Getting Critical About Critical World Citizenship. Exploring Tensions and Opportunities in Bottom-Up Skills Development Within a Dutch Liberal Arts College

Many universities, including our own, have responded to contemporary challenges by setting themselves the task of educating responsible and critical citizens who are presented with an interdisciplinary curriculum aimed at teaching the knowledge and skills needed to effectively engage with contemporary complex social changes and crises. Though there is no shortage of innovations, an exact definition of a critical citizen and what it means to educate for critical citizenship remains a topic of debate. A conundrum that is well illustrated by the friction between students, academic staff, and university leadership over the war on Gaza, attempts to decolonise the curriculum, or urges to divest away from fossil fuel. This research acknowledges the debate over how different disciplines, faculties, and student bodies hold divergent interpretations of what criticality entails and attempts to make the conversation on criticality in higher education more personal, feasible, and tangible. Whilst many universities succeed in introducing learners to critical perspectives, many struggle to identify what skills their graduates need to mature into critical citizens. Our research explores these issues within a Dutch liberal arts and sciences programme that explicitly aims to educate ‘Critical World Citizens’ and aspires to deliver graduates who ‘accept social and civic responsibilities and to speak out against prejudice, injustice and the abuse of power’. In this presentation we draw lessons from our research and teaching innovation project in which we ask three related questions: First, what does Critical World Citizenship mean? Second, what skills are associated with Critical World Citizenship? And finally, how to teach these skills in an academic setting? We do so by taking both a theoretical as well as empirical approach. The former seeks to identify interpretations, skills, and teaching methods from literature. The latter attempts to answer these questions based on a Delphi study, content analysis and bottom-up workshops with academic staff, students, and alumni of Erasmus University College in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Theoretically situated in the classifications made by Andreotti (2014), Oxley & Morris (2013), and Stein & Andreotti (2021), we identify a set of broadly defined ‘Critical World Citizenship skills’ and teaching methods that, together, constitute a ‘toolbox’. In this toolbox, theoretical inquiry and practical knowledge combine to provide a low threshold point of entry for those considering putting critical world citizenship on their agenda. By creating a space to give practical meaning to theoretical notions of critical world citizenship we managed to introduce a personal, feasible, and tangible practice-oriented understanding of critical world citizenship (education). We distilled a set of nine interrelated skills: open-mindedness, information literacy, empathy, patience, positionality, self-reflection, autonomy, listening, fun and failure. By presenting each of these skills and associated teaching activities in an interactive online toolbox, we contribute to educational innovation and hope to encourage students and teachers to experiment with innovating their teaching praxis. In doing so, we introduce a hands-on innovation that allows educators to better equip learners with skills needed to effectively understand and intervene in a multitude of complex global issues and crises.