Excited and curious, we drove closer to the mountainous ranges of the landscape, not knowing quite what to expect. We were on our way to a school visit in Bogotá, to see first hand how the city has integrated citizenship into its education curriculum.
As members of the LMTF 2.0 Working Group on Global Citizenship Education, we were in Colombia on July 15th and 16th for our first meeting. The working group had convened to begin to sketch out a working definition of global citizenship and to design a road map for an inclusive consultation process, a process that will ultimately lead to developing tangible means of integrating and measuring global citizenship in education systems across the world. After hours of debate, brainstorming among groups, individual presentations and sharing of experiences, the working group acknowledged that global citizenship education encompasses a set of skills, knowledge, attitudes, values and actions, including: empathy, critical thinking and problem solving, ability to communicate and collaborate with others, conflict resolution, sense and security of identity, shared universal values, respect for diversity, recognition of interconnected global issues and inter-cultural understanding.