While Jesuit education has always incorporated and celebrated a global dimension with social justice and solidarity at its core, it is only in recent years we have begun to frame this as Global Citizenship Education. When we look at the recently launched “Jesuit Schools – An Integrated Perspective” graphic, we can see just how important Global Citizenship is in the context of our Jesuit Mission and indeed how it relates to other areas of our mission to form men and women of conscience, competence, compassion and commitment. Global Citizenship Formation was one of the 13 Actions which Jesuit Education Delegates agreed to at JESEDU-Rio in 2017. In 2019 it was included as one of the 10 Global Identifiers of a Jesuit School in A Living Tradition and when we read through the UAPs it is clear that all four UAPs relate to our understanding of Global Citizenship Education.
In 2017, we launched our first Global Citizenship Course for educators. The course, created by experts in Global Citizenship from across the world (members of the Educate Magis global community), has become an integral part of Ignatian Global Citizenship Education in many Jesuit schools and has indeed been adapted to create a version of the same course for students. In some schools, the entire faculty have taken the course as part of their formation, like in “San Francisco Javier” school in Colombia where they included Global Citizenship Education as part of their Pedagogical Innovation Process. The Educate Magis Global Citizenship Course became part of the formation process for Directors and Teachers which is rolled out every day for 30 minutes before classes start and one afternoon a week for two hours. In these time slots the faculty and school leadership teams go through the course and exchange their learnings. In this video, the school’s Academic Director Mónica Derazo shares details of how they organized their time to take the course and reflect together, and teacher, Alba Gallardo, shares her experiences as a learner.
In other schools, individual teachers with a keen interest in Global Citizenship have taken it as part of their own professional development. Altogether, over 1,500 educators have enrolled in this course to date to learn more about Global Citizenship from an Ignatian Perspective, including topics such as Human Rights, Sustainable Development Goals, Poverty, Migration, Care of our Common Home and more. We have received much positive feedback on the course over the past few years as well as a desire expressed by some schools and Provinces to add a certificate of completion.
We are delighted to announce today that we have added this certificate of completion. This means at the end of each module you will be asked to take a quiz. On completion of the course including the five quizzes you will receive a personalised certificate which you can download and print. For those of you who have already completed the course but would like to now avail of the certificate, you are welcome to do so by taking the quizzes at the end of each lesson. You will not necessarily need to go through the content again, unless indeed you would like to. The quizzes themselves may also serve as a gentle refresher.
You will notice we have also updated the layout of the course, and indeed all courses on Educate Magis, to make them more user-friendly. In addition, we have made some small updates to the course content, most notably the addition of our Ignatian definition of Global Citizenship presented by the Secretariat Global Taskforce in 2019 as well as the inclusion of both the UAPs and A Living Tradition, both of which have been published since we first launched the course, and which certainly help frame our understanding of Global Citizenship Education.
“Global Citizens are those who continuously seek to deepen their awareness of their place and responsibility in an increasingly interconnected world, both locally and globally; those who stand in solidarity with others in the pursuit of a sustainable earth and a more humane world as true companions in the mission of reconciliation and justice”. – Secretariat Global Taskforce on Global Citizenship, 2019
To see the syllabus that the new Ignatian Global Citizenship Course offers and to enrol in the course go to Global Citizenship Course in Educate Magis.
Solidarity is learned through ‘contact’ rather than ‘concepts.’ Students in the course of their formation, must let the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively. They should learn to perceive, think, judge, choose and act for the rights of others, especially the disadvantaged and the oppressed.” – Peter Hans Kolvenbach
It is exciting and inspiring to see how our understanding of Global Citizenship is continuously growing and developing. We look forward to continuing to deepen our knowledge and experience of what it means to be a global citizen in today’s world as we journey forward together as a global community and as companions in our mission of reconciliation and justice.
