Creating Changemakers Through Global Citizenship and the SDGs
With real world examples on how to integrate it in schools
What does the ideal 21st-century school look like in practice?
This article is part of an ongoing collaborative series that brings the School Matrix to life; a blueprint designed to reimagine education for the future. By exploring real-world case studies from pioneering schools and programs around the world, we aim to explore practical ways to embed life skills, self-discovery, and purpose into everyday learning.
In this collaborative article, we explore how Global Citizenship and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be integrated into education through two inspiring case studies:
Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC): Founded in 2005, the Academy for Global Citizenship is a Chicago Public School, with a mission to cultivate the next generation of mindful leaders. AGC is reimagining the future of learning through its whole-child learning model that is rooted in social justice, environmental education, entrepreneurship, dual language learning, and wellness.
Ages of Globalization (AoG): Program created by Professor Jeffrey Sachs (President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network). It is a free, multidisciplinary initiative that empowers students (14+), educators, and lifelong learners with the knowledge, skills, and values to drive sustainable change.
Learn more about the collaborators at the end of the article.
What are the SDGs and Global Citizenship and why should they be integrated in schools?
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are part of a framework designed by the United Nations to give a clear and structured overview into the world’s biggest socio-environmental problems. Children will inevitably face these challenges in the future, so building awareness and understanding from an early age is essential.
Global Citizenship teaches children to lead healthy lives, become aware of the world around them and develop the necessary skills, values and compassion to become future changemakers who vouch for sustainability.
UNESCO explains that Global Citizienship education addresses three core conceptual dimensions of learning:
“For education to be transformative, knowledge (cognitive domain) must touch the heart (socio-emotional domain) and turn into action to bring about positive change (behavioural domain). This framework emphasises an education that fulfils individual and national aspirations and thus ensures the well-being of all humanity and the global community at large (UNESCO, 2018, p. 2)”.
How are SDGs presented to students at Ages of Globalisation?
At Ages of Globalisation, students learn about the history and geography of our World across time and cultures by exploring the 7 ages of globalisation: Paleolithic, Neolithic, Equestrian, Classical, Ocean, Industrial and Digital.
“By understanding our shared history, we can also understand how to meet the great challenges of our time.” - Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Founder of AoG.
The program offers 28 classes for free, containing video lectures, lesson plans and activities, all aimed at understanding global change through time and the role of SDGs in the 21st century. It also includes virtual visits to UNESCO World Heritage Sites and monthly live sessions with world leaders to explore different perspectives and learn from experts.
Students complete activities and research projects aligned with specific SDGs to understand how their country is handling the issue by analysing policies, trends and national goals.
Each lesson contains prompts to help redirect children such as:
Which SDGs are pertinent to your community?
Are there some areas where your town has been able to address the sustainability issues successfully?
What are the continued challenges?
They then discuss solutions and ideas with their classmates, UN officials, and youth activists during virtual sessions.
How do students become global citizens at the Academy for Global Citizenship?
“It’s important to start local before you go global”.
- Meredith McNamara, Primary Year Program Coordinator at AGC
At the Academy for Global Citizenship in Chicago, kindergartners aren't presented with big world problems yet (such as rainforest deforestation). This is to avoid upsetting and overwhelming them from a young age. Instead, they start observing their own culture, traditions and origins and compare it to their classmates. They focus on building small, healthy habits over time, like having shorter showers or picking up litter, to better grasp how even small actions can make a difference.
As they grow older, they begin exploring how they can positively impact their own school and neighbourhood, and eventually become more global oriented. Children explore real world examples of other children positively impacting their community to understand that no one is too “small” to change things.
They also explore where food, clothes and other items they frequently use come from, by analysing the item’s supply chain, how far it travelled and the impact this has on the planet and its inhabitants.
Students have access to all 17 SDGs and have to do a service project attached to them. For SDG #1: No Poverty, students have collected blankets and food donations for those in need, whilst others have promoted the issue to their community and raised money for charities.
Global citizenship isn't just about solving world problems, it is first and foremost about developing the mental capacity to see beyond the self and think about others.
What is one example of a student project at Academy for Global Citizenship?
At AGC, 2nd and 3rd graders learn from people in the past in a social activism module, and get to choose their own area of interest. They are then placed in one of five different groups based on what they picked:
Group 1: world peace
Group 2: environmentalism
Group 3: trailblazers
Group 4: human rights
Group 5: injustices
Each group is tasked with picking a few key people to research in their own category (such as Martin Luther King for Human Rights or Jane Goodall for Environmentalism).
They then create “museums” on these activitists containing timelines of their lives and have to come up with a related group action that could positively impact their school. For example, the world peace group, created a slide deck with meditation and mindfulness resources to help other students find inner peace in challenging moments.
💡An innovative tool for you:
To help educators create customisable Project Based Learning activities on the different SDGs, International Education leader Gerry Docherty created a free-to-use Project Builder tool on ChatGPT which can be found here. The AI tool first asks questions about what SDG you wish to target, the number of children involved, their age group etc… and resumes to build entire projects from scratch! A real time saver!
What is the role of the teacher at Academy for Global Citizenship?
At AGC, teachers act as facilitators who help students think, plan, strategise and get back on track (when necessary) through targeted questioning and feedback.
For example, during projects, 8th graders have three advisors to present their ideas and plans to. The advisors act as “the voice of reason” and give them the guidance they need to achieve their goals whilst following learning outcomes. Students are given a planning template that outlines where to go, who to talk to, what resources they may need… to promote agency, independence and critical thinking.
How is progress measured at Academy for Global Citizenship?
Teachers follow a planner and rubrics to measure student progress in line with learning outcomes and IB standards. They focus on the process more than the final product and give necessary feedback that promotes continuous improvement.
Rubrics tend to follow several desired outcomes covering the different steps of the project: from research, to taking action and, reflecting on the experience. Each outcome is graded from 0 to 8 in terms of how well this was implemented and documented.
An example of outcome might be their ability to plan and record the development process of the project or to evaluate the effectiveness of their action with regards to the problem they aimed to solve.
Is Global Citizenship education helpful for children’s future success?
At AGC, students bring their learning beyond the classroom. They invite their own families to adopt healthier, more environmentally-friendly habits which helps connect what they have learnt at school with the real world.
Students occasionally collaborate with charities and local organisations and get to develop valuable life skills, like communication, self-esteem, initiative, and leadership, that prepare them for life beyond school.
Global citizenship education also opens doors to international exchange and connection. Through programs like AoG, students learn directly from world experts, participate in live global sessions, and explore perspectives from around the world. This type of experience is rare in traditional settings and incredibly valuable for the future.
How to integrate this at the school level?
On the school system level at AGC, solar panels are used to power the school. A lot of the materials are recycled, and some of the benches were even built using trees that were already on-site.
To integrate Global Citizenship in education, we have to think of schools like a pyramid, with different layers that all need to align:
The system of the school → the physical environment, leadership style, policies, governance, and how the whole school operates.
The pedagogical strategies → how we teach, what the curriculum looks like, how classrooms are structured, and the overall learning approach.
The learning experience → the daily activities, lessons, projects, and what students actually do and take away.
If you're interested in designing future-ready schools like this, make sure to subscribe to be the first to access future blueprints and step-by-step implementation guides that cover all three layers of the pyramid, as well as more collaborative case studies just like this one.
About the author and collaborators:
Melina Maghazehi is the Founder of Schools for Purpose, an initiative dedicated to creating collaborative blueprints and roadmaps for designing future ready schools that nurture life skills, self discovery and purpose.
Elizabeth Sarah Ippel is the Founder and Executive Director of AGC since its creation in 2005.
Meredith McNamara is the Primary Years Program Coordinator and Founding Team Member at AGC.
Alexander Ontiveros is the Middle School Program Coordinator at AGC.
Katja Anger-Delimi is an Education Consultant at both AoG and UN SDSN and is a Former UNESCO Project Officer.
Gerry Docherty is an Internationational Education Consultant, SDG Advocate and Former Regional Head of Education (South East Asia).