Global Citizenship Education                                               

– intercultural understanding and democratic dannelse* 

In Denmark, as in many other countries, we are focused on education, which has become a central concern of policy makers and politicians all around the world. The policy makers’ narrow focus on the PISA scores have resulted in policies that favors specific curricula areas, thus putting education systems, schools, teachers and students under pressure.

Professor Gert Biesta argues that this has distracted education from the much more urgent questions that are facing humanity: questions of the sustainability of our planet and the sustainability of our human togetherness. Here we find an entirely different agenda for education, which is often discussed in terms of global citizenship, intercultural understanding and democratic dannelse.

Professor Emeritus Michael Byram will contribute with angles on intercultural communication and intercultural dannelse of global citizens in diverse, global contexts. The conference seeks to discuss what we understand about intercultural competences and how perspectives can be integrated into the education system, based on the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4.7.

^{*) Dannelse
A Danish term that means ‘formation’. It is applied to general, non-vocational education whose aim is to produce well-rounded individuals. Dannelse is similar in meaning to the German Bildung, used within Educational Sciences. There is currently no direct translation for either of these terms in English. However, one will often see ‘education’ and ‘character formation’ used in translation. For the purpose of this conference, we use the Danish term dannelse throughout so as not to obscure the meaning.}