Two readings explore key themes in the DEIJ debate:

• Dzenana Kurtovic-Ceman, “If You Have a Problem, You Are the Problem”: A Day in the Life of an International School Student (July 2022), The International Educator. This excellent article is written by Dzenana Kurtovic Ceman who is an IB educator at the Vienna International School. It raises some key questions such as:
• Aubrey Blanche, ‘Eight ways to make your D&I efforts less talk and more walk’. Aubrey Blanche comments that whilst diversity, inclusion and equity have been trendy hot topics, efforts to put them into action have stalled due to several reasons: D&I ‘fatigue’, the sheer complexity of issues that need to be addressed, a lack of shared understanding of what we mean by D&I. She goes on to suggest eight strategies to make sure caring about D&I results in actions. The following especially resonates: “There’s overwhelming evidence that if you don’t have diversity on your team, you’re going to miss something,” says Blanche. “That’s because balanced teams are better at problem identification. They see more problems, they hold each other more to account and they're also a lot more uncomfortable and challenging, but that’s what pushes us to be great.” Blanche and her colleagues worked to standardize how they interviewed and evaluated candidates, making sure everyone was assessed against the same technical bar. They also got rid of the practice of looking for “culture fit” by focusing on values instead. “I’m totally allergic to this concept of culture fit. It’s actually just an intractable morass of unconscious bias,” says Blanche.”

Teaching for sustainable development through ethical global issues pedagogy: A resource for secondary teachers is based on the work of Professor Vanessa Andreotti. Her checklist of historical patterns of oppression that are often repeated in well-intended approaches to understanding and addressing global issues in educational contexts forms the basis of the resource.

They adopt the following principles:

• Global issues are complex, and we need pedagogical approaches that take up rather than gloss over these complexities
• Environmental issues are deeply tied to social, political, cultural and economic inequalities; it is essential to link such issues to historical and present-day colonial systems of power
• Connecting to all species in our world requires an ethical stance towards both the deep issues threatening us all and the differently experienced impacts of environmental issues
• Classrooms are important spaces for raising questions. There are solutions to promote and actions to be taken. Re-thinking and unpacking are themselves important actions. When schools and wider community activities promote charity appeals, classrooms can support students to deeply engage with and identify tensions and possibilities.
• Reflexivity must be encouraged and developed. Deeply understanding nuances and considering tensions and paradoxes is as important to global citizenship as is taking a specific action (or deciding not to take an action). These must go hand in hand.

The International Youth White Paper on Global Citizenship is a result of work done by over 1300 students from 11 countries. They united around Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind…” Global citizenship is defined as “an ongoing conversation about multiple ways to enable equity around the world”, and the paper focuses on three key themes: interconnection and complexity, diversity and difference, and community and compassion. “The concept of equity and discussions of justice and fairness have been central to all aspects of this project. We all have different backgrounds, religions, cultures, languages, genders, and races, and many experience marginalisation which impacts us in different ways and prevents us from having what we perceive as a good life. Equity is acknowledging different needs of people and communities in their contexts. Equity is about being in dialogue with all people and recognizing that many people are marginalised in a variety of ways.”

There are several other great introductions to this subject, all accessible for use in schools:

• What is global citizenship? World Economic Forum
• What Matters Most? Exploring poverty with upper primary students - an excellent resource with lots of activities.
• UNESCO (2014) Global Citizenship Education: Preparing learners for the challenges of the twenty-first century. What is global citizenship education? Do we learn it in school? What difference can it make? How can it be introduced and become a common feature of school curricula? 
• Oxfam, Global Citizen Guides: Aimed at teachers in all subjects, and across all age groups, our global citizenship guides introduce the key elements of Oxfam's Curriculum for Global Citizenship, as well as providing case studies outlining best practice in the classroom, activities that can be adapted for use in many curriculum areas, and resources for further reading.

Back to the future of education: Four OECD Scenarios for Schooling is a tool to support long-term strategic thinking in education. These scenarios can help identify potential opportunities and challenges and stress-test against unexpected shocks. We can then use those ideas to help us better prepare and act now. Chapter Two provides an overview of strategic foresight, highlighting three main benefits: 1) to reveal and test assumptions, 2) stress-test and future-proof plans, and 3) generate shared visions of the future to support action in the present. 

Chapter five sets out seven inherent tensions that must be considered in this process: