Our Global Citizenship online course invites students to explore what it means to be a citizen of the world in the 21st century. Drawing inspiration from thought experiments like “The World as a Village of 100 People,” this course transforms abstract global statistics into deeply human stories that illuminate our interconnected world. As with all our courses, Global Citizenship is delivered one-to-one, allowing your teacher to craft a learning journey that resonates with your unique perspective and interests while addressing the complex challenges facing our global community.
How Our Online Global Citizenship Course Works
You will meet with your teacher in live sessions online twice per week, embarking on an exploration that bridges local experiences with global realities. Using interactive digital tools, you might analyze data visualizations showing global wealth distribution one day, then connect with a community organizer addressing similar issues in your own region the next. This personalized approach allows for deep conversations about ethics, justice, and responsibility that might be difficult to have in a traditional classroom setting. It also teaches students how to understand statistics and tie data to real-world issues.
Your teacher will guide you through primary sources, current events, and case studies while encouraging you to develop your own informed perspectives on the world’s most pressing challenges.
Why Choose This Course?
Our Global Citizenship course is particularly valuable for worldschooling families, nomadic learners, and students who want to understand their place in an increasingly connected world. With teachers located across different continents and time zones, we can match you with an educator who brings authentic global perspective to discussions about citizenship, sustainability, and social justice.
But, overall, this course is ideal for students who are naturally curious about other cultures, concerned about global issues, or preparing for future studies in international relations, development studies, or any field requiring cross-cultural competency.
Our Global Citizenship Course at a Glance
The curriculum framework draws from UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education guidelines and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but your specific learning path will be completely customized to your interests and context. Your teacher might begin with exploring how your own community fits into global patterns, then expand outward to examine similar challenges and solutions worldwide. The course adapts to your pace and passion—perhaps diving deeper into climate activism if that sparks your interest, or spending more time on economic inequality if those concepts need more exploration.
Core Concepts in Our Global Citizenship Curriculum
Although each course is tailored to the individual student, by the end of your Global Citizenship journey you ought to have engaged with these essential areas:
- Global Interconnectedness and Systems Thinking: Understanding how local actions connect to global consequences through supply chains, migration patterns, environmental systems, and digital networks. Students might explore how their morning coffee connects them to farmers in Guatemala, or how social media shapes political movements across continents.
- Human Rights and Social Justice: Examining the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its real-world applications, including contemporary challenges around freedom of expression, refugee rights, and economic inequality. This foundation helps students analyze current events through a human rights lens.
- Sustainable Development and Environmental Citizenship: Engaging with the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for understanding global challenges like poverty, education access, gender equality, and climate change. Students might investigate how different communities are addressing these challenges and what roles young people can play.
- Cultural Competency and Global Perspectives: Developing skills to understand and appreciate different worldviews, belief systems, and ways of life. This includes examining how historical experiences shape present-day perspectives and learning to engage respectfully across cultural differences.
- Economic Systems and Global Inequality: Understanding how wealth, resources, and opportunities are distributed globally, and examining different economic models and their impacts on human wellbeing. Students might analyze everything from microfinance initiatives to fair trade movements to rising the economic causes and impact of rising inequality in the U.S. since 1980.
- Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding: Exploring the root causes of conflict and investigating how communities build peace, from restorative justice practices to international diplomacy. This includes understanding the role of dialogue, compromise, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Media Literacy and Information Analysis: Developing critical thinking skills to evaluate sources, identify bias, and understand how information travels in our digital age. Students learn to distinguish between reliable journalism and misinformation while understanding how different perspectives shape narratives.
- Civic Engagement and Active Citizenship: Examining different forms of political participation, from voting to advocacy to community organizing. Students might explore how young people around the world are creating change and consider what forms of engagement align with their own values and interests.
Project-Based Learning and Real-World Connections
Throughout the course, depending on your interests and your teacher’s teaching style, you may engage in meaningful projects that connect learning to action. (Let us know if you highly value project-based learning so that we can ensure that it is woven into this course!) You might research a global challenge that interests you, then propose and implement a local solution. Perhaps you’ll conduct interviews with community members from different cultural backgrounds, or collaborate with students in other countries on a shared research project.
Your teacher will help you design projects that build on your strengths while pushing you to grow as a global thinker and engaged citizen.
Developing Global Citizenship Skills
Beyond content knowledge, this course emphasizes developing the skills and dispositions of effective global citizens. You will practice empathy by engaging with perspectives different from your own, develop critical thinking through analysis of complex global issues, and build communication skills through respectful dialogue about sensitive topics. Your teacher will help you cultivate intellectual humility—recognizing what you don’t know while building confidence in your ability to learn and contribute.
Preparing for Global Engagement
By the end of our time together, you will emerge with a deeper understanding of your place in the global community and practical skills for engaging with complex, interconnected challenges. Whether you pursue further studies in international relations, environmental science, or any other field, you will have developed the analytical tools, cultural competency, and ethical framework to contribute thoughtfully to our shared global future.
This course prepares you not just to understand the world, but to help shape it.
