The thrEEEs of global citizenship

[Boyd Roberts]

It helps us to keep important messages in mind if we have a memorable phrase or key words.

We are all familiar with the phrase

Reduce reuse recycle

which encourages us to moderate our consumption and to make good use of objects and resources.

A stronger version has emerged, which has greater punch, and reminds us more forcefully that it is our initial choice to purchase or consume that fuels humanity’s ever-growing use of resources:

Refuse Reduce Reuse Recycle

There are also variants which included Rethink, Recover, Regenerate and other Re   ̴ words.

I was reminded of these phrases when I came across a memorable, but rather chilling phrase seen at the entrance of some shopping malls or in advertising for luxury goods:

Admire Aspire Acquire

which embodies all the worst of the consumerist culture.

These slogans inevitably over-simplify matters, but they can be a useful way to focus and remember some important key points.

It occurred to me that it might be helpful to have a memorable shorthand slogan for our work with students educating them for global citizenship. Characteristics of global citizens often take the form of (rather long) lists – very worthy but not easily remembered.  I’ve set out a simple idea in a short article that is appearing in this month’s International School magazine. In this I suggest that global citizenship education can be abbreviated to three Es:

ECOLOGACY - the ability to live sustainably - living responsibly to take account of other people, other species and the environment

ETHICACY  - the ability to make sound and ethical judgements, and to act ethically

EFFICACY - the ability to take effective action

This mirrors the three Rs – reading, writing and (a)rithmetic. The full article is below, if you are interested. Any reactions/comments very welcome.

Back to basics: the three Es of education

 

The start of the 21^st century was a time for optimism, and of dawning realism. Optimism was expressed in the formulation and agreement of the Millennium Development Goals. Realism was expressed by a growing awareness that the old pecking order between nations was being challenged. In education, there was plethora of initiatives on 21^st century learning or skills. Thousands of words were written on the skills and competencies our students need to work and compete in the global world of the new millennium.

12 years on and the new century is seen in a different light. Many of us work in, or hail from, countries whose economies are reeling after the financial debacle.  Optimism and long-sighted realism have been buffeted, in some parts of the world at least, by the immediate challenges of keeping the banks open, coping with debt and reducing expenditure. We are so much preoccupied with our own financial circumstances that we seem to have little time, will or money to work strongly towards the Millennium Development Goals to which so many countries pledged support.

Democratic countries have a political perspective shaped by the frequency of elections: few elected politicians have the inclination or ability to take a longer view. But as educators ours is a relatively long game. The fruits of our efforts are not always clear for years, even decades after we have finished our work with individual students. We need to take a perspective that reflects this timescale. Clearly helping students to acquire skills and qualifications so that they can get a job in a global employment market is very important. We know that there is more to life than employment and earnings, and education is more than preparing students for the life of work. But it has been argued that education still embraces a model appropriate to an industrial world, where we are preparing workers for production.

While pursuing competence and achievement goals we need to keep hold of other things of enduring importance – to make sure we don’t lose sight of the basics.

It was not lack of cleverness or competence that gave rise to the collapse of various banks. Indeed some of the most able brains on the planet were engaged in the slicing, dicing and selling of worthless debts – modern day alchemists trying to turn dross into gold. Rather it was a lack of ethical awareness – of the implications of individual and corporate actions.  Self-interest took centre stage. Keep this thought, to which we shall return.

On 31^st October 2011 we passed a significant milestone of the new millennium. On this day the United Nations officially recognised that the human population had reached 7 billion.  Our increasing population, and the perfectly understandable and reasonable aspirations of those in emerging economies to enjoy a standard of living some of us have long enjoyed, combine to raise challenges about how the earth’s limited resources are exploited and distributed. There is growing awareness that we need to give attention to aspects of education that are most clearly related to our place as human beings sharing a finite planet with fellow people, and with other species. Keep this thought too.

For many years there has been talk of the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic – taken to be the cornerstone of basic schooling. These have been reconfigured into the broader concepts of literacy and numeracy. More recently, the Partnership for 21^st century skills has put forward the “four Cs” as part of its broader framework of education for our time - Creativity and Innovation; Critical Thinking and Problem Solving; Communication; and Collaboration (http://www.p21.org/).

We can’t subsume education under such simple models, but they are useful ways to remember key aspects of education as we go about our daily work, and to provide focus in our planning and deliberations. In this spirit, and drawing on what’s been said before, I would argue that we should also give overt attention to the three Es - a further group of attributes we should be fostering. In the same way that we refer to competence with words as literacy, I’m suggesting three Es, all concerned with abilities:

Ecologacy – the ability to live sustainably – involving living responsibly to take account of other people, other species and the environment on our shared planet

Ethicacy – the ability to make sound and ethical judgements and to act ethically

and Efficacy – the ability to take effective action.

The three Es, which I’ll elaborate on a little below, seem particularly important in our global 21^st century world, although they are a repackaging of and re-focus on some timeless attributes.

Ecologacy is a new term I’ve coined to combine three elements – home (”eco-“), study (“log-“) and ability or competence (“-acy”). Ecologacy is the capacity to live sustainably in our planet home, with its other inhabitants – human, plant and animal. This requires an underpinning of key knowledge about our planet and the interactions between its inhabitants, but in considering the use of resources, goes beyond this to consider our lifestyle and behaviour as individuals and a species. It is more than sustainability, because it focuses on our fellow inhabitants of the earth – human and other. It is concerned, for instance, with extinction of species and elimination of habitats not always present in discussions of sustainability. And its importance for us as educators is that it is concerned with our attributes as individuals. What specific features would an “ecologate” person have? How would we work to develop these in education? Developing ecologacy seems a key challenge with an arguably unprecedented urgency as the population rises and expectations increase. (Ecologacy is somewhat different from “ecolacy”, a term coined by the eminent biologist Garrett Hardin and defined as having a working understanding of the complexity of the world and the long term consequences of interactions.)

 

Ethicacy is not the formal study of ethics, or the ability to develop a well honed ethical argument in an essay or debate but the capacity and practice of making ethical judgements in daily life.  It’s about doing ethics. It involves an ability to identify that issues have an ethical element (which research indicates we should not take for granted), to analyse ethical issues involved and to think through and take appropriate action.

Critical thinking is clearly important here, and the IB Diploma’s Theory of Knowledge can help. But ethicacy places an emphasis on getting things right – not only arguing persuasively or cleverly. It moves from the purely cerebral, to embrace a commitment to action, not inherent in critical thinking. Ethicacy is about doing things that are good or right, and for the right reasons.  But ethicacy is not about indoctrination. In the words of the IB mission, we – and our students - need to “understand that other people, with their differences can also be right.”

Efficacy is being able to influence events and to take effective action – getting things done. Efficacy and ethicacy go hand in hand - although of course we can be effective in the wrong direction. Ethicacy determines the direction and focus of action and efficacy is concerned with how we carry it out. Key to this is the ability to work alongside others, to influence, to share in decision-making, and, where appropriate, to exercise leadership. Efficacy helps us to express our good intentions. Taken together ethicacy and efficacy are not concerned with what we know but what we do; how we behave and act effectively.

Any such model is going to be oversimplified and incomplete. Here, the three Es are only being aired. And, of course the underlying intentions are not new. But the three Es may help to remind us as educators that there is more to life than economic wellbeing and material success and the three Rs and the four Cs.  There are some basics concerned with humanity and our life together on earth that we should always think and act upon. Taken together, the three Es represent the core of global citizenship. And, I’d suggest, nurturing these is an even greater challenge for 21^st century education.