Self-Awareness for Critical Global Citizenship Education: A Model for Exploration

Global Citizenship Education (GCE) requires educators to engage with power, privilege, inequality and social justice while recognising how their own identities, assumptions and positionalities shape this engagement. Yet how the self-awareness required for such work might be developed, particularly among teacher educators (TEs), remains underexplored. This conceptual paper proposes a model for developing self-awareness for critical GCE, developed iteratively through engagement in a Community of Practice (CoP) as a practice-based context and critical engagement with relevant literature. The model conceptualises self-awareness as an ongoing, relational, socially mediated and contextually situated process rather than an individual or linear endeavour. It comprises four interconnected domains: teacher educator identity, unpacking self-awareness, engagement with social justice matters, and an intentionally open domain responsive to emergent professional learning needs. These domains are situated within a social learning space, a CoP, and underpinned by facilitation characterised by trust, psychological safety, dialogue, challenge and critical reflection. The model offers a flexible framework and shared language for designing and facilitating professional learning that may enable TEs to interrogate assumptions, engage with discomfort and difference, recognise their positioning within unequal systems, and connect emerging self-understanding with pedagogical and collective action.