Thinkpiece: Are We Changing the World?; Reflections on Development Education, Activism and Social Change

 This article has been published as part of a one year development education project delivered by the Centre for Global Education and funded by Trócaire. It aims to support reflection and debate on how development educators engage the public on international development issues. The article comes on the back of recent research, most notably Oxfam’s Finding Frames report, which suggests that the development sector is struggling to enhance and sustain citizenship engagement on the structural causes of poverty and inequality. The article probes some of the factors that may underpin this lack of engagement both within the development education sector specifically and the wider development sector more generally. It examines some of the challenges involved in engaging learners in actions on global issues. Some of these challenges relate to the sectors and environmental pressures in which development educators operate which can thwart in-depth engagement with learners.