Development Education: Learning for Transformation

The theme of Issue 43 of Policy and Practice, ‘Learning for Transformation’, is a conscious evocation of the Training for Transformation (TFT) handbooks (Hope and Timmel, 2014) published in the 1980s and 1990s by Partners Training for Transformation (Partners TFP), a non-profit community organisation established in 1981.  Partners TFP was created under the influence of Paulo Freire’s (Freire, 1996) radical pedagogy by community educators, many of whom had worked in the global South, and explored ‘the benefits of using experiential methods in community and development education’ (Partners TFT, n.d.).  For example, Sally Timmel and Anne Hope, authors of the Training for Transformation books drew upon their experiences as development workers in Kenya and South Africa where they gave a ‘practical application to the Freirean methodology’ (Ibid.).  In writing about the Freirean influence on community development in Ireland using Partners TFT as a case study, Bernie Grummell argued that the Training for Transformation books created ‘a temporary learning community using problem-posing and dialogic group processes to address the circumstances of marginalized communities in a politicized and empowering manner and to co-develop community-based resources’ (Grummell, 2025: 78).   The training courses written and delivered by Partners TFT looked at problems systemically and how they impacted wider society by offering ‘opportunities to better understand social, political and cultural systems and how we can constructively engage with them’ (Partners TFT, n.d.). 

This community-led, bottom-up, radical, politically engaged and systemic practice appears to be missing from contemporary development education (DE) which has impeded the sector’s capacity for transformational thinking and action (Fricke, 2022; 2025).  As Bernie Grumnell (2025: 79) concluded from her case study on Partners TFT, the ‘shift from a process-oriented approach to an outcome and measurement orientation means community development groups, including Partners TfT, increasingly struggle to get their transformative, process-oriented approach recognized’.  This is the result of neoliberal processes, like Results-Based Approaches, imposing ‘performative criteria’ on ‘development discourses of conscientization and transformative action that lies at the heart of Freire’s approach’ (Ibid.).  Previous issues of Policy and Practice have discussed the deradicalisation of development education as the sector has become more professionalised, managerialist and accommodating of government agendas (Bryan, 2011; Selby and Kagawa, 2011).  Drawing upon the GENE (2026) peer review of development education in Ireland and studies by Cannon (2023) and Gaynor (2025), I discuss the sectoral shift from DE to global citizenship education (GCE) and whether it can support transformative learning or instead signals the further deradicalisation of DE.  I’ll then introduce the Focus, Perspective and Viewpoint contributions to Issue 43 of the journal.

The shift from development education to global citizenship education

Three of the five Focus article contributions to Issue 43 use the term GCE to describe our sector.  Two of them have GCE in the title and another employs the term to describe their practice in the article.  While some practitioners use GCE and DE interchangeably, the 2026 GENE peer review suggests (2026: 32) ‘the two predominant terms in use in Ireland today are ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) and GCE’ with the former used in the education sector and the latter featuring more prominently in Irish Aid-funded work.   So, why has GCE mostly supplanted DE in how we describe our work?  When did it happen and was the sector consulted on this change in terminology?  Does it matter or is this just a meaningless exercise in semantics with no real bearing on what we do as practitioners?

We can narrow the sectoral take-up of GCE to around 2021-2022.  In a content analysis of the use of citizenship terms in Irish Aid and Irish Development Education Association (IDEA) documents between 2003 and 2022, Niamh Gaynor (2025) found a sharp increase in GCE usage as Irish Aid launched its new GCE Strategy in 2021 (Irish Aid, 2021).  The use of ‘citizenship’ in Irish Aid documents increased from two in 2003 to 105 in 2021 and in IDEA documents from three in 2012 to 128 in 2022 (Gaynor, 2025: 32).  Irish Aid’s previous strategy was titled ‘Irish Aid Development Education Strategy 2017 – 2023’ (Irish Aid, 2017) and it unsurprisingly carried fifteen references to GCE compared to 301 references to DE.  IDEA’s 2017 document called ‘Development Education in Ireland Report’ had 372 DE references and just ten to ‘global citizenship’ (IDEA, 2017).  By 2025, in its ‘Vision 2030’ document, IDEA used GCE 76 times compared to 27 references to DE (IDEA, 2025). 

‘Despite this marked shift’, Niamh Gaynor found ‘no definition of citizenship or any of its related framings’ in the documents examined (2015: 33).  ‘Overall’, she found that ‘the analysis of Irish Aid strategies points to a narrowly circumscribed understanding of what citizenship entails which appears to draw largely from civic republican and neoliberal traditions’ (Ibid.: 34).  While she found ‘a more active form of citizenship’ in the IDEA documents, the ‘Discourse and framing of both citizenship and DE are more watered down in the documents from 2021 and 2022’ (Ibid.: 34).  Gaynor concludes that ‘broader citizenship literature’ points to ‘theories and practices of citizenship’ that ‘remain highly contested’.  ‘As such, they offer both opportunities and limitations to GE (global education) policy and practice’ (Ibid.: 36).

Pragmatists, agnostics and sceptics

This highly contested view of ‘global citizenship’ was also evident in a study carried out by Barry Cannon from Maynooth University, Ireland in 2023 compiled in partnership with the Irish international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), Centre for Global Education, Comhlámh, and Suas.  The research was framed by the complexity of citizenship in the context of globalisation which eroded the power of the state as the traditional guarantor of citizenship.  It grouped research respondents into three categories: pragmatists, agnostics and sceptics with responses suggesting a ‘relatively superficial attachment’ to GCE among professionals (Cannon, 2023: 7).   The study was also responding to a perceived deficit in sectoral discussions on global citizenship and to the importance of language in articulating goals to learners.  The study considered the pragmatic position to be one which evinces no strong opinions on global citizenship but finds it useful to advance working objectives such as securing funding from donors conversant in the term GCE.  Agnostics have reservations about the concept and believe that more discussion is needed to ‘flesh it out in theory and practice’ (Ibid.: 7).  Sceptics are ‘suspicious’ of global citizenship’s ‘ideological underpinnings’ (Ibid.).  For example, the perceived ‘Eurocentricity of the concept’ and the ‘depoliticised, technocratic and individualised biases in dominant conceptualisations of it’ (Ibid.: 5).  The findings and conclusions of the Maynooth study strongly suggested that the debate on global citizenship is unfinished and more sectoral discourse needed given the contested nature of the concept and contrasting views of research participants who were mostly drawn from the DE sector in the north and south of Ireland.  

GENE peer review

With this study in mind, it was interesting to note that the GENE peer review of global education in Ireland found that: ‘A few years ago, a switch in terminology took place where Irish Aid went from using the term Development Education to instead using Global Citizenship Education’ (GENE, 2026: 36).  It suggests that the ‘switch has seemingly worked well with stakeholders and fits with international trends in terminology use, particularly Agenda 2030 and UNESCO frameworks’ (Ibid.).  It goes on to point out that:

“The peer review could not find information regarding how this switch came about – e.g. a policy rationale, a dialogue with stakeholders or partners resulting in this change, or an exploration of what the change in terminology meant in terms of ethical and pedagogical underpinnings” (Ibid). 

The content analysis by Gaynor and study by Cannon seem to confirm the observations by GENE as to the lack of consultation with the sector on the introduction of GCE.  Cannon goes further by suggesting an unease and under-developed understanding of what GCE means and how it relates to the DE sector’s radical Freirean origins.  The GENE report’s definitions of DE and GCE seemingly point to significant differences to the purviews of DE and GCE.  The report proposes that development education ‘highlights the structural (my emphasis) causes of poverty and inequality between the Global North and South, often foregrounding colonial legacies, trade rules and debt’ (GENE, 2026: 32).  Global citizenship education, however, ‘places stronger emphasis on shared global challenges, citizens as agents of change and moving away from the “development abroad” perspective towards a shared global responsibility’ (Ibid.).  According to these definitions, development education is more clearly concerned with the root causes of inequalities, particularly within a colonial context and, therefore, more attuned to Freire’s transformational learning.  GENE’s observations suggest that the differences between DE and GCE are substantive and amount to more than an exercise in semantics.  As Gaynor wrote in conclusion to her study: ‘My own content and discourse analyses of Irish Aid strategies and Irish Development Education Association (IDEA) submissions reveals an increase in neoliberal framings over time’ (2023: 23).   While GENE proposes that ‘This (the switch to GCE) might be an interesting topic to explore, perhaps in connection with future strategy development’ (2026: 36), there appears be some urgency in exploring the DE/GCE nexus as part of the roll-out of the 2027-2031 Irish Aid strategy.

Although the GENE report suggests that GCE fits well within the Agenda 2030 and UNESCO framework, Bryan and Mochizuki (2023: 70) found ‘considerable ideological convergence’ in the ‘contemporary education policyscape’ that settled on a global citizenship ‘which reflects a way of belonging and being in a globally-competitive market society and economy’ (Ibid.).  They also argued that DE/GCE’s ‘de-radicalisation agenda has accelerated in a post-2015 context driven by an SDG framework that espouses contradictory and fundamentally incompatible goals’ (Ibid.).  GCE’s seemingly comfortable convergence with UN policy architecture and the Global Goals will not allay sectoral concerns about the kind of global citizenship advanced by the UN and SDG agendas.  It would seem that, at the very least, the DE/GCE/ESD sector(s) need to re-open the debate on why we are using GCE, what it means, who confers it, what are its ideological underpinnings, and how does it relate (if at all) to our Freirean origins? 

Models of transformative learning

All five Focus article contributions to Issue 43 invite readers to re-evaluate the transformative learning assumptions underpinning our practice, albeit from differing and most interesting perspectives and practices.  Ana Benavides Lahnstein, Marta da Costa and Gonzalo Peñaloza question how European development education scholarship engages with Freire’s ideas, given the ‘complexities, colonial legacies, and potential complicity in harm’ that accompany their use.  Anne M. Dolan considers how development education could benefit from a closer alignment with Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory (TLT) to address traditional weaknesses in the DE/GCE sector such as a lack of systemic thinking, Eurocentrism and inaction.  Lynette Shultz and Carrie Karsgaard discuss the challenges of advancing climate change education (CCE) when vested interests in the fossil fuel sector align with media and government elites to exert ‘discursive as well as legislative control over education’.  As the title of their article asks, in those circumstances ‘does CCE stand a chance?’  Michael Walimbwa draws upon his practitioner experience in the higher education sector in Uganda to discuss the interface between DE, digitisation and artificial intelligence (AI) asking whether DE can sustain its ‘radical and transformative purpose’ in these new pedagogical environments?  And, Brighid Golden, Charlotte Bishop and Nina Sachau discuss the outcomes of an effective Irish project partnership between a higher education institution (Maynooth University) and a non-governmental organisation (STAND) to create an ‘educational framework for critical global learning’ that centres ‘systemic thinking and critical engagement with the root causes of global injustice’.  These articles contemplate and re-evaluate how global learning can be positioned to effectively engage with the meta crisis when the pedagogical process itself is assailed and compromised by the forces of marketisation and competition that make transformational learning more challenging.

European framings of Freire

As the dominant theoretical and practical influence on DE in Europe, Freire’s pedagogy is ‘a cornerstone of critical approaches to GCE’.  The Focus article by Benavides Lahnstein, da Costa and Peñaloza asks to what extent European scholars are appropriating Freire’s ideas to enunciate their own positions which can reinforce ahistorical and Eurocentric perspectives in DE scholarship.  Using a critical interpretative synthesis (CIS) method, the authors review European ‘GCE’ literature comprising twenty-nine articles from leading DE journals, including Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review.  The most common practice identified in the findings was that of scholars selectively applying key Freirean concepts to supplement their own approaches to DE/GCE, which may be implicated in Eurocentric or colonial relations.  One of the examples drawn from their research by the authors is the blurring of Freire’s critical consciousness, which analyses social and economic inequalities, with critical thinking which lacks the same ‘political and transformative commitments’.  Another common European practice picked up by the authors is the conflating of the ‘distinct theoretical positions’ of Freire and Vanessa Andreotti.  The former emerged from a Marxist tradition whereas Andreotti’s work is more firmly positioned in ‘a postmodern and post/decolonial tradition’.  ‘Overlooking these distinctions’, suggest the authors, ‘may foreclose opportunities to examine the tensions, overlaps and synergies across the two theoretical positions’.  The authors conclude that the most beneficial form of supplementation is to combine Freire’s ideas with other theoretical tools that offer ‘a more robust approach to address the complexities, tensions and difficult engagements that come with explicitly addressing coloniality and individual implication in harm’.

This article asks challenging questions about how Freire is mobilised by European DE scholars which makes it a valuable contribution to the sector’s literature base.  But does the DE sector also need to reflect on Freirean omissions from its practice?  Has the Marxist analysis of class, artificial scarcity, global capitalism and austerity been sidelined from European DE scholarship?  A CIS analysis of this critical component of Freire’s pedagogy in European DE literature seems long overdue.

Perspective transformation

Anne M. Dolan’s exploration of what Mezirow’s transformative learning theory might offer the GCE sector focuses on perspective transformation which is the process that leads to a profound shift in how learners interpret their experiences and apply those experiences to effective action.  In GCE, argues Dolan, ‘learners receive information about global issues, but they lack the structured opportunities for critical reflection and dialogic engagement’ that perspective transformation can provide.  Her article asks: ‘how does transformative learning theory illuminate the processes through which GCE can foster perspective transformation?’; what are the theoretical tensions between GCE and TLT?; and ‘what implications can be drawn for the conceptualisation and enactment of transformative GCE?’.  Dolan concludes that the key ideas in Mezirow’s TLT, which were further developed by post-Mezirow scholarship, explored concepts that included critical theory, decolonial scholarship, poststructuralist thought, and research on emotion and the body.  Her article includes ‘a theoretically grounded framework for transformative GCE’ that effectively applies perspective transformation to GCE.  Dolan’s article pushes the boundaries of critical inquiry in GCE and tackles some of the sector’s traditional weak spots such as reinforcing epistemic hierarchies, reducing transformation to an individual transformative event and the ‘divide between the ambition of transformation and superficial or tokenistic delivery’.  The TLT/GCE nexus opened by this article is clearly worth further and deeper exploration.

In their article on climate denial and obstruction, Lynette Shultz and Carrie Karsgaard provide a disturbing case study from the petro state of Alberta, Canada where a campaign of disinformation on the causes and effects of climate change has been mounted by the Government of Alberta’s Canadian Energy Centre (CEC), or ‘Energy War Room’.  The Energy War Room is a publicly funded provincial corporation tasked with pushing back criticism of the oil and gas sector and undermine activism toward climate mitigation.  Using a ‘discourses of climate obstruction’ framework, the authors analyse the CEC’s posts on X/Twitter to discern four delaying and denying tactics described as: ‘it’s not us’, ‘it’s not happening’, ‘its not bad’; and ‘it’s taken care off’.  These posts are a combination of: flat-out denial of the climate crisis; a denial of the role of fossil fuels in climate change; a denial of the need for action; and denial of the severity of the crisis.  This is, of course, a scenario tailor-made for development education’s critical consciousness and awareness-raising to confront the ‘false communiques’ of the CEC.  But the authors report that Alberta’s discourse of obstruction includes the curtailment of climate change education in a system in which ‘educators are positioned as resistant’.  Such is the petro-influence on government and education policy that climate change education in the formal sector is labelled as ‘extremist’.  However, what the petro-sector and the Government of Alberta can’t obstruct is the lived experience of learners who are becoming increasingly exposed to the extreme weather events caused by climate change.  This lived experience should provide greater impetus for the introduction of stronger climate education policies that are ‘needed to better support education transformation’.  This article is a valuable addition to the discourse on how educators can effectively respond to the climate emergency.

Michael Walimbwa’s Focus article is one of the first contributions to Policy and Practice on what is sure to be a burgeoning literature in the development education sector on the growing influence of digitisation and AI.  It addresses an important question for practitioners: ‘how should a field committed to justice and critical literacy respond to data-driven platforms, algorithmic mediation and digitally networked learning environments?’  It raises concerns about how development education’s participative methodologies and radical learning will be mediated through digital technologies.  This could result in a compromise of ‘DE’s deeper ethical and political commitments’.  Walimbwa frames his discussion within the Ugandan initial teacher education sector, which is being re-shaped by rapid and extensive policy-change, and his pedagogical experiences as a higher educator.  Through his reflections as a practitioner, he interrogates his epistemic assumptions while remaining ‘attentive to asymmetries between global North and global South contexts’.  These asymmetries include reflections on epistemic hierarchies, Indigenous knowledge, curriculum localisation and decolonial approaches to education.  Walimbwa concludes that the greatest risk to DE is not technological change but depoliticisation: ‘the subtle drift towards framing global challenges as technical problems requiring managerial solutions’. 

The fifth and final Focus article from Brighid Golden, Charlotte Bishop and Nina Sachau discusses ‘Get Critical’, a Research Ireland-funded project partnership between STAND, an NGO that ‘mobilises third-level students to stand up for global justice, equality and sustainability’, and Maynooth University.  The aim of ‘Get Critical’ was to adapt an existing ‘educational framework for critical global learning’ to guide STAND’s educational activities.  The article describes the process through the framework was adapted and tailored to STAND’s purposes by ‘centring systemic thinking and critical engagement with the root causes of global injustice’.  The newly adapted framework is presented in the article and the organisational and educational outcomes of its practical implementation monitored and discussed.  The article also considers how the framework can support deeper engagement with Freirean praxis and assist global educators in ‘dialogical reflection’, an ‘interrogation of assumptions and surface organisational values’, and a ‘critical analysis of their existing pedagogical practices’.  The authors argue that the project’s valuable learning points include ‘the value of engaging in context-specific, collective inquiry as a means of translating abstract principles of critical GCE into grounded and meaningful pedagogical approaches’. 

Creating a community of praxis

The first of two Perspective articles in Issue 43, is authored by Jaime Alvaro Paredes Paez, a doctoral candidate in the University of Calgary, and draws upon a study conducted over four months with six schoolteachers in Western Canada.  This action research study draws upon teachers’ lived stories framed by dia-logics of ‘practical hope and radical love’ that animated the creation of a community of practice.  The study finds ‘that teacher learning and professional development may need slower, more relational and ethically grounded conditions’ to thrive.  The second Perspective article by Barry Peak, Education for Sustainable Development Officer at Dublin City University, is a warning about the perils of AI, particularly in its most common form of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), to education, specifically epistemology, pedagogy, human rights, and sustainability.  Peak argues for the closer integration of global education into schools’ curricula and practice, to enable educators to mitigate against the harms posed by GenAI.

Henry Giroux is the author of the first of two Viewpoint articles that warn about epistemic injustice, silencing and erasure in higher education.  Giroux writes about the ‘authoritarian restructuring of higher education’ as the sector ‘faces a coordinated assault unlike anything witnessed in generations’.  Historical erasure, the criminalisation of dissent, dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes and ideological surveillance are some of the threats assailing universities in the United States.  Under neoliberalism, universities operate more like businesses than communities of learning with the number of humanities courses contracting by a third in the US as evidence of a creeping corporatism in higher education.  In this context, argues Giroux, the claim of institutional neutrality is a myth with universities deploying the concept of neutrality ‘as ideological cover for institutional silence in the face of assaults on democracy, academic freedom, and human rights’.  Giroux cites a wonderful speech delivered in 1974 by Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born sociologist and cultural theorist in defence of the radical intellectual Walter Rodney.  Rodney was the author of the classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney, 2018) and denied a position in the University of Guyana because of direct interference by reactionary and neo-colonial Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham.  Hall’s speech challenged the idea that the role of the intellectual is separate from politics or subject to ‘value neutrality’ (Hall, 2025).  ‘This is a disastrous and crippling view’, argued Hall.  ‘It utterly mistakes the role of the intellectual and the nature of intellectual work in its relation to politics’ (Ibid.).  Like Hall’s speech, Giroux’s article is an urgent re-assertion of the political and activist role of the intellectual as universities fall prey to neoliberalism.

Finally, Giulia Filippi’s Viewpoint article discusses how passport hierarchies and visa restrictions deny access to academic spaces, opportunities for collegiality, and the international exchange of research-based knowledge.  She cites the example of two scholars, one based in the UK and the other in Nigeria, who had contrasting experiences when invited to a workshop in Cape Town, South Africa.  The Nigerian scholar received her visa after the workshop ended and the British scholar described her travel experience as ‘fast and easy’.  The passport and visa impediments to travel for scholars, particularly from the global South, invisibilises their work, prevent international collaborations and create epistemic hierarchies. The mobility privilege of scholars from the global North results in ‘greater academic visibility’ which is a platform for professional advancement.  For Filippi, this issue ‘goes to the heart of transformational learning’ and demands from development education a ‘more material account of solidarity’ that ensures full collaboration with and participation of, colleagues from the global South.

References

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Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education and Editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review.