Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Global Campus Online – GloCo

Act locally - learn globally: At the Global Campus Online, people come together to make their contribution to a "good life for all" and to learn together with others.

The background image for the GloCo meeting shows a self-designed world map.

Objectives

The “Global Campus Online” (GloCo) is an international teaching-learning hub for students, researchers, activists, artists and employees from the public and private sectors about the common interest in the pressing issues of our world in the 21st century. The project aims to bring together people from the Global South and the Global North to share their perspectives on the crises and challenges of our time. To this end, the participants realise some small and some larger projects in their own local sphere of influence on selected sustainability goals of the UN 2030 Agenda (SDGs) and share their experiences in the Global Campus Online. Overall, the project aims to foster a mutual learning process and exchange between its participants, who then in turn serve as multipliers in their respective communities. Ideally this process will also inspire and support the development of different learning opportunities and formats for transformative learning and Global Citizenship Education, best practice examples and local initiatives as well as related scientific contributions and publications. The main goal is to play out the concept of Global Citizenship Education as the idea of the planetary interconnectedness of all with everything on a concrete level, thereby sharpening and further developing it. This cannot be a short-term goal and certainly not an exclusive claim, but is the goal of a growing scientific community to which the Global Campus Online would like to contribute.

Background

The Global Campus Online has been set up at the University of Klagenfurt, Institute for Educational Science and Educational Research, and is run by the UNESCO Chair Global Citizenship Education - Culture of Diversity and Peace at the same university, headed by Prof. Dr. Hans Karl Peterlini. An initial pilot project was funded by the state of Carinthia, and the expansion of the network into a multi-year project was made possible by funding from the Austrian Development Agency (ADA). The UNESCO Chair "Global Citizenship Education" project is based at the Institute of Educational Science and Educational Research at the University of Klagenfurt; the Game Studies department at the University of Klagenfurt is also involved in setting up a digital space for the network. The exchange meetings take place online via videoconference.

(Implemented) Activities

Overall, the activities in the project aim to: - Exploring and testing options for social and personal transformation - Developing different teaching-learning settings and delivery formats for transformative education - Supporting relevant local initiatives and projects (through exchange, networking, support with planning and implementation, possible funding) - Teaching practice-oriented, creative methods for dealing with the topics, e.g. through theatre, rap/poetry or photography (PhotoVoice) - Monitoring and documenting the working and learning processes in the dialogue groups in order to gain a basis for strengthening transformative teaching and learning methods in academic discourse and to make these accessible for institutional and political action - to contribute to the curricular strengthening and dissemination of Global Citizenship Education as an important educational perspective - to promote a dialogue between different approaches to Global Citizenship Education and worldviews in general, in the hope of actively counteracting the dominance of Western-influenced, neo-colonial perspectives

Results

A sizeable international network has already been established since the start of the project in 2022. The glocal approach focuses on two levels: firstly, the local level, where small projects are implemented by the participants. These projects are exemplary in nature and have a limited but effective impact: - by accompanying young people in a Klagenfurt school to deal with experiences of migration-related exclusion and to try out possibilities of inclusion. - the availability of hygiene products for girls was improved in a neighbourhood in Pretoria - two young people from South Tyrol/Italy explored travel routes for accessibility and created an inclusive traveller's book about them - an international group of students from a Viennese university organised a festival of encounters with Roma young people in Hungary. The second level is the global level, in which the exchange on various projects in the Global Campus Online encourages participants from 17 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and America to learn from each other and develop new ideas.

Lessons learned & transferability

Difficulties and potential for transformative approaches can be identified from the individual projects. One difficulty undoubtedly lies in the framework conditions that transformative projects encounter. These include, for example, civil war-like situations of violence in Ethiopia, where GloCo participants are active, or socially precarious situations, which a group in South Africa worked on with neglected young people. In contrast, projects in countries of the Global North tend to encounter attitudes of indifference or suppression of the problems. The GloCo projects can therefore only set the tone and provide impetus on a small scale; it is difficult to bring about changes in society as a whole. At the same time, the participants also gain courage through the exchange in the Global Campus, learn from each other and develop new ideas. This is the real purpose of the exchange. Individual measures alone cannot change the world, but examples can be used to explore the possibilities for change. The projects are currently still in the middle of implementation, and an overall evaluation of the lessons learnt is scheduled for the third year of the project.

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