The EarthCARE Global Justice framework emerged out of an international R&D network of eco-social learning initiatives that seek to integrate ecological, cognitive, affective, relational, and economic (EarthCARE) approaches to local and global justice. This framework is intended to push the boundaries of prevailing approaches to global change and related definitions of ‘global citizenship’, ‘development’, ‘success’, and ‘sustainability’ beyond problematic patters of simplistic analyses and engagements well documented in research (see ‘HEADS UP’ tool). The framework aims to support the design of deep learning processes that can enable CARE-ful learners to think, relate and work together differently to alleviate the effects and transform root causes of unprecedented global challenges.
Global citizenship education informed by the EarthCARE Global Justice Framework is less concerned with cultivating prescriptive approaches to problem-solving and more concerned with preparing people to work with and through the complexities, uncertainties, paradoxes, and complicities that characterize efforts to address unprecedented global challenges.
In this approach to global citizenship, learners would be supported to:
- Identify and transform problematic on-going patterns of North-South engagement that tend to be hegemonic, ethnocentric, depoliticized, ahistorical, paternalistic and offer uncomplicated solutions (HeadsUP tool);
- Develop complex, systemic, multi-layered, and multi-voiced questions and analyses that challenge and provide alternatives to simplistic solutions to global injustices;
- Weave local and global CARE-ful coalitions that advance critically informed approaches to global justice in multiple contexts, and engage constructively with difficult issues that emerge in processes of deep intercultural, intergenerational, and intersectional learning and change;
- Cultivate awareness of how we are implicated in the problems we are trying to address – that is, how we are all both part of the problem and the solution in different ways;
- Expand frames of reference, acknowledging the gifts, contradictions and limitations of different knowledge systems, moving beyond ‘either or’ towards ‘both and more’;
- Move reciprocally from theory to practice and from practice to theory, understanding the essential and dynamic link between theory and practice and valuing each equitably;
- Open our social and ecological imagination to different forms of knowing and being, and different futurities beyond a single story of progress, development and evolution;
- Sense our connectedness with and responsibility towards each other and the planet.
The EarthCare Framework by EarthCare Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.