Introduction

Starting from the premise that the modern experience of globalization allows new ways of access to cultures, economies and languages (^{CONSELHO DA EUROPA, 2010}) produces new challenges for education in several dimensions. In this context, global education emerges as a formative path with the potential to make individuals aware of issues concerning globalization and of an enlarged citizenship, which is realized through participation and the assumption of individual and collective responsibility on the planet in favor of values such as (environmental, cultural, economic) sustainability, peace and social justice.

This educational point of view demands a revision of the curricula concerning the training of teachers and educators by education professionals, in order to include in them a global perspective. Therefore, it is important to do research how these professionals conceive global education and the possibility of including it in their practices. This study is an important starting point since, as ^{Sercu e St. John (2007)} sustain, actions centered in teacher training, especially those focused on changing their practices, need to start from the identification of their personal conceptions about teaching and learning.

Taking into account these principles, this study intends to summarize the interactions between the conceptions of future preschool educators and primary school teachers about the contribution of Education in Portuguese to the promotion of global education and about the ways in which such educative perspective can be integrated in linguistic-communicative educative situations.

Theoretical Framework: From Global Education to Teacher Education

The modern experience of globalization brings challenges that affect educational systems in different dimensions, taking into account the fact that it implies new forms of interaction between cultures, economies and languages (^{CONSELHO DA EUROPA, 2010}). Global education arises in this framework as a way to help people to become aware of the need for an enlarged citizenship, which materializes in the participation and the assumption of individual and collective responsibility towards the planet and favoring values such as (environmental, cultural, economic) sustainability, peace and social justice. These same ideas are referred in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (^{ONU, 1948})², namely in article 26, which states that

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

Although one cannot ignore a mercantile perspective of global education, relating it to training for the labor market in more and more competitive global contexts (^{CONSELHO DA EUROPA, 2010}; ^{PATRICK; MCQUEEN; REYNOLDS, 2014}), it is essential to emphasize, especially in in the face of humanitarian and environmental issues in today's world, values that are important for cooperation among people such as understanding, friendship and peace.

In this sense, adaptation to a globalized society emerges as a relevant issue in the educational policies for the 21^st century, in particular Europeans, since it’s essential to “better prepare people for changing labour markets and active citizenship in more diverse, mobile, digital and global societies, and develop learning at all stages of life” (^{EUROPEAN COMMISSION, 2018}, p. 4). This implies promoting specific key competences: “Communication” (both in the mother tongue and foreign languages), “Mathematics, Science and Technology”, “Digital Competence”, “Learning to Learn”, “Social and Civic Competences”, “Entrepreneurship”, and “Cultural Awareness and Expression”.

In Portugal, it is important to refer the Perfil dos Alunos para o Século XXI³ (^{GOMES et al., 2017}), the most recent curricular document that presents orientations for educational policies. This document establishes, among its principles, a humanistic-based education that demands that the pupils acquire knowledge that allows them to contribute to the building of a fairer society where the human dignity is an essential value and to act on the world as a good to preserve (^{GOMES et al., 2017}, p. 8). It also defends the sustainable development through the preparation of the 21^st century citizens to think globally while acting locally (^{GOMES et al., 2017}, p. 8). Therefore, according to this text, the pupils should be encouraged to adopt values such as respect (namely for diversity), ethics, responsibility, solidarity, conflict negotiation, ecological sustainability and equity, in order to become responsible citizens at local, national and global level.

Taking these ideas into account, it is important to discuss the conceptions about global education and the challenges this perspective presents to the training of preschool educators and teachers. The following two subtopics are dedicated, respectively, to each of these thematic axes.

Education for Global Citizenship

In the face of increasingly evident global issues in the contemporary scenario, emerging mainly from the experience of globalization that has been built historically, there is a tendency for the intensification of competition between different nations, on the one hand, and the economic premise of human exploitation of natural resources, on the other. The broader disclosure of local and global realities results from the same communication networks created and strengthened by the phenomenon of globalization, allowing global issues such as conflicts between different peoples, poverty, social (in)justice and climate changes, among others, to become increasingly pressing concerns in educational contexts (^{HOLDEN; HICKS, 2007}).

In this scenario, global education has emerged as a response that different educational fields have given to such concerns (^{CONSELHO DA EUROPA, 2010}; ^{HOLDEN; HICKS, 2007}; ^{PATRICK; MCQUEEN; REYNOLDS, 2014}), in order to promote, in students, a broader perspective of the world they live in and allow them to adopt attitudes based on the respect for differences and on responsible intervention towards sustainable development for a shared future. In the end, education is supposed to contribute to the formation of individuals capable of acting as global citizens in contexts that are larger than the school and the university.

In the European context, global education was defined in the Maastricht Declaration on Global Education, published in 2002, in which governments and representatives of the civil society assumed that they would contribute to the formation of globally conscious and responsible citizens. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the history of global education is older in English-speaking nations (^{LOURENÇO, 2017}).

Global education is an educational approach focused mainly on raising awareness of cultural diversity, interaction/interdependence different between peoples, social, environmental, political and economic issues affecting the entire humanity. It is also about individual and global actions based on social justice, peace and environmental sustainability (^{PATRICK; MCQUEEN; REYNOLDS, 2014}). In summary, it is pertinent to recall the notions registered in the Global Education Guidebook:

Global education is an education perspective, which arises from the fact that contemporary people live and interact in an increasingly globalized world. This makes it crucial for education to give learners the opportunity and competences to reflect and share their own point of view and role within a global interconnected society, as well as to understand and discuss complex relationships of common social, ecological, political and economic issues, so as to derive new ways of thinking and acting. (^{CONSELHO DA EUROPA, 2010}, p. 10, highlight of the authors).

The formation thought along these lines requires a closer look at the learning to be promoted in the educational process, either in a fragmented perspective (related to several domains of knowledge) or an integrated and transversal standpoint. In this regard, a reference curriculum can be found in the document Education for Global Citizenship: A Guide for Schools (^{OXFAM, 2015}), which provides schools and teachers a set of knowledge, skills and attitudes that are essential to the education for global citizenship.

From these brief contributions, it is observed that global education establishes and reinforces a challenging educational perspective for both present and future preschool educators/teachers, making them reflect on the curricula in order to introduce a global perspective in such policy documents. In other words, it is important to try other paths of curricular construction, leading to the acquisition of knowledge, the development of abilities and the adoption of attitudes coherent with the exercise of global and responsible citizenship on the part of the subjects.

Train Educators/Teachers to Global Education: A Closer Look to the Pre-Service Teacher Education

The review of training curricula according to the challenges of global education also involves the initial training of educators and teachers. In this regard, a first question that can be asked falls on the purposes of such measure: why is it important to internationalize the teacher education curriculum?

Faced with this issue, ^{Zeichner (2010)} sustains the importance of helping teachers and future teachers to develop a sociocultural consciousness, which makes them understand that “their ways of thinking, behaving and being are deeply influenced by their social and cultural location-race, ethnicity, gender, social class, nationality and so on” (^{ZEICHNER, 2010}, p. 6). This awareness leads to the development of a more relative perspective about one's own worldview in relation to those of other people. Also, according to ^{Zeichner (2010)}, an international curriculum may help the teachers to learn more about the histories and cultures around the world, including those of migrant pupils they may have in their classrooms. In summary, the global perspective inserted in initial teacher education can contribute to the development of intercultural competence, making people become more attentive to contemporary social issues, namely the ones related to global injustices, that education must not ignore.

The profile of an educator/a teacher capable of promoting global education is someone who deeply knows himself/herself, with great knowledge about the world and its problems, openness to several forms of cultural expression and possessing a critical sense of social justice. In this sense, ^{Goodwin (2010)} sustains that training globally competent educators/teachers involves five kinds of knowledge: “personal knowledge”, related to autobiography and teaching philosophy; “contextual knowledge”, related to understanding pupils, school and society; “pedagogical content knowledge”, related to theories, teaching methodology and curricular development; “sociological knowledge”, concerning diversity, cultures and social justice; finally, “social knowledge”, related to cooperation, democracy and conflict resolution. These different kinds of knowledge should be put together by means of comprehensive training and reflection on issues that go beyond dealing with contents and classroom activities.

Empirical studies involving future teachers help to understand the kind of challenges and benefits underlying the adoption of a global perspective in initial teacher education. For instance, ^{Holden and Hicks (2007)} studied the knowledge of trainee teachers about global issues and their motivation to include a global dimension in their practices. In turn, ^{Patrick; Mcqueen; Reynolds (2014)} focused on the analysis of future teachers’ representations on global education, such as ^{Horsley and Bauer (2010)}, who led a more extensive study on this subject.

These studies show that, directly or indirectly, it is possible to promote global education among teachers in initial formation, highlighting the value of the global perspective of contents being incorporated along the process. Most of the future teachers that took part in these studies seemed motivated to teach about global issues, although it is difficult to assume that many global issues are seen as sensible, complex and/or controversial (^{HOLDEN; HICKS, 2007}) and were more focused on primary classroom issues, rather than the role they can play as global citizens, are the primary object of concern for future teachers (^{PATRICK; MCQUEEN; REYNOLDS, 2014}).

Taking these clues into account, this research seeks to contribute to this field of empirical studies by assuming, as a context, an experience with the insertion of a global perspective in the curricular documents and in the didactic development of a Curricular Unity included in a master’s degree centered in the training of preschool educators and primary school teachers. As will be developed below, the focus of this study had a similar direction to the ones discussed above, since it tries to identify the representations of these students about global education in general and, more concretely, the ways it can be promoted by teaching Portuguese as a mother tongue.

Methodology

The study here reported aimed to understand how pre-service teacher education can prepare future teachers/preschool educators to promote global education. The general research plan took place in the 2016/2017 academic year, within a Curricular Unity of a professional master’s degree, in whose program, work guidelines and evaluation criteria a global education perspective was introduced⁴.

The central question addressed by this article is the following: how future teachers/educators’ representations about global education are reflected in written texts and in plans of linguistic and communicative teaching situations in Portuguese?

As it is an exploratory investigation in a real context, the study assumed a qualitative epistemological orientation (^{BOGDAN; BIKLEN, 1994}; ^{FLICK, 2009}; ^{LESSARD-HÉBERT; GOYETTE; BOUTIN, 2005}). Besides, it was oriented towards the identification of the individuals’ representations on global education in the referred context (being the individuals’ meanings the central object of study and the interpretation the focus of the analysis of these meanings). It was also of interest the study of how these representations evolved along the Curricular Unity’s activities and were reflected in the students’ educative plans centered on Education in Portuguese with changers of global education and on their theoretical foundation.

Therefore, this text presents the cross analysis of two aspects: identification of the students’ initial and final representations and characterization of the students’ performance in planning educative activities related to teaching Portuguese as a mother tongue in a global education perspective and its theoretical foundation.

Data Collection Instruments

The students’ initial representations were identified through the analysis of the answers to a questionnaire about global education and its manifestation in the training course and its promotion in the teaching and learning of Portuguese as a mother tongue, applied to the students at the beginning of the semester. Through the questionnaire, it was also possible to draw a profile of the group of students and it was found, among other information, that it was a group formed exclusively by female individuals.

The students’ final representations were collected through the content analysis of individual written reflections on the learning activities of the Curricular Unity. Such documents were delivered at the end of the semester as part of the evaluation criteria.

The results concerning the performance came from the content analysis of plans produced by the students and presented in the last session of the Curricular Unity. These documents included descriptions of educative activities for a week in a kindergarten or primary school and should develop competences in oral and written communication in the mother tongue considering principles of a global education. The plans were produced in teamwork, around themes chosen by their members, and should include a theoretical framework, which was also analyzed in this study.

Data Analysis Process

The analysis of all the data was conducted according to categories presented in the following table:

The data were submitted to content analysis (^{BARDIN, 2007}) meaning that registration units were collected in the several documents and later grouped according to recurring topics that, finally, gave origin to categories and subcategories. Afterwards, the occurrences for each category were counted and percentages were calculated, a statistic proceeding which allows the researcher to be aware of the representativeness of the data. The data collected in all the documents could refer to global education either in an explicit or in an implicit way.

Results of the Analysis of the Initial and Final Representations of the Students

As already mentioned, this analysis was done taking into account the knowledge, skills and attitudes & values associated to the promotion of global education (^{SÁ; MESQUITA, 2018a}).

Results Concerning the Analysis of the Students’ Educative Plans

This analysis was carried out taking into account the knowledge, skills and attitudes & values associated with the promotion of global education referred in the performance goals and/or topics registered in the educative plans produced by the students⁷. The relationship between the activities proposed by the plans and learning strategies that promote global education was also considered (^{SÁ; MESQUITA, 2018b}).

Teaching Activities and Strategies that Promote Global Education

The analysis of the educative activities proposed in the students’ plans allowed us to verify that:

Results of the Analysis of the Theoretical Framework of the Plans

Analyzing the texts in which the students justified the pedagogical-didactic options allowed us to understand how they had appropriated the education process on global education that had been provided to them (^{SÁ; MESQUITA, 2018b}).

Teaching Activities and Strategies that Promote Global Education

Also, in the theoretical basis of the plans, none of these strategies was explicitly mentioned. However, implicit references to global education can be found in the allusion of:

Intersections of the Results of the Various Analyses

Teaching Activities and Strategies that Promote Global Education

Due to their nature, the subcategories regarding teaching activities/strategies were only represented in the plans and in their theoretical framework.

References to the first two - “Cooperation-Based Learning” and “Dialogue-Based Learning” - were implicitly and only partially considered. Therefore, it seems that the students were not aware of how they could operationalize them through the proposed activities.

Conclusions

From the intersections of all the results, it is possible to conclude that global education became part of the students’ professional future, since the categories of analysis of this study that were present both in their final written reflections and in the theoretical framework of their plans.

The students’ initial representations revealed a general understanding of what global education could be, most likely because they were not yet familiar with the topic at that time. The progress of the Curricular Unity’s activities may have contributed to a greater understanding of the problem, which led to more categories being mentioned in their final representations.

The problem lies in the fact that their presence is not observed in the plans, which are an ideal tool to register ways to operationalize global education in its various aspects.

It is also worth mentioning the fact that there is a notable gap between the operational part of the plans and their respective theoretical framework. Among the goals to be achieved and the topics to be addressed by the plans:

Regarding the planned teaching activities, there is consonance between the plans and their respective theoretical framework. In both cases, there were implicit references:

In summary, it is possible to conclude that these students would need to deepen their reflection on these issues, in order to find possible ways to operationalize global education in the teaching of Portuguese as their mother tongue.