Exploring the potential of mindful compassion pedagogies for effective global citizenship education and education for sustainable development

Effective Global Citizenship Education (GCED) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) benefit from three interrelated dimensions of learning identified by UNESCO: cognitive, social-emotional and behavioural. The latter two of these are especially relevant to mindful compassion pedagogies, and the purpose of the literature review presented here was to ascertain how well such pedagogies could cultivate GCED and ESD social and emotional behavioural competencies in preschool to secondary-level education, tertiary-level education and professional development programmes for educators. The research team analysed 37 relevant peer-reviewed research articles and reports published between 1956 and 2021. Their findings point to many possibilities for how mindful compassion practices could serve as building blocks for desired GCED and ESD competencies. However, this requires a great deal of intentionality on the part of those responsible for the design, implementation and evaluation of mindful compassion-based programmes seeking to cultivate GCED- and ESD-related behavioural competencies. In essence, curriculum designers need to provide opportunities for students to practise mindful compassion as a microskill that leads to the attainment of behavioural competencies conducive to global citizenship and sustainable development. This article summarises the researchers’ findings and posits guiding questions for educators and researchers to consider as they design and evaluate social-emotional competencies of the kind needed for GCED and ESD to be effective.