizenship means with regards to contemporary topics such as climate activism, migration, biodiversity or decolonisation and geopolitical threats. We believe that this toolbox can facilitate discussions on such hot issues in an informed and empathetic manner.

On one hand, this imperative requires thinking beyond immediate surroundings and engaging with global issues by encouraging collaboration and constructive criticism to continuously improve ourselves. On the other hand, fostering critical world citizenship skills can lead us to uncomfortable situations in which tensions within our community are laid bare. We are faced with questions about the purpose, meaning, and impact of our education: are we improving the status quo from within or are we tackling hegemonic powers upholding that status quo?; do we act as in- or outsiders?; can critical world citizenship be taught with or without practicing it?; if so, should that praxis be local or global in scope?

In academic literature, critical world citizenship is often described as critical global citizenship, which is a subform of ‘global citizenship education’. Four principles are key to critical world citizens:

As global citizens they share an ambition of realizing their talents and capacities for the benefit of society.
Still in line with global citizenship, critical world citizenship adopts a holistic approach to learning, and to sustainable coexistence.
Critical world citizens go beyond global citizenship in their contribution to challenging oppressive structures, fostering emancipation, and promoting social justice.
Critical world citizenship encourages practicing the duties and responsibilities we hold as citizens in any given polity.

The overarching aim of global citizenship is to allow learners to flourish, in the sense that the individual can fully realizing their talents and capacities in ways beneficial to themselves and to society. Global Citizens identify as a global social, cultural, and economic being and thus embrace cosmopolitanism (i.e. a worldview of interdependence) in their search for multi- and interdisciplinary answers to global concerns and challenges.

A second feature of global citizenship is its aspiration to holistic education, one that does not only pay attention to cognitive outcomes but also to affective, ethical, moral, peace-based, aesthetic and artistic forms of learning. This is linked, furthermore, to sustainability, since global citizen education invites learners to de-center themselves, deepen their sense of responsibility, and to disinvest from harmful desires to (co)exist on the planet we all share.

Thirdly, critical world citizens go beyond the cosmopolitan mindset of global citizens in directing the praxis of their citizenship rights and duties in ways that highlight issues of power, voice, and difference, for example, between global north and global south. It is awareness of such structures of inequality, and the commitment to reflexivity vis-à-vis universality that drives their attempt to make a positive societal impact and contribute (however modestly) to emancipate less-privileged others.

Fourthly, critical world citizens emphasise the importance of ethical values, social responsibility, and active citizenry. They share an understanding of citizenship defined not only as a certain legal status as a citizen, but also as a sense of belonging to a community in which citizens exercise their rights to action for societal change. In other words, an understanding of citizenship rooted in ‘doing’ and in ‘practicing’ citizenship.

Practicing critical world citizenship requires a set of skills that blend moderation with determination. Nine such competencies, including autonomy, patience, and self-reflection are presented here in some detail. A truly harmonious implementation of all these skills at once remains a utopic ideal. There rarely is only one right way of observing the attitude of a critical world citizen. Rather, are there multiple paths of meaningful action that occur simultaneously – with all the benefits and contradictions this entails - and aim, each in their way, to advance genuine equality, authentic liberty and resilient personal or collective growth. In this sense, this toolbox for critical world citizens is more a permanent invitation for dialogue and deeper investigation than a template to be emulated.

This toolbox was developed based on insights from Erasmus University College (EUC) teaching staff, students, and alumni. At EUC, we pay extra attention in our teaching real-life problems in contemporary society because we do not have a disciplinary field of specialisation. Instead, through active learning assignments, we strive to educate critical world citizens who dare to engage with the major issues of their time -many of which are interdisciplinary by nature.

Rather than designing new tools in a one-size-fits-all manner, we deployed a three-step approach to (1) take stock of how critical world citizenship is being taught across EUC curricula and see (2) how these practices can be usefully operationalised for teachers within our university and beyond, so that (3) we can align, improve, and circulate an interdisciplinary transferable toolkit to build critical world citizenship skills.

In 2022, we started with an inventory of understandings and approaches on critical world citizenship gathered during focus groups with EUC students and staff. The summary of these findings then served as input for a round of workshops (again involving students and staff) in which we presented the initial findings and jointly distilled a preliminary list of skills. With the assistance of RISBO and CLI, we then elaborated this list into a publicly accessible toolbox. It is this repository we are now making available via TeachEUR.

The benefits of this exercise, so we hope, go well beyond our small-scale education community. Given its co-created nature, we hope that this toolkit can be recognisable and use-able for students and staff at other EUR faculties and beyond university. This may sound ambitious, but we are adamant about giving back to the wider (EUR) community and consolidating EUC as a centre of expertise in critical world citizenship that can develop tools for real-life challenges.

We therefore encourage you to explore the practical set-up of this toolbox, hoping it will offer you concrete ideas, suggestions, and exercises you can use or share. Through this collaborative use, this website can grow and serve as a resource hub for students and scholars interested in global critical citizenship education and for practitioners in society at large.

Stocktaking, operationalising, and disseminating conceptual and practical competencies.

20221010 CRIST Intermediate Report pdf, 1.4 MB

More about the CLI Fellowship

Dr. Ward Vloeberghs is senior lecturer Political Science at Erasmus University College (EUC). Together with Jop Dispa and Katja Skenderija, Ward is conducting research on the inventory, operationalization, and dissemination of conceptual and practical competencies. With this page on TeachEUR we aim to deliver a publicly accessible, interdisciplinary transferable toolkit so that we can align, improve and circulate critical world citizenship skill-building within our university and beyond.

CLI Fellowship of Ward Vloeberghs

Ward Vloeberghs
Head of Department SBS (EUC)
Contact details Opens external
Jop Dispa
Lecturer SBS (EUC)
Contact details Opens external
Katja Skenderija
Student assistant (EUC)
Contact details Opens external

dr. Gera Noordzij
Department Director (EUC)
dr. CDC (Christian) van der Veeke
Senior Lecturer (EUC)
prof.dr. E (Esther) Rozendaal
Professor (ESSB)
dr. R (Roy) Kemmers
Lecturer (ESSB)
dr. JP (Julien) Kloeg
Lecturer (ESPhil)
Ivar van de Loo
Projectmanager (CLI)
Sandra Lousberg
Senior educational consultant (Risbo)
Celine van der Lienden
Educational consultant (Risbo)

Critical World Citizenship

TeachEUR

Exploration

Support

Skills

Patience

Information literacy

Listening

Self-reflection

Open mindedness

Empathy

Positionality

Autonomy

Fun & failure

Q&A about this toolbox

Towards a Critical Citizenship Skills Toolbox

More about the CLI Fellowship

Downloads

Project team

Advisory team

Compare 0 study programmes

@title

Follow us

Critical World Citizenship

TeachEUR

Exploration

Support

Skills

Q&A about this toolbox

Active learning methods to tackle contemporary challenges

Another toolbox… Why?

Skills for Erasmian values?

How (not) to use this toolbox?

What is Critical World Citizenship?

Principles

How did this toolbox come about?

Towards a Critical Citizenship Skills Toolbox

More about the CLI Fellowship

Further reading & resources

Downloads

Project team

Advisory team

Compare 0 study programmes