SDG Education and Global Citizenship in Qatar: Enhancing Qatar’s Nested Power in the Global Arena

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has recently called attention to the importance of and urgent need for increased Global Citizenship Education (GCED). This is in response to the alarming rise in human rights violations, inequality, and poverty that threaten global peace and sustainability (UNESCO, 2019). GCED empowers learners to become active promoters of more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure, and sustainable societies. GCED builds on the work of Peace and Human Rights Education to instill in learners the values, attitudes and behaviors that support responsible global citizenship and urges learners to become agents of change in their communities. Qatar, a significant investor in global educational initiatives such as ‘Education Above All’ and ‘WISE’, understands the importance of and need for increased education around the globe. Qatar’s commitment to GCED, through its funding of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UNESCO’s ‘Education for Justice (E4J)’ initiative, as well as H.H. Sheikha Moza bint Nasser Al-Misnad’s recent reappointment as an Advocate of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), shows that Qatar embraces the importance of education as a tool for empowerment, civic participation, human security, and sustainable societies. However, improved and increased GCED requires active participation and embracing its values, attitudes, and overall goals by the general population. Engaging Qatar’s citizenry and residents to accept GCED as a pedagogy and welcome all of the principles behind the United Nations (UN) ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ and 17 SDGs requires carefully planned, evidence-based, and piloted programs for the educational system. This project is motivated by Her Highness’s goal to raise awareness, inspire greater ambition, and push for faster action on the SDGs by making the connection between Qatar’s education system and GCED. We propose to address NPRP-C’s thematic area 5.4.4 by assessing the Qatari education system’s policies, guidelines, current knowledge, and practices related to SDGs. The overarching goal will be to understand how the SDGs are currently taught in Qatar’s education system in order to enhance global citizenship and awareness and to establish an understanding of where the education system can be systematically targeted to further empower students via targeted curriculum design, enhanced teacher training and pedagogy, and increased collaboration with community organizations. The project will address the question of how the GCED goals and SDGs can be increasingly absorbed into Qatar’s education system, while assessing current awareness of these goals, in order to build a more robust dynamic community of Qatari students and global citizens. The project is designed in seven sub-projects that will examine existing initiatives, policies, knowledge, and curricula in Qatar and review global best-practices related to education and advancement of the SDGs. Through data collection, surveys, interviews, focus groups, teaching document analysis, pilot observations with participant groups including students, teachers, administrative and leadership personnel, relevant government personnel, and community groups, this project will identify progress made advancing SDGs in Qatar. It will then identify what further work needs to be done to meet the GCED objectives. The approach is multidisciplinary given the range of subjects involved and the sub-project designs that also involve curriculum and pedagogy models for school and higher education levels. To this extent, the project will have an international relations perspective, while using other disciplines relevant to revising curriculum and pedagogy. Ultimately, by collaborating with multiple and diverse stakeholders, this cluster will provide a holistic profile of the best educational practices that can be adapted and indigenized to appropriately meet the needs of Qatar’s education system. It will offer recommendations of how to improve education, in line with the SDGs, in a way that respects Qatari tradition, culture, values, and heritage. In sum, its goal is to study existing education and create the best possible SDG education (SDGED) for Qatar.

Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)