Global Citizenship Education:
Bringing the World Into the Classroom - Creative Methodologies for Teachers
Duration: 5-days / 30h
Location: Nicosia, Cyprus
Language: English
* Eligible for Erasmus+ KA1 funding
ABOUT THIS TRAINING
This 5-day training equips teachers with creative, classroom-ready methodologies for bringing the world into the classroom; not as an extra topic but as a thread that runs through whatever subject they already teach.
The course is shaped by WAVES' work on the Erasmus+ POP-Ed project (POP Culture for Global Citizenship Education), which uses the music, shows, games, and stories students already love as the doorway into global citizenship learning. It also draws on intersectional pedagogy, critical media literacy, and the lived experience of teaching in a Mediterranean society where migration, multiculturalism, and global interdependence are everyday classroom realities.
Target group: Pre-primary, primary and secondary teachers; school leaders; youth educators and adult education staff
Format: Face-to-face, experiential, creative and project-based
WHAT MAKES THIS COURSE DIFFERENT?
Global Citizenship Education is the most crowded category in the European teacher training market. Most providers offer some version of it; few do it in a way that teachers actually find useful or interesting.
Our approach is different in three concrete ways:
Pop culture as the doorway. We start where students actually are. The Pop Culture Decoder, drawn from WAVES' ongoing POP-Ed project, gives teachers a structured method for using the music, shows, games and stories students already consume as the entry point to serious global citizenship learning, without falling into the trap of using pop culture as bait or as decoration.
An intersectional, justice-oriented lens. We treat global citizenship as a question of justice, not charity. Through the Identity Compass and the Object Journey, teachers and their students examine how global systems produce unequal experiences and unequal voices, and how the classroom can make space for the missing perspectives.
A Cyprus classroom. The course is delivered in a Mediterranean island society at the crossroads of three continents, where multiculturalism and migration are everyday realities (see 'Why Cyprus' below). Study visits put participants directly in contact with migrant-led organisations, civil society, and multicultural neighbourhoods.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
Knowledge
Define Global Citizenship Education and explain UNESCO's three dimensions (cognitive, socio-emotional, behavioural).
Locate GCE within the EU Council Recommendation on Learning for Environmental Sustainability and Global Citizenship, the OECD PISA Global Competence framework, the Council of Europe RFCDC, and the SDGs (4, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17).
Distinguish between 'soft' and 'critical' GCE, and between charity-based and justice-based approaches to global issues.
Recognise key contemporary GCE themes, such as migration, climate justice, responsible consumption, gender equality, media and information literacy, intercultural dialogue, and how they intersect.
Skills
Run the four signature embodied exercises (Pop Culture Decoder, Object Journey, Five Headlines, Identity Compass) with their own classes.
Design cross-curricular GCE units that weave global issues through their existing subject teaching rather than as an extra layer.
Handle migration, refugee, and culturally sensitive content with accuracy and respect, avoiding the 'single story' and other representation traps.
Facilitate respectful classroom dialogue on contested global topics across lines of identity, politics, and experience.
Use simple creative and narrative methods to bring global content alive for any age group.
Attitudes
Approach 'the global' as something already present in students' lives, not something distant or imported.
Hold a multi-perspectivity stance toward contested histories, identities, and news events.
Build a sense of agency and active citizenship in students, focused on what they can do, not only what they should know.
Sustain GCE work over time as embedded practice rather than as event-driven.
SIGNATURE METHODOLOGIES
The course is structured around four creative, classroom-ready signature methodologies that are introduced, practised, and adapted with participants during the week:
The Pop Culture Decoder — the course's flagship method, drawn from WAVES' Erasmus+ POP-Ed project. A structured five-step process for taking any piece of pop culture students already love (a song, a TikTok trend, a Netflix show, a video game, a sports moment) and decoding its global citizenship content: who made it, whose labour, whose stories, whose absences, what values it carries, what global system it sits inside. Works with any age from upper primary upwards, in any subject, and changes how students see media they consume every day.
The Object Journey — a tactile mapping exercise in which students choose a single everyday object (a t-shirt, a phone, an avocado, a chocolate bar) and trace its real global journey from raw material to end-of-life on a wall-sized world map. The exercise makes global supply chains, labour, environmental cost and inequality concrete and emotionally engaging, and works for ages 8 to adult. Maps directly onto SDG 12.
The Five Headlines Exercise — a fast, repeatable classroom method that compares how the same global news event is reported across five different countries and media outlets, looking at parallel headlines, lead images, framing words, and missing context. Builds multi-perspectivity and critical media literacy and gives teachers a method they can re-run all year with whatever is in the news.
The Identity Compass — an intersectional self-mapping exercise in which participants chart the multiple identities they carry (nationality, gender, class, language, age, ability, faith, profession) and explore which ones become visible in which contexts. The basis for empathy and intercultural understanding work, and a tool teachers can adapt for use with their own classes to surface the diversity already present in any classroom.
Alongside these signature methods, participants work with:
Creative narrative methods and digital storytelling for GCE
Photo-language and image-based reflection tools
Role-play, simulation and World Café facilitation techniques
First-voice resources and ethical use of testimonial material
Project-based learning structures for student-led global action
Whole-school 'GCE thread' planning tools
DELIVERABLES
Each participant leaves the course with:
A full toolkit containing the four signature exercises with all templates (Decoder worksheet, Object Journey mapping sheet, Five Headlines comparison grid, Identity Compass template) ready to print and use
One fully designed GCE unit or activity sequence tailored to their own subject, year group, and school context
A whole-school GCE 'thread' plan with concrete first steps
A curated list of first-voice, ethically-sourced classroom resources on migration, supply chains, climate justice, and intercultural dialogue
A personal reflective journal and continued-implementation plan
A Europass Mobility certificate of attendance and a WAVES Certificate, both indicating learning outcomes and contact hours
WHY CYPRUS?
If you want to teach the world, come to a place where the world is already in the classroom.
Cyprus offers a set of teaching contexts that you cannot find together anywhere else in Europe:
A living migration story, as both a sending and a receiving society over time, with one of the highest proportions of asylum applications per capita in the EU, making the global-local link visible in real Cypriot classrooms.
A multicultural island, shaped by Greek-Cypriot, Turkish-Cypriot, Maronite, Armenian, Latin, Filipino, Syrian, Sri Lankan, Nepali, Romanian, Ukrainian and other communities, with neighbourhoods in central Nicosia that visibly tell that story.
A divided capital where teaching about identity, belonging, and the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is not theoretical but a daily question for teachers on both sides of the line.
A Mediterranean and Middle Eastern crossroads, where global issues , such as climate change, displacement, trade, conflict, land with particular weight, and where teachers can see the global in the local.
WAVES' grassroots networks of schools, educators, civil society organisations, and migrant and refugee initiatives, built through more than a decade of global education work on the island.
Add to this a Mediterranean climate with mild, sunny conditions for most of the academic year, easy direct flights from across Europe to Larnaca, English widely spoken, the euro, and an extraordinary food and cultural scene that itself tells the story of centuries of global exchange.
Cyprus becomes one of the most teaching-rich destinations in Europe for a course on global citizenship education.
This training is aligned with:
UNESCO Global Citizenship Education framework (cognitive, socio-emotional, behavioural dimensions), UNESCO Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development (2023), OECD PISA Global Competence Framework, Council of Europe Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC), EU Council Recommendation on Learning for Environmental Sustainability and Global Citizenship, EU Youth Strategy, and SDGs 4, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17.