Intersections and collaborative potentials between global citizenship education and education for sustainable development

ABSTRACT

This article examines intersecting agendas and concerns in global citizenship education (GCE) and education for sustainable development (ESD) in the face of current global crises and pressures. While it cannot be assumed that the two educational projects automatically converge, generative and promising overlaps emerge from the shared interest in the SDG 4.7 education target. The article elaborates on a conversation emerging from the Bridge47 Knowledge Exchange Partnership focused on critical global citizenship education, and discusses the tensions, ambiguities, limitations and implications for critical, transgressive and potentially transformative GCE + ESD. While GCE and ESD can be ambivalent and constrained in formal educational settings, especially in comparison to informal projects where there are direct partnerships with people living on the margins of society, we argue that the potential generativity and transgressive possibilities of engaged and collaborative research have been under-emphasised. Participatory and praxis methodologies where education and research overlap offer significant transgressive and transformative potential. We point to important collaborative potentials in research practice that can help to bridge GCE-ESD gaps, given their substantial theoretical and practical experience in situated contexts, engagement with transgressive politics and creative and inclusive ethics of practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Global citizenship education
• education for sustainable development
• SDG 4.7
• collaborative research
• praxis methodologies
• transgressive education

Introduction: troubling GCE and ESD

There is no more urgent time than the present for thinking about how to mobilise global citizenship education (GCE) and education for sustainable development (ESD) jointly, hopefully and synergistically for alternative futures. The world faces overwhelmingly difficult and challenging times, with a combination of ongoing global pandemic, ecological and climate emergencies, economic crises, crises of borders, refugees and displacement and overall turmoil in education. These times bring especially high expectations and poignant desires for educational action to be mobilised to move towards a post-pandemic world, where we can possibly hope for liveable futures, while surviving and continuing the work of learning and teaching in a fearful, precarious, mourning, grieving, boring and tiring present.

We welcome the call by this special issue’s Editors to exceed existing educational approaches to global engagement and interdependence and to mobilise GCE and ESD in more ethical and solidaristic directions. We are asked ‘identify the edges of existing GCE conversations and to gesture beyond them’ – towards alternative ways of knowing, being and relating on, and to, the planet. GCE and ESD have potential to work synergistically in this quest, but such potential is not straightforward as GCE and ESD are each contested fields. In this paper, we look for strong commonalities across these two fields and explore beyond the edges for potentially motivating and generative overlaps, particularly from types of research that engage with transgressive and decolonial critique while experimenting with collaborative education and knowledge generation in situated contexts.

We begin by drawing out some thoughts responding to the call to embed the GCE and ESD debates more thoroughly in forms of critical praxis and a broader landscape of strategic action oriented towards urgent societal crises and transformation (Suša 2019). These have a variety of starting points, from meta-conceptualisation to small research and professional practice projects (e.g. Sund and Pashby 2020). Within both fields, there are strong calls for decolonising education with attempts to ‘delinking and decentering of narratives of modernity' (Sund and Pashby 2020, 158; Lotz-Sisitka 2017). However, Suša’s report on GCE for the Bridge 47 knowledge partnership is more optimistic about non-formal educational and social experiments, and generally sceptical about formal education and its pursuit of citizenship skills and competences. This is because formal education seems more likely, in the report’s opinion, to lose its critical and transformative potential under increased pressure from governmental and corporate forces to standardise and align GCE with market competences, thus losing its transgressive edge. The Suša report therefore locates GCE’s transformative potential in more direct educational partnerships, involving innovative practices with people living on the margins of mainstream society (Suša 2019, 19).

One area that is not fully explored in Suša’s assessment of formal education is the intersection between education and research – especially where these meet in praxis methodologies. Higher education devotes a roughly equal amount of effort to research as it does to education and most higher education educators are simultaneously engaged in research. However, Kulundu-Bolus and others (2020) observe that ‘education’ does not always look to ‘science’. In failing to engage fully with research, ‘science’ and especially how all sciences are conducted and justified (methodology), GCE and ESD may be missing important bridges to transgressive learning happening beyond their edges. We sense a certain fatigue within educational research with positivist and instrumentalist methodologies and a suspicion that these align with neoliberal instrumentalities. As researchers who are engaged in methodological reflection, we notice a hunger for more critical, participatory, ethical, flexible and creative research designs across many disciplines (not just education), capable of challenging and transgressing assumptions about what is ‘research’, who or what is an ‘educator’ and where or what constitutes an ‘educational setting’ (Lotz-Sisitka et al. 2015; Lotz-Sisitka et al. 2016; Chaves et al. 2017). The current crises surface and add urgency to evergreen, foundational questions about what or who learning is for, where learning comes from, what has, has not and ought to be learned, and how learning should take place.

The continued recurrence and deepening of major, destabilising societal crises challenge our presuppositions and hopes that improving global citizenship or sustainable development education practice can bring about needed and desired global societal transformation. The large and continuing increase in forcibly displaced persons (at the latest count, some 79.5 million persons, UNHCR 2020) and the hardening of xenophobic, anti-immigrant, racist, misogynist and other exclusionary ideologies in many countries has put citizenship of every kind into question (Gamal and Swanson, 2018; Khoo and Kleibl 2020).

Kagawa and Selby’s review of sustainability education (2015) summarises experiences from high-level global policy gatherings, criticising the general failure to deal with neoliberalism as a root driver of unsustainability. While they decry the unwillingness of the global sustainability and ESD policy communities to treat sustainability as a critical and contested concept, many sustainability researchers (including ourselves) have been discussing this issue from the very beginning (Jickling 1992; Khoo 2013). The ESD visible in policy discourses mainly assumes that ESD straightforwardly contributes to the achievement of sustainable development (Lotz-Sisitka 2015, 7). By deploying ‘sustainable development’ as if it is a coherent term, the policy community ignores a well-documented history of global contestation and problematic compromises (Khoo 2013; 2015a). Such silences reflect and reproduce problems of epistemic injustice that have their roots in coloniality (Lotz-Sisitka et al. 2015). Environmental and ecological education are largely corralled within geography and natural science subjects, emphasising technological fixes, rather than addressing dilemmatic normative, moral or ethical questions such as ‘climate justice’ (UNESCO/UNEP 2011, 55; Sweeney 2015) or environmental injustice (Haluza-Delay 2014). Discussions of the SDGs continue to be constrained by fears that an overly critical examination might ‘ruin the idea’ and slow down implementation of the Global Goals (Jickling and Wals, 2008, 6). Instead of offering a holistic and transformative educational response that measures up to current crises like the climate crisis, current ‘sustainable development’ discourse marks out a trajectory of ‘the bland leading the bland’ (Kagawa and Selby 2015), that fails to challenge an ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen 2013) by continuing to reproduce a world where only a global minority can continue to live well at others’ expense (Lessenich 2019). Questions about who counts less and who is pushed outside the margins of citizenship are ignored. This history of avoidance highlights the need to transgress the silences and centre questions of social justice and inclusion, especially decoloniality and epistemic injustice. There is a need to engage difficult ‘border thinking’ in both GCE and ESD (Khoo and Kleibl, 2020).

The frames and perspectives introduced by critical conversations in GCE and ESD invite challenges to deep assumptions about modernity and its processes and purposes. Critical GCE and ESD invite learners to ask what anyone means by ‘transgressive’ education or ‘transformative’ change, what purpose and role education has to fulfil, who is responsible for education, and what responsibility actually entails. Alternative, decolonial educationalists like the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective advance propositions for educating ‘beyond reform’, suggesting that the priority should be to address harmful desires and attachments to ‘modernity-coloniality’ as a meta-frame of reference (following Mignolo 2007), ‘so that we can grow up and show up differently to the challenging work that we need to do together as we collectively face the gradual collapse of the house of modernity, or, in other words, the end of the world as we know it’ (GTDFC 2020).

Speaking to this apocalyptic turn to ‘facing the end of the world as we know it’, we find it useful to revisit one particular ESD critique. It has been observed that dire warnings about ecological apocalypse have failed to motivate citizens to act (Hulme 2009). This realisation led to an ethical turn within ESD to ‘push’ citizen engagement and oblige people to act. Fagan (2017) suggests a different take–apocalyptic messages were not ‘unsuccessful’, but perhaps succeeded too much in obstructing the formation of action-oriented ethical subjectivity, i.e. political subjectivity. Reproducing the shared assumption that subjects fail to act reinforces that failure as a sociological ‘reality’, a common sense ‘truth’. Ethical ‘common sense’ is not something that exists a priori, but is reflexively produced and reproduced. Language, be that bland or apocalyptic, frames how people think about ethical problems and perpetuates forceful but possibly unacknowledged assumptions – about the future, human relationships, human nature, political community and human-environment relationships. Different strands of apocalyptic and ethical thinking may interact to reproduce and sediment a particular intertextual logic. Fagan argues that the unchallenged liberal logic of the non-relational, self-contained, self-interested, autonomous and sovereign individual prevents subjects from developing the capability to see themselves as ethically related to the causes of problems and as being responsible to others for unjust and destructive effects (Fagan 2017, 226–227). Thus, GCE and ESD may need to transgress the individualism and separateness implied by the autonomous space of liberal education and to begin to engage with different, action-oriented and collective subjectivities. However, this takes education outside the ‘safe space’ that distinguishes it, marking it out as being ‘closed to society, but open to the world’, and brings back the ‘obstinate’ and resistant possibilities education affords (Biesta 2019; 2020) by relating it back to a world that is not simply to be apprehended, but to be reconstructed in a risky, democratic and emancipatory manner.

These are, of course, enormous themes and questions. Regardless of how broadly or narrowly we choose to frame the questions, some ground-clearing, clarification and further bridging work seem helpful to make the potentially generative and transformative potential of GCE and ESD come more clearly into view, whether separately or (hopefully) together. We therefore return to our starting point for this conversation and deciding to co-write this article.

Beginning again with civil society-academic partnerships and conversations

The starting point for this conversation was provided by a Bridge47 project meeting on the subject of critical global citizenship education. Bridge47 is a network of 15 European and global organisations collaborating to mobilise civil society ‘to do their part for global justice and eradication of poverty with the help of Global Citizenship Education’. One of Bridge 47’s strategies is to partner with universities and academics to further their goals.

SDG 4.7 constitutes the point of departure for Bridge47. The SDG 4.7 target for SDG4 (to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all) is to ensure that by 2030, ‘all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development’. This broad canvas means that Bridge47 partner academics are involved across several research fields, including (but not exclusively) global citizenship education research, development education research, and education for sustainable development research.

The invitation issued by the Bridge47 project seemed important as an invitation to critically revisit the history of GCE and ESD, to reflect upon the edges of the two fields, and discuss how critical, collaborative approaches may serve to bridge, but also potentially transgress them. Both GCE and ESD have the appearance of being universally and timelessly normatively ‘good’, yet they are most often invoked in the context of societal crisis, to supplement time-bound, urgent projects for liberal ‘modernisation’. These look to GSE and ESD as ‘tools’ or ‘best practices’ to secure and sustain present trajectories of ‘development’, while at the same time also somehow managing to slow down harmful, even catastrophic aspects of that modernising ‘development’, even if it cannot actually prevent them.

Our intuition is that the GCE and ESD communities struggle a lot, but separately, with questions of ‘criticality’. This question about criticality tends to get folded back into within-field divisions. For GCE the debates concern ‘soft’ versus ‘critical’ forms of GCE (Andreotti 2006) or distinguish reformist from abolitionist teleologies (GTDF 2020). In ESD, the debates concern biocentric versus anthropocentric and ecological versus economic sustainability concerns, mapping onto ‘weak’ versus ‘strong’ definitions of sustainability (Neumayer 2011; 2012).

Despite these different, contested and somewhat separate origins and trajectories, the critiques within GCE and ESD are actually quite similar and advocates of SDG 4.7 have seized on opportunities to centre it, and build a common enterprise. Educators across the two areas have begun to share critical tools and frameworks of support to help people think through, ‘stay with the trouble’ and continue wrestling with difficult dilemmas and contradictions (e.g. Andreotti 2006; Pashby et al. 2020; Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2017; Pashby and Sund 2020). Such tools, typically piloted and developed through practices of engaged and transgressive research, provide a warrant to engage in critically ‘unveiling’ and troubling universals where individual practitioners or teachers might otherwise feel too exposed or discouraged.

Pashby and Sund (2020) point to a shared problem of the two fields, to the extent that both these ostensible forms of social justice education tend to reproduce rather than challenge colonial systems of power, where a ‘we’ in the Global North can learn about and solve the problems of ‘them’ in the Global South. Other critical perspectives find that mainstream approaches, for example those that promoted the United Nations Decade for Sustainable Development (UNDESD) (2005–2014) are uncritically ‘universalising’ (e.g. Wals 2009; Sund and Öhman 2014), overly reliant on individualistic behaviour modification and fail to highlight the systemic issues, namely the unjust and arguably ‘unsustainable’ neo-colonial structure that underpins contemporary globalisation, deleteriously affecting indigenous peoples livelihoods and cultures, as well as the environment per se. At the root of the problem is the epistemological dominance of Western thought and the erasure of non-Western and indigenous ways of knowing and being (Gough 2014).

The quest for GCE and ESD to be informed by nuanced solidarity and justice (Bryan 2011; Khoo 2015b; Sweeney 2015) rather than by Western-centric over-generalisation, paternalism or charity can be supported by boundary and border thinking. Raworth’s ‘doughnut’ marks out bounded horizons for thinking about GCE-ESD intersections. The outer and inner boundaries of the ‘doughnut’ represent the possibilities for an ecologically sustainable and just shared future (Raworth 2017). Attention tends to focus on planetary ecological ‘ceiling’ problems like climate emergency (Gills and Morgan 2020) and extinction catastrophe (Kolbert 2014), hence social justice critics direct attention to the inner boundary, or ‘floor’ of citizenship, marking out who is most likely to fall through by being deprived of necessary minimum levels of human needs, goods or rights (Khoo and Kleibl, 2020; Khoo 2020). This latter critique is not intended to undermine the shared global ‘ceiling’, or efforts to prevent the biosphere from exceeding critical thresholds, thereby denying future generations a present and a future in their entirety. As Haraway reminds us, boundaries are tricky and siting (or sighting) boundaries is a risky business (1988, 595). Today, the planetary situation is particularly perilous for persons failed by governments and political boundaries, even as these systematically fail human and planetary life within and beyond them. The wide and hopeful scope of global citizenship ‘education’ and global ‘development’ invoked even by the bland language of the SDGs seems tragically over-idealistic, even Utopian, in espousing modestly reformist goals as inequities and exclusions widen and become ever more unbearable under the magnifying glass of the current pandemic, systematic racism and reckless ecological destruction (Khoo and Floss 2020). The unfolding of the global COVID-19 pandemic has only served to underline the connections between urgent demands for social justice and climate action (Lambert et al. 2020; Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg 2013). Climate change remains a challenge that changes everything (Klein, 2014), including our understanding of what it is that must be ‘sustained’ in education, in global learning and in citizenship (see also Martinez-Sainz and Khoo 2020).

The current uncertainty of our educational times has been highlighted by the Fridays for Future school strikes and Black Lives Matter protests around the world. Arguably, something fundamentally changed in 2019, when 1.6 million people, mostly students, formed the ‘Fridays’ for Future’ global protest movement (Wahlström et al. 2019) to bring attention to the consistently procrastinated and minimised issue of climate change and to reframe it as ‘climate emergency’. Fridays’ for Future arguably indicated that the tables had turned for the stakes, institutions and tools of education. It is schools and universities that have to re-think and repurpose themselves. The kids are all right – it’s the rest of us – adults, institutions and politics that will have to adapt, to make educational structures and institutions a more conducive and enabling environment for students who are already engaged in learning from their contexts, learning from others and learning for themselves (Hjelleset 2020; Khoo and Kleibl 2020).

The concurrence of pandemic inequalities, Black Lives Matter protests and climate strikes make it more obvious that it is impossible to continue as if structural racism, poverty and planetary health are unconnected (Lambert et al. 2020; Hage 2017). Questions of GCE or ESD continue to be haunted by tendencies to mirror, and remain complicit with, historical and structural legacies of dispossession, appropriation, colonisation, and enslavement. These continue to be present within general narratives of ‘modernity’ (Bhambra 2014) and the structurally racist, people-displacing, extractivist and polluting aspects of the ‘modern-colonial’ (Mignolo 2007).

Shared critical edges of GCE and ESD – decoloniality, diversification and border thinking

One of the participants at the Bridge 47 meeting in June 2020 suggested that the value of criticality in critical GCE (or ESD) lies in its ability to engender a line of deep questioning: for whose benefit is this analysis or intervention, then, now, and in the future? Who makes choices about understandings of reality? Whose choices are ‘forgotten’? Who decides what the problems and solutions are? And so forth. These critical questions challenge the perceived singularities of any given socio-historical context and push GCE and ESD towards deepening understandings about solidarity and what constitutes a socially just global society. These critical questions can be posed at one or more of Pashby and others (2020, 158) three ‘layers’ for analysis and intervention with regard to global education and social change: at the methodological (the level of doing); epistemological (the level of thinking); and ontological (the level of being).

A broader view from educational and research practice allows us to discern lines of sight beyond the liberal-neoliberal edges of GCE’s and ESD’s frames. In critical GSE, decolonising moves (‘gestures’) pushing thinking ‘beyond reform’ and towards alternatives to modernity have been emerging for some time (Andreotti et al. 2018; Sund and Pashby 2020; Suša 2019). Pashby and Andreotti (2016, 10) call for the practice of GCE to be rooted in relational ungrounding – starting with disarmament, humility, and historical consciousness to prepare students to ‘learn to unlearn’ and become able to listen, learn with others and reach out ready to work in solidarity, towards the co-construction of alternative futures that do not reproduce the problematic historical structures in the present. Fagan’s work (2017) on crisis, apocalypse and the formation or deformation of ethical subjectivity remains relevant to the question of whether the pedagogical intervention is liberating and productive of an ethical subject or foreclosing, particularly of collective and political subjectivity.

Within the ESD field, new materialist theories have opened conversations on how to challenge and move beyond the modern divide between human and non-human (e.g. Clarke and McPhie 2020). The post-human perspective, with its ‘flat ontology’ thinking, brings in ethical questions about relations to non-human others, potentially expanding discussions about what ‘a socially just global society’ means (Sund and Pashby 2020; Nxumalo and Cedillo 2017). A recent Think Piece on transgressive learning speaks of ‘decolonial love’ as ‘always holding women, young people, children and the most marginalised in our societies in mind, which at times includes not only people but those creatures that are dying out and the soil, waters and air being polluted due to human arrogance, extractivism and exploitation’ (Kulundu-Bolus, McGarry and Lotz-Sisitka 2020).

It seems that ESD and GCE research share a critical edge that speaks to the need for decolonisation and diversification at the epistemological and ontological levels. Critical-decolonial perspectives are growing in influence across both ESD and GCE research, permeating discussions about curriculum and pedagogy, but also in research ethics and research methodologies. Methodology offers itself as the level that can connect and align promising overlaps at the different levels since it travels through all of them, and perhaps it can reflect the expansive educational aims of SDG 4.7? Our intuition is that critical and creative praxis methodologies offer particularly fertile intersections. These respond to common interests to redress epistemic injustice, especially as a structural legacy of coloniality that problematically reproduces injustices.

A critical-decolonial perspective may call on ‘border thinking’ to unsettle the colonial modern meta-frame, opening the way for more diverse and intercultural approaches. Border thinking engages with communities and social movements representing sections of society that have suffered most from deprivation, marginalisation and stigma and diverse experiences and traditions of thought that are routinely denied, forgotten or repressed within the colonial-modern meta-frame (Lutz, Inkje and Stauß 2017; Khoo and Kleibl 2020). Border thinking is excruciatingly salient at political borders, where the treatment of visitors, migrants and refugees simultaneously embodies and negates immediate needs of global citizens, let alone the imaginative reconstruction of abstract cosmopolitan citizenship or sustainable futures (Gamal and Swanson 2018; Lessenich 2019). The current pandemic and ecological emergencies have made such realities even starker.

Connecting educational co-formation and research collaboration – critical and creative methodologies

There is a dawning realisation that substantial gaps remain between the possibility of imagining alternatives and different attempts to experiment with and prefigure such alternatives. Ontological and new materialist turns may contain potentials for formulating alternatives (eg. Coole and Frost 2010; Hage 2017; Tsing 2017), but these may bring very different political implications for educators, opening debates beyond education to other forms of research, activism and experiments in planning, living and study. These engage debates beyond the disciplinary domain of educational practice in asking what GCE and ESD offer to societies, how they can impact societies or offer some kind of ‘answer’ to global challenges (Suša 2019). Suša’s report informs how Bridge 47 moves forward in developing new, civil society focused partnerships within and beyond the established GCE sector. The Suša report points to tensions between the urgent need for new thinking and action to address sustainability and social justice challenges and the inertia of formal educational systems which tend to reproduce old values (Levinson and Holland 1996).

Sund and Pashby call for teachers to engage in critical-decolonial and transgressive praxis to think and learn from where they are located in the Global North (2020,167); while Kulundu-Bolus, McGarry and Lotz-Sisitka pursue a scholar-activist praxis that reaches towards wider formal and informal learning processes in the Global South. This connects critical educator praxis with an expansive imagination of social learning taking place within environmental, developmental and social justice struggles, linking critical pedagogies, public policy, ecological citizenship and the arts. The decolonial impetus in ‘education’ moves beyond the classroom to meet social movement activism, embedding decolonial praxis in broader transgressive and transformational learning networks (2020, 112).

Key to this shift is the turn to different methodologies – ways of doing things differently (Suša 2019, 7), that seek to draw in various possible contributions and approaches at the ‘edges’ without requiring a large-scale ‘core’ consensus as the basis for cooperation, while avoiding a resort to the lowest common denominator by focusing on shared commitments to certain tasks (Suša 2019, 13).

In different research fields, calls for moving beyond critique and towards more ‘engaged’ research are emerging (Nielsen and Jørgensen 2018; Khoo 2017, 2020). Within fields of educational research, such as ESD and GCE research, we suggest that education and research efforts overlap in participatory and praxis methodologies. This overlap represents significant transgressive and transformative potential resulting from processes of mutual and collective learning or ‘co-formation’. A recently published volume on Participatory Research, Capabilities and Epistemic Justice (Walker and Boni 2020) provides useful insights, theorisation and examples. The subtitle for this volume is ‘A Transformative Agenda for Higher Education’. These researchers see higher education as a non-ideal context for realising social justice, beginning with a concern for epistemic justice. There are serious limitations on what higher education can do to bring about a more just world, but the same might be said about all forms of education, or indeed about any other real-world starting point. As Sen points out in The Idea of Justice (2009), the world is packed with manifest injustice and the point of theorising justice is to reduce injustice. The non-ideal nature of higher education does not prevent it from playing an important role in reducing and preventing further injustice. It is indeed necessary to start by critically interrogating higher education’s specific role in producing, codifying and validating knowledge as a first step to identifying what might be done to redress epistemic injustice. The demand for more reflexive, inclusive and decolonial knowledge is central to making higher education more responsive and responsible for the transition to ‘sustainable futures’, understood as democratic, deliberative, participatory and ecologically sound transformations for the whole of global society.

In the ESD/ESE research field, researchers have been experimenting with transgressive and potentially transformative research and praxis through projects that use collaborative, co-designed learning actions and action research (Lotz-Sisitka et al. 2015; 2016; MacIntyre et al. 2019). A key element of this kind of work is to develop concepts and reflective ideas which make sense in practice. Many use contextual and creative participatory methods such as story-telling, photovoice, art and video in workshop formats to foster inclusion, encourage transgression and open the way for transformative change in non-ideal and frequently challenging situations and localities (for examples see e.g. Walker and Boni 2020). These methodologies bridge the ‘high theory’ critique of colonial ontologies and epistemic injustice with ‘low theory’ ‘critique and practices in the everyday that matter, in ways that can overcome the separated nature of specialised knowledge(s), transforming our learning as we go’ (Kulundu-Bolus, McGarry and Lotz-Sisitka 2020, 17). We see such critical, participatory and transgressive ‘applied’ research and situated learning projects as means to jointly engage research and education.

Transgressive learning does not necessarily imply that ‘anything goes’. A decolonial position acknowledges that some structures of living-together should not be sustained and must be transgressed and dismantled. We need to ask how transgressive learning practically extends into a commitment to actively living in transgressive ways? (Kulundu- Bolus, McGarry and Lotz-Sisitka 2020; Lotz-Sisitka et al. 2015). Some important insights on what needs transgressing includes challenging ‘binary logic’ as a technique of coloniality, which reproduces the coloniality of power through oppositional categories of racialized Other, such as ‘Black’ and ‘Indigenous’ (Hage 2017; Kulundu- Bolus, McGarry and Lotz-Sisitka 2020; Mamdani 2020). These constructs are very difficult to unlearn, and dismantling them involves challenging the link between ontology and epistemology (i.e. how beings and knowledges are named) at its roots.

Conclusion – revisiting the methodological intersections through the lens of critically engaged and participatory scholarship

Although we cannot assume them to be identical, similar or even convergent, the frames of global citizenship education and research overlap significantly with those of global sustainability education and research. What is particularly interesting with research going on across these domains is that they feature manifestations of ‘engaged scholarship’ (Shultz and Kajner 2013). Collaborative experiments in context-driven, critical and participatory research praxis can offer forms of co-learning that bridge GCE-ESD gaps, given their substantial theoretical and practical experience, engagement with transgressive politics and creative and inclusive ethics of practice.

Critical GCE and ESD have the opportunity to engage in immanent critique – to interrogate and gain more explicit understanding about the ways in which we position ourselves as researchers and educators. This article is offered in the spirit of critical dialogue or polylogue, in the spirit of what is ‘critical’ in ‘critical’ GCE and ESD. It began as a response to a particular conversation in a particular knowledge exchange project and has moved towards the edges of transgressive and transformative methodologies, drawing on research.

The space of overlap between GCE and sustainability education is not always very clearly delineated because these are interdisciplinary spaces, containing different stakeholders and interlocutors, each coming from slightly different places. Different perspectives may be implied, rooted in different stakes and commitments.

There is already a large amount of critical GCE research directed at the epistemological level, while the interest in new materialism within the ESD research community indicates that deeper, ontological critiques and directions are gaining interest. We point to methodology to bridge the epistemological and ontological ‘high theory’ critiques and the pressing instantiation of inclusion, needs and context explicated by ‘low theory’. The different levels of critique, transgression and hope for transformation are bridged by praxis research. Praxis research that is conceptualised within a decolonising frame remains a crucial shared terrain.

This Special Issue’s call to historicise approaches encouraged us to revisit trajectories, divergences and intersections of GCE and ESD. We reviewed some of main debates framing GCE and ESD in the current context of pandemic threat, student and school strikes, epistemic crises and crises of authority for knowledge institutions, in political and communicative landscapes characterised by fragmentation, reactionary mobilisation and polarisation. Questions of methodology and what and how to do education and research are always connected to the ontological and epistemological dimensions - ways of being and knowing. As things fall apart and the centre fails to hold, we notice salient demands for education and research to foster different ways of knowing that are more compatible with critical and solidaristic modes of being and relationality. This includes relationality between different human beings, but also with the material and nonhuman world.

Critical and collaborative research methodologies may contribute to the shared transgressive and transformative edge for the kinds of GCE and ESD envisaged by SDG 4.7. Collaborations will undoubtedly involve new, informal and educational actors, for example NGO and community activists and involve new materialities, working with artistic, creative and ecological methods and modes of being. Being in nature or being engrossed in creative practices are attractive methods that can sit hospitably alongside critical theorising and transgressive praxis. In the current pandemic upheaval, collaborative and solidaristic approaches have come to the fore. The need for education beyond ethically individualist, depoliticised, utilitarian and ‘neoliberalised’ conceptions is more obvious than ever, as is the necessity of collective and mutual survival. However, critical collaboration requires a historical and contextual understanding of who or what is involved and their stakes. Positivist liberal and neoliberal frames reproduce monotonous assumptions that education must be narrowly funnelled towards economically instrumentalist purposes, and that it must embed individualistic and competitive values. Yet the current multiple crises of global society point to a great need for alternative, cooperative, solidaristic, relational and affective modes of knowing, doing and being.

Acknowledgements

Both authors are grateful for the invitation from Bridge 47 Knowledge Exchange Partnership to in-person and virtual meetings in January and June 2020, especially Dalene Swanson, Tanya Wisely, Talia Vela-Eiden and Sonja Salminen and to all participants for their presentations and comments. We also thank the anonymous reviewers, whose helpful comments and queries helped us to substantially improve this article. Su-ming Khoo acknowledges the Irish Research Council for funding the BCAUSE project which opens up connected theoretical and empirical questions (COALESCE/2019/88).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council: [Grant Number COALESCE/2019/88].