How can you help students develop into global citizens? What exactly do we mean by global citizenship? And how can you inspire students to draw on their academic knowledge, skills, and values to make a meaningful contribution to the world, particularly when that motivation has yet to emerge?
As a teacher, you may wonder how to create space for this in your teaching. How can you encourage collaboration and engagement, particularly when students encounter perspectives that challenge or unsettle them?
Drawing on research and established concepts, the VU Centre for Teaching & Learning offers pedagogical and didactic approaches that teachers can put into practice.
Together, these constitute the VU World-Oriented didactics framework.
An extension of the VU MIXED model
The VU World-Oriented didactics framework builds on the VU MIXED model. At VU Amsterdam, we regard diversity as a strength and believe that an inclusive learning environment is essential if students are to learn optimally from and with one another. The VU MIXED model was developed from this conviction (formerly the VU Mixed Classroom model; Ramdas et al., 2019). The model emphasizes:
- exploring one’s own frame of reference and positionality;
- engaging with other perspectives within the group;
- integrating different perspectives.
This integration does not mean that everyone must arrive at a single shared or uniform position. Rather, it is about being able to acknowledge and sustain differences, or, in the words of the model, “to hold the tension of the opposites.” An inclusive learning environment therefore requires empathy and a continual search for balance, without severing our connection with others.
What does the World-Oriented didactics offer?
The framework offers inspiration and practical guidance for teachers seeking to embed a world-oriented approach in their teaching and create meaningful, outward-looking learning environments in higher education.
The framework presents three building blocks for fostering global citizenship through A Broader Mind, while inviting teachers to reflect on their own role and responsibility as global citizens. A teacher, after all, not only contributes academic expertise, but also embodies what it means to engage with the world.
The central question is how teachers can contribute through their teaching to the development of agency, understood as students’ capacity to form independent judgements and act purposefully in the world around them.
VU World-Oriented didactics
The framework invites teachers to reflect on their own contribution as global citizens. In this context, teachers do more than share academic knowledge; through their own choices and engagement, they also model how to participate responsibly in the world.
The central question is how teachers can foster students’ agency: their capacity to form independent judgements and act purposefully in the world.
