Global Education Guidelines: A Handbook for Educators to Understand and Implement Global Education

These Global Education Guidelines are the result of a need expressed by the North-South Centre’s (NSC) network of global education practitioners – the Global Education Week network - to have a common tool, built on experience gained by the network and other partners, to support educators to comprehend and successfully implement global education initiatives. By offering perspectives on global education as well as related methods and evaluation criteria – including sharing of practices, tools and resources - these Guidelines aim at strengthening the overall work for global education. It also aims at supporting practitioners in formal and non-formal education settings by introducing general elements which may be developed by them according to the needs and based on their own experiences; assist them in identifying existing global education approaches and practices; support them in reflecting on and becoming more aware of their own global education activities; increase global education practice sharing and create synergies between stakeholders; contribute to education policies at local, regional, national and international level.

The Global Education Guidelines are an initiative of the Global Education Programme of the NorthSouth Centre of the Council of Europe, involving a team of educators from the Global Education Week network which constituted the drafting team with the mandate of drafting collectively the Global Education Guidelines. The writing process included a participatory method at several levels of consultancy amongst global education educators and practitioners actively involved with the North-South Centre global education and youth programmes. Moreover, a Group of Mentors was identified among NSC’s European and international partners, which included, inter alia, a team of trainers from the NSC’s University on Youth & Development.

Topics presented in the Guidelines aim at clarifying fundamental questions related to global education; it suggest strategies on how to build contents; put forward aims, skills, values and attitudes; offer guidance on methods, curricular design and evaluation and list useful contacts, links and bibliography. The Guidelines should be regarded as an ongoing process of evolution, which should be regularly reviewed with new ideas, inputs and practices brought from a diversity of partners and their experiences.